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
Pre-Event Indicators: Staying Left of Bang With Patrick Van Horne
What if you could see disruption coming before it hits? The concept of "Left of Bang" transforms how we understand threat detection and strategic advantage—not just in combat zones, but in boardrooms, investment portfolios, and everyday situations.
Patrick Van Horne, co-author of "Left of Bang" and former Marine Corps Combat Hunter instructor, breaks down this powerful framework that was originally developed to help Marines identify insurgent threats in Iraq and Afghanistan. The premise is elegantly simple: "bang" is any critical event that forces reaction, and positioning yourself "left of bang" means you've anticipated it, prepared for it, and can potentially shape the outcome rather than merely responding to it.
The discussion reveals how this approach creates fractal advantages across different domains. For business leaders, it means establishing systems to monitor weak signals and market shifts. For investors, it provides a framework to recognize patterns before markets react. For security professionals, it sharpens threat recognition. At every level, the methodology transforms reactive thinking into proactive positioning.
Van Horne explains that when disruption hits, organizations typically follow one of three paths: immediate collapse, diminished survival, or adaptive growth. The difference isn't luck—it's preparation, awareness, and the ability to detect what others miss. He introduces practical components like establishing baselines (what's normal), identifying watch points (indicators to monitor), and setting action points (thresholds that trigger decisions).
The episode underscores the synergy between Left of Bang and Boyd’s OODA loop, highlighting how both empower individuals and organizations to stay ahead of disruptions by embracing adaptability, decentralized decision-making, and a deep understanding of complex environments. Van Horne’s insights, grounded in real-world applications, make a compelling case for why Left of Bang is essential reading for anyone seeking to thrive in uncertainty—whether in combat, business, or everyday life.
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March 25, 2025
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
Well, we might have some disagreement on the definition, but Patrick and I are both Marine officers, past Marine officers. Ponch is a retired Navy captain. So I said we have three Naval officers here on board which technically I think I'm right.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:Yeah, me giving a tour of an aircraft carrier goes like this there's a front, there's a back water, all around.
Mark McGrath:Any questions here's where the plane crashes into the deck. Yeah, so, um, the book left of bang has been on my uh, the book that it comes from black irish publishing it's not. It's not really big, it's very lightweight. It can fit in just about any pocket. You don't even need a big cargo pocket in camis. You could put it in your suit pocket, you could put it in your blazer pocket or take it to work and that's what I would use it a lot in asset management. The concept of left of bang and the book is geared towards the tactical applications. I want you to take us through that and then let's see if we can build it up to the fractal strategic applications at the highest level, because I think that's what everybody's going to get a lot of value out of.
Patrick Van Horne:First, I'll just say when the book was getting made, stephen Pressfield and Sean Coyne's view and vision for the book was exactly as you described. It was designed to be able to fit into a cargo pocket. What kind of cover was meant to look like in one of our technical manual style documents? And so to hear you say that I guess nothing else was validation for kind of their design and their vision right from the very start. So appreciate that the book Left to Bang what it talks about.
Patrick Van Horne:It tells the story of the Marine Corps' combat hunter program and, for maybe any listeners who are unfamiliar with it, at the beginning of the war in Iraq, but also Afghanistan, marine soldiers and sailors were really at a disadvantage. Soldiers and sailors were really at a disadvantage. We launched Iraqi Freedom was in March 2003. 21 days later, the American military and our coalition partners occupied Baghdad right. We had just moved faster, moved further, while taking fewer casualties than any military has ever done in history, and we showed the world exactly what we could do with our advanced weapons and our advanced technology. We showed what shock and awe truly looked like For enemies, though they also learned a very critical lesson where, if they wanted Marines overseas, we lost our ability to identify who out there was targeting us and we became very reactive to everything that they would do. And then in 2007, then General James Mattis said this is an unacceptable outcome, this is an unacceptable way to fight a war.
Patrick Van Horne:He directed the creation of the Combat Hunter Program that the book talks about, and the goal was very simple, was to give Marines operating on the ground the ability to look out and observe and assess the environment, both physically the physical environment, but also the human terrain and understand what is normal.
Patrick Van Horne:And once you can identify what's normal, what that baseline is, you have the ability to identify what's normal, what that baseline is. You have the ability to either recognize that anomaly, recognize that person trying to hide within the crowd because their intentions here are different, or recognize when that baseline is shifting. And really the goal was to give Marines the upper hand by first improving and enhancing the way that they observe and improving their situational awareness, knowing that the decision-making and the actions that follow. If you have better inputs, you can make better decisions and do so at the speed of combat. And that's what the book is really about was to help give Marines, initially written to help give Marines and soldiers and sailors, that ability. And then, in the 11 plus years since it's been published and to your point, mark, it's been expanded and applied into a number of different concepts and a number of different fields as well.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I mean, I live in Manhattan.
Mark McGrath:I think that everybody in Manhattan should read that book, because you're in crowded places like Penn Station, grand Central, times Square, hale Square, wherever it is, and a lot of the things that you discuss in the book tactically, for my own personal safety or my own situational awareness, or when I'm in Manhattan with kids or something like that with my children.
Mark McGrath:It's a really good book, but the more I thought about it I'm like, wow, yet I could take these same concepts and I could share this with a portfolio manager or an investment advisor or something like that, and they can extract this actual pattern and they can position their clients to be left at bang. You know, at a, at a grander level than just, um, you know, when they're walking into a skyscraper or something like that. Like they can, they can think of it more, um, along the lines of you know, along the lines of geopolitical events, like look what's going on in the world right now between Iran and markets and everything else. If I had systematically been left of bang strategically, not just tactically that I would be better off, such that when bang happens and I'm right of it I'm not reacting, I'm harnessing bang as an advantage, I'm not reacting as it is a disadvantage.
Patrick Van Horne:At the core of the concept written about in the book is you teach people how to define what's normal. How do you establish this baseline, recognizing that this baseline could be different anywhere you go and just kind of, as an example, just flew back to New York a few weeks ago for a conference. Anywhere you go and, just kind of as an example, just flew back to New York a few weeks ago for a conference and the minute I step off the plane coming to the airport, there's a guy just screaming into his cell phone, lacing into someone, and out here in Colorado, that would absolutely not be normal, that would absolutely attract our attention. New York City, it's just another Tuesday where someone's angry and yelling at someone. That person doesn't necessarily stand out because if that's what's normal, that behavior might not attract your attention.
Patrick Van Horne:But I say that because whatever decisions you make and that might work in a concept of threat recognition but for your portfolio managers, for your executives, the decisions they make are different than the person who might be customer facing or might be interacting with clients. And it comes down to establishing what's normal for the decisions that you need to make at your level. And once you have that baseline, then you become capable of recognizing when that baseline is shifting, as maybe you've seen in markets or just the operating environment that we have for businesses and organizations and public safety entities today. But it starts by just articulating it kind of in a way that supports your decisions, that changes based on what your job is and what your role is.
Mark McGrath:So I think. So let me bring Ponch into this. Like Ponch, what I hear that our clients would want to know and the people that we talk to, I hear patterns, mismatches, gaps to exploit competitively weak signals. Right, I mean that left of bang concept is fractal, just like orientation is. Just like it is.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:Yeah, 100%. So, as Patrick was talking there, I was thinking about sense-making. How do we make sense of the environment so we can act into it? So, act in it. So third level situational awareness is like anticipatory thinking, right. So we talk about how do you build that basic situational awareness? You just can't go to third level essay or that sense-making without starting with looking back at what happened, right. So this is when we coach situational awareness.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:I try to simplify it a little bit what happened, what's happening now and what could happen, right? So what happened is that debrief, get people to look back at a situation and reconstruct from multiple perspectives what happened. Generally, what you get is people don't know what happened in the last 10 minutes. We just don't pay attention to what's going on. What that does? It allows us to pay attention to what's actually happening now so we can anticipate what's going to happen next. So this is critically important at every level of an organization for sense-making, right. But the way you wrote about it in the book, it is fit for the tactical operator right Out in a hostile environment. But that doesn't mean it can't be exacted into what corporations are doing today. They have to make sense of the environment. They have to understand what happened. They have to debrief and understand what's happening now and anticipate what's going to come next. So no, I think there's a huge connection there, moose.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, and that's why anybody that's listening read this book. Read this book for its practical use if you're ever going to be in a crowd in a busy area, uh, but also to read this book to pull out the, pull out the concepts. I mean that's. I guess that's the thing, patrick, that when I think about um, is this still on the common dance list? Is this still? It is, it is perfect. Well, there's a. There's a. There's a great vote. I mean the books that are on the common dance list. Is this still this? It is perfect. Well, there's a. There's a. There's a great vote.
Mark McGrath:I mean the books that are on the common dance list almost over almost all, are books that you could take in any domain, because if you pull out the patterns, you pull out the, you pull out the concepts. They're applicable pretty much to anything, and our ground school in chaos, in the Marines, is really where a lot of these universal concepts have had a great historical testing ground and they work for where they work for everybody. What I'm thinking of is in the scope of even cognitive warfare, right, like where there's a war for our minds right now and it's being overrun by every media channel you could think of how do you stay? How do you stay left of bang in the digital environment, not just the physical environment?
Patrick Van Horne:And before we get to the digital. I think you know kind of one point on that and you know, brian, to kind of follow up on your comment about the levels of situational awareness, I think that there's a lot of organizations and a lot of leaders that when you think about what is their, what are their inputs, what are their data points, a lot of it in my experience comes from the news where they are reading about things that have already happened. It's the things that are covered, whether it's the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg or the Financial Times or whatever. Their source that they trust is most of it has already occurred. Source that they trust is most of it has already occurred. So when you think about those levels of situational awareness again, just my experience with this but an overwhelming majority of those data points are all what happened, not what is going to happen, what has been forecast or what is coming, and, as a result, the best case scenario for many is they're operating right at bang when that breaking news alert comes in. That's when they start and they have missed and they've given up a lot of the precious seconds and minutes or days or however long that they have left to bang. They might've missed that opportunity.
Patrick Van Horne:Just thinking about where's their information coming from, and, especially for executives, they can't necessarily monitor all of those different components themselves. They probably need support and they need staff. They need to outsource whatever that is to make sure that the volume of information they're receiving each week is also prioritizing those things that are about to come. Otherwise, they will struggle to intentionally get to that point where they're thinking about what's coming and we think about pre-positioning or being ready to act. So much of that comes from simply just knowing that it's not, you know, crystal ball. We can't say this is exactly what will happen. But as you're outlining scenarios and outlining situations, you can have a plan ready to execute the minute one of those scenarios manifests itself.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:Let's unpack that real fast. I think this is important for clients that we work with and it is about how do you put in your planning process if you have a planning process the ability to identify those weak signals, those threats that are out there, those constraints, whatever they may be, and build a contingency plan around that. And I think this is where most organizations go wrong, is you rightly point out? They're driving forward, looking in the rear view mirror at what happened in the past, trying to figure out what's going on. They're not paying attention to what's going on their dashboard right now. Right, they don't know what's happening right in front of them. So how do we create the conditions for them to start thinking about those multiple futures? And that's, that's what's missing, and I think that's what your book kind of hints at as well.
Patrick Van Horne:To me this comes down to kind of two steps.
Patrick Van Horne:It starts with two steps, but it's first, can you define what decisions you need to make in your job or in your role, and if those decisions can be articulated and communicated clearly, then you can back plan and you can identify both the watch points and the action points that should trigger and meet those thresholds to actually move into your decision making process.
Patrick Van Horne:And by defining the decision, the action point and the watch point, kind of moving further and further, left being monitored either in an automated way or with staff or support, in order to just provide you, hey, this condition, this threshold was met, no action needed.
Patrick Van Horne:But we are here at this stage and it takes that executive who's in back-to-back meetings or doing something and they cannot be monitoring, that just tells them, hey, it's time to start to think about what those maybe actions or responses will be. And so I think the first step really being, if you define the decision, figure out what are those watch points and the action points, so that people know this is specifically what I'm looking for, and by no means does it overrule or override an executive's judgment to say, hey, I don't care about that today, actually based on everything else, or hey, we haven't. Really I know this is the watch point, but actually I think we should probably start to move people, or money, or resources or something around, because if this occurs, our exposure, our risk or whatever it is that we're concerned about is different today than we originally anticipated.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:But it just very intentionally brings that forward. You just described an adaptive landscape where we have to be prepared to adapt to new things that we don't know today, that we might find out tomorrow. Yeah, 100%.
Patrick Van Horne:But I think, once you define and we're talking about anticipated challenges, anticipated risks to define these watch points and action points, but what it does is it does key you in to the sources of information and everything else, to the sources of information, everything else they might alert you to.
Mark McGrath:Hey, we didn't consider this scenario, but you're at least monitoring these other sources where you increase the chances that you'll be now made aware of those things that were unanticipated as well I also think like there's a great marriage of, uh, red teaming with this concept, because the things like pre-mortem, the that you know going through I was just having a discussion about MP Co is like most probable courses of action. I mean, these are, these are, these are not. You know, sometimes, sometimes we we could stifle ourselves, I think, by by imagining scenarios that are completely unlikely. But in advance, if we talk about things that are possible, I really see that red teaming and pre-mortem and things like that really have a lot of value around this concept too. It's a nice orbit.
Patrick Van Horne:You know, and we do a lot of work with state and local governments and a lot of organizations that are involved in disaster response or incident response, and we'll talk to leaders who are thinking about what events are they going to go through to test or evaluate their plans throughout the year, and there's some organizations who will do. Everything is a known risk it's the wildfire, it's the tornado, it's the earthquake, those sorts of scenarios. Then there's other groups who will ignore all of their high probability or more quantifiable risks and focus on things that are less likely but would be super impactful. And again, just my experience. But it's neither either. Or it's making sure that you can execute on those things that are likely to affect you.
Patrick Van Horne:If you're a business and you operate in the Rockies or to the West, knowing that your staff or your people operate, your customers work in a wildfire zone, you should be able to adjust your operations if that occurs. Or Florida, if you have a hurricane, but then also making sure that you can still adapt. You have the processes for how you're monitoring your environment. How are you bringing together a decision-making body, how are you making decisions and communicating them and activating response plans for the things that maybe you didn't anticipate Either. Making sure that you can do both and a balanced approach. Usually make sure that those organizations have the capability to flex based on whatever it is that they are facing.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:Yeah, creating the habits of mind for an organization to plan which is really not about the plan, but the ability to adapt to a changing environment is essential, right, that's. I think that's what keeps everybody left to bang. Those who can't do that are right working right at the edge of bang, I believe.
Mark McGrath:So, yeah, I don't disagree with you on anything you shared out there, patrick yeah, it's also too like you could talk and discuss about these patterns in advance, and I think that that's really what boyd was trying to do, like he was trying to to help people identify the, the patterns that make organizations successful and make organizations fail, and, and a lot of it is, I guess I think of left of bang and sort of the john boyd patterns of conflict sense I think of. Like, if I'm Left of Bang, I understand the patterns, I understand what could happen and I'm prepared, I accept that VUCA, you know, is the state of the universe and I'm prepared to harness it and go in any direction. I need to go versus everybody else. You know the Goliaths to get defeated, the Kodaks, the Blockbusters, the slow-to-move army units or whatever, not to pick on the army, but the slow-to-move bureaucrats that are looking to synchronize everybody when bang happens. All they're going to do is have the ability to react. They have no ability to proact and adapt. They're going to be completely reactive and that's really what again? That's what I see is like you can pull this out, that I could take a person in any industry. I say, hey, take the time and read Patrick's book and go through, if anything, just for the graphic of of, of examining, like, what actually left of bang truly, truly means, uh, in terms of incident response or news incident response, or whatever, and what left of bang truly means from a red teaming, leadership, debrief, pre-briefing, pre-mortem, all the things that we talk about it's.
Mark McGrath:You know, bang is not necessarily inevitable, but oftentimes it is and probably more often than not, like some unforeseen anomaly is going to come up, whether it's a new competitor or a new innovative technology that we hadn't factored, or something like AI or whatever. And what's going to happen when it does? Well, if I'm linear and static and bureaucratic and I don't understand the nature of OODA loop sketch and constantly reorienting when bang happens, I'm not. I don't understand the nature of OODA loop sketch in the of constantly reorienting when bang happens. I'm going to be free. What's it? First Suddenly, then not. Or what did Buffett say about bankruptcy? Like, first gradually, then suddenly, you know, like it's just like bam, you're, you're toast. You're always going to be back on your heels.
Patrick Van Horne:Yeah, the graphic in the book too it's incomplete. Yeah, the graphic in the book too it's incomplete, right In the sense where it presents it as a timeline. But if you were to think about this in terms of performance and when bang occurs, there's three types of organizations. There's some, you know to your point, you know, kind of using the Warren Buffett analogy bang occurs, that disruption happens. There's some organizations that just fail. They go out of business very quickly, they cannot adapt, they collapse.
Patrick Van Horne:There's a second group of organizations that they hit that disruption. They hit bang, they take a dip, and then they just kind of stay at this little bit lower level for an indefinite period. It takes them very long to actually recover, to get out of this incident. There's a third group, though, that hits the same disruption that everyone else does, and they adapt very quickly and they don't just stabilize when that occurs, they start to grow and they come out of that event stronger. And however that organization defines it, whether it's financially, whether it's reputation, whether it's trust, whether it's credibility, however an organization defines growth and success for them, there's this group that will come out of those.
Patrick Van Horne:But you know, for those organizations that are reacting in the moment, they had no advanced warning, even if the event is inevitable. You know those groups that can adapt. You know they certainly run. At the start of the pandemic, March 2020, Best Buy, for a period of a few weeks, had faster delivery times than Amazon, but I mean, how many of you are either of you buying from Best Buy to get it delivered today? I don't know, if nothing else, they're irrelevant. But Amazon learned, they adapted, they adjusted and there's probably disagreements on whether all those adjustments and changes are necessary or the impacts of that but they grew through that event, Whereas many others collapsed and many others barely hung on.
Mark McGrath:I wanted to pull up the graphic because we'll put this on YouTube too and I have it. I'm going to share it. I wanted you to talk a little bit more about. Well, you say it's incomplete. We say that about OODA loop sketch. All the time. It's an illustrative abstraction. It's incomplete. It's on us to develop and learn or whatever. Talk more about that as it relates to the left of band graphic, because I think that that's a huge, that's a huge differentiator of understanding this versus uh, you know, versus other, uh, other concepts. In other words, when I think of left of bang, I think of don't look linearly, like, like, as you say that like the graphic is, is it's, it's, it's given as a, as a, as a linear timeline, so to speak. But really think you got to think in four dimensions, five dimensions, like you have to think in uh. You cannot think like that. You have to think of uh in complexity, understanding that that's going to be something like it, but not not exactly and are you talking about the?
Mark McGrath:oodaloo. No, no, the left at bang graphic that you have in the book. I was trying to pull it up right now, but basically it's like you know, bang in the middle and they got left and right and it's got like friendly forces and everything. I'm going to try to pull up a different one here, but go ahead, okay.
Patrick Van Horne:The premise and the title. You know again if it, just if it helps any listeners or viewers. You know whatever event that you don't want to happen or whatever event you care about, that is bang and that is what we call time zero. It's directly in the middle of your timeline. When you're operating. Left to bang, it means that you're operating earlier on that timeline. But to be able to operate left to bang, it means you have the ability to identify the pre-event indicators that let you know bang is coming. And then if you're right of bang, it's not just being later on the timeline, it's more representative of the groups or the people that had no advanced warning, that the first time they recognized a threat was present was when that event occurred. And now they're simply reacting to it. And, kind of to your point, you cannot prevent, you cannot stop every incident or every bad thing from happening. But if you have that advanced warning, then you have, you create the opportunity to either influence the outcome or better position yourself, or to minimize damage or to grow. However you'd ultimately define a success for that.
Patrick Van Horne:But the top you know using this timeline. You know this very much in relation to recognizing threats and so I'll just put that out there, but it's thinking about things maybe from a competitive perspective of what are our adversaries doing. They're going through a planning and preparation process up until the event and those pre-event indicators that we were talking about in the book but easily applied into businesses and other settings as well. It's designed in relation to that and other settings as well. It's designed in relation to that. What behaviors are going to cause the person again for recognizing threats, that person with a violent intent to stand out as opposed to the people who are here for a legitimate purpose? I don't know if I actually answered your question, mark. I'm sorry.
Mark McGrath:Well, no, I mean, when you look at it, I see a lot, even in the book as it is, and this is this is right off the right off the site, wherever it came from. And if you Google it, if you Google left a bang book graphic, this comes up. I guess you guys released the PDF, right, is that?
Patrick Van Horne:um, no, but there's a lot of it's out there yeah, I guess people have found a way to create it and yeah, uh, knockoffs and other things, but yeah, yeah, well, I mean this is.
Mark McGrath:This is from the actual appreciate anyone who actually purchases the book, as opposed to finding the pdf well, as I mentioned, I bought it in stacks and like hand them out, um, but anyway here. So here it is. This is the graphic. If you google image, search this, this, this will be there.
Mark McGrath:That's that's where this is taken from, and and as you say that, so like like linearly right, we go right to that, like we go right to linear, like we look left and we can understand the concept of of time. It's just kind of like, even like oodlewp sketch right, people are going to do that because that's just how we, that's just how we're prone to to read things in the scope of time. But then the more I think about that, if you were going to redraw this in a different way, you do have a pretty good start because, yeah, you have a timeline, but you have a lot of other complexities that are on top of that that show that what's happening in reality it's not really a flat, linearic thing like this is a. There's a lot of unknowns, there's a lot of known unknowns and unknown unknowns and you know, and everything else, there's a lot going on, um leading up and pursuing and following it.
Patrick Van Horne:Yeah, yeah, you know as you're, as you're operating, unless you're dealing with, you know, something like the weather. Maybe that cannot be changed if you're dealing with a human the weather. Maybe that cannot be changed If you're dealing with a human adversary as you, or a competitor. As you adjust your approaches left to bang your adversary, your competitors probably adjusting what they do as well, which is just constantly shifting, either when bang occurs or how bang occurs, or what you need to look for as well. It's certainly not just a stepwise approach either, because there's always a constant reset, whether the competitor detects something that you're doing or you detect something the competitor is doing as well.
Mark McGrath:We're looking at different public relations scenarios with a public relations firm that we're partnered with, and, and the principal of that firm we, he and I have co-authored some papers on on on uda and applied to the information war. And what's interesting is is that traditional public affairs is like when you look at it it's it's wired and trained and prepared for right of bang. It's not thinking, it's not thinking about left of bang, it's not thinking about reorientation, it's not. It's not thinking about anticipatory, necessarily it's. It's it's let's wait to see what happens and fix it after it happens, rather than, uh, rather than proact, rather than the weak signals and the, the, you know, the, the patterns and the anomalies and that kind of thing, the mismatches I'm talking about when I'm presenting Left to Bang.
Patrick Van Horne:There's a story that I'll often kind of default to, as people are understanding, maybe, how it applies to their organizations. In it it's a Steven Pressfield story, but there's a Roman general kind of, who's leading his legions to this really swampy country in pursuit of their adversaries. And this general realizes that the next day's battle is going to take place on a certain plain because it's the only flat, dry ground for miles around. And so this general pushes his army through this really deep, really scary swamp throughout the night to get to the battlefield before his adversary does and take the high ground. And after the next day's victory he looks out over his army and he kind of yells out or he asks them you know, when did we win today's fight? And there's one captain who immediately, you know, chimes in and says you know we won when our infantry attacked. You know the captain screams out like no, we won when the Calvary broke through. And the general pauses and he says no, we won last night when we marched through that swamp to take the high ground.
Patrick Van Horne:And I say that because when we think about getting left to bang, that is the epitome of what it is to be in the right spot at the right time with the right capabilities to win. And it's so easy to look at a story like that and say, oh yeah, just do that. But it's much harder to actually do and practice. And that's the challenge that a lot of executives face. Or in your PR example of being in the right spot at the right time with the right capabilities means you cannot wait for bang, but maybe in that PR context it's having the relationships needed with enough publications or however you're going to distribute those messages so that the minute you launch, you're not introducing yourself, you're sending a message and that you're getting it out to different audiences and that you have the right awareness to go from kind of that general threat we know that there's a threat out there to a very specific.
Patrick Van Horne:This is the threat so that you're customizing any pre-canned messaging or templates or anything that you've thought about ahead of time for the specific scenario that you're in and the organizations that are waiting for banking to occur, and then that customization starts and then that outreach occurs. You're just watching them move further and further right on that timeline before they begin impacting whatever it is, whether it's a competitor or the community or the public, or however they're defining it. Their time to impact is kind of moving much further down that line, whereas if you do know what capabilities you do need and you do have a system for monitoring the environment, to just shift from day-to-day operations into you know that crisis mode, you're just buying yourself time to, you know, get ahead of your competitors or start to move um and do it in a way that you're calm still because the actual event hasn't occurred yet. And so you mentioned cognitive capacity and capabilities. Being able to do this when not metaphorically under fire is infinitely easier than it is once things go wrong for your organization.
Mark McGrath:I think in another way. Everything that you said could be also redefined, as every battle is won before it's fought, right?
Bian "Ponch" Riera:Never heard that before.
Mark McGrath:Yeah Right, it's a great tie, I mean, but again, this is why, conceptually, this book is so bad-ass, because it's a great tie into things that we know to be universally, we know to be universally true and and and it taps into that and that's why I think it resonates and that's why people should be reading this. And it's no surprise that somebody like Pressfield, who talks about this in all of his stories, like all of his stories, have even his nonfiction, like the Lion's Gate, about the Six-Day War. All of these ideas are in there. And then, of course, I bring in Sun Tzu, because it not only resonates, but that's also the only book that Boyd never found fault with and he read like eight different translations. He says I can't find any fault with this.
Mark McGrath:This is the one book, so I'm sure maybe he could find some with yours, but I think in general he would probably like it, because I think what you're telling, again what you just said, it seems to me that that's another great way of saying every battle is won before it's fought and that's what leaders and operators need to be thinking about that if you're on the left side of this thing, you're going to be better off and you're going to be in a better position than probably the overwhelming majority of your competitions versus on the right side, where most people reside.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:Hey, moose, there's another tie-in that I got out of the book. It came from Gavin DeBecker, from Patrick's book anyway, and it says that everything a person does is created twice right Once in the mind and once in the execution. There's a strong connection back to intuition, recognition, prime decision-making. That goes back to Gary Klein's work. There's a solid connection the way we explained it at OODA Loop. You have that action observation pathway, which is your simulation, it's your plan, it's you actually running the simulation within a system. It could be a cell, it could be a neuron, it could be a brain, it could be a team, and then there's the actual execution, which is act into the external world, right. So there's that piece and, of course, to tie into the free energy principle. So, again, picking up this book, there's so many ways you can look at and go. That's what Gavin DeBecker means when he said everything a person does is created twice once in the mind and once in execution.
Mark McGrath:Read this as a companion to the big short. Think about that, right? I mean guys like Michael Burry and others. They're on the left side and they're starting to see these weak signals. They're starting to see these mismatches. And they were prepared on the left of Bang, right, and then, when Bang happened, the overwhelming majority of actors in the market were on the right side and they got torched. But the ones that were, you know, realizing every battle is won or lost before it's fought, realizing that they have to be on the world of reorientation, realizing that they have to be left of bang, all these things tie in beautifully. Really Honestly, there's no other word for it.
Patrick Van Horne:You could make that graphic for just about any business, literally Every sport, every, every Go ahead, literally every sport every, every good, and we think about the behaviors that we wrote about in the book or the way that we work with kind of organizations today to define those watch points, those action points that matter to them. What I think is really kind of important it's that there's two types of people, right. There's people who intuitively, naturally, recognize these things and they're just better than everyone else for some reason because they know what it is. But for everyone else, you know, you need to learn how to recognize those pre-event indicators and so the behaviors that we talk about in the book, you know part of it was how do you teach someone who grew up not in a crime-ridden, gang-controlled neighborhood who just could naturally recognize threats in Iraq and Afghanistan? How do you break down what that person is seeing into a way? Brian, to your point on recognition-prime decision-making, teach those behaviors, teach those observations and drill it and practice it and deepen your experience with it to give anybody the ability to recognize it and what you know Jason Riley, my co-author, and I we didn't create, you know, the Poundbutt Hunter program.
Patrick Van Horne:We wrote the book that talks about it.
Patrick Van Horne:We were instructors in the program, but what the creators of the program did was they took something that was intuitive, your Gavin DeBecker scenario and articulated it, what those different components are. And once you can articulate it now, you can train other people on it. Now it's not just you know in the military example, the person who's done three or four deployments overseas, who's dealt with IEDs and bombs and insurgents long enough, who's got it, or that business executive who's been in the field and in that company for 20 years and has that intuitive feel. By breaking it down, you start to push the ability to recognize those threats, those indicators, to a larger group. And now you expand your monitoring network. Now you expand the people who can make judgment calls in the field, adapt very quickly and they're working off of the same principles and the same components, not just, hey, you'll recognize it when you see it, or if something feels bad, act that you can take it and you can teach it and you can develop it so that ultimately, at the organizational level, you're building speed into this.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:Maybe we can use this to explain what porn is in the future, but that's another story. You'll know it when you see it right. So I want to go back to what Moose had been writing about lately, and that is that you can actually teach orientation and this kind of connects to what you brought up here. In fighter aviation generally, you get guys that have good situational awareness, the ability to understand left and right and forward and back, that type of thing right, just the basics right. But you end up developing this ability to pay attention to many not many things, but task shed, you know, look at things as you need to focus on one thing, come back and look at something else, go look at something else, come back to that main thing.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:So we are taught how to do this and plan over time and then to come back into, like a corporate setting, having our I'll call it our trauma, our PTSD from this type of training, which is not necessarily a bad thing. We have the stress put on us in the cockpit in combat. That allows us to pay attention to more things, to challenge assumptions, to always ask why. That isn't always the case in corporate settings, right. So going in there to train folks on what to look for, how to leverage the human sensor network, how to look for those weak signals. That's what's important. So I want to hear from you, patrick, on how do you do that. What kind of tools and techniques are you providing to your clients to help them understand what's happening?
Patrick Van Horne:I think there's a piece that goes into this. There's a fundamental component there, brian, that you said but kind of went over pretty quick. It's before you can learn how to do this, you have to recognize that there's a need. If the market is great, things are stable and everything is fine, there's no need to invest in new capabilities, there's no need to invest in reading the situation that you're in. It's only once people recognize that there's a risk that can impact me that, hey, I better improve the way I work, the way I think, the way I operate if I'm going to succeed in this new environment. And it kind of marks in the articles that you've been putting up recently way I think, the way I operate, if I'm going to succeed in this new environment, and what kind of marks in the articles that you've been putting up recently I think really hit on that understanding the way people can manipulate words or messaging and structure articles to influence you. If you don't realize that you're being influenced, people have a tendency to just read on and buy into that message without ever realizing that they are the target themselves. But once you and I appreciate some of those articles of using real life examples, this is how people are using these different tactics and techniques to do it. You step back and you realize well, these are present in a lot of articles that I read a lot of the things that I value in terms of input, that I read a lot of the things that I value in terms of input, and it's not saying that it's good or bad. But when you recognize that there is a manipulation occurring and you recognize the tactics and the approach that people take, now you can just step back and figure out well, what is right for me? Do I want to go with this? Do I agree with this? Do I want to challenge this? How could I? But just recognizing that there's a problem then incentivizes people, I think, to learn on their own if they want to grow and if they want to succeed. And when we wrote when Jason and I wrote Left to Bang, that was it there were people there's some people who read the book and said this is dumb, I'll never need this, I can't believe. I wasted my time and they read the whole. Shockingly, they read the whole book before writing the Amazon review to tell us they shouldn't have read the whole book.
Patrick Van Horne:But there's other people out there that wanted to learn that were not able to come through the combat hunter program, and it's been long enough where I might get some of these numbers wrong, but generally speaking it was something like 40 out of every deploying thousand Marines or something like that, was required to come through the combat hunter course before that unit deployed.
Patrick Van Horne:Before that unit deployed and we had Marines who were coming through the course, deploying overseas, who are coming back and telling us hey, there's something I learned in this course that saved my life. I am here today because we got off that street, we shifted, we moved off that hillside or whatever it was. I want to come back to the course because there's more to learn and because there are instructor to student ratio issues. We had to look at these Marines who wanted to learn more and say, hey, we're really sorry, but we got to hit 40 new Marines before your unit goes back out and it drove me crazy that there was nothing out there that could break this down. There was no place for sometimes these really young Marines and soldiers to turn to and that's ultimately led, uh, to jason. I write in the book and you know, me starting my company was just to put it out there. If someone wants to learn, they shouldn't have to.
Mark McGrath:There shouldn't be barriers what do you think those barriers were? Because I, I, I wanted to tie in we're. You know, we're talking about some articles that we put up. I wanted to tie in the guardians of decay because when you, when you said, you know, some guys thought it was dumb. When you guys were writing this, you were what young captains I mean, I'm guessing I think jason.
Mark McGrath:He was a little older, he was almost major, so he was okay, but I'm gonna well, I'm just gonna make, I'm gonna take a wild guess and bet that there was some senior majors and some, you know, some others that, like, really were the ones that were saying, oh, this is dumb, or we don't need this, or Marines don't need this. And so I'd be curious to know, like you know, what were some of the institutional barriers that led to that exactly that you're talking about, where there was clearly a demand of people that are going to be on the business end of these scenarios that you're teaching and the institution has, you know, guardians of its own collapse within it that are going to enforce it such that that doesn't happen. What was your experience like in that respect, other than people writing shitty Amazon reviews, but, like, institutionally inside, what was it like?
Patrick Van Horne:I think there's two things that go into that, mark, and one is everything that's written in the book. People have been doing their entire life right. If you've been looking at observing, interacting with people, if you've been out people watching, you have done the things that we talk about, and so what was in there, though, was the ability to articulate it and communicate it and break it down in a repetitive way, and so there's a certain amount of people and I don't disagree with them at all, like I mentioned, negative reviews, but you know I understand, I understand their perspective. Um, you know, what we had to do was take something that was common sense to some people and help articulate in a way where it can become common sense and a skill for people who didn't have that ability. Naturally, um, but it's not new. Um, hold that thought too.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, because you have another point. But hold that thought, because punch and I are both smiling at each other. I mean this, like uda, like everybody who does, everybody's doing it. It's axiomatic, but go ahead, uh, and then the.
Patrick Van Horne:I have no idea what. My second point will come back to you once you go with what you were uh, well, what you just said is what people really f up.
Mark McGrath:Is that like okay, yeah, I've been doing this all along.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:Everybody knows this.
Mark McGrath:No, everybody doesn't know this, but everybody's doing it. Yeah, but they don't understand it. And and and knowing is not enough. You have to understand the scope of what actually is going on. Knowing is not enough the awareness that you can create around things that you're already doing subconsciously or unconsciously. Once you become conscious of those things, then I can improve that. So, to your point, if all of this stuff is happening anyway, they've all done it. That's great, and the better we understand that, the faster that we can compress our OODA loop right. I mean the faster that the more dialed in our orientation is to a range of scenarios where we can identify anomalies, mismatches and gaps faster and strike at them before we'd have to be reacting to something them before we'd have to be reacting to something.
Patrick Van Horne:And so the other piece to that. Then it's also, when we wrote the book there wasn't a lot of violence prevention resources that were available and I promise you we looked and there might be some people teaching different components that went into the Combat Hunter program, or people teaching one specific element of what we write in the book, or now we kind of talk is six domains and now we kind of talk about as these four pillars of behavior. There are people doing different components, but this wasn't all brought together. And so you know, going back to you know, brian, my comment on people have to recognize that there's a need before they invest in it. Up until this point in Iraq and Afghanistan the risk had not become so great to need it. So we would get bombed. We would strap more armor onto our vehicles, put more armor onto Marines and soldiers Now you can withstand that blast and then the insurgents just built the bigger bomb. It was only once that cycle got to a point where we could not armor up or we could not invest enough in stuff, that a different approach was needed.
Patrick Van Horne:And so in the book part of the goal was we also had to convince and show people that prevention was possible, because up until this point it was just react.
Patrick Van Horne:And so there's a lot of time dedicated in the book that's explaining the situation and the need. And so there's a lot of time dedicated in the book that's explaining the situation and the need. And there's some people who don't agree that that was ever a risk. And there's some people say, hey, yeah, I already understand the risk, stop explaining why. But when we wrote the book, we used the case study of the Marine Corps because we wanted to help people realize that prevention was possible. And then, since the book came out and looking at this mostly on the threat recognition, violence prevention side, it essentially became you know, we we broke the four minute mile. Now there's tons of resources, books, concepts, technology, equipment all helping to prevent, but up until this there wasn't a ton, it was just all the bigger barrier, and so we had to help kind of get past that as well which I think is something that goes into your kind of approach as well.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I think about, like those guardians of decay that are trying to attenuate this stuff. The first thing I think of and we use this quote all the time what if your competitors understand this and you don't? We use this quote all the time. What if your competitors understand this and you don't, you know? I mean, you're going to dismiss it as dumb. Or everybody knows this, or everybody does it, but you really don't understand it. Well, what if your competitors do? Do you think that your competitors understand that? And what if they're working on this right now? What if they're doing things that are displayed in this right now that you can't, you know you're not going to be able to recognize? Because you didn't take the time to understand it, you dismissed it. Seems to me that would be pretty costly.
Patrick Van Horne:There's companies you've probably seen them too that are not integrating AI, they're not experimenting with it, they're not sure how to use it, they're not trying.
Patrick Van Horne:There's other companies that are limiting the talent that they have in their organizations by demanding, forcing return to work policies, as if this was pre-COVID.
Patrick Van Horne:And I'm not saying that any of those decisions are right or wrong, but there's other organizations that are built for speed, that are distributed, that can work from anywhere, that can use different technologies and tools and that probably have a very different view of the market and those opportunities that are present.
Patrick Van Horne:And I think when we look at the concept in the book of atmospherics, we're looking at kind of the collective mood of an area that can be applied to the global political environment, that can be applied to the economy, that can be applied to industries and that is changing from, generally speaking, a period of positive atmospherics to a period of negative atmospherics where there's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of change and I don't know, there's probably a lot of organizations that think that we'll get through this, it'll be the same when we come out the other side. And then there's another group that's saying well, we're going to shape what the future looks like and the battlefield might not look like it did in 2018 or 2019. But it's one of those things of in hindsight they're going to be judged maybe right or wrong, I guess but some people want to see that proof and that validation versus the speculation that things are actually sifting.
Mark McGrath:Ponch.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:I think that people making snowmobiles are left to bang 100%. They're creating the future.
Mark McGrath:They're creating the future, they're shaping it. Well, patrick, I mean, this is phenomenal. One thing we had one of our paid subscribers on the world of reorientation. We threw it out there that we were going to be recording with you and if anybody had any questions, and we actually had one. Um, and this comes from kyle shepherd s-h-e-p-a-r-d has a great site, um, it's called the resilient mental state and he's in the army, I believe. Uh, or or is an army veteran, uh. But he wanted to tell you uh loves the book recognizing anomalies in Any and All Environments, a Situational Awareness Training at its Best. He'd be interested in the thoughts on recognizing physical threats domestically in this day and age. So I guess, when we're thinking when the book was written and most people are thinking in Baghdad, marketplace type situations. But he'd be interested to know what are your thoughts on recognizing physical threats domestically, particularly I don't know anything in domestic terrorism or active shooter situations.
Patrick Van Horne:There, when you look at the beat. One of the reasons that we break down behavior the way that we do, and the process to establish a baseline, is to make that search for anomalies as objective as possible. It'll never be completely objective your biases, your experience will always tilt your lens but by looking at these behaviors, one of the goals is to get people past that paralysis by analysis and recognizing there is something different about this person. Today I need to make a decision. I need to take action. Action doesn't mean attack. Don't want to hurt someone. It can be having a conversation, but it's recognizing this person's behavior is different and to try to make that objective. And to try to make that objective no-transcript, there's probably a certain degree of you don't want one of your fellow citizens, americans, to be an attacker. There's certain people that maybe naturally hope or believe that nope, I'm overreacting, I'm wrong, there's no way this would occur here. We should be a safe society, and so I think there is a little bit of delay when we're recognizing and searching for threats from our own group. I think that is one piece that comes in. And then, with that delay, with that second guessing, with that denial about what you're actually seeing you're getting closer and closer to that person launching the attack and then you lose those opportunities to intervene or you lose the different things that you have at your disposal to interact. So one, I think it's recognizing that you may have a personal bias with that and thinking about that and just being more intentional about that. The other thing, it's recognizing the environment that we're in right now and you know we start with our baseline process right.
Patrick Van Horne:There's two types of atmospherics. There's positive atmospherics where, generally speaking, people are comfortable in the area, and there's negative atmospherics people where or areas where people are just generally a little bit more uncomfortable. And I always use the example of an airport baggage claim. You look, you watch people at an airport baggage claim and the atmospherics are negative. Everyone is uncomfortable, everyone is fidgety, no one wants to be hanging out there. And the reason we start with the baseline is, once you know it's normal, the thing that is not normal stands out. So when the place is positive atmospherics, people are comfortable, that person who is uncomfortable stands out and it's an anomaly. Above the baseline there's the additional presence of behaviors that say this person warrants some attention. When you're looking at an area that has negative atmospherics. The person who is uncomfortable is not the anomaly anymore, they're the baseline. But the person who is comfortable, who is calm, who is relaxed, we're in one area. They were just part of every two people Now in that baggage team. That's the person I'm going to pay attention to.
Patrick Van Horne:But what's really hard about recognizing that it's an anomaly below the baseline, it's the absence of something. It's something that should be here, that is not. And going into new areas, going to new places, recognizing what is missing is much harder to recognize, especially if your depth of understanding is lacking. And so I say all this where, as things like the attack recently in Minnesota with the politician assassination attempts, the protests, the violence, the confrontation, our baseline in the country has become very it's negative in a lot of places, a lot of events, a lot of cities.
Patrick Van Horne:I say that because that makes recognizing threats much harder when everyone is angry, everyone is uncomfortable, trying to pick out those people who are not here to protest, they're here to really stir stuff up or they're here to do an attack or whatever that is, and I kind of use those examples. But it's, the more we can tone down those emotions, the more we can calm things, we increase our ability to recognize threats. We increase our ability to get left to bank because the recognition is much easier. I don't know how you control other than you know every person, or I don't even know how you influence that, but it's just the recognition here at home of when everyone's angry, finding the person who's a little extra angry. What?
Mark McGrath:do you do in places? I don't know what it's like in Colorado now, I've only been to the Denver airport recently but and then down at a ranch where no one was smoking pot, but like where, where, where people are allowed to smoke pot, it seems like everybody's high Right. So I live in the west village and actually anywhere in manhattan you walk, you can't not smell pot. It's everywhere, right, and one of the things that I've noticed is a pattern. Um, you know, having been, you know, pretty much in and out of this city my entire life, is that the, the loud, wild, drunken brawls used to hear at night. You don't hear those anymore, right, because I feel like everybody's high right. So so I just I'm gonna kind of throw that tug of cheek but also coming at it like kind of that, that is an actual trend and pattern. Yeah, that you know, coming to new york for living in it, in and out of it, like for 50 or almost 50 years, it's like wow, it's, it's mellow, it's like something, something's off.
Mark McGrath:Yeah.
Patrick Van Horne:Your baseline has changed, what's normal, and so you have to recalibrate and as you look at different, you know, people have kind of informed this field man I forget his name Heuristics, daniel Kahneman. Yeah, you know he talks a lot about where those biases come from and one of those is simply exposure and the volume of exposure. And so you know, um, you know, new York city's baseline at Westville has changed a little bit. Like you have to overcome, as you said, 50, whatever years of going into now New York and your new experience have to become on par since, like volume wise, with what you're used to before you truly and intuitively understand the environment. It takes recalibration a little bit as well.
Mark McGrath:but you, you know I mean you went to school here I mean you know, when you walk around certain neighborhoods where the bars are open and everybody would be out there screaming and yelling, and and now you? Now you walk by between everybody getting high and like the pervasive use of mocktails, right, like non-alcoholic beverages, it's just a lot. It seems a lot quieter around here.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:but just a thought of this type of thinking? Have you worked with any safety professionals or any organizations in a safety capacity? Because it sounds like to me it's entirely possible to identify when a bang is going to happen in a safety environment.
Patrick Van Horne:Yeah? The short answer is yeah. We work with a number of. We're one-on-one with some of the chief security officers, chief risk officer positions and also, through our training programs, oftentimes more of the line-level security staff as well, but helping making sure that not everyone wants to read a book. And so there's the video-based course that ties this in, if you want to watch it and practice a little more specifically, but also on the executive side, really defining those risks, those decisions and those watch points, action points that matter to them. That's, you know, at its core, what we do today.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:Okay, no, I appreciate that. That's great and then it's funny. While we were talking I just got a text from a police officer. He's going through training right now and he said brought up Kahneman's. He said intense, uncertain, rapidly evolving situations. I'm a police officer, he's going through training right now and he said brought up Kahneman's, he said intense on certain rapidly evolving situations. I'm not convinced that it's one or the other regarding system one or system two. So you know, I think it's kind of well known that we don't have two operating systems in our mind. It's just a kind of a metaphor, our way to think about things. But from your experience and looking at Economan and looking at how the brain works and how we work, are we operating in system one all the time or system two, or is there a combination where we're in a high threat environment? Just want to get your thoughts on that.
Patrick Van Horne:I think that comes down to how threatened that person feels, right, when they um. I kind of go back to some of my experiences in Iraq, where there'll be you know we would be working with, or nearby, maybe, a special operations unit who would let things go much further than maybe a unit that um had not seen combat or was not fighting. And the reason was those special operations teams knew, hey, if this does come down to a fight, we're fine, we're going to win, Whereas people who maybe don't have that same degree of confidence maybe turn to the trigger a little bit sooner or they escalate because they're less confident and they recognize more threats than are probably there. I'm willing to bet in that law enforcement experience is very similar.
Patrick Van Horne:You take someone who has worked in a neighborhood for 10, 15 years. They know the streets, they know the people generally, they're probably a little more comfortable. They can shift between that system one, system two, maybe a little more smoothly when they recognize nope, I have a few minutes, I have some time, I'm not immediately a threat. I can mentally step back and truly assess this under the situation that I'm in and there's probably others that may be a little bit younger or where I'm not, you know, literally or metaphorically been punched in the face or in a fight before who might feel more threatened because they might not have the same degree of confidence in their ability to respond as well. But I don't. You know nothing.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:I'm not a psychologist or anything but my experience is not one or the other.
Patrick Van Horne:It certainly shifts based, but it's based on your perception of a threat.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:So many questions to the previous one about safety. How about athletes, coaches, any use of this type of thinking for them? Have anybody come to you and said, hey, I want to try to implement this type of work in my highly dynamic world of whatever sport it may be.
Patrick Van Horne:Team sport, not personally but we get the number of messages or the number of applications that we've seen to it, from cybersecurity to healthcare, to executives, to education. I guess the closest parallel that we have seen is on the educator side, the teachers. One of my very first clients after I got out of the military was a school district and short version is I absolutely bombed the course and I short version is I absolutely bombed the course. Um, and you know I was talking with this principal after and he's you know his lesson to me was you were talking to these teachers. If their job and if they're focused and what they care about is threat recognition, he goes.
Patrick Van Horne:None of the teachers that were here got into teaching to be to stop an active shooter in their schools.
Patrick Van Horne:They're here to teach and coming out of that, what I learned how to do a little bit better was teach them how to read behaviors and establish baseline so they could become better teachers. If they could read their classroom and recognize who was comfortable or uncomfortable or down or submissive in their classrooms, they will be more effective as a teacher than at the very end of the course. And now here's how the same things that make you a better teacher apply to the violence threat recognition side, but I imagine there's probably a similar parallel with coaches and their athletes of recognizing those. When you work with someone every day, you probably recognize how they're feeling, how they're responding, energy levels, everything, um. And just by having that language, though, you probably you can get past that things are getting a little bit worse and you don't recognize it because there's maybe more clear thresholds of hey, there's something different about them today, or if it's an competitive activity, this is how the other you know, just having a way to establish the baseline, um, as well that's it.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:No, that's a great lesson. The application of uh, application of an active shooter to teachers that aren't there to defend against that but really teach, is critical. That to me, is context-specific.
Patrick Van Horne:It's a great lesson today. Yeah, it's huge. I appreciate that. I just started my business. I thought I wasn't going to make it because I failed at the very first course. I taught to a civilian audience.
Mark McGrath:What's the state of this right now in the Marine Corps? Are they still teaching this stuff or no?
Bian "Ponch" Riera:I mean, I know it's on the.
Mark McGrath:Commandant's List, but that doesn't mean people are reading it. Probably more people outside the Marine Corps read it.
Patrick Van Horne:Yeah, it was built into. There's pieces that were built into basic training for both for enlisted and officer and then kind of throughout professional development basic training for both for enlisted and officer and then kind of throughout professional development in the marines. Um, we were a portion of. We were a unit that was designed to address emergent needs overseas, where we would design, develop courses that were meeting specific operational criteria that commanders were coming back with and it was never meant to. You know, when we were teaching this as a two-week immersive program was designed to address the need and then ultimately put it back into the pipeline of standard professional development that a normal Marine would go through throughout their career. But I believe it's still being taught, just in different, maybe not as a standalone entity.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I mean it seems. I mean the book is accessible, right. I mean it should be taught at Annapolis and Naval, rotc and certainly the basic school. I mean I don't see why that shouldn't be a text like a textbook that everybody should not only have but demonstrate that they know, demonstrate, uh, demonstrate that they, that they grasped the concepts. But just a, just a thought. I mean I'm a few years ahead of you. I would have, but I would have found this book extremely valuable at basic school.
Patrick Van Horne:I didn't go, I didn't know off the combat hunter program. Um, until after I had finished my deployments, and when I saw it for the first time, I was angry. You know, mark, it was. This was, you know, we were dealing with situations with young Marines without, you know, having the chance to go through it. When I realized that there was a program that was available designed to deal with the exact thing that was keeping everyone on edge, I was angry that this was not readily accessible, and that's ultimately what both the book and our company were meant to address of.
Patrick Van Horne:No one should have to wait to go through a course or ask permission. Everything should be accessible to someone who wants to learn it, especially if it comes back down to saving their life or helping them have that advanced learning that's needed. And so it's been very humbling. The book's been out for almost 11 years now. We still get messages, and we got one just recently from a police officer who had survived an ambush. We hear from corporate security teams. We have these videos from some of our clients who've security professionals, stopped attacks or crime or stopped crimes from occurring in New York based on what was taught, and it's probably the most humbling thing that we have done to know that we could have. There's one more person that is here or one more crime, one less crime that occurred.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:Yeah, I learned about your book from Lou Hayes. He's at the Chicago police department. I don't know if you know Lou, but he's a huge fan of the book. Oh, is he? Okay, yeah, so he'll probably listen to this and getting an opportunity to go down to South side of Chicago with him and as a in a ride along, it's just eye opening. Not everybody gets to experience something like that. I don't know if you have done that, but I think Moose is going to go out there in the next few months to do that you got to go do that, you know.
Mark McGrath:The other thing it made me think of too is the book. I have them all and I just heard that he passed away recently H John Poole. If you've read his books, like the Last 100 Yards, like the last 100 yards and they're generally small, unit, small unit tactic books for basically sort of squad and below, but we keep coming back to that magic number of 13 of units. Once they get, you know, like small, autonomous, decentralized units can really empower themselves at very strategic levels by understanding concepts like this. And he was another one of those guys and he had a lot of experience teaching law enforcement and he was friends with Don Vandergriff and all those guys too.
Mark McGrath:It all kind of ties in, Because I think at the end of the day, what we're all pointing at is we're trying to get people to understand truth right, Like what's actually going on in the universe. You can tap into that resonance and you can hit it punch. Another thing I thought of while we were sitting here was left of bang is sacred geometry, like applying sacred geometry things to identify patterns and movements and things like that.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:I may or may not have had another conversation today with somebody on sacred geometry and wayfinding, but that's another story. So, yeah, I saw the same thing there, Miz.
Patrick Van Horne:Yeah, I'm glad you guys are connected with Lou. The work that he's doing with real-time crime centers and information sharing and recognizing some of these challenges but also the opportunity to interdict and move fast onto some of these criminal organizations, is absolutely remarkable and kind of similar to some of the other things we've talked about. There's a bureaucratic wall sometimes that I imagine that he runs into with some of this, but the work that he is doing I think he's probably very early on. He's very left to bang to a capability that I think as a country we will go. Why didn't we not have this forever?
Patrick Van Horne:And he's having a lot of those conversations and reading a lot of those conversations as well.
Mark McGrath:He may or may not have been behind the John Boyd account on LinkedIn, like there was a.
Bian "Ponch" Riera:That's right. I remember that.
Mark McGrath:It was like it had that the picture of John Boyd and his Air Force like service dress uniform and he would comment on things like I never said that it had the picture of John Boyd in his Air Force service dress uniform and he would comment on things like I never said that it was epic Lou taught me the limitations of my understanding of the OODA loop very early on.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I mean talking about guy gets the OODA loop. I mean, lou is. When I got connected with Ponch years ago it was like I started finding guys it was Ponch and Lou and Fred Leland had L-E-S-Cnet. How is it that these guys all see OODA the way I do, you know, and it's different than the circular BS that everybody learns, which I've I've launched a few LinkedIn and Substack Tomahawk missiles at because it's just, it's just so bad. You know, it's just it's it's garbage.
Mark McGrath:But when people I think I think I would close with this and then I want to, I want you to close it, patrick, with just kind of like where we can follow you and your company. But I would close with this is that, you know, stop thinking in the terms of big giant, bureaucratic. We have all this tech, we can figure things out and start thinking small, dispersed, autonomous, decentralized teams that can recognize patterns and gaps faster such that you can exploit them. You know, be in a tactical save your life situation. Which again, a portfolio manager learning this for a emerging market strategy that's also running the subway and going through Penn Station. It doesn't hurt, it's fractal, you could use it at all levels.
Mark McGrath:I would tell people to you know, don't pass, go and get this book. It's a very quick read, it's a very accessible read and it's very practical and applicable. You do not have to be a Marine in a uh, in a Baghdad market. So, with that, where can we, where can we follow you? We're going to link to your sub stack, of course, which we recommend. Uh, people do.
Patrick Van Horne:I appreciate that you know our site. It's uh cp-journalcom and uh, through that that you know, kind of going off of what we talked about, our goal is to make the material and the concepts accessible and uh through there's a number of free articles, um, there's some courses that people can subscribe to receive, as well as different applications of it, um, but you know all of the content on there comes back down to this single goal of how do we help, you know, not only people but organizations actually stay left to bang and continue exploring and pushing on the different components of the book or the trends that we're seeing in just the operating environment today, to make sure that people have the resources to do it.
Mark McGrath:Well, we'll end the show on that note and make sure that everybody gets directed that way, and if they're smart, they're going to pick up a copy of the book before their competitors do so. Thanks for coming on. No Way Out, patrick. You're welcome anytime, and let's keep the dialogue going.
Patrick Van Horne:I appreciate the chance to talk. I enjoyed it.
