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
Top Gun Day Special: The Four Ps of OODA
In this electrifying No Way Out podcast episode, recorded on May 13, 2025—Top Gun Day—hosts Brian "Ponch" Rivera and Mark "Moose" McGrath dive into John Boyd’s OODA Loop through the "Four Ps of OODA": Perception, Pathfinding, Prediction, and Planning.
Framed as a Top Gun Day Special, they clarify that while John Boyd, a former U.S. Air Force Top Gun instructor, developed the OODA Loop, it was not rooted in fighter aviation but emerged from his remarkable consilience, pulling from diverse disciplines including systems theory, natural science, philosophy, warfare, The Toyota Production System, cognition, and decision-making. The hosts present the OODA Loop as a cognitive weapon system for navigating complex, uncertain environments, with Orientation as its Schwerpunkt.
Drawing on Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle, Chuck Spinney’s Evolutionary Epistemology, and insights from collaborators like Chet Richards and Sarah Kernion, they debunk linear misinterpretations (e.g., "OODA-R" models), emphasizing the Four Ps’ ability to capture the loop’s fractal, adaptive essence.
The episode showcases the OODA Loop’s universal applicability, from cognitive warfare and corporate strategy to flow states and psychedelic-assisted therapy, illustrated by examples like a seventh-grade basketball team’s comeback using breathing techniques. Cultural references to Last of the Mohicans and Top Gun add vibrancy, while the hosts encourage listeners to explore the World of Reorientation Substack and avoid outsourcing strategic thinking.
NWO Intro with Boyd
March 25, 2025
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Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
Hey Moose, it's just you and I today shooting the shit talking about the OODA loop One. Every single day I see bad OODA loop everywhere. We recently saw people adding risk to the OODA loop. Nothing wrong with that, but it's Boyd's work. Is that the free energy principle by Carl Friston actually formalizes what John Boyd gave us All right Not everybody's going to agree with me on that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:In fact, they'll attack us left and right on LinkedIn and there are folks out there already writing poems about me and how I get things wrong, and you know who they are and they know who they are. You know who you are. But anyway, let's go ahead and talk about the four P's of OODA. Yeah, sorry, I'm just fired up about this stuff because-.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:We believe in free speech here, at no Way Out.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:But this connects to what you're writing about on Substack with the cognitive warfare I mean. People need to understand the power of John Boyd's real OODA loop. So I want to run this by you today, but first I want to see what's going on in your world. What have you been up to?
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, well, I've been taking what it is that you and I leaders one-on-one, oftentimes behind closed doors, to help them reorient, to help them craft their perception and understand that the war that they're in is not necessarily a physical business war. It's actually a cognitive warfare perceptions, internally and externally. And once they get that, once they see that you see it everywhere, you can't unsee it. And once you can't unsee it, you're virtually unstoppable're virtually, you're virtually unstoppable. Everybody still thinks I have to have this much money, I have to have this much tech, this much software. And what they don't realize is the other paper that I'm working on. I don't want to say it out loud yet, but it's, it's something to do with economics. What, what they don't understand is that the orientation is literally everything we keep coming back to, that we keep running into people that are trying to improve jump boy, do the loop sketch by completely not understanding it and then completely taking all the power, draining all the power out of it. It's ridiculous and it's exactly what you want your competition to do. So if, for those leaders that are out there paying attention and they understand the nature of what we're actually in, then what's pervasive when it comes to teaching bad boy, which is an article title that we've had, or linear OODA loop. You want your competition to do exactly that, because you're going to beat them every single time. And here's the irony they're going to do all the work for you, and that's what these models perpetuate.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:This one specifically. I've not met this person. I do feel compelled, maybe to reach out at some point, rather than or I just throw the Iowa class broadside out at it because it's, you know, it's unfortunately, people are actually taking it seriously and I don't understand why. But you and I don't understand why, and others that we know don't understand why, for example, the live broadcast that you saw last night. Yeah, we understand Boyd's OODA loop sketch and they don't simply because they don't know it. They don't understand it. They've reduced it, this particular thing. You could run a Monte Carlo on it and you could see that the odds are. This person has never read a direct source of Boyd. They certainly haven't spent time in the archives like we have, or talking to acolytes like Chuck Spinney and Chet Richards and GI Wilson and others.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We'll talk about Chuck Spinney today. I want to go back to something you brought up about last night. I got to join in on Sarah Kernighan's substack going live where she brought up John Boyd. If you're not familiar with her work, you need to go listen to Tom. Is it Tom Woods? Is that correct?
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Tom Woods yeah.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, that podcast is spectacular, but Sarah is stepping out there bringing Boyd's work and theories and ideas to two places in my mind. That's one, the world of non-speaking autistic children, what it's like to be a mother in that situation, and then two, the cognitive warfare that's happening. So what we're seeing in her space is people are attacking her and contradicting their own views as they do that. Any more thoughts on that, amos?
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, I mean. So again, this is someone that understands the power of Boyd and Marshall McLuhan and what exactly they're telling us. And when you get into these sorts of situations where you're being attacked, once you understand these things as she does and as others do, it reverses on itself to the point where they end up doing all the work. There's nothing more rewarding than using someone's own words, not against them, watching someone use their own words against themselves. Right, because these things are overloaded in logical fallacies, these things are drenched in this just sort of soft soft language, and really it goes back to the two things that we, you know I've been putting up on Substack on the 5T protocol, and also to the guardians of decay, and a lot of people are quote guardians of decay, wittingly or unwittingly, because what they don't understand, they understand symptoms and they can look at symptoms and they can attack symptoms all day long. They have no understanding of systems.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, and and that's, I think, where we're trying to help people make a difference in in their observations of understanding that, their sense making and why it's easy to attract others, uh, like, and John Robb and others that are doing the same exact thing, that are that are looking at the system for what it is, knowing that, again following Marshall McLuhan, that the medium is the message and it's the tech and the environment or whatever that's what's having a direct effect on us, because all those things are extensions of us as humans. Right, and you misunderstand that. You're toast If you understand that. You're going to clobber your competition every time in any endeavor where humans make decisions.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So we're about six minutes in, let's get into it. We're going to get into the world of reorientation to help people really understand John Boyd's observer-oriented side hack loop. I'm going to do it through the four Ps. You've never heard me do this, moose. Maybe you've kind of heard me talk about it lightly here and there. But I want to start with. We'll talk about Chuck Spinney here in a minute. But big picture is second law of thermodynamics, action-perception loop. We'll talk about the perception-action loop as well. We'll touch on the free energy principle. We're not going to talk much about the entropic OODA loop. But I want to get going with the external environment. And this is important because in the external environment it could be physical, it could be social, it could be the organizational side. It's where living systems operate. And what do you know? What did John Boyd say about the external environment? Give me some thoughts.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:What did John Boyd say about the external environment. Give me some thoughts About the external environment. It's our understanding of it. Our comprehension of it is based off of our orientation, because our orientation implicitly guides and controls how we even understand and sense make in the external environment.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Anyway, he also said what he said there's no way out of these things.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:You can't get out of it. You can't get out of reorientation because it's drowning in mathematical imprecision, entropy, uncertainty, volatility, everything that causes friction for us as humans. There's no way out of reorienting and if you stop reorienting, those things are going to consume you and kill you.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Right. So there are certain features of the world that we just cannot eliminate. They're listed up there. You brought some of them up entropy, numerical imprecision, mutations, quantum uncertainty Today people call them other names right, there are affordances in the environment which we may talk about. There's adjacent possibles, there's VUCA. We use volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity to understand the external environment. So, to understand John Boyd's OODA loop, I believe you need to start with an understanding of the external world before we get into the internal world. And I want to go back to. You had a chance to talk to Chuck Spinney. You may be familiar with this sketch. Just give us some background on this.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:I was. That was four hours. That was seemed like five minutes to me because just to sit there with Chuck and go over the stuff with him was phenomenal. But the critical point in the graphic that you're using is from his evolutionary epistemology of destruction and creation, which is his interpretation of helping people understand destruction and creation. And, to be fair, when this came out, this to me was the Rosetta Stone and I'm happy to go, and I've done this with our clients. I'll go through this entire deck with them, line by line, because destruction and creation is very dense. It's very hard to understand. Even though it's very brief, chuck illuminates it in a way that if you don't get it you're going to get rolled by your competition. You have to understand the difference between what's external in the world and what's internal in your perception.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Absolutely so. The connection for me is when I went back to reread this and I saw this diagram, this image, what he is essentially doing and we're talking about Chuck Spinney here is he's actually putting a blanket or a statistical boundary between the internal states principle. This is known as a Markov blanket. Think about this If you put a blanket around a cell, a neuron, a brain, a team, an organization, a state, a nation state, whatever a universe, whatever it may be, it's a fractal approach to understanding what's internal to the system and what's external, no-transcript. This is a open system. Has a boundary, has inlets and an outlet. This is a flow system. That's all it is. This is basic physics system has a boundary, has inlets and an outlet. This is a flow system. That's all it is. This is basic physics 101, right External environment.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And on that boundary there are two things. There are sensory states. This is connecting back to the free energy principle. Sensory states are observations and, for those of you who may recall, john Boyd actually wanted to call it the SOTA loop for sense, orient, decide, act. So sense for sensory observations. That's what that is on the left side of the OODA loop. On the right side is the active states or action. Right. So we actually have this capability where we sense or observe things from the outside world. They go through something in the internal states of the OODA loop and then we take some type of action on the external environment to change either the environment or to solicit feedback from the environment to update what we're observing. So Moose thoughts on this. Anything to add?
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, I mean, this is the term that we've heard, the term that we've heard perception is reality. It's not wrong, right, it's true. Your perception is your reality.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So we'll build on. We'll get to perception in a moment. So I'm going to go with observe on the left side, our sensory states In the middle, there it's just our orientation right. So we'll go observe, orient. So when we observe something you can think of our eyes, our nose, our mouth, our skin, a radar, whatever it may be, taking in some type of information from the external world and communicating that to a internal map, what we call orientation, a generative model, if you will, an internal map of the external world. So this information, these sensory signals that are moving from observations or our sensory states, are what John Boyd called new information. Right, sensory signals are nothing more than new information and they go in and they mix with and you know what they mix with Moose, just share with an orientation.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, everything. So who we are, where we're from, what we think, how we think, what are our psychological states, what's our cultural traditions, our heritage, our environment, our ability?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:to handle breakfast, how many hours of sleep we got last night. It's genetics, cultural and, of course, previous experience, and that's already built into what John Boyd sketched in the Zoodaloop.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:And this is exactly where I would almost say 100% of the linear OODA models completely fall apart with one punch. One punch. You don't even have to punch, you just go like that, go boop, it falls over because orientation is everything.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Right, it's a swear point, it's everything. So, on that, I'm going to introduce the first P. You brought it up earlier. We talked about perception. Yeah, perception is constructed top-down, inside-out. We know from the work of people like Neil Seth Clark I'm sorry, I can't remember his first name at the top of my head, I also get to call Friston we know that they call perception a controlled hallucination. It's top-down, inside-out. It emerges from inside. Just using humans right now, inside of our brains, inside of our bodies, our perception of reality is constructed. It's a controlled hallucination, right? So where is that within the OODA loop? Well, it's the implicit guidance and control pathway that moves out of orient back to observe. For those of you who are familiar with the brain, you can say, hey, this might be what they call the reticular activating system. It acts as a filter. You can look at it as a default mode of how we observe the external world. It's rigid. You can also think of it as ego, right, your ego is this pathway, perception. So thoughts on that, moose.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, it's implicit guides and control. This is again, this is the finger push that you can topple the Jenga tower of every linear OODA loop model, just like that, because they don't factor in how our orientation, which is fractal I have one, you have one, we have one as a, as a, as a collaborative duo, um, we have them as families. You know, marine Corps, navies, companies, everything these things are fractal, right, and those orientations, in other words our cognitive understanding of what it is that we're seeing or does that we're up against, that shapes how we, how we see things. So some things that look like a crisis to somebody might look like an opportunity to somebody else, even though they're looking at the exact same thing. It's because their orientation creates a different perception.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So I'm going to add something in here. I'll just put an arrow in here that moves from orientation to action or active states, right? So there's something known as the action perception cycle or perception action cycle, however you want to call it. The problem with it? It oversimplifies how living systems actually interact with their environment. So when people talk about the OODA loop, they generally think of it as a linear process, like you brought up. But perception action you update your internal orientation or you take action to change the external world. Right, that's all we're trying to do as living systems. We're trying to minimize what is known as free energy, and we'll touch on that here in a second. But what we learned from the free energy principle is that the simple way of looking at the perception action loop is wrong. We need to look internally to the system, and that's what we're doing now is building that internal system up using the framework of John Boyd's OODA loop. So perception, we have that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Let's go into the next thing here. I'm calling this pathfinding, and I don't know if it's going to fit with you or how it's going to sit with you, Moose. Let me explain why. So I recently sat in a conversation with Steven Kotler, I think he's a bestselling author wrote several books on flow, on flow states, right. So, following a lot of work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi individual peak performance and he was also working with Dr Michael Menino they have a new article coming out. They have a new article coming out and I think it's with Carl Friston again.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:But this is that intuitive action, if you will, that autonomic response, the habits of mind that Dr McCabe shared with us several episodes ago. It's that response you have when you do deliberate work for your technical skills. So think about basketball players, all that, but John Boyd called it finger spits and gefuel right, it's those processes. So when you think about teamwork, I'm going to transition from individual performance to teamwork now, In a team setting.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Pathfinding to me is those non-technical skills that you develop through deliberate work. So, things that we present to you in the flow lab or the flow learning lab, we're trying to build up how you build or how you plan as a team, how you plan as a team, you need one shared expert mental model of how to plan. And the same is true with debriefing, Same is true with communication. We're borrowing from aviation crew resource management and doing that. But that's that pathfinding pathway there might be a little redundant Pathfinding. Is that implicit guidance and control pathway that moves out of orientation towards action? It doesn't mean it goes directly to the external world, but it feeds into the active states. Moose, I want to hear your thoughts on that.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Well, there's an interesting. So I'll tell you why I love the term. One of Mary Boyd told us one of John Boyd's favorite movies was 1990, the 1990 rendition of Last of the Mohicans. Now, I went to an all boys Catholic school that made us read all the books, so I had to read the leather stocking tales. There was the Deer Slayer, there was Las Mohegans and Natty Bumpo, nathaniel, the Daniel Day-Lewis character that was one of his call signs, if you will, or one of his monikers was the Pathfinder. And what were they doing? They were trying to understand their environment, to to basically branch out. They were, uh, it's one, I mean it's a tremendous OODA loop movie. I think I, I think I know what, uh, the world reorientation movie night is going to be this weekend, but, um, it, yeah, it's a. Um, I, I like, I like that term because ultimately think of like neural pathways too, right, like, if we think of all these other things, like, like a pathway, like the way I mean, I think it's a, I think it's a, it's, it's acceptable, absolutely.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, so we'll see how it sticks with listeners and all that. But again, I'm borrowing this from Steven Kotler in a conversation I had with him a few weeks ago. I, I'd like that, I like that makes sense. If it's an intuitive, you know they're looking at cognition, zero, cognition one and two, so kind of like system one. Right, this is that system one autonomic response to the world from from Daniel Kahneman.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:So to me I remember the Pathfinder was a badass Right, so maybe that's why John Boyd loved the, I'm sure, and I'm sure he read the books too as a kid. But he's trying to navigate what they call the inland sea, like the unexplored country, the VUCA the volatility, the uncertainty, the complexity, the ambiguity. We don't know what's out there beyond the colonial cities like Philadelphia or whatever. As the further we go west into the frontier, there's more unknowns and we have to rely on our orientation, our adaptability.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Let me throw this at you. So, using language from the Kenevan framework, these are good practices, meaning that in pathfinding as a process or method or whatever it may be, to go work in a complex environment as a team, you need those non-technical skills to do that. That's a good practice. It's a complicated thing to deal with complexity. So, going back to your point about the last Mohicans and the Pathfinder, does that still resonate with you?
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Oh, yeah, totally.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Okay.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Maybe more than the Deer Slayer. That was his other name. That was the other book. Was the Deer Slayer the Pathfinder? The last book Got it, but you couldn't be a Deer Slayer unless you're doing this either. So that's the other lesson, I guess.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I want to put a note out to everybody here. We're not saying that you build perception first and pathfinder, these are going on simultaneously within your OODA loop or your fractal OODA loops. Your, your OODA loop or or your fractal OODA loops, All right.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:So on this great point, because a lot a lot of what punch just described is exactly how I've heard people that are, you know, credentialed consultants saying okay, so the first phase is I observe and I see what's going on, and then the next thing I do is I orient Okay, I started doing. And if you're doing that, you're basically saying if you're Tom Brady, okay, the first thing I do is I'm going to squat down, I'm going to put my hands out, I'm going to call the snap, I'm going to step back and I'm going to drop back. If you're thinking like that, you're toast and you're going to get your clock cleaned.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:No, I agree. So, okay, we have two things at the moment. We have perception and pathfinding. Perception is that top-down construction of our view of the external world. It also includes things like our ego, default mode of operation. The default mode of operating when it comes to pathfinding are those things that have to go through cycles of destruction and creation as well, right? So we don't always say that's why we say there's no best practices, there's only good practices. That way you can go back and as the environment changes, as you learn more, you can refine those through a cycle of destruction and creation. So, perception, pathfinding, emerging out of orientation, and we're going to move on to what emerges next, which should be, in this case, it should be decide, which is really a prediction or hypothesis, right? So the way I kind of look at decide here is it's like a fork, right? We're going to test a prediction, potentially, or we're also going to run and test some hypotheses and we'll get to those here in a minute. So decide in this case, observe, orient, decide is a fork and the first thing it does is it goes through a cycle of prediction.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:This is known as Bayesian inference.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:This shows that humans are prediction machines and what this is doing is it's comparing the new information that's coming in to our internal model of the external world.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So a common thing from the free energy principle is we're trying to minimize that surprise. We're trying to minimize the sensory signals coming in from the external world, right? Why is that? Well, our brains are 2% of our body weight. They burn 20 to 25% of our energy. So instead of taking all the information in from the external world which could potentially kill us and I like to talk to Sarah about this again if autistic people are being overwhelmed by the sensory information coming from the outside world, are being overwhelmed by the sensory information coming from the outside world how this kind of fits into Earth space. But anyway, we're trying to predict what's going on in the external world, because that's a lower energy approach than to just soak in all the information that's coming into us. So it's a Bayesian approach, so this gets into statistics and this is aligned to what we're learning in the free energy principle. Moose, help clean that up a little bit, man.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, I mean, again, people misunderstand the term decision. I think in general it's a hypothesis. It could happen. I'm doing this because I'm not sure what's going to happen. Given the nature of uncertainty and this goes back to how I connected not connected really, but like try to demonstrate the connection between what Boyd was saying and the Austrian economists were saying is that I think something's going to happen, so I'm going to choose to act. I'm making the decision to act, but it's still all hypothetical. I don't know if it's going to actually work.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Well, we'll dive into that in a moment, but I want to go back. You and I had a conversation with Chet a few weeks ago. Chet Richards and then something I'm going to just look at my notes over here. He wrote that projection is making predictions, trying them out and comparing that to what actually goes on. So the idea here is that Boyd already wrote that into I'll get the right language here in a second. That's in Supporting and Losing. Yeah, already wrote that into um, I'll get the right language in a second um essence of winning and losing.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, I believe it's already in there. Yeah, so in there again. That's another thing that people have not read.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, oh by the way, by the way we should, we should make a critical point about that. So and we did say I think we said it with chet the essence of winning and losing is the only place, the only place, where john boyd actually graphically illustrated the ooda loop period and it's the ooda loop in quotes sketch period and it's also his shortest, one of his shortest briefs. It's not very long and people go right to that and they think I'm just going to read this and I'm going to understand everything. And I'm telling you, if you go there and you haven't read any of the others, especially Destruction, creation, conceptual Spiral, you're absolutely hosed.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Absolutely so. I'm going to just read my notes here from that conversation. And we were talking about orientation, many-sided, implicit, cross-referencing process of projection, empathy, correlation and rejection. Chet pointed out that projection is prediction. He said that's what Boyd was getting at. And what we're saying with prediction here is that we are trying to figure out the causes behind the sensory signals that are coming through us, from our sensory states. What is that thing that's on the outside world, that information that's coming out to me, right? We're predicting that, we're anticipating that. This is that whole predictive processing thing that's already inherent inside of the way John Boyd explained the OODA loop and sketched it. Right. It's predictive processing, bayesian inference. This is where we're trying to minimize, surprise or minimize variational free energy and this is that connection back to the free energy principle which, again, I believe, formalizes John Boyd's OODA loop. So minimizing variational free energy, and we'll talk about expected free energy here in a minute. All right, any more thoughts on this Moose?
Mark "Moose" McGrath:No, I mean, this is the critical part. A decision is a hypothesis. It's just like, at least in the old days, the United States. They taught us the scientific method and you had a hypothesis what's? I think this is going to happen and I'll find out. And how will I find out? Well, I'll, I'll observe and I'll see what happened and I'll reorient.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, so let's build on that. So this is now. We're going to anticipate what to do next, right? This is the planning portion of the OODA loop. Uh, it's course of action development. It's counterfactual thought. What if scenarios? It's running the simulation internal to the system, right? So this pathway here is I have a hypothesis about what I'm observing or what I want to have happen, and I'm going to run it internally before I actually execute it on the outside world. So inside of this, this is a connection to the free energy principle, where they talk about expected free energy. And expected free energy are you ready for? This is uncertainty and risk, right? So you do not need to add risk to John Boyd's Observed Orientated Side Act Loop. It's inherent in the system and the way we're drawing it. So any more thoughts on that, Moose?
Mark "Moose" McGrath:I mean again, it's a very simple rudimentary reading would have told you that you can't. This is not an additive process.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Right. So that's that planning, that happens. It's that simulation. And I'm going to make a point here that you and I need to go look back at naturalistic decision-making recognition, prime decision-making and look at the free energy principle and compare them all under this understanding of John Boyd's OODA loop. And I believe RPD recognition prime decision-making is going to become OBE by this explanation of the OODA loop because it creates situation awareness. It already does those things, has a simulation built into it. I sat down with Gary Klein years ago before I learned about the free energy principle, before I really understood John Boyd's OODA loop to what we're talking about today. But given what I know now, compared to what I knew then, I believe Boyd was way, way, way advanced in this thinking.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:I've told I told it to marry his daughter just in the last week or two. Because of AI, we might be able to try to catch up to your father.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, yeah, it's reality. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:So let's build this out some more All right.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, it's reality, yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's build this out some more, all right? So there we have it. We have the four P's of the OODA loop perception, pathfinding, prediction, planning. It doesn't mean we're changing the OODA loop, we're just using them to amplify what the pathways mean. Right, orientation remains the square point remains the focal point remains the internal model of the external world.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:What I do want to point out here is when you look at pathfinding and how it interacts with action and planning. I want to point out something that I brought up earlier A single expert model of planning shared across a team will help you improve your planning process. This includes things like red teaming. How do you use red teaming techniques in your planning process? So I'm talking about a team here, not individual Individuals can do this to a certain extent, but when you build those skills up like think, write, share, which requires a lot of energy to do for those of you who may have been clients or are thinking about becoming clients, that is a high energy approach, right. That requires a deliberate system to approach to learn how to do that autonomically or automatically throughout when you do it in the future, right? So pathfinding would be those effective methods that improve your planning.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And let's take this up a level For strategy. Your strategy is dependent on understanding the external environment. Right? It's improving that internal orientation, or building a map of the external world, and the way you do that is you have to have methods. You don't hire McKinsey to do this. It's probably the dumbest thing you can do in the world. By the way, you don't outsource your strategic thinking to other people.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:If you're doing that, you're dead, I guarantee you that and you would have found you could have paid us a lot less. You've gotten 10 times, 100 times more value, but whatever.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, this kind of reminds me of Hans and Franz. Hear me now and believe me later. If you don't do this, your company's dead. All right, done, 100%.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:You have to take these approaches, you know, and a lot of this built in the flow system and a lot of it's built into adaptive strategy. A lot of this is what you're doing with your clients, moose, but this is what you're doing with your clients, moose, but this is it. If you do not understand this, you're about to get your ass kicked. Now this applies to artificial intelligence. This applies to strategy, teamwork, leadership, leader's intent, affordances, attractors, all these things. Hell, we can even apply this to understanding different modalities of combating PTSD and TBI, including psychedelic-assisted therapy. Why? Because they're using the free energy principle to explain that. Now we can apply this to behavioral economics or economics, because we have Patrick Skotanis on the show, who's using this. Now we can use this to explain peak performance and flow states. Why? Because Steven Kotler and others are using this. Now, this isn't magic. This is two knuckleheads named Moose and Ponch figuring this out with John Boyd's acolytes and saying hey, this is a weapon system.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:That everybody's designed with for free.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, you don't go and implement, you're already doing this.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, you're already doing it.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:You're already doing it Right now. You're doing it and, if you understand it, you're going to destroy your competition. You're already doing this. Yeah, you're already doing it. You're already doing it Right now. You're doing it and, if you understand it, you're going to destroy your competition. You're going to thrive and survive and you're going to have that capacity for free and independent action.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:I will tell you too. Yeah, I mean, it was actually engaging with a client where this forthcoming project that you're aware of, that will, uh, will, come forward. It all came back to this idea of you're already doing this, and it's right in front of your face yeah, yeah, and the put, like I said.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Some people are pushing back on this, and I get it, because they didn't come up with it. We didn't come up with this, we just visited the archives and we're asking questions that's it and we're still asking.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:By the way it's, and we're still asking by the way it's all ING stuff. Ponch has already said it Learning, asking, planning, red teaming. You know it's constantly, constantly, constantly a continuous ongoing process. We don't write, we're writing and sometimes we change our minds. You know, mcluhan and Boyd were really good at changing their minds. I think the OODA loops actually are a really good place to talk about that, because when Boyd was figuratively talking about OODA loops in Patterns of Conflict which, again, no one ever read, it was not what it evolved into. What it evolved into is that he realized that this is actually how our cognition understands reality and how we engage with reality.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, yeah. What many people connect the OODA loop to in the cockpit of fighter aviation. Yes, it applies there. Yeah, 100%, but it didn't emerge from there. Right, john Boyd was a fighter pilot, but he looked at different disciplines and I'm going to use the word consilience it's basically pulling from multiple disciplines to see the overlap there. Right, that's what John Boyd did, and what we're seeing today is. You know, I hate to call it a theory of everything. I know there are people talking about that now, but this is about as close to a sketch of everything that you can imagine, and I know Stephen Collard-.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Because everybody does it.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, those that don't understand it look at me like you're absolutely out of your mind. Let's just observe, orient, decide, act. I'm like, really, some man spent 40 years of his life after he created the energy maneuverability theory, after he looked at the Toyota production system and says, oh, it's really simple First you observe, then you orient, then you decide, then you act.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Well, you heard Sarah brought it up last night too he was a special needs dad. This guy had chaos and change all around him his entire life. That's why his biography is so important, because you get a better context of where he came up with a lot of this stuff. It's not just limited to fighter aviation. It's not that that doesn't have an important part, because it does. If you think that's everything, we want our clients, we want their competitors to think that that is the way to do it, because I want the client, I want the competition running out on U to R. There's your counterintelligence strategy Get them running on U to R, get them running on linear udaloop, you know moose, I just realized today is may 13th, it's top gun day, top gun day this is the most important podcast you should be listening to today.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We're going to push it out as soon as we're done here. You want to do that. This is the top gun brief of the udaloop. This is the most important brief you'll ever have.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:If you don't like it there's other things you can learn. I'm going to ask a dumb Marine question because I know those movies backwards. Was that the day that they did the last action in Top Gun?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:The movie was released on May 16th. May 13th was picked as the official Top Gun. Let's see the movie was released on May 16th. May 13th was picked as the official Top Gun day. So yeah, so that was 19. I don't know, I was.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:I think it's also for you know, we just have a new pope for all the Catholics out there, I think May 13th was also the apparition of Fatima, really yeah. So there you go. Yeah, it's the feast, really yeah. So there you go. Yes, the feast. Oh yeah, today's the feast day of our lady of Fatima. Catholic devotion.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We're going to. We're going to get this up.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:There's no accidents. There's no accidents.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:May 13th is Top Gun day, by the way.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:the Pope actually. So I did. If you saw my article about Leo the 14th, the new pontiff, formerly known as Robert Francis Cardinal Prevost, I learned it's Prevost, not Prevost who's from Chicago. You know, the Pope is from Chicago, he's a Sox fan, he's a Bears fan, he's a Blackhawks fan. I mean this is huge. And he went to Villanova and you know, as others will tell you, sarah would say, you know, if Villanova fans were annoying enough, now the Pope went there. Anyway, what I was writing about was how, based off of his first homily, so his sermon in his first mass as Pope, it seems to me that his orientation, at least what he said, is that he actually understands that there's an information and cognitive war which is the predominant prevailing theme across the globe In the selection of the name Leo XIV.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:If you go back and you know your history about Leo XIII, leo XIII wrote a famous encyclical which is a papal pronouncement on some topic. In this case it was on labor. It was called Rerum Novarum announcement on some topic. In this case it was on, uh, labor. It was called rarum novarum. And leo the 13th was recognizing the trends back then of what was being caused by the industrial age. You know things that were being thrown, and so now it seems that, uh, pope leo the 14th is successor and named too. Um is talking about the same type of thing. So I would predict back to prediction hypothesis, I would predict that his first encyclical is something major around that topic, because he came out of the gate swinging on that Um.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:And then, of course, you know when, when a Pope comes out, any Pope, any, anytime there's a.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:And you know, sometimes I did get an email like how do you know so much about this stuff? And I could go down the list of being, you know, catholic school, my whole life being a knight of the order of the holy sepulcher, down to the. Every time a pope comes out, both camps claim him oh, he's a conservative, oh he's a liberal, oh he's a conservative. Like, all of a sudden, not even a week, you're starting to see the commentary that, like you know, the left is now upset that he's not a liberal, based off what he said at one mass. Now he's a, they're afraid that he might actually be Catholic or whatever. And like you're already seeing the fifth generation war unfold, you're already seeing the cognitive war go, go, go and unfold. So you know, it's not a judgment on whether the Pope's a conservative, liberal or whatever the judgment is. Take it all in and understand that it's a perception war. It's a cognitive war and if you understand that you can start to filter through a lot of the noise.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So everything we just talked about in the last 40 minutes, it connects back to the cognitive warfare, everything, yeah, and if you understand what we just went through, you'll understand what's happening to you and what you can do to others. Remember, leadership and manipulation are different sides of the same coin, right? That's it. So if you understand what we just explained, you'll have an advantage. If you don't, you're going to be taken advantage of, right.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Every time there's no way out. I mean, that's the thing. There's no way out. You can orient poorly, and that's fine. It's disconnected, that's cool. You could think you're doing it well. Why? I learned this at Harvard. They taught us this in the MBA school Cool.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Nobody's teaching this man.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:No, so I'm. I'm actually working on an article right now that basically says it's If you're working with us and you haven't read Destruction and Creation and you don't understand OODA Loop Sketch, we're not going to work with you. Yeah, yeah, we're going to go work with your competitors because you're going to rely on your education, what your consultants told you, whatever, and really all you needed was to read Destruction and Creation and understand OODA Loop Sketch. Ooda loop sketch. It's kind of like when, years ago, he just stepped down as CEO, I used to go out every May well, earlier it was always like Derby weekend to go to the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting and I went several times and it's really interesting to go and listen. Great OODA orientation exercise I could talk about this. We could do a whole episode on this. Uta orientation exercises I could talk about this. We could do a whole episode on this. Anyway, one of the things I'll never forget was that Buffett, he would take questions open mic, he and Charlie Munger and this guy would get up and a bunch of them would say the same exact thing.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:I've read all your books. I've read all your letters. I went to Penn, just like you did. I went to Columbia Business School. I did everything, everything. Why am I not a multi-bazillionaire like you and Buffett would say? Because all you had to do was understand behavioral, how to think about market ups and downs and how to value a business. Everything else is filler, because everything else that you learn in business school is, is just all filler, and I think, from our perspective, what that means to us is okay. If you understand destruction, creation and you understand a loop sketch, everything else is just. Everything else is just a distractive filler. You know everything else is meat. We can, we can put a lot of meat on that and we do. Yeah, understand those things fundamentally. Forget about it, it doesn't matter.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Well, hey, moose, that was 43 minutes. Man, that was fun. Let's get this out there. It's May 13th, top Gun Day. We'll put the four Ps out there. Hopefully it'll make sense to our listeners. They can go ahead and comment. Throw some questions to us on Substack, on the world of reorientation. Please go out there to the world of reorientation. Find out what Moose has been writing about. Go to Sarah Kernian's Inchstones Inchstones. Go see how she's using these ideas to really get ahead of what RFK put out a few weeks ago on autism. There's a lot going on in the world and, of course, if you're putting R or risk at the end of the loop because you need to, that's your choice. You can do what you want.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:I mean, even the graphic is an inward spiral. It's like irony is not lost on these in any way.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, A listener reached out and said hey, you got to listen to the All In podcast. I think it's about an episode about a week ago. They talk about the OODA loop in there. They use the linear OODA loop.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, that's okay, but again, please learn the real OODA loop. That's why we're here. I do so. I am drafting an article about OODA-R as a professional rejoinder, because NATO generals are reading that. And you look at the people who are commenting on LinkedIn and all I want to talk about is how it just utterly disregards and distorts all the core insights from Boyd's major works All of them, not some.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:all particularly those that deals with orientation, adaption, tempo, collapse, evolving evolution, tempo, uh, collapse, evolving evolution. It disregards all of boyd's brief to some extent. Some completely like essence of winning and losing. It's a complete rejection. Yeah, um, destruction and creation. Fundamentally, it completely disregards that now I don't know how you say that you're improving boyd and you fundamentally completely ignore his core work that he riffed everything and built everything off of. So that's coming. I don't think we need to improve Boyd.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We need to improve how we understand Boyd. That's what we're saying here. I want to point out a few things. In the last 40 minutes, what we shared with you covers cognitive warfare, it covers cybersecurity, it covers strategy leadership teamwork 12 year old basketball 12 year old basketball artificial intelligence. How does PTSD, TBI get mitigated through different modalities, including psychedelic assistive therapies, right Breathing exercises?
Mark "Moose" McGrath:How does that fit into?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:that, by the way, chet brought that up in our episode with him, where he talked about yoga and the importance of implicit guidance, control and how breathing helps us become present, which is a key enabler to being in a state of flow. So we covered flow, we covered flow states, we covered the Toyota production system in 40 minutes, right.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:I know somebody that I will introduce you to that says that's a psychedelic advocate, that says that breath work is more powerful than the psychedelic medicine.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, and let's wrap it up on this. So Wim Hof, last night did some great Wim Hof breathing 20 minutes of it last night, fantastic. 20 minutes of it last night, fantastic. Two weeks ago I shared a vagus nerve breathing with a bunch of seventh grade girls on a basketball team. They used that when they were down at halftime in their championship game. They were down by 13 at halftime, came back to win by 24. They let the other team score one point in the second half, All right. So these things, correlation causation point in the second half, all right. So these things, correlation causation, I get it. They may work, but this is all built into what we just explained through 35 minutes, 45 minutes of the OODA loop. So, and using the four Ps. So let's wrap it up there. You got the last thoughts, moose.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, last thought is, as Ponch said, get over to the world of reorientation. We've had a really nice uptick in paid subscribers, and the paid subscribers uh, that put skin in the game are that's where we get a lot of our feedback, so they're the ones that are able to comment. They're also the ones that are able to participate in our chat room, which is is closed to. Uh. In fact, I have an article coming out I'm gonna probably put out next week or the week after of somebody writing a nasty restack saying that you know, I liked your stuff, but you don't open up comments or whatever and it's not a subscriber. And you go and you start to look at this uh guy's writings and this 5t. I know why he's pissed because he wanted to crap on the pope or whatever he wanted to do so, um, but it's actually. It worked out being uh kind of like the autism mommy wars thing that put out. It actually works out to be a really instructive lesson for people that are paying attention, and I'm getting a lot of really good feedback from leaders that are saying that, hey, I love how you took a real world example and showed me exactly what's around me all the time. So that's coming out.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:The other thing too, I've been putting in these things I don't know if it's the right name, but I call them the devastator, so I've I throw out like a, like a logical devastation of linkedin um, I forget what else I've put in there right off the uh oh, the pittsburgh pirates organization, because I'm, uh, you know, in manhattan and board of new york parents but raised in pittsburgh, so I love them too and it's just a disaster and it's just a devastating. Again, it's all incorporating boyd mccluhan, whatever, um, kind of following Chuck's example, because I think his thing was called the Blaster. He would call them Blasters, and I just thought of like Devastator, like you know, like a J-Dam or a Tomahawk coming in through a window. So those are in there as well. And then I know that you're working on some stuff too that you'll limit to our paid subscriptions inside the chat and get a really good forms on there.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So cool man. That was fun. We'll see you here soon. There's no way out.
