Beyond the Linear OODA Loop: Jon Becker Breaks Down Authentic OODA Loop

Explore the authentic OODA loop with Jon Becker on No Way Out Podcast – John Boyd's strategies for tactical leadership and decision making

Fresh off Mark “Moose” McGrath’s viral appearance on The Debrief (where the internet lost its mind over authentic OODA), we flip the script: Jon Becker — CEO of Aardvark Tactical and host of the top-rated tactical podcast The Debrief — comes to No Way Out for the highly requested return match.

Together with co-hosts Mark McGrath and Brian “Ponch” Rivera, Jon pulls back the curtain on what really happened when Moose flew to California and spent two days dismantling the “linear OODA loop” myth in front of Jon and a room full of California’s top tactical leaders.

In this episode you’ll discover:

• Why orientation — not speed — is what actually wins (and kills)
• How Jon’s entire worldview on Boyd shifted overnight
• The moment a room of alpha SWAT commanders realized they’d been teaching OODA wrong for decades
• Destruction & Creation explained simply (and why almost nobody talking about OODA has actually read it)
• Real-world examples: Blockbuster vs Netflix, Toyota Kaizen, AI thought bubbles, and why your team’s implicit biases are quietly sabotaging every decision
• The Socratic “no-slide-deck” method that turned skeptics into believers in under five hours

If you thought the Moose-on-The-Debrief episode was fire, this is the sequel you didn’t know you needed.

Jon Becker on Linkedin

John R. Boyd's Conceptual Spiral was originally titled No Way Out. In his own words: 

“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”

March 25, 2025

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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:

The No Bell Podcast Episode 24
...

Chapters

• 0:00 Rain, Intros, And Setups
• 5:14 Meeting John Becker And The Mission
• 12:03 Orientation Takes Center Stage
• 17:53 From Finance To Blockbuster And Netflix
• 23:36 Destruction And Creation Explained
• 28:47 Bias, Shared Awareness, And Team Learning
• 34:40 SWAT Training: Crashing Old Models
• 40:27 Socratic Teaching And Building The Sketch
• 47:30 Why Over How In Tactical Mastery
• 53:20 Toyota, Kaizen, And Ground Truth
• 59:32 Mission Command And Co‑Created Intent
• 1:03:50 Education Beats Training

Transcript

Mark McGrath: 0:40

So, Ponch, you and I, as uh former naval officers, we're no stranger to SoCal being in and around San Diego and LA. And as many times as I've been there, I had never been there, and it was pouring down rain as if you were in Kentucky in the middle of June and it was a summer thunderstorm. Um, and I brought all that rain with me because our friend, Patrick Van Horn, who is the author of Left a Bang, connected me with John Becker, the CEO of Artvark Tactical, who's joining us today from Laverne, California. How are you, John?

Jon Becker: 1:14

I'm good, buddy. Thanks so much. And just for future reference, when you live in Southern California, you know this, but being from New York, you don't. It's rude to bring your weather to California. So next time, just leave your rain at home. We don't need that water falling from the sky.

Mark McGrath: 1:27

Tell you, it crashed, it definitely crashed my orientation because again, I've never been there and the sun wasn't shining. In San Diego, I've seen clouds, but I never saw rain.

Jon Becker: 1:35

So yeah, no, it happens once a year. And, you know, every year we threaten to reduce our tax payments to make the weather machine go back on, and it does.

Mark McGrath: 1:42

So our our buddy Patrick Van Horn, my brother Marine, who's who wrote a great book called Left It Bang with another buddy from the Marines, and it became a sensation. And I had taken that book and applied it in the uh asset management world for years. And then Patrick and I, as we became friends over the years, he pings me out of the blue. Hey, you're gonna get a call from this guy, John Becker. I was just on a show, and Oodaloop came up and I told him to the other talk to you. Then one day I get a call from a California number, and and here you are. And then what did I do? I packed up, I flew out to LA. We recorded a great session, and then we spent time the next day, about five hours, of organically constructing John Boyd's Oodaloop sketch, which we'll get to. But um, I want to start from the top. Ponch and I have a very specific way that we talk about John Boyd and his work across the board. UDA, what he's most commonly known for, which is only really a small piece of actually John Boyd's complete corpus of work, is what he's most known for, particularly in the world of tactical SWAT, military, special operations, Marine Corps, fighter aviation. And Punch and I are on another level with this in the sense that we've been in the archives of John Boyd. We interact with his acolytes frequently, and we're on a mission to make sure that the authenticity of Boyd is taught and trained and understood. Because when people that understand the tactical version, understand the authentic version, it opens up minds and ways and up opportunities that they've never uh they've never even realized. Part, would you add anything into that from our mission standpoint?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 3:19

No, I think the uh closed oodaloop, it misses the enacted part of the real oodaloop, and that is the engagement or the agent's experience with the environment, right? And that's probably the key reason why you don't want to use that closed oodaloop in anything.

Mark McGrath: 3:34

So John Becker takes the dare, calls me, I fly out there, we sit down, we have a podcast on John's Debrief Live, which we highly recommend. That's not just that episode, just in general, because it really does play to a lot of the things that we talk about with our clients. John, you sit me down, you take it from there. And then we're gonna let's let's walk through the whole, uh, let's walk through the whole process of what's getting us to where we are right now.

Jon Becker: 4:00

Yeah, it was really interesting when when I interviewed Patrick, you know, obviously Patrick, really bright guy, wrote a fantastic book, Left to Bang, that you know, now it's it's been a decade. And had Patrick on to talk about Left to Bang, you know, a decade later. What what what in your thinking has changed? And somewhere along the lines, we started talking about, you know, UTA and orientation. And we finished the podcast and he's like, oh my God, you've got to talk to this guy, Mark McGrath. He's like, this guy, and I'm like, the guy from Sugar Ray, and he goes, No, no, no, the other Mark McGrath got it. He says, You've you've got to talk to him. He's really understands Boyd and is making an effort to teach Boyd authentically. And it was, you know, you you have these moments where you realize you look through the through the world at the lens that you carry. Right? We we all have a lens that we look at the world. And and I had always seen Boyd as this, you know, the way that Boyd is taught in the tactical community, which is a very reductionist, you know, I see the coffee cup, I reach for the coffee cup, I adjust my grip, I grab the coffee cup, I drink from the, you know, and and this this kind of notion that you and I both have an ODA loop spinning, and if my loop is spinning faster than your loop, I win every time. And and then, you know, I start talking to you and watching and reading what you're teaching, and it was kind of like my entire world changed with regard to OODA. It went from this like, you know, man has fire to, you know, man has, you know, six burner, double wide, you know, wolf stove. Um, and and it was interesting because there were things that always bothered me about Boyd and the way Boyd was taught, but you couldn't really like it was it was a good framework to kind of understand all the things that you have to do to make decisions and act, but it wasn't an applicable thing. You couldn't take the oodle loop and go forth and understand your relationship with the world. And it was this very shallow, monolithic, linear process that candidly I feel like I've I've I've found the six-burner stove with regard to Lloyd.

Mark McGrath: 6:04

Well, we like to think that we're bringing a flamethrower at least versus uh versus a six-burner stove.

Speaker 4: 6:10

Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 6:10

Um well, so I walk into this phenomenal studio that you're sitting in right now. I'm in New York, Ponches and Virginia, and you're there, you're there in California in the studio that we sat in, eyeball eyeball, talking, and that we kick it off. What was the first thing that really hit you that you know made you think that we're this is not what I, this is not how I understood it. This is this is adding to what it is that I know, or this this is hitting me in a place that like I need to learn more. What was it that what was think the first uh shot fired, if you will?

Jon Becker: 6:43

I I think the initial discussion about the UTA sketch, right? The the one time Boyd drew UTA and the disproportionate weight of the UDA sketch, how orientation is prime, how orientation is fed by all of these things, cultural heritage, et cetera, and how those implicitly guide and direct not only your observation, but also you know, your decisions, your actions. And when you when you look at it from that perspective that orientation is prime and that that kind of your mission is to align your view of reality against reality, Boyd makes a lot more sense. There are several different directions to go with that, but it is ultimately orientation being prime makes a lot more sense. The its effect on not only what you sense, but how you sense. And then not only you know how you make decisions and why you make decisions, but then then actions and and kind of the the non-circular relationship between orientation and how it drives the other three aspects makes it make a lot more sense and also makes it a lot more applicable. You know, you you you look at it and you go, okay, so really my primary objective and everything I'm doing is orientation. It is it is aligning what I'm seeing in the world with what is actually happening in the world and trying to make sure that I am holding my orientation as close to reality as possible. And when you look at it from that perspective, now all of a sudden you question how you sense. You know, you question what am I looking at and what are the things that I'm observing, and how is my implicit bias from my orientation driving what I'm sensing? You question, you know, how you make decisions, how you act. And to me, it just it was like the lights came on on Boyd and have had the same reaction. I've had a lot of emails and and text messages from people who've been in the topical community a long time and teach and talk about Boyd. They're like, oh my God, I had no idea it was this robust.

Mark McGrath: 8:44

Yeah, I mean, that's the thanks. First of all, thanks for that, John, because that, you know, not that it, not that it validates what Ponch and I do. You know, Ponch and I work on this daily 24-7 because we don't want Boyd to be ossified and memorialized in granite and frozen in time.

Speaker 4: 9:02

Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 9:02

Boyd left this work intentionally open. And at the same time, there is a headwind in that, that the the inauthentic understanding of his work puts a wet blanket on the authentic work that's actually what is discovered and described by him to unleash human performance in ways that we didn't even know that are that are possible. And I always say the way I say it, you know, the Marine Corps, they taught me this, they gave me the basics, I got the what, but something about it, you say, I'd love to know what bothered you about Boyd. We could talk about that for for our no way out audience. But what bothered me about Boyd, and I didn't really get into this until after I left the Marine Corps, was that there's gotta be something more to this. This just this makes perfect sense, but there's this massive but, but there's gotta be, there's gotta be more. And where it hit me, and I've said this on a million podcasts, I probably said it on yours too, if I recall, that when I got out, I stepped out and I realized that I was seeing it, I did. Yeah, but I talked about uh the great financial crisis. Why was I seeing it differently? And why were people jumping off skyscrapers or jumping in front of traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike or in front of subway trains? If you remember that conversation that we had, like, you know, what's going on? And that's really what opened me up to realizing that Boyd was onto something and that reducing him to a little circular model is is putting your two hands behind your back and tying your ankles together.

Jon Becker: 10:27

Yeah, it's taking Shakespeare's work and saying, so this guy wrote this book, and one time he said to be or not to be.

Mark McGrath: 10:34

Exactly.

Jon Becker: 10:34

Yeah, no, no, that that that was not what his work was. That was a sentence from his work that doesn't even capture a small percentage of it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:42

And never mind all the fascinating geometry that's associated with Shakespeare's work, but that's another story. Yeah, we'll save that one for a while. Exactly.

Mark McGrath: 10:50

What were some of the things that bothered you about Boyd? So I I had the things that bothered me about Boyd. I thought there was something missing, or there's got to be more to this. What were the things that you thought about?

Jon Becker: 11:00

So the way Boyd is taught is a very reductionist view, right? This is this is the way that you see sense, make decisions, and act. And it always bothered me that one, that they're equally weighted, because it doesn't feel like they should be equally weighted when you when you think about it. It's not like you spend one minute observing, one minute orienting, one minute deciding, one minute acting. There's obviously a disproportionate relationship between those four components. The other thing that really bothered me with it is it was a framework that explained kind of how how decisions were made and how actions were taken, but it was not actionable. But it's not something you can take action on. You can't, you know, you can go, oh, well, I need to speed up my loop. So what does that mean? Well, it it means I I sense faster and I make decisions faster and I act faster, and like that's that's not a thing. Um and I think that when you when you start to dig into it deeper, you look at orientation, and let's just let's just take orientation since it is prime in this. When you look at the work on a deeper level, destruction creation, kind of Boyd's concept of mental models and how you're going to take mental models apart, constantly be rebuilding them, then a lot of things come into play in the way you lead and the way you make decisions, right? You start to look at, okay, well, actually, I do need diverse perspective. You know, I need to I need to root out my own implicit orientation biases because they pull me farther away from reality. You know, you you start to recognize how prime that decision is going to be and how the the passing of information among a team through the team, aligning situational awareness, how critical that is. It doesn't feel that way when you look at it in a linear fashion, but when you look at it, you know, using the UTI sketch and and looking at the primary position of orientation, you now go, okay, well, we really need to make sure that what we're doing the best is aligning orientation. We're we're having common operating picture, we're you know, we're sharing information effectively, we're rooting out our implicit bias, we're looking at all the things that drive the way that we look at the world. And and in that context, now the the UDA sketch in you know, kind of the whole UDA concept begins to explain a lot of things that happen in business, like the financial crisis, right? Where where one guy looks at it and goes, yeah, this is completely phakakta, and you know, everybody's wrong, right? Which is it is an insane thought to go, yeah, everybody's wrong. The government's wrong, the financial companies are wrong, the insurance companies are wrong, rating agencies, the rating agencies are wrong. Yeah. Like everybody is wrong. And and you had a couple of people who were completely contrarian that were like, no, what they're looking at, the lens they're looking at right now is not an accurate lens. It is not reflective of what's actually happening. And the delta between the way they're perceiving it and reality is such a great delta that there's an there's an arbitrage to be had there. There's an opportunity to move in between those two and take advantage.

Mark McGrath: 14:12

I mean, that's a very apt description of what understanding Blood authentically and understanding Ouda Loop's sketch and loop in quotes. You realize that I forget the exact number, I want to say off the top of my head, it's 30 total arrows, 30 total directions inside of the Oda Loop sketch versus one circle. And when you think about just using the great fight, you just take the movie The Big Short or the book The Big Short as an example. That's exactly what you just described is that people were willing to crash their orientation. Because really it's remember, it's orientation that kills. It's not speed. It's orientation that kills. If your orientation is off, speed doesn't matter. You're just going to go off in the wrong uh direction. Yeah, you're just gonna hit the wall at a higher rate of speed. We talked about on the show, on your show, how yeah, Blockbuster was really fast. They had a lot of cloud, they had a lot of capital. They were number one in every category, and they were going really fast in the wrong direction. And the rest of the rest of the stories.

Jon Becker: 15:11

And you look at today's news, Netflix is buying buying Warner Brothers. Insane. The guys who used to mail you DVDs at your house in an envelope are are buying the largest, one of the most successful movie studios in history that includes Discovery. It includes all of these things. And the other studio's argument, Paramount's argument, is this isn't fair. It creates it creates a monopoly because Netflix, the guys who used to mail you DVDs and everybody thought was crazy, is the most powerful media company in the world. It's not fair to us. It's fascinating.

Mark McGrath: 15:47

So we brought up on the show, on your show, the Blockbuster example. And I made a comment that the Netflix that beat Blockbuster back then is not the Netflix that beat that's that's there today. It's one that constantly crashes their own orientation, rewrites their own orientation, constantly, constantly adapting, adapting, adapting. And the only way that you do that, now whether they have somebody inside teaching them Boyd and in Oodaloop sketch, we can only we can only guess. But at least inherently, successful organizations, successful SWAT operators, successful fighter pilots, successful marine officers, whatever it is, inherently they understand what it is that Boyd has discovered and describing. And it's when they actually understand it explicitly, that's when the geometric results come.

Jon Becker: 16:32

Yeah, no, completely agree. And I mean, I see that in my own career, right? Like I'm I am by nature contrarian. Um, it's just I I've always been that kid. And so I'm absolutely willing to believe that the entire world is wrong. You know, and it's that's why you start a company, right? I had a friend, a private equity friend uh years ago that said the problem with private equity is a concept is you take people who by their nature believe that the world is wrong and that they're right, and you give them fuck you money and you and you hope they don't say fuck you and leave. And you know what? They always say fuck you and leave because they're contrarian by nature. And I think that the fact that I am so contrarian in my thinking, Uda made perfect sense to me. It's like, yeah, everybody can. There can be group psychosis, the world can see the thing wrong, especially when you look at the kind of, you know, let's call them structural biases that are built into a company. We talked about Kodak on the show, right? And like, okay, you're you're the guy at the House in the Hamptons, and you're the Kodak board member, and you've made your entire life on film, and film is amazing, and film's never going to change. Because if it changes, well, then then your world is gonna change. You're gonna lose your your primary position in the world. And so you you become emotionally invested in in carrying on that misaligned orientation. And the longer you do that and the bigger the group becomes, the farther from reality that orientation gets. And pretty soon you have, you know, the 2008 financial crisis where everybody just sits around and goes, Oh, I can't believe it happened. Really? You you you can't believe that people were over mortgaging their houses and that mortgage companies were taking terrible loans and bundling them together and wrapping them around insurance policies. And yeah, I I had a friend that that was uh at Bear Stearns. And he at a family dinner was explaining how derivatives worked and kind of how he was involved in in a lot of the mortgage trading and the tranche, you know, the tranche wrapping and all the stuff they're doing. And and he explains this. And I was the only one listening after about 30 seconds because everybody else was borne had no idea, and I'm a big enough nerd that it made sense. But he explains it and he goes, You get it? I said, Yeah, I get it. I said, You're taking a piece of shit and you're wrapping it in a piece of bacon and you're calling it shit with bacon, and then you're handing it to somebody else who's insuring it, and they're wrapping another piece in the bacon around it, and they're calling it a bacon with shit. And by the time we're done with about seven layers of bacon, this is a bacon wrap fillet. But in the end, it's just a piece of shit wrapped in bacon. And and he's like, no, no, no, you don't understand, you don't understand. Well, bear crashes, he loses his money, he texts me and goes, Yeah, it was a piece of shit wrapped in bacon. But the whole industry was like, no, no, no, it's gonna work. And so you can see how with somebody who puts orientation in the middle and and is constantly destroying and creating to coin boyd's phrase, their own mental models. Yeah, they're not gonna get wedded to an incorrect orientation.

Mark McGrath: 19:35

So it's one of the questions that you asked me, and I said, well, we've got to go back a little further first. So, because you had asked me, you know, walk me through UDA as a concept, and I said, we've got to go back a little further and really understand Boyd because what what ended up happening, and I said this on your show, was that there he is, a retired Air Force colonel, and he can't get over this concept of this idea that keeps bugging him is like, how did I come up with the aerial attack study? How did I come up with energy maneuverability theory? How did I do all these things with all the other crap that I have to do that keeps me, that keeps me busy? How was I able to figure this out, which is what precipitated his uh sort of monastic exile, self self-imposed exile, to come up with destruction and creation. And what I told you on the show, and what we'd say repeatedly, one of the easy, and now now I think, John, that you can you can identify this now. One of the easiest tells that people that are coaching UDA or telling you about UDA, one of the easiest giveaways is likely they've never read Destructure and Creation or heard of it. And I've had the that's say, I'll call it say. Privilege to review some things that somebody sent me, books and papers and things. And I go right the first place I go is always right to the reference section. And you almost never see a Boyd primary source. And if you see destruction and creation, it's given a very sort of mystical touching, just like a just like almost like a, well, we have to talk about it, but they don't understand what it is that Boyd's actually doing to get people to break down and shatter their correspondence of what they think is reality, to reassemble it through synthesis to show them a better picture of reality that will never actually be actual actual reality and constantly revise and update that in order to improve their capacity for free and independent action. Nobody will say that. We say it because we understand it and we believe it and we and we and we put it to the test and we talk about it and we interact with people that uh directly did this with Boyd from his inner circle. That's that I think is what I noticed when I went out there. The the mismatch that we ran into and that we worked through and reoriented together, and then the next day training SWAT officers for five hours, that to me was like the biggest thing that hit. They didn't really understand what was behind it to get to Uta even in the first place. And they realized that you couldn't reduce it to just this little four, four, four-step tactical model.

Jon Becker: 22:03

No, which is, I mean, honestly, is is fantastic, right? Like I for me, uh, you know, two days with Mark McGrath talking Uta is like drinking off of a fire hose. You know, you you capture little bits and and the rest of it is just all over the place, right? It's it's so there was so much information that I've gone back and listened to the episode a couple of times and reread things in in preparation for Ida, my column for the NTOA, you know, you and I had subsequent conversations and I kept picking it up and looking at it. And it's, you know, it in the end, I I think to some degree, Boyd had this brilliant epiphany that, not to coin a common phrase, but like we're living in a simulation. We are always living in a simulation. We are always living in a perceived version of what is actually happening. And I think that one of the biggest takeaways for me was this belief that you're never accurately seeing it. Never. If you're standing there when it happens, looking at it, you are still judging it through your life experience and culture traditions and all the things that lie in the middle of the orientation. And the minute that you accept that you're living in a simulation, then it isn't, there isn't ego involved. And well, you know, I see it the real way. You just, you know, you're not seeing it correctly. You're seeing, you're seeing part of it. And so instead of standing there thinking you have everything, look for other perspectives. You know, walk all the way around the elephant and then ask other people that walked all the way around the elephant what the elephant actually looks like. And and I think that that opens up kind of a humility in your own, uh, you know, your own alignment with reality that then makes a lot of the a lot of the things that I teach in culture-centric leadership, you know, of group sourcing or crowdsourcing things and and you know, doing kind of collaborative planning and and trying to have diverse perspectives in your in your group, like all of those things suddenly came into like, yeah, I believe those things because those things align orientation.

Mark McGrath: 24:05

Yeah, Punch turned me on to a term years ago, controlled hallucination. It's a it's a controlled hallucination. And I reacted the same way you just did. Yeah. No, I mean it's but then like you think about it, you're like, yeah, holy shit, it is a controlled hallucination. Like we really are a controlled hallucination to interact with our reality that is only basically like it's a movie camera, you know, sensing of what and it's processing and it's what we compute and wherever we calculate our orientation that is still not aligned with what actually what actually is.

Jon Becker: 24:40

Yeah. And that's where you stop and think about like all of the information you ignore constantly, right? The weight of your clothes on your on your body, the sound of your own breathing and heart rate, the pressure of the chair you're sitting on, we're ignoring millions of pieces of data every day. You know, you and I had the conversation about being in Manhattan.

Speaker 4: 25:01

Yeah.

Jon Becker: 25:01

When you grew up in LA, you're never in the kind of circumstances you are in Manhattan. And the first time I went to Manhattan, the biggest thing I noticed is nobody looks at anybody else. There's there's no eye contact. Right? And and I thought, man, that's really weird. Nobody makes eye contact. But the longer you're there, the more you realize if you make eye contact with everybody, your head's going to explode. So you know, everybody is just kind of focused on their own thing and in their own thoughts and listening to headphones and like, you know, everybody has kind of put themselves in a bubble because there's so much stimulus that you can't orient to it all. And so you have to you have to recognize that if that's the case, if we're constantly ignoring things all day, you know, and oh, by the way, our hearing doesn't cover the full spectrum of sound, our vision doesn't cover the full spectrum of light, like we know we're we're looking through a toilet paper tube at part of an elephant and trying to orient off of it, then then that's kind of liberating because you don't you don't have to know everything, but you can surround yourself with people that will reorient you and allow you collectively to align that orientation as close to reality as you can to then inform what you're what you're looking at, what you're observing, the the decisions that you're making and the actions you're taking.

Mark McGrath: 26:18

And I would add that it's not even to that you don't have to know everything. You also accept and understand through humility, as you mentioned, as we talked about in the show, that it's impossible for me to know everything. And that's why Boyd rejected the term being called an expert. He thought that an expert was uh was a was he took it as extreme offense because that would suggest that I'm not learning. And ultimately, orientation and and implicit guidance and control and UDA sketch, that's all about how you learn, how you create, how you create novelty. It's a learning, it's a learning experience. You know, that's the that's the that's the critical part.

Jon Becker: 26:57

And if you're not it begs, it begs education. Right? Like if if the minute you recognize that you know life is a constant fight for orientation and reorientation, it it has to make you crave more information. It has to make you crave more knowledge, right? I I mean I've been that way my whole life. I I always want to learn more. Um, and and I've said for a long time, I I'm willing to talk to anybody that is passionate about anything because if they are, they're gonna be interesting. And even if something you don't care about, something you're not interested at all. I watched a documentary uh a few weeks back about ballet shoes and the company in New York that makes ballet shoes for you know the Met, who go through a ridiculous number of ballet shoes, by the way. Didn't I thought that was like, oh, you wear them for a while, like one performance. But it was the company that works with the ballerina, and and they talked about how you know it aligns the bones and the foot and that that affects everything else. And I'm 15 minutes into a documentary on ballet shoes going, this is the most interesting documentary, and it's something I had never thought about. Right? Because you just, if you believe Boyd's tenant, then you should be creating information and you should constantly be striving to learn. And you're you're never gonna be an expert at anything.

Mark McGrath: 28:16

This is where I'll bring Ponch in. I mean, this and this is why Boyd was not a specialist. He pulled from everywhere. He'd be as interested in Arden Ballet shoes as he would fighter jets and fighter engines, in the sense that these things apply universally. And one of the things that I mentioned on your show is that when you look at the scope of Boyd's work from a subject topic category standpoint, it's not limited at all to military history or to uh to science and engineering. It's philosophy, it's specifically Eastern philosophy, it's manufacturing processes in Japan, it's literature, it's you know, it's it's it's big time. It's it's uh it's it's finding this everywhere. And we say all the time, it's it's only applicable where humans make decisions and act.

Jon Becker: 29:00

So I'll give you an example. So we released a documentary called Confronting Hate, and it's about the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue attack.

Mark McGrath: 29:06

Yeah.

Jon Becker: 29:07

And, you know, on the debrief, we are constantly telling stories about tactical events. And and the purpose of the show is to provide professional tactical operators with an understanding of what occurred at the event, the decisions that were made, why they made them, you know, help them to orient to that kind of an event. And so we put it together and I sent it to a friend who who was the president of one of the major studios. I said, Hey, just watch it and let me know what you think. And he said, I think it's very well done. I think it makes a lot of sense, and I think it serves the audience you want, but nobody's gonna ever want to watch this outside of the industry. And I said, Why? And he said, Because the way you're telling the story is not the way Hollywood tells stories. And so that started me on a three-week deep dive on heroes, journey, story arc, everything else. And I I then went back and re-watched the footage through that new lens and realized I know exactly what he's talking about because I cut out of in the process of making that documentary, we cut out all kinds of stuff that is relevant and interesting. As an example, I'll give you all the emotional stuff, right? I mean, everybody that that entered that synagogue was was permanently affected by it. And in my interviews, there were very emotional interviews. The guys hadn't talked about this in seven years, they've been under federal gag order. So it was opening Pandora's box in every single interview. And so we I cut out all the emotional stuff, and I cut out the emotional stuff because I know that a professional tactical user is, you know, the the show to some degree is medicine. And and the more bitter that medicine is, the less likely they are to take it. And so when I went back and re-watched the footage, I was like, oh my God. I I didn't even notice this stuff the first time we, you know, when we edited the movie. I didn't even see it. So we're doing, we're gonna do a complete recut of the movie and launch it as a different kind of consumer-facing piece. But it was that it was taking off the lens that I always looked through and picking up somebody else's lens and having this moment of like, I didn't even see this stuff the first time I watched it because that's not what my orientation was.

Mark McGrath: 31:16

And then reorienting.

Jon Becker: 31:18

And having the humility to let somebody tell you, I don't like this. This is not good. This needs to be done differently from their lens. And then having this kind of moment of liberation where I looked back and I was like, oh my God, there's so much stuff here. Yeah, yeah.

Mark McGrath: 31:34

That's the debrief, right, Punch. That's the that's the value of debrief.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 31:38

Yeah, it's the idea of uh control is outside and bottom up, and going back to what Boyd explored with the Toyota production system, he identified that. He said, you know, control is always outside and bottom up. Go back to Blockbuster, right? Um they they failed because they were trying to go inside or top down, inside out, right? Same thing with uh uh Kodak. So uh that empathy, uh putting yourself in the persp in the shoes of the consumer, uh potential consumer is critical, right? Um and it's tough to do, uh John. I I I think Moose and I struggle with that, even though we know this stuff, it's hard to do, right? That doing the hard things is getting out there and and understanding what that that lens is from uh the perspective of others. So good on you for doing that. It's awesome.

Jon Becker: 32:18

Well, Punch, you bring up you bring up Toyota, right? Like, you know, we're we're all old enough to remember when the United States made, you know, was the biggest car manufacturer in the world and and what Toyota did. And if you really look at Kaizen and you kind of look at Toyota's concept in manufacturing, you know, you can go, well, they're empowering the workers, they're pushing down responsibility, they're doing all these things. Really, what they're doing is they're getting ground truth constantly. Right? The the big three were, you know, the supervisor is the one that understands what's going on, and the guy in the line doesn't know what he's doing. So when the car is coming down the line in a big three manufacturer and it's got you know a bent panel and the gearbox didn't quite go in, there's a rework department that's gonna unscrew all that at the end because it's the supervisor that's gonna push the stop button on the line, and he's not gonna want to do that because it costs a lot of money. And Toad is like, no, no, no, the person that knows the most about fitting a door panel onto a car is the person who fits a door panel onto a car. So let's listen to that person and accept their truth and use that to reshape everything that's downstream from them. It's fascinating.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 33:29

Yeah, that uh I'm gonna get this wrong, but it's Genshi Genbutsu. Genshi Genbitsu. But yeah, go see for yourself. Go to the source. And we've done a lot of work with the uh well, actually with Toyota over the years to work inside of Toyota Motors North America and and other Toyota organizations to actually see what's going on in there and bring John Boyd's Observe Orient to Side Act Loop in there as well. There's another interesting connection that I think, as we're talking about TPS and the ODA loop, and that is when people talk about agile software development, they often associate that with Scrum. And Scrum, according to the co-creator of it, who used to be a fighter pilot, says that Scrum comes from the OODA loop of fighter aviation and the Toyota production system. Moose and I now know that that's not necessarily true. OODA is not from fighter aviation, but the OODA loop, according to John Boyd, is highly informed by the Toyota production system. So now there's, you know, there's again, this is going back to our fighter aviation community. We get this wrong quite a bit, right? Everybody comes out, they jump around and in their flight suits, get on stage, try to close the gap between some desired high-definition destination future state and where you are today. Well, that's great. And that works in a complicated system. That doesn't work in a complex environment, right? So there's a lot of interesting connections here. Um by the way, I'm I'm totally enjoying this conversation, just sitting back and going, I'm so proud of Moose jumping in there and doing what he's doing, because it's it's fucking fantastic to hear this story, John. I really appreciate that.

Mark McGrath: 34:59

Well, John, you're speaking Poncio's language when you start talking about like Kaizen and uh and Toyota production systems.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 35:05

Yeah, no, it's it's freaking awesome. I'm gonna throttle back and just sit back and enjoy this. So, Moose, back to you, brother.

Mark McGrath: 35:11

Well, so then we go through, let's take it to um day two. So John and I finish recording. We are I got a great tour of Pasadena, which I always wanted to see because my great-and-great-uncle used to live there, and I never had gone out there, and I got to see the Rose Bowl, and we went out for ramen. And the next day, we go back to uh Art of Arc Tactical HQ, and we have members of the California Association of Tactical Officers. Now these are things what we have John 11 or 12.

Jon Becker: 35:44

Yeah, there's a strategic leadership program for Cato.

Mark McGrath: 35:47

Okay, so the leaders and these are leaders that are high performance, high octane, you know, high human performance SWAT officers. And then, you know, I wasn't the only Marine in the room. We had a couple Marines, a couple soldiers, a couple airmen. We fill a room with egos, don't we, John? Like we had it was a it was a it was a conference room filled with egos. And what I felt was that I looked out to 12 guys and they're like, we're gonna nail this guy. He doesn't know shit about UTA because we we have the we have the UTA down through our marksmanship, our marksmanship training, our tactical training, the blah blah blah. And what happened over the next five hours?

Jon Becker: 36:29

So I think I think I think your your orientation was wrong. I think they look like that just because they, you know, tribal tattoos, testosterone, and and small t-shirts. I I think that the whole point of the strategic leadership group is it is 12 guys that have been handpicked from all over the state of California to be mentored by the smartest people we can find with an idea that over the course of the 18-month program, we see them nine times for two days. We are going to build a higher level of tactical leadership and start to really change the community. So the goal with this group is walk in with no ego and learn from everybody you sit down with.

Mark McGrath: 37:12

Let me let me reorient and rephrase tension. There is tension between what I'm going to talk about. I sensed it. And what they what they that's what I meant to say. But but let's let's be let's be honest. I mean, these are these are pretty between me, you, and them, isn't it this is a group of confident men.

Jon Becker: 37:27

Yeah, no, there there was no shortage of testosterone or confidence. Yeah, it is it is you know 15 alpha males sitting in a room together arguing over something that they all think they understand.

Mark McGrath: 37:39

Exactly. That and that's the that's the that that was the mismatch, the tension of their understanding of UDA and what I was going to, what happened over the next five hours. Okay. Yeah. Now that now that we reoriented, we're but we're realigned on that, take it from there.

Jon Becker: 37:52

Yeah, I mean, you completely disrupted their their notion, right? Like it, it's the same thing you did to me is is you know, you think you think you understand this very simple concept. One of my favorite sayings is that the world is a very scary place when you don't have any knowledge. You know, the the the water falls from the sky and lightning and like the you know, thunder and earthquakes and planets, and there's all these things that you don't understand. And so you have to fill in that gap with whatever mythology you do to make sense of it. You get a little bit of knowledge and the world makes more sense, it becomes stable and it stops being scary. You get a little more knowledge and you realize we actually don't really understand shit. And, you know, we can't even reconcile astrophysics and and quantum mechanics. So we don't totally understand. That was one of those moments where, you know, you're like, okay, now that you understand that, here's what it really means. And you can watch everybody just kind of sit there and go, oh my God. There's there is so much more here that I didn't understand. And and, you know, I don't, I don't think you're gonna eat a plate of Boyd in a single survey.

Mark McGrath: 38:55

No. Oh no.

Jon Becker: 38:57

This is gonna be a lifelong.

Mark McGrath: 38:58

We've been doing it for 30 years and we're still not done. And G.I. Wilson, his friend and collaborator of the Marine Corps, said, I met him in 1979. He died in 1997, it's 2025, and I'm still learning from the guy.

Jon Becker: 39:10

Yeah, I think Boyd was one of those people. You could say it was a savant, or you could say, you know, whatever. He was one of those people that just looked at the world a little bit differently. He just had an ability, like some musicians do, where you go, where did where did that come from?

Mark McGrath: 39:27

And and I think with the group that we had there too, uh, you know, I on some levels it did seem like I I guess I went in there and I pulled the rug out from under people, but really I wasn't. I really I was just refining knobs. And then they were able to come to their own conclusions. And then we together, as a as a as a new orientation of instructor and and and student, constructed Oodaloop's sketch from the from the ground up, and they did all the work.

Jon Becker: 39:55

Yeah, I really I it was interesting because generally speaking, when somebody teaches something as as complicated as this, um it is much more a top-down kind of you know information push. Right? Here's all the information, looking for rote memorization. One of the things that I loved about the way you teach this is it was actually bottom-up. Right? It was it was Socratic method. It was, well, why? Where would this come from? And and kind of, you know, the group kind of intuited its way through it, which I think allowed you to eat the elephant much more effectively than if it had just been shoving information downward. I I think that that boyd is something that you have to constantly pick up and you kind of play with it in small parts. Before it begins to make sense. You know, looking at that sketch, you can spend hours on any aspect of that sketch. But if you don't understand that orientation is prime and you don't understand how it drives everything else, then then you're never going to get the part of it. And I think that's what led to this kind of reductionist linear view is it's very complicated and you have to take some time, or it's just really easy to go, oh, it's just these four things. And it's funny because we just had the Cato conference in San Diego and uh Patrick Van Horn was out there and taught for us. And it was it was interesting to see the kinds of conversations that are now occurring specifically around orientation and and you know how how to best align it. It's it's really interesting. I mean, it was it was it was a fascinating experience, and I think is has kindled a lot of interest. I'm actually, I wrote the article, my column about that for this month's or this next quarter's NTOA Tactical Edge magazine is about kind of Boyd and the way you're teaching Boyd. But I've also got a couple more pieces that we're gonna do about it because I think it is something where we're gonna need to constantly kind of pick up an aspect of it and discuss it. And and I think the more we can do to bring that to the tactical community, the greater the greater the value.

Mark McGrath: 41:58

Well, I would say having you know being the outsider and not known anybody in that room, that the men that walked into that room to learn were different than the ones that walked out.

Jon Becker: 42:09

For sure.

Mark McGrath: 42:10

Yeah. We got to a very different place really quickly.

Jon Becker: 42:12

Which is which is what great mentors do. Right? Like if if you you go back to my my conversation about the movie, what my friend did was hand me a new lens. Now you've got to be humble enough to go, hey, you know, my lens is wrong. My lens is always wrong. Right? Our view is always wrong. So you can't emotionally invest in your view. You have to be willing to look at other people's lenses. But what he did was he handed me a different lens to look at the world. Look at the look at the work that I had done. You know, and and it, I'm not gonna say it made me unhappy with what we had done because what we had done served the audience we intended it for. To some degree, it was almost liberating to go, oh my God, we have all this material that we haven't used, and now we can go back and take a completely different look at this thing. And and I think that that's kind of the reaction that most of the guys had to the conversation with you is I thought I understood this, I don't. And you know, to some degree, it's like you pulled back the curtain and and revealed that there was a gold mine behind it. And so that hopefully inspires them, like like any good mentor does, to go dig deeper.

Mark McGrath: 44:17

Well, we we tell everybody, and and that's what I hope people take away from this conversation is that, and the conversation that you and I had on debrief, that all the software you need, all the tech you need, all the books and everything that you need to make this a reality, it's you've been designed with it. It's all here. Like it's it's it's this is what we're trying to help you understand to use. And it's when we understand these things explicitly. And the reason I thanks for pointing out the Socratic approach, whatever, because that gets people to come up with their own conclusions. There's nothing that I, as a former Marine artillery officer or you know, 15 years on Wall Street consultant, whatever it is, I can never presuppose that I know exactly what a SWAT officer has to do in a hostage situation at a bank, whatever. However, socratically, through this method of teaching and this method of learning, he will come up with the uh he or she will come up with the what to do on their own once they start to break and shatter those previously held mental models and start to rewrite the new ones. It's gonna, it's gonna become evident and self, uh they'll become more self-aware of what they need to do without having to tell them what to do.

Jon Becker: 45:29

It's inductive logic, right? It it's yeah, this is not A plus B equals C, ever.

Mark McGrath: 45:35

And especially inductive and deductive together. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like destruction creation said.

Jon Becker: 45:41

Yeah, exactly. When you when you look at tactical situations, no two tactical situations are exactly alike. Like they they never are going to play the same game. And they don't know when it's going to start. They don't know who the players are, they don't know what the situation is. Like it is, it is the land of unknowns. And how did the real fight is the orientation?

Mark McGrath: 46:05

What do you what do they because I think I felt like I I felt like I saw some orientations crash in the in the uh in the conference room when I didn't hand them a deck. I didn't have a slideshow. I had three specific things that I always talk about or aim to and then jam around and get them involved, and they built it up together with me. I I I felt like not handing them a deck. They were they were expecting uh uh enabling learning objectives, technical learning objectives, a slide deck, you know, and they didn't get any of that. Thoughts on what were your thoughts on that? Because I I feel like that when you involve them that way, they it's gonna stick and it's gonna encourage them to want to learn more.

Jon Becker: 46:46

Yeah, I mean, it to some degree it's it's it's IKEO without the manual, right? And not even knowing what you're building. You're gonna get all you know, it's it's the snowmobile. It's the snowmobile, but it's all the parts of the bike, it's all the parts of the boat, but none of them built into finished systems. And so I think that by when you say, hey, these parts equal a boat, these parts equal a bicycle, I think that's a different experience than somebody sitting there and putting the things together. And and it's interesting, one of the things that I've noticed in the tactical community, you know, I've been in it for 40 years, I've been surrounded by SWAT teams, the guys that I originally worked with were kind of the OGs. They were the guys that had to figure it out. And they understood things at a really deep level. If you go back to the Sid Hales and Mike Hillman's and Ron McCarthy's, and you had conversations with them, they they were unbelievably detailed in their thinking. And, you know, I've noticed over the course over my career arc that that's we've kind of gone away and we've lost a lot of that depth of knowledge. And it didn't dawn on me until I interviewed Mike Hillman about the 84 Olympics. He was talking about how LAPD had to figure out, you know, it's on the heels of Munich, right? The Munich massacre happens in 72, in 84 the Olympics come to the U.S. And it's what causes SWAT to explode in the U.S. is the 84 games. Because they said we are not going to have Munich occurring in the city of Los Angeles. And so LAPD SWAT, among other things, was tasked with trying to figure out how to respond to a Munich. And when I talked to Mike, Mike Hillman was one of the original guys that did that. And I was talking to him about, you know, what they were doing in preparation for the Olympics, and he goes, well, you know, like as an example, we had to figure out, you know, Munich, they put all the hot the hostages on a bus. And so we had to figure out how do you assault a bus. It wasn't we needed to go to a linear assaults class, we needed to learn bus assaults, we had to figure out how do you attack a bus. And because these guys had to build the knowledge ground up, they spent a great dime, good deal of their time in why and very little of their time in how, because there wasn't a how manual to look at. So that gave them this very broad, you know, Simon Sinek's notion of why gave them this very broad depth of knowledge of education in why. And they spent a lot of time looking at at the opposite of what they believed, because they needed to understand, oh, I think we should do it this way. Well, why wouldn't that work? And and that, you know, much like the Socratic method, they built the knowledge and they had a very deep understanding of why. The minute they started teaching it, it became a how. And that that the problem with having a how is when you're when your orientation doesn't match reality and all you have is a how, you don't understand why it doesn't match. And you don't you can't draw inferences from the paradigms that you have. Right? If if I've taught you how to use a hammer in only one way, and let's just say I taught you how to use a hammer as a pry implement, you don't even understand its primary purpose or how it can be used. And it isn't until you take the time to understand you know all of its capabilities that now you have this tool. So what's happened is we've seen this kind of decline in depth of knowledge, and we're not teaching why anymore. We're teaching how in everything.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 50:08

Right.

Jon Becker: 50:09

We're not educating, we're training. And the problem with training is orientation is is rooted largely in education, not in training.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 50:16

Uh John, I'd like to add to this, going back to what Mark did when he was out there, the co-creation of intent is what's going on when Mark is negotiating, feeling what everybody else needs, right? That's the same thing. And it's creating those affordances to understand collectively what needs to come next. And we've we've had Rob Gray on the podcast, who does a lot of work in constraints-led approach, ecological dynamics, to plan exactly what you said to training children, kids, uh, NBA players, athletes to the why. You give them the affordances, that bus, and let them figure out the why behind it and the how and the execution piece of that. That is fundamental to mission command. How do you actually develop leaders' intent? It's not just a leader, by the way, and that's what Moose did when he was there. He created that leader's intent, co-created with those in the room. How do you develop that? And how do you create the conditions to create an adaptable workforce team, uh, basketball team, SWAT organization, or what might have you? So this is very critical on everything we coach and teach. And it's non-traditional because everybody, like Moose said, they want a deck. They want learning objectives, they want these things. And that's not how the world works, right? I don't have a learning objective for my children on raising them, do I?

Jon Becker: 51:29

Right? I mean, if you do, I'd love to know it. It's I don't want my my son's 24, my daughter's 20. It's been a tough fight trying to figure it out.

Mark McGrath: 51:38

Yeah, let's let's let's let's stay off that way. I got a 22, yeah, 22, 20, 18, and 17. Yeah, that's enough. But you but to your point though. I mean, that's I guess to a larger extent is that in in any industry, you can take this exact approach to do this exact thing, and you're gonna get gain a lot more ground for yourself as an organization with your capability to thrive in non-standard, non-linear, complex environments versus the deck approach, the formula approach, what Ponch and I call the merchants of certainty. It doesn't work in reality.

Jon Becker: 52:17

No. No, and that's that's the thing is you have to take the time to become educated. Whatever your discipline is, whether it's running a business or making ballet shoes or or hostage rescue, you have to take the time to become educated on the why of what you're doing, because that's where the inference comes from. Right? The inference comes from a depth of understanding of the subject matter that when orientation doesn't align, you are able to draw the conclusion that now gets you the next step. When you find the thing that that has never made sense. And so many of the cases that that we cover on the debrief are these like, you know, you look and you go, whose idea was that? How the hell did that happen? And it's part of the thing I look for with cases is novelty. It's okay, and then how did you come to this conclusion and why and how did you make the choice? Because that's the part that we're lacking as a society. And and the thing is, like, as you look at the evolution of AI, AI is going to outrecall us every single time. You now have the capability of looking at almost the entire humanity and being able to ingest information like we feed all of the episodes into the show into an AI engine that we can then draw off of. And I query that all the time when I'm writing articles. And there's stuff that I don't remember. I mean, I did the interviews, I sat with the guy, I'm like, holy shit, we talked about that.

Mark McGrath: 53:51

It's it's you know, how ironic that we we come to this because at the end of our episode on the debrief, I briefly just I said this is going to take another, another episode, another podcast. The importance of understanding Marshall McLuhan because you're describing how the technology in the medium of AI is affecting our orientation, which in turn affects how implicitly the guys of control works, which affects, you know, Uta overall and the two marry each other uh quite well.

Jon Becker: 54:23

It's kind of terrifying, actually.

Mark McGrath: 54:25

Well, if we disobey Boyd, Boyd said people, ideas, things, all is in that order. And when we understand that AI serves us, we don't serve AI, then I think that we have a we have a shot. You know, the way uh Ponch and I have this discussion quite a bit. If you look at Udaloop's sketch and you look at orientation, AI should be helping us augment our orientation in order to improve our implicit guidance and control, in order to improve our decisions, improve our actions, and improve our ability to learn. I think you and I were talking about this out over Raman in Pasadena, that like I feel that because of AI, I actually learn a lot more than I ever did. And I find myself buying more books and reading more books than than I ever did because it's pointing me out to the directions that I never thought and that I hadn't uh that I hadn't considered.

Jon Becker: 55:10

So it's interesting. I think that I think we're going in two directions with that regard. I think that people that are open to having their orientation disrupted, people that are craving information, AI is amazing. I completely agree with you. I mean, I I'm reading books I would have never read. Um I'm reading papers and watching YouTube videos by people I probably would have never crossed because something's getting suggested in the process of doing that. But I'm constantly trying to pull myself out of a thought bubble, right? I watch all of the major news sources. I don't watch a single news source. When something big happens, I will watch Fox, CNN, MSNBC, read the Wall Street Journal, look at CNBC. Like I'm trying to get the broadest base of information I can. I think there's a small group of people that are going in that direction. But I think the majority of people are putting themselves into thought bubbles, reading news they agree with, they're surrounding themselves with friends that they agree with. And in the process, they're pulling their orientation farther from reality. I think part of what we're seeing politically currently in the country where you have our right and left that are neither the right nor left that they were when I was a kid. Like it's it's fucking confusing what what our politics are even more anymore. But we no longer agree on a common set of facts.

Speaker 4: 56:27

Yeah.

Jon Becker: 56:27

And as a result, we're not, we're never going to align our orientations if we're putting ourselves in a thought bubble and only reading things we agree with and talking to people we like, we are guaranteeing that our orientation is going to be wrong.

Mark McGrath: 56:44

We just published a podcast with Max Borders, who, like us, is also Gen X. And I think the fact, what kind of what you're alluding to, John, is the fact that we are Gen X. We're not digital natives. We we know what it's like to live analog, we know what it's like to live digitally. Versus a digital native, it's almost like it seems in a lot of ways that that their orientation is completely wired for them by the screens that they interface with, that that's all they've ever interfaced with.

Jon Becker: 57:10

Which is which is really scary because when you are living in a in the real world and you're seeking competitive information and you're you're looking at other perspectives, it's very easy to know when you're being lied to. It's very easy to know when the information that you're being fed is not accurate. But when we are surrounding ourselves with our thought bubbles and we are living exclusively natively, and we're relying on AI to make our decisions for us. Should I go to therapy? Should I kill myself? And you know, it was one recently um you've now not only given up your own ability to orient to what's going on, but you've put yourself in a situation where a very slight manipulation of that algorithm will drive you in a direction that you don't and you saw it with with kind of Russian interference in the election, and you know, where you had both sides of a political issue being agitated by outside agitators, foreign adversary agitators, and I'm thinking the Yankees suck, and you thinking they're the best baseball team, and both of us are getting spun up by outside agitators that are probably bots to then go meet somewhere for a protest, right? And and now our realities run into each other in a way that we don't even understand each other.

Mark McGrath: 58:30

I think we can bring it to a close on that note. I mean, really what you're saying and what I'm hearing is the value of understanding Boyd authentically and Udaloop Sketch authentically is also a defense against that exact dynamic that you're talking about.

Jon Becker: 58:46

100%.

unknown: 58:46

Yeah.

Jon Becker: 58:47

I will say, uh, I do need to tell you one really funny Mark McGraw story before we go. Please do. So we're driving In N Out Burger, my favorite. And your partner over here, all of a sudden we drive past. Now I live in Laverne, I've lived in Laverne for like 20 years. We drive past a church on D Street. You guys can look it up. It's a Presbyterian church on D Street. Uh, there's four of us in the car. All of a sudden, Mark's like, oh my God, oh my God. That's the church from the graduate. Right. And if the other three of us look at each other like, okay, there's something wrong with this guy. And he is, he's very animated about, and he's like, he's reenacting the Elaine scene where he's banging me to be like Elaine. And we're kind of looking at him like he is insane. And then he pulls it up and right there is actually it's the church from the graduate, a movie 50 years ago.

Mark McGrath: 59:38

After I left, dude, I went back to it to go get my pictures in and make some videos for my parents because they showed me that movie when I was young. It actually is a marker. It says that this was the movie, you know, this is the church from the movie. And let's let's bring it back to the lesson. How many times have you driven by that?

Jon Becker: 59:53

Yeah, every day.

Mark McGrath: 59:55

Right? How many times had I driven by that?

Jon Becker: 59:57

Yeah, once. Orientation. It was a fantastic lesson. Yeah, it's a fantastic lesson on orientation. And it was also a sign that Moose is definitely some kind of savant.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:00:10

He is a Cliff Clavin, yes.

Mark McGrath: 1:00:12

Diversity is my yeah, absolutely. John, close us out. Just give us a uh a you know a big picture view of the things that you're involved with from your company and from uh the you know the other organizations that you're involved with that help uh the tactical officers.

Jon Becker: 1:00:27

Probably the easiest way to think of it is my my career is kind of four, you know, there's four forks on my career, four points on the fork. One is that I own Artberg Tactical in an armor company called Project Seven. My job there is keeping tactical operators physically safe. Whether it's a United States Marine on a post in Somalia or it's a SWAT operator in Laverne, California, my job is to keep that guy physically safe. I do a lot of training, writing, uh, write columns, articles for you know a variety of tactical organizations. That my job is to educate him as best I can and try to improve his leadership. Then the the third fork of that prong is the debrief, which is you know a podcast that focuses on bringing the top experts like you to the tactical community, focused exclusively. You know, we're not doing war porn. I don't, I'm not targeting the consumer at all. My goal is a professional tactical user. That's that's you know what I'm trying to curate a list of events and experts that will make that guy as good as he can possibly be to make him say. And then this kind of new fork that is developed is this idea of documentary films and trying to take talking about orientations as a as a public, we are misaligned on our law enforcement and we do not see them for who they are. We do not recognize the cost that they pay, the the effect that these events have on them. And so, you know, I noticed in doing the debrief how far people's perception was you know, we think that when Tree of Life is over, the cops go home, everything's great. We don't understand that for Andrea and Dan to have been saved, Tim Matson had to be shot 12 times and has had 25 surgeries, and we'll never be back to who he was prior to that event. And so part of what I want to do with some of the films projects that we're doing is bring a view, bring a lens, provide some orientation of what's actually happening in these events and with these officers and the kind of heroics that I see every day that most people never know happen, and trying to expose that to a broader audience so that we can get a more balanced perspective of our law enforcement. Because we we judge them by, you know, the one in a billion incident, the George Floyd, and we ignore the fact that the Pittsburgh SWAT team charged into the Tree of Life synagogue to save people that they had never met, would never meet again and didn't know and risk their own lives to do it. So that's that's kind of the fourth prong of my my career arc.

Mark McGrath: 1:03:01

Phenomenal. Well, we highly endorse the debrief live, slightly biased, having having been a guest. I highly recommend you get punch to come out there and talk about flow and states of flow. I love it. Yeah, let's do it. For tactical operators, we should do that too. But for sure. John Becker from Laverne, California, site of the church from the graduate. Thanks for thanks for coming on No Way Out Podcast and sharing uh the learning experience of authentic Boyd versus linear Boyd.

Jon Becker: 1:03:29

Thank you so much, guys. I appreciate what you do and hope you keep doing it.