OODA Loop: Reorientation, Flow, and Adaptive Leadership with Ed Brenegar

Certainty feels safe, but it slows you down—and in chaos, slow is dead. On No Way Out Podcast, we sit with leadership expert Ed Brenegar to unpack what separates rigid managers chasing control from true leaders who build adaptive teams that move faster than the problem. Using John Boyd’s OODA loop and Boyd's Conceptual Spiral as our compass, we explore how your orientation—shaped by genetics, culture, experiences, and biases—filters what you see, how you decide, and why you act. Widen that aperture through relentless curiosity, humility, and unlearning, and you create conditions where people don’t wait for permission: they execute with clarity and psychological safety.

We also explore decentralized decision-making, commander’s intent, and mission command—showing why pushing authority to the edge delivers speed and resilience in volatile environments, from manufacturing floors to flight decks, family dynamics to boardrooms. The traps are real: media distortions that flip figure and ground, the seductive lie of “the video clearly shows,” and merchants of certainty peddling easy answers instead of better questions. True leadership replaces control with trust, compliance with alignment, and certainty with rigorous reorientation.

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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…”

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John Boyd’s Conceptual Spiral was originally titled “No Way Out.” In his 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…”

Download a complete transcript of Conceptual Spiral for free by clicking here.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Framing The Leadership Problem
• 3:18 Managers Versus Leaders And Capacity To Learn
• 9:08 Curiosity, Discovery, And Boyd’s Conceptual Spiral
• 13:56 Leadership In Business And At Home
• 18:40 Decentralized Decision Making And Speed
• 23:25 Learning, Unlearning, And Adaptive Culture
• 30:16 Figure And Ground, Media, And Bias
• 36:31 Illusions, Orientation, And The OODA Loop
• 42:22 Psychological Safety And Humility In Teams
• 46:36 Systems Over Heroes: Seeing The Whole
• 53:26 Mission Command And Leadership In Practice
• 59:36 Measuring Success: Beyond The Numbers
• 1:05:46 Team Science, Behavioral Markers, And Coaching
• 1:11:58 Universal Principles From Military To Markets
• 1:18:06 Stockdale, Stoicism, And Practical OODA
• 1:24:56 Culture That Enables Feedback Up And Down
• 1:31:08 Strategy, Orientation Shocks, And Tempo
• 1:38:26 Systems, Corruption, And Accountability
• 1:46:56 Culture, Context, And Building Local Agency
• 1:54:06 Ownership, Community, And Personal Dignity

Transcript

Mark McGrath: 0:21

This is a long time coming. I've been a guest on Ed's show twice. Ponch has been a guest once. And we've had tremendous collaborative relationships with people like Andrew McLuhan, Louise von Palmgarten. All thanks to our good friend Ed Brennegar, who's finally with us here on No Way Out for the first of many appearances, I'm sure, Ed. So finally welcome. Long overdue, but here you are.

Ed Brenegar: 0:47

Thank you for having me. Love what you do. And thank you for the contributions you're making to the world today. Certainly uh needed and certainly appreciated by me.

Mark McGrath: 0:59

Well, we're glad to have you in the tribe, and we're glad to have again, it's good that our kind of people, I guess we find, we tend to find each other. And I guess that maybe segment to what uh we were just talking about offline. You know, what do we do with Ponch? Why don't you phrase the question? Because I I think you you hit it, you hit it perfectly.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:18

Yeah, I was I was Moose, you and I had this conversation recently, and that is at some point you we're dealing with leaders or managers that that just don't have the capacity to understand what we're talking about. And it's not it's not to say that they're not qualified in this, it's just that they don't seem to be interested in it. And my take on it is why do I want to spend effort trying to explain how a low energy approach, like and I what I mean by a low energy approach is um compared to learning about 50,000 things in the universe, why not teach them a basic thing about orientation, genetics, culture, experiences, and how that shapes how we perceive reality, how that shapes how we make decisions, how we act, how we react to things on the web and the internet? How awesome is that to explain that? But when folks that we deal with sometimes push back because this is too complicated, it's too hard. My question to Ed and to Moose is do you really want to spend time working with those folks? What kind of energy do you want to put into that? Actually, I want to turn over to Ed, because you've been doing this longer than we have. So, what is it like working with managers or leaders that just can't seem to grok the things you're talking about?

Ed Brenegar: 2:30

It's uh it's an important question, and I've been talking about that today and this week. And let me let me describe it, describe what I see. I I think that the problem, there's a leadership problem. This let's call this a leadership problem. And it's a leadership problem because people don't actually accept the mantle of leadership. They tend to be more managers. They see themselves as managing systems, managing structures. And if they decide they're going to be a leader, what that really means is that they've decided that they're going to engage with people at a level where people will follow them and will join them in a manner that is similar to them. So I I talk about that, that a genuine leader or leader of impact, as I call it, is going to facilitate the development of the leadership of the people that work for them or in their organization. And instead of them being, you know, kind of living off their li a title and their and their compensation and their role, they're actually seeing themselves as a servant to the people of the organization and that their measure of their the measure of their leadership is in the leadership of the people that they that they're leading.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 3:51

May I share this? And that is what I just heard is people that lead are going to continue their own whirl of reorientation, meaning they don't stop learning. They they continually attune to the external environment. They're going to create the conditions that uh uh enable their people to thrive, right? And what I've seen in the past is when we're working with managers, and we'll call them managers now, they don't have that whirl. They don't have that drive to continually learn. Is that does that resonate with you? Is that kind of what I'm hearing?

Ed Brenegar: 4:22

Well, let's take it another step, which is that they were not hired to be leaders, they were hired to be managers. And they recognize that, and so they were never equipped to be leaders. And so for them to become a leader, they must go through some kind of process of discovery, we can call that reorientation, where they they decide, I want to be more than just a person who's pushing paper in the in my office. I want to be someone who is known for having created some kind of impact that changes the world for the better. And for them to do that, that's that's a huge step for many people who are very comfortable in the world that they live in.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 5:04

No, it's funny. I uh I was just thinking about things I heard in the military early on, and that was leaders that I that I saw as leaders later on in my life would joke around and say things like, Hey, Ponch, the world needs ditch diggers too. You know, you're you might be good at that. So it's just an you know an invitation to go ahead and move from the world of management to the world of actually leadership. Well, there's what do you have up there?

Mark McGrath: 5:28

Well, I just threw up uh page slide 34 from conceptual spiral, and it has the D-word that uh Ed just said, you know, and it's it's it it it follows what you were saying. If we connect the continuing world of reorientation, uh we have a conceptual spiral for, among other things, what Ed just said, discovery. And I think that um a word that someone else we all know we were just talking about was curiosity. You know, I think that there's there's a lack of discovery because there's a lack of curiosity, and those are those are traits of a leader. A leader should be curious, a leader should be trying to learn as you know, constantly in a state of learning. And you also saw in there the world of reorientation, one of the words, so I'll put it back up. It said, it said learning. And, you know, when you look at this exploration, thinking, learning, comprehending, discovery, doing, unlearning, which is as important as learning. And I think that that's kind of what, you know, Ed, when you say about a manager, I have to unlearn a lot of management things so I can learn authentic leadership, shaping innovation, achieving, relearning, adapting. Just that conceptual spiral for learning, unlearning, relearning. That's so important to Boyd. And then hence you have a conceptual spiral for generating inside, imagination, and initiative. And we know that that's what fluid adaptive teams, that's what they, that's what they're really good at. Well, they're good at that because they're in an environment of leadership and and uh and not in management. Now that's from conceptual spiral, and then I just for everybody listening, I want to tie in organic design for command and control, because here's where uh where Boyd defines leadership and he he merges it oftentimes with appreciation, that recognition of worth, value, understanding, comprehensive, discernment, and leadership being the art of inspiring people to enthusiastically take action towards the achievement of uncommon goals. It's a lot different than managers thinking that they're in control. We're recording with a guest tomorrow that received the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor for the State of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, and he was 21 years old as a young officer. And I think that a lot of a lot of young military officers in any branch can say that, boy, but yeah, they can be in a corporation somewhere at age 50 and think back, good lord, when I was 21, 22, 23, I had more command and responsibility and leadership for humans, hardware, strategic responsibility at the young age in my early 20s, than these people that are in charge of me at age 50 have ever had in their entire life. Um, and I think it goes back to what you're saying is like the environment is tuned towards management and managers, not towards leaders. And where the three of us, I think, where we have impact with people, with the right organizations, is that they're open to learning leadership over management. It's very different.

Ed Brenegar: 8:41

Let's let's broaden this concept a little bit or broaden the context that we're talking about. Two ways. Uh think about the people, let's say you run a manufacturing company. Do you want the person who's running the machines to have learned how to be kind of an ood loop kind of guy where he recognizes that there is a problem with the machine and instead of just allowing it to operate until it fails, and then they have to go find someone to come fix it, he decides he's going to fix it himself. He's reorienting his own relationship to that machine so that it gets fixed before it breaks. And that is a form of leadership because he's he's clearly acting in order to have an effect upon the uh the process of manufacturing that they have. So and you think about it, maybe the other person who is who's uh cleaning the bathroom, so the sanitation guy, and and that person is looking, how can I make this better? What does it look like for this bathroom to be a place where people would want to eat off the floor? What does it take for me to create that kind of cleanliness? You know, and so they're taking ownership of their work. Now that that's one level, that's in the business context. But let's take it to a family context. What it what would it mean if you decided when your children are five or six years old, you start teaching them how to reorient their life that you see treat them as adults, and you you're teaching them how to make those kinds of adult level decisions when they're very young, so that when they reach 10, 11, 12, they're already thinking like an adult and they're already thinking, well, maybe I should be starting a business. I'm 12 years old. Why don't I go and start my own business? I could I could sell something, I could create something. And and I've seen this happen. I mean when I I mean for I'm not gonna go into all the the details of it, but when my oldest son was about 11 or 12 and his sister was about five, I decided it was time for me to treat my children as adults. So not I wouldn't ask answer their questions, I would ask questions so that they would find that they're find their own answers to the questions that they had. And they had now they are very independent thinkers. It's sometimes to my detriment, but they but they think for themselves, and they have always been really clear about who they are because they have they have kind of the the skill set that Boyd would have wanted for them as adults, but they're they're gaining those when they're children. And I think that's something that we have not been talking about at all, but I think it's really possible that we could do that.

Mark McGrath: 11:30

Aaron Powell Well, you made me think of an again, another uh I don't know if I'll be able to show it on here. I'll have to get it, but basically in Patterns of Conflict, Void talks about the the formula for successful operations is decentralizing decision making to the lowest possible level. Absolutely. When Ponch and I go into an organization to a team, everybody owns the mission. Everybody's responsible for the strategy. Everybody, you know, the leader has ultimate command of it, but at the end of the day, everybody's empowered to affect the mission so that when when when the VUCA increases and the and and the the tempo increases and the battle, you know, and the chaos is going up, the chaos ensues, then I have the ability within maybe certain constraints, but I have the ability to do what's right to advance the mission without having to stop and ask dad, you know, without having to stop and ask the leader. And that increases organizational speed and effectiveness versus competitors that don't. You know, the world that I came from for a couple decades of being in asset management on Wall Street, you had to have a permission slip for almost 100% of everything. Like it's just it was asinine. But what ends up happening is is that you become so slow that rogue grenades out there with that are that are more adaptive can can run roughshod over you because they're able to make decisions quick, whereas you're not.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 12:52

I want to share something uh from you know, being a dad father, a girl dad. I know people don't like that, but I do have two girls. And then applying this type of thinking that Ed shared with your children is is challenging. Let me share a few things. You have to let them fail, right? And we don't want to see our kids fail, and we want to protect them the best we can. But at some point, you can't just going back to that decentralized execution and decision making, you've got to let them go out there, but you've got to create the conditions. And I think that's what you do as a parent is you create the conditions for them to learn at a lower risk, lower mistakes environment from here and there. And you can learn that in play and you can learn that elsewhere. But but being a parent is probably the greatest opportunity to learn how to lead. And I think that's where we there is no manual to being a parent. I don't think there is, right? I didn't I didn't get it when my kids were born. But applying this type of thinking to watching the girls grow up, I will say this. I fail a lot. It's not hurts the ego to go, man, I got that wrong. God, I got that wrong too. You know, every and then Moose, you and I have conversations every week about what's going on in our day-to-day lives. And I think you know that that it it's it's not easy, man. And and I'm I'm kind of it's it's it's frustrating because all do they see you failing?

Ed Brenegar: 14:01

See me failing?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:02

I don't think so. No, I don't think so. I I think they they see me as a uh you know an authoritative figure, but just having this conversation, just it just hit me that this is what happens in our day-to-day lives, right? Every single day. We have to deal with this at home. And uh it just hit me today, just now I appreciate it. Uh we could do better, but at the same time, you have to learn how to fail as as an apparent as a parent.

Mark McGrath: 14:22

Well, you hit the you hit the conceptual, another conceptual spiral. You gotta learn. You gotta learn, you gotta unlearn, you gotta relearn. And most people don't want to do that. And you I think one thing, Ed, and I would love to know your thoughts of this when you go into organizations and you interact with leaders, you know, it's almost a dead giveaway when you when you go into somewhere and you assess their cultural climate and you see it's not a learning organization, automatically you know it's not adaptive. Like they're not gonna adapt. Like they're they're waiting for some exogenous event to wipe them out because they're not learning. And if they're not learning, they can't adapt.

Ed Brenegar: 14:59

What I have found is that if you got a a group that you're working with, and it may not be the senior leader, but someone in that group is gonna be thinking more like you than the other people. And they're seeing things, they're seeing things and they're waiting for permission to express those things, express what they see. And they're waiting for the opportunity to maybe present an idea, but if they're never presented with that opportunity, then they they stay quiet. But they're seeing things. I mean that that's what I find is that this is not brain surgery, this is life. I mean, we're just living our lives. We see things, we may not understand it, but we're seeing it. And the question is, how do I come to understand what it is that I see? That's the reorientation which leads to the decision and excuse me, leads to the actions. But we have to first see it, and we have to I think if you're the consultant, if you're the coach or whatever, you're you're presenting things in such a way so that they can see something and they say, Oh, yes, well, that makes sense. Okay, now what are you gonna do about it?

Mark McGrath: 16:12

Yeah, that goes back to what you just said. I mean, that's that's why you have to understand the conceptual spiral and you have to allow that that world of reorientation. Uh, well, there's no way out of that world of reorientation because that's that constant learning and updating and revising and and and interacting with reality is imperative if you expect to improve the capacity for free and independent action. And that's our that's sort of our governing foundation of everything that Boyd, you know, riffed and jammed off of his entire career, to include conceptual spiral. It all comes back to that being able to destroy and uh create, destroy and create continuously so that you have a sound and effective understanding of what's actually of what's actually going on. I think one word that should have been on there that's not, but Boyd used it in other places, and I think that he exemplified this was humility. I know that you know the three of us have talked about that, you know.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 17:12

Let's build on that, Moose. Yeah. So it's today, it's January 8th while we're recording this, and and Elvis's birthday early on in 2026. It's Elvis's birthday. Right, right. But but there's a lot of events going on in the world that we could talk about. We don't need to right now, but we can share an experience, we can observe the same thing, we can all walk away from that with a different perspective, a different orientation, right? Yeah. So I'll give you an example. Uh over the weekend, Moose, you and I talked about this. There was an incident that we were part of in my family, videotaped it or had it on our camera, didn't share it out. And I explained to my kids, hey, one of the reasons I don't want to share this. There's many reasons I want to share it out, but when you watch this video, based on your orientation, and I'm talking about an incident that happened over the weekend, and I'll make a connection to what's happening in the last 24 hours. The video clearly shows is probably the worst thing anybody could say, right? Because I gave them an example of time I went into CNN, I'm going to name names here, back in 2006, to see what the video clearly showed and how the producers manipulated the narrative and the story to show a show something. Where I'm going with this is even though we can experience the same thing, that orientation, our experiences, our culture, whatever happened, you know, how we slept, all these other things, drives how we see things. And I think the worst thing that management consultants or leadership consultants do, and you could see this on LinkedIn today, January 8th, is this phrase the video clearly shows. And I'm like, wow, right? So I think that's the danger of that. And those, and and I'm I'm I'm shooting a you know a warning shot across the bow. If you're a business leader and you're hiring one of those fools that comes out and says, constraints matters, context matters, complex adaptive systems matters, the wisdom of crowds, red teaming, things like that. And by the way, the video clearly shows you've hired the wrong person.

Mark McGrath: 18:54

Yeah, you know, you know that they're in they're incapable of understanding that things have more than one perspective. So back to Boyd's example, they're absolutely sold on equilateral triangle and they're not square and you know, not square with an X in it or whatever. And they don't realize that they're looking at one side of a pyramid and they're going to get blindsided because they were looking at the wrong thing. They weren't, they weren't, they were so certain of what it is that they saw that they were blinded by that. That myopia um it goes back to that to that opening line of the big short, right? It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble, it's what you're absolutely positive of that just ain't so. You know, and that's that's what I think most Yeah, I think that's what most people are are doing. It's hard. I mean, you know, I I think that like I mean, we're we're unique, right? We're readers, we're we're arguing these things, we're we're we're constantly talking about these things, we're constantly trying to see and observe these things and teach them to others that don't want to learn because for whatever reason they're comfortable and that comfort leads to complacency. And ultimately, I think, you know, the of events in say the last, I don't say twenty-four hours, but like the last month maybe, um, people are so shocked and surprised. Why? Because they don't look at patterns, they don't understand objective reality, they don't even try to under they don't try to learn, they don't try to see anything because they they look at things through the myopia of tribal lenses or political lenses or or Group lenses. I did a live cast earlier today, and I said, you know, look at the article that we put out this week on on Boyd talking about evil and corruption in McLuhan talking about figure and ground. That was my article about Somali daycares because I got plenty of DMs. What are you going to talk about, Somali daycares? Well, I talked about Somali daycares without talking about Somali daycares, because that pattern is not unique to Somali immigrants in Minnesota. I'm not saying it's not valid. I'm not saying there's not crimes being committed or fraud. I mean, you know, the investigations will come out and they'll show us. What I'm saying is that rampant pattern of the systems that drive the behaviors to defraud, that's not unique to them. That's that's pretty that that's pretty widespread and rampant. But how do I know that? Because I understand that the pattern doesn't distinguish between being valid only for one group and not valid for another group. That pattern is wrong no matter who's doing it. And these tying in the McLuhan figure and ground, people get so wrapped up in the figures they don't realize the ground that's that's shifting beneath their feet that realize that one of the things I said on the live cast, hey, Trump's doing it and that's okay. It was wrong when Obama was doing the exact same thing. Or Obama's doing it, that's okay, but now it's wrong because Trump's doing it. If you're thinking like that, you're wrong. You're you're just flat out wrong because you're not looking at things, you're not even trying to go back to that conceptual spiral. You're not even trying to discover, you're not trying to learn, you're not trying to explain. You're you're giving up thinking, you're giving up thought.

Ed Brenegar: 21:48

We come back to Ponch's original question about these leaders that you get tired of dealing with because they won't listen or they won't do anything. And it's and it's because they are simply looking to have their com their bias conf confirmed. They look they they practice confirmation bias. So they look at a video and they they will see in the video what they want to see and do not realize that every video that is displaced except mine and yours, but every video is a diversion from something else that they don't want you to see. So if you if you figure them ground, yeah. If as the the Somalis in uh Minnesota, that's that's a real thing, but it's a diversion from something else that they don't want me actually to be addressing. Yeah. And it's impossible to actually know all of that. And so if it's impossible to be absolutely certain about anything you see online, then then you have to step back and say, what is it that I actually know? What is it that I actually know for certain? And I think what we f what we'll find is that the things that we know for certain are the things that we experience in direct interaction with people. And and we and we can sniff out when when people are lying to us or being duplicious towards us, but it's in our direct interaction with people that I think we discover what is where the reality is, and then that that becomes the basis for our our reorientation or our uh decision to to do something else. We go a different direction.

Mark McGrath: 24:28

Ponch is really good at these things. He shows you pull one up, Ponch, those uh like the chessboard and the sphere.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 24:35

I mean, people Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the illusions are, you know, they're they're pretty powerful. Um years ago, uh, you know, the whole gorilla walking through, the basketball players are dribbling to basketball, and you count the numbers. Those things are illusions, right? Those things are easy to things to talk about. We only see what we expect to see, um, those biases and things like that. Uh, but they're a fantastic way to show folks the beginning, how the OODA loop works, right? Based on your orientation, based on these things, based on things that you're predisposed to know genetically, um, based off of shadows and things like that. That's how you see the world. By the way, there's you know, we follow a lot of folks that say uh the you inverse, you, you know, the universe is you inverse, right? You see the world based on what's inside of you, based on your orientation. That's what's out there. So that's what's happening today. And I'd I'd love to get back to the leadership focus because we can take a lot of leadership lessons from what's happening on January 7th, January 8, 2026, those things in the environment, and go, that's is that's just another example of what's happening inside your organization, right? As a leader, you have to leverage the um diversity, cognitive diversity of how people see things to understand what reality may actually look like. Because no one leader has a good understanding, no one person has a good understanding, but collectively, we all can have a better understanding of this external world that we're all part of. So, yeah, Moose, those illusions are powerful.

Mark McGrath: 26:01

Go ahead, Ed. Go ahead. I have a question for both of you, but go ahead, Ed.

Ed Brenegar: 26:04

Let me just say one thing before we move on. What I find is that if you ask someone directly what do you think, they they are going to have to say something where if they're not being asked what do you think, they're going to be taking what they're hearing and they're going to absorb that and they're going to be operating in the next 10 minutes in a different environment with that same sense of what they believe is to be true because of what they heard 10 minutes before. So if you ask people, well, what do you think about this? Give me some thoughts about what you're hearing. When you ask people to be clear about what they and they and own their statements, then you're asking them to actually think about something where I don't think most people think about anything. They're just emotionally reacting to what they see and what they hear, and they're looking for some way to feel to find some kind of certainty and comfort in what they're doing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 27:05

That's a great example of creating how do you create psychological safety. That is, I think, one of the key triggers in that space is how do you create those conditions? And it's it's a leadership's actions by taking those, asking those questions. What do you think, right? Or the humility, humility piece that that Moose brought up. I don't know, right? Um, I I don't I don't know. I don't have an answer for this as a leader, right? It's okay.

Mark McGrath: 27:27

The other thing too, uh, this is what I was going to ask you. I mean, are we so prone to always pin it on one person in the United States? Like our culture, like we forget that there's a system, we forget that there's a larger, larger whole. So we just pin it on one person. You know, it's it goes back to one. Like, you know, Warren Buffett just Well, I say I say collectively. I well, I say collectively, like our culture in in the United States, like we're we're predisposed to pin it to look for a person that's either going to be the hero or the scapegoat. So, so take take take an organization like a Berkshire Hathaway, right? It all, yeah. Warren Buffett started it, Warren Buffett, you know, created it, Warren Buffett built an entire ecosystem of several companies, of several leaders, of several thousand people that work there in different commodities. And it doesn't just hinge on one person there behind the behind the scenes as the as the wizard of Oz. He gives them complete autonomy, but he's stepping down as CEO, and people are like, oh, what happens now? Like the man that's responsible for the whole thing, as if he's the orchestrator of that. And they and we we don't see the system, we don't see the whole. We only we only see the one, the one, the one person. We don't understand the culture, we don't understand the the heritage, we don't understand the new information, we don't understand, we don't understand anything. We just pin it on one one one person's shoulders. It's like anytime you hear of the it's always a boogeyman, right? It's Trump, you know, it's Obama, Trump's doing this, Obama's doing that, you know. Well, they're not. It's a broader system that you might think is represented and characterized by that one person, but the person oftentimes becomes irrelevant based off of the system that the ground, again, this is the difference between figure and ground that nobody sees or talks about.

Ed Brenegar: 29:20

What I see, and I agree with you, what I see is that we are manipulated to see that singular boogeyman. Yeah. The singular person who is responsible. And and it's it's done by the the media and it's done by people in power, it's done by politicians, and it's done because it's a way for them to avoid actually being accountable for the things they say and the things they do. So we're we're being manipulated by.

Mark McGrath: 30:50

I think I think Baudrillard's agree.

Ed Brenegar: 30:52

Because what what it does is it it sends a message that I don't know what they know, and they are they're important and they know things, and therefore I must trust them. I mean, this this is the whole premise around um you know entertainment news. They know things that I don't know, and they're telling me what they think I need to know, and therefore I'm responding to them. And so they so we don't know what's behind the reasoning for why they're supporting, say, one candidate or or one policy or something. We don't know why they're doing that. So you know, one of my family members says, Well, I'm just a I'm just a rule follower. I said, Well, that's gonna get you in trouble someday. You're just following rules, following what people tell you to do.

Mark McGrath: 31:43

Yeah, a lot of Germans did that. Didn't work out so well.

Ed Brenegar: 31:46

That's exactly right.

Mark McGrath: 31:47

Yeah. I I you know, we're all old enough to remember people's, you know, you see all these media things gushing all because they hate Trump so bad. You see them gushing over George W. Bush. Well, I'm old enough to remember when George Bush was Hitler. When they said that George that Bush was Hitler and Bush was gonna have uh, you know, this and that and whatever. It's like what changed? You know, what what changed? Did he find Christ or something? Like, how is he no longer Hitler? Like, how are the people that would call somebody Hitler? They're saying the same thing about Trump, you know, Trump's Hitler, you know, or when when when George Bush's father passed away, and you you listen to these eulogies and you're like, Tom Brokaw just said that, really? Like, I recall George H. W. Bush, they suspected him of this and he was that, and he was Andrew, you know, all of a sudden nobody was saying anything negative. Why? Because of Trump? Like, because really, that's how it works? That goes to the manipulation that we're all doing. Yeah. Well, and I think that it's important that that's why we, you know, you mentioned a lot of these thinkers. That's why it's important to understand and learn this stuff because you realize that you are constantly being manipulated. One of the things I said today on the live cast when I was walking, I was walking from the financial district back here to the West Village, I was saying that you you you can't just look at something and think it's wrong because you used to think it's right, and all that changed was the person in office. That's that's participant status, not observer status. You're not you're not observing reality for what it is. You're participating in something and you're blinded by that participation, you're retribalizing. And you know, McLuhan talked about that. Boyd talked about that, John Robb talks about it all the time. It's very important to understand that because once you see that, you can't unsee it. And when you can't unsee it, then you're less likely to be manipulated by by a lot of these things.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 33:37

Hey, Moose, I want to add this. I think we're we're everybody susceptible to that, and uh includes you and I. So the questions I ask every day, am I seeing this correctly? What am I not seeing? What do I need to understand? Yeah. I don't have the full picture, right? You got to always ask that. I think the moment somebody goes, This is absolutely the way it is, I'm like, you sure about that? And and we've had guests on the show that that post things that I don't agree with, right? And I'm like, well, that's that's fine. That's that's why do they see it that way? What am I missing? And these are questions I think leaders need to ask. But the moment you see you you're absolutely certain in what you see, you're wrong.

Ed Brenegar: 34:11

Yeah, yeah. That's that's where the context. Go ahead, Ed. Well, I think I think context does matter. I mean, it's not everything, but if you are um you know, if you grew up in Eastern Europe or in East East Africa or Southern South America, you're gonna have a different view of things. You're gonna hear things, you're gonna see things. And but you're j you're gonna be just as susceptible to being manipulated as as a person who lives in Toledo or in Salt Lake City or in Winston-Salem, where I live. I mean, we're this is human nature. And I think part of our human nature is that we want to belong and then we want we don't want to create conflict. We want to feel like we belong to, you know, have you this just raises the question. Have you seen the the show Pluribus? Have you watched Pluribus? Absolutely, yeah. I have not. I think you need to mar watch it, Mark. It's okay. I think it's a perfect example of what we're talking about. Okay. And because it's it's uh there's some kind of thing that's not really clear that infects the planet where everybody becomes happy, willing to help, and will always tell you the truth, which sounds like the the perfect society to live in. Well, uh, but Carol, who is the lead is the who's the protagonist of the show, she's not like that at all. She's kind of curmudgeonly and and always kind of looking for a a fight or something like that. And she's a she's a novelist. It's a and and she doesn't like it at all. And they're trying to convince her that she needs to be nice and compliant, and and it's really a really well done done show.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 35:55

Yeah, I think there's a lot of connections to things that are connected to the Oodaloops. You have outside information, you have the orientation, genetics, the culture, the experiences. Genetically, we're predisposed to something. Maybe it's a platonic space, maybe it's just you know, what three eye atlas going by, maybe it's this code coming from the aliens in the in the show or whatever. It is it is a great it's actually a great way to explain the Oodaloop, Ed, that that that show. It is fantastic. So for those listeners that haven't tuned into it, I highly recommend it. I think we just watched one of the last episodes in the last two nights uh here in the household, but it is it is completely worth a no-way out episode to talk about.

Ed Brenegar: 36:32

Oh, all right. Well, I watched the entire first season in one day. And it was that immersive experience was you know, it all these things that we have been talking about are all right there in the show. And uh it's it's worth, I think I think that's true with anything that happens.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 36:50

We could watch a show, we could talk about this. It's a fractal. So we're presenting here on No Way Out, and what you talk about is it's a fractal. If we go watch a kid's basketball game, if we go drive out to a supermarket and watch people interact in in the parking lot and see how they interact inside, it's the same thing. What we're seeing is just natural intelligence, you know. I hate the way, hate to give away too much of purpose, but the idea that we're all one. Yeah, we are all we are one, we're all separated. Maybe we are one consciousness separated by these meat suits that are experiencing this world. We don't know. And we're getting into a lot of philosophical things here, but but the point is there are many ways to look at what we talk about in in any setting and say that TV show, that event, that thing is a fractal of how this universe works.

Ed Brenegar: 37:43

I I got it on the roster now. Check it out. You'll you'll enjoy it. And I think that there's another side of this which is worth exploring because I think what you guys are principally focused on, things I'm focused on, I think it's that we often think about this as sort of a warlike environment. And we're challenging something that everyone is, you know, we're trying to challenge people to change. And but I'd like to reverse that. I'd like to reorient that to say what we're really are offering to people is a sense of hope that they can find their lives and and live a full life where they are really confident about who they are as individuals and who they are as families and who they are in their businesses. So we're not talking about something that's onerous and difficult and painful. We're actually talking about something which is hopeful and and good and and uh freeing for them.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 38:44

So we're favoring interaction over isolation. Absolutely. That'solation. Isolation is is is a manipulative approach to this leadership. Interaction is a you're inviting folks to collaborate. And that's going back to the I think Boyd said this early on in an interview with the Air Force. He said, I'm your environment and you're my environment, no matter what. But we collaboratively, if we want to work together to create something that's greater than the sum of the parts, right? That's that's kind of just a gross.

Mark McGrath: 39:12

What a great place, Ponch, to tie in McLuhan that said the present is an environment. It is. That's why we mean also. I'm curious.

Ed Brenegar: 39:19

Yeah, go ahead. And the past impact upon us is a part of that environment. Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 39:27

The media is. Can I ask a question? Yeah. So this is coming out in the last couple days, and I think this to be true, that the present influences the past. And I'm gonna say that again, because I'm not I want to make sure you're hearing it correctly. The present influences the past. Thoughts?

Mark McGrath: 39:43

Yeah. I mean, look at talk to a kid younger than us. They think that everything is evil in the world and America is a terrible place, and you know, Columbus is worse than Hitler. And and I mean, I'm I'm old enough to remember growing up an Army brat, son of a West Pointer, where uh, you know, there was Fort Lee and Lee Barracks and statues of Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan Jackson, Stonewall Jackson, and and we're in a completely different, we're in a completely different world. So the present does have an effect because when they when people look back at the past now, they're they're completely they have a different interpretation than say I do from it's our perception of the past. Yeah, our perception.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 40:26

I mean Because we're projecting our current orientation onto what it should have been like in the past. And this is a problem in in like aircraft accidents, things that we worked on many years ago. So safety environments. What you do not want to do as a safety investigator is put your current orientation into the cockpit of what you think should have happened then, right? Because you don't know. We don't know what the context was, what that orientation was, what they ate, how much sleep they got, the environmentals, the NVGs, what was actually going on. So again, this goes back to those those leadership gurus on LinkedIn that tell you with certainty how things were. And I'm like, or are. And I'm like, well, it can't be true, guys.

Mark McGrath: 41:04

That's our favorite group, Ponch, the merchants of certainty. They they they're selling that as if it's That's your first disqualification for a uh leadership advisor like we are, or like they believe if they're merchants of certainty, you can detect. them really quickly and really with the merchants of certainty are nothing more than guardians of decay because they're ensuring the entropy is going to take over and and win out they're not going to be like us to go in there and tell you hey yeah you need to you need to be doing destruction creation you need to be breaking things down and and building it back up but but that's the uh it reminds me of that scene from Sully you know where the NTSB investigative team is going through their computer models and he and his co-pilot his first uh captain or whatever the termin is are are describing well what you have in the in the computer models doesn't reflect what we experienced yeah we see the computer models were for them was was was reality and his experience was a perception of reality. Well you guys both know the story you know and quorum does a pretty good job talking about it. What did Boyd think was going to happen in the fly off between the YF 16 and the YF 17 which became the F-18 what did he think like on paper per the models what what plane should have won was the F-18 you know the F Y F 17 that became the F-18 yeah but that's that's a perspective you know he's looking projecting information forward into it and read based off of those modeling but based off yeah I get I see what you're saying but like but but still it baffled him that there was more more to the kind I guess I got I don't know I just it that's why I was thinking about what Ed was talking about there's there's another perspective. Well in this case it was the pilots that were flying the the two planes and overwhelmingly said no the F-16 is like way better.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 42:57

Yeah. So Ed, are you you're familiar with Kinevin framework? Are you familiar with Dave Snowden's work? Yes I mean I'm so I I I actually in the past this is like seven eight years ago I used to use the Miracle on the Hudson to explain the Kinevin framework which is fantastic because there's so many elements of that story including who was flying the air aircraft when they actually struck the birds right it was a sky house and and he had been spent several hours or a lot of his time in a 737 now he's in a 319 or 320 or whatever it was at the time and uh um it was his um non-expertise in the aircraft that that aided in in this as well right I mean it uh Soley was an expert he knew a lot of things of course he he knew how to fly a glider and all that but it it there was no hero and this according to Soley there's no hero in that story there's a crew and that crew included the passengers right and by the way when you go in that book a little bit deeper in the whole story they talk about team science which we talk about quite often with what we do. So I just think uh I haven't heard the Soli story brought up in a while but I just want to offer that up as we can use that to explain the Kinevan framework, how checklists work, why they don't work in all domains, what complexity actually looks like in that space, right?

Mark McGrath: 44:12

I always think that the flight the flight attendants are the real heroes because you think of 150 people with varying personalities psychological psychological states and emotional states and something that's novel to them that they have no idea no understanding versus two pilots that at least train for that I think that the flight attendants keeping all that together I think they're they're they get they're unsung heroes too.

Ed Brenegar: 44:34

Well they're a team it's Poncha's point it's a team let me ask let me ask this question of you guys because I think it's it comes back to your original question. How how do you all talk to your clients about how they measure the success of their businesses? And because I think that this is a a major subject which is which is deferred and never really addressed. Because I see that most many of these people who get advanced into positions of senior leadership are there because they have mastered the skills of numbers. And and they're not they're not equipped to be leaders of people. They are only managing the numbers that and so the question is how do you talk about how should we be measuring the quality the effectiveness the success of our organization? How do y'all do that?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 45:35

Can I go first Moose I want to try something on you. Do it so there's the if you look at Annie Duke's work where you she talks about separating decisions from outcomes and resulting and all that sometimes luck has a lot to do with how businesses do and organizations win or succeed, right? But a better measure of success is actually use some NFL analogies and I'm going to lean on Moose for this is the number of quality coaches you put out into the environment, right? I think that's that's a better measure because sometimes luck, no matter how awesome you guys are and organized and a good product you have, the environment and other OODA loops have an impact on the what happens with your bottom line. Whereas you can have horrible decision makers in an industry that is notoriously known for producing making money and I'm not going to name the industry that's really good at that, but it goes with oil and gas. You can have phenomenal people leading that industry and have horrible outcomes and you can have horrible people leading in that and have amazing outcomes not because of the quality of decisions that are being made not because of the quality of OOD loops. So that's that environment that that matters too but I'll go back to this again it's it's to me a better measure of how you are as a leader in an organization not an organization is going to be the the the quality of leaders you produce and it's I think that's what we see in the military too is um uh the best leaders are the ones that actually create the best quality leaders right but they're not usually the ones that get promoted just so you know yeah it's no I like I like this one though.

Mark McGrath: 47:07

I mean like is there a metric let's hold that question for a second but like when you when you walk in this is this is Boyd from Patterns of Conflict slide 178 but when when you look at it he defines the art of success is appear to be an unsolvable cryptogram while operating in a directed way to penetrate adversary vulnerabilities and weaknesses in order to isolate him from his allies, pull them apart and collapse his will to resist, yet shape or influence events so that we not only magnify our spirit and strength, but also influence potential adversaries as well as the uncommitted so that they are drawn towards our philosophy and are empathetic towards our success. I think Ponch and I are pretty good at walking into a situation and assessing that really fast. I mean and there is you know when you ask about metrics, you know, we could argue about what those what those are but you know I've always thought that when a in an A transaction where everything looks great on paper and everything looks awesome on the spreadsheets, you know should send me in Poncha to go look for this because this is this is where it really counts. This is where the this is where the the culture is is going to be the difference between any foreseeable metric and I'll use I use it to a point of a dead horse but the blockbuster analogy every metric they owned they were the number one at they they dominated in metrics and it and it and it meant nothing because they were not an unsolvable cryptogram to their to their adversaries and they got blasted into a relevance largely on their own momentum on their own their own weight fell on them. They did all the work for their their competitors because they didn't have this.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 48:52

They didn't understand this they're focused on numbers why numbers look great to what to show shareholders or to show potential investors but it's not necessarily the reality of what's actually going on with the with the people and I think that we Because the videotape clearly showed them what was going on right the metrics clearly they weren't attuned to the external environment and that's what this is about is how do you get your people to attune to that external environment that those affordances the to create those new snowmobiles the adjacent possible which by the way we're about to go parabolic on here in the next few years or months right well let me answer my own question.

Ed Brenegar: 49:33

I think it is how you lead your people and how how the people who are at the middle management level lead their people and they establish expectations for change that their their people are making to improve the situation. So you define it in terms of what problems have you faced that you have now fixed? Who are you communicating with that you weren't communicating with over the last quarter? What new ideas are you bringing into your team or group and and you're writing this stuff down you're you're producing a report which is really a report of change. What is it the change that's making a difference? And what are you abandoning? What are you stopping because it was not helping us I think that conversation that has to happen between a manager and someone direct report is is where you begin to be able to create some kind of metric that they they find meaningful for themselves maybe not for the industry but for that for that maybe that department or that company.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 50:42

The leading indicators to everything you just said the way you can do this and this is a huge secret that that we we know and then we're gonna share it out here I don't mind because people need to know this teamwork is observable. Therefore you can measure it. And the way you can measure this coming from the conversation about Sully and you can read this in the book uh you know his book and other books there's something from aviation crew resource management known as behavioral markers and they're binary they're basically bad things you know things are people are doing this and they're doing that. I got to spend time with Anne Rhodes. She's one of the founders of JetBlue we haven't had her on the show yet I definitely want to invite her on here. And when they stood up JetBlue leaving Southwest Airlines and uh the founder of Southwest actually implemented a lot of this inside the organization before we brought all the bean counters in there before all that changed in Southwest is they implemented this type of thinking which was using team science to guide how teams work, right? So as a leading indicator to change, I could take the three of us into an organization, we can use the behavioral markers, we can observe what's going on and we can have a conversation about what we just saw. Remember we talked about earlier that we we're not all going to see the same thing, but we can have that conversation and and give them I hate to call it a grade but using a rubric to go, here's where they are on the spectrum here's generally what we find. They're very low performing teams they will rate themselves as the highest performing team in the world and we'll go, well, here are 20 things you did that show you you're not even a team. You don't even know what your goals are. You don't even have roles defined you can't mitigate you don't even start things on time.

Mark McGrath: 52:16

You don't even know how to have a communication you don't know how to plan I can see that right so that's how we can kind of get a leading indicator to all that let me pack onto that Punch what do you think Punch about when we tell tell people tell me where you want to go you don't even know where you're at. So how would you even have metrics in the first place when you you have no idea where you even are well this is this there's something known as guided uh guided self-correction.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 52:43

In order to do that you have to know where you are right so so you and we we haven't used this in a while Ed uh let's be honest here I we've kind of gone away from that because again going back to the beginning of the conversation today um how do you get leaders to to understand these things that they they just don't want to know they're like well that's not what Kenzie said that's not what I learned at Harvard. Therefore you guys are crazy. Well okay cool we're crazy we'll go on and figure something else out for somebody smarter than you um these things are very well known you can look them up on the web you can find them but nobody uses them right they they don't want to do this because that's not what uh Company X is selling or they're doing over there. They want to copy their neighbors. But if you want to get ahead in this world you got to go to those weak signals. You got to find those things that we just talked about on here. And by the way there's a lot of awesome things we did talk about on the show that I wasn't expecting to talk about. You can dominate and by the way if you download this transcript put it in an LLM and say what the hell are they talking about and how do I execute on this you're probably gonna beat the snot out of your competition.

Mark McGrath: 53:40

Don't be this is this is verbatim I you know I'm gonna anonymize the story to protect both the innocents and the idiots there's there's nothing you I was told this I was remember I was in asset management. I was told this verbatim don't come to me with your military bullshit that you learned in the military. There's nothing that you learned in the military that could ever approach what I've learned. I went to undergrad at uh Harvard I got my master's degree from Wharton. I'm a chartered financial analyst blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Now I don't take ownership of it because it was him not me but he, with his rigid thinking that didn't understand Boy Deruta ended up getting fired a year later because of the performance of a portfolio that was so tightly coupled that had no flexibility, no agility, it could only see the world through one lens and it he wrote it all the way down to the to the bottom. Whereas some of the best portfolio managers I ever met, which by the way went to the same schools they went to you know they went to elite boarding schools like Exeter and Phillips Andover and stuff like that. The best ones were the most curious and they asked the most questions and they they were interested in something that they they heard and you know that might have been learned in the military because they were able to compartmentalize the fact that something that's taught to people like me and Punch were in our young 20s, something that's taught to help them thrive in chaos without a Harvard doctorate or whatever, maybe it's worth taking a look at maybe there's something more going on than just G.I. Joe shit like maybe there's actually systems theory behind it. And maybe maybe there's actually universal concepts that are applicable in any other chaotic domain, which there are and that's you know there's there's nothing that you'll when when we're when we're sitting down and advising leaders, there's never any of this like well this is what I learned in the cockpit so that's how that's how it worked there and then or you know this is what worked out in the fleet marine force so this is what you got to do. That's not it at all. There's there's extracted concepts that we've taken but those aren't unique to the fleet marine force or the cockpit or anything like that. Those are universal principles that are designed to help any human thrive in chaotic nonlinear environments.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 55:56

That's exactly what John Boyd did. He didn't pull it out of the cockpit. He pulled it out of natural science right that's right that's exactly philosophy.

Ed Brenegar: 56:03

You know there are many, many days when I feel like I should have gone to law school and become a litigator because I I feel like so many of my conversations with people who are leaders organizations really require me to litigate the conversation to ask them as if they're sitting on the on the stand in a in a courtroom having to defend their thinking. And frankly I think it's rather easy to defend concepts which have been proven to be no longer very valid and yet still remain sort of the the dominant narrative.

Mark McGrath: 56:38

And if you ever read the book by Norman Dixon and I have an article about it's one of my most read articles on the world it was a a book suggestion. It's in the world bookshelf if you go on the tab on the world subsect.com the world bookshelf it's one of the books The Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman Dixon. Have you ever read that book? I cannot recommend it enough and here's why there's a there's a tremendous you know Norman Dixon was a veteran of World War II from the on the British side but he was also a uh uh an academic psychologist and and his entire book is twofold one it's a historical illustration and part two is a psychological illustration of of concepts of why certain military things, which are historical examples of why they failed what I have found with that book every single time and it's one of the most important books I think I've ever read and I will tell you that one of my deepest regrets there's a list of books that I deeply regret should have been handed to us the first day as an 18-year-old fourth classman shipment I should have gotten this book. That's one of them because you could cross out military and put instead of the psychology of military incompetence it could be the psychology of basketball incompetence or the psychology of lawyering incompetence or the psychology of of government incompetence or the same parenting incompetence doesn't matter it's the same exact concepts and I would defy everybody read this book because you know one good thing about studying military history is that it's well documented and if you're if you're if you're bright enough you can extract the concepts really really quickly and realize that that even as a Wall Street trader that's never been in the military these concepts can still mean something to me because it's describing something else that's going on in the universe. But that's that's one of those example books I think that you would highly get a lot out of it because like back to back to talking to leaders pick their industry just give them the book and cross out military and just put manufacturing or whatever and give it to them because it's the it the it'll it'll carry over.

Ed Brenegar: 58:44

I have a one other question for you um one of my heroes is um Admiral Stockdale great man great man and um I started reading him you know in the 70s when he first started writing and and it strikes me if you've read his the book he wrote with his wife Love and War I recommend it. It's a fantastic book.

Mark McGrath: 59:09

He describes the way he he led the POWs in the Han Oy Hilton and it and it strikes me just as we've been talking today that what he did was actually a um a a version of practical OODA loop uh leadership where he was constantly changing the way he related to the the uh uh North Vietnamese jailers um because he was looking to preserve as many of his men as possible and he and he took the heat he took the the the punishment oftentimes because he wanted he was willing to take that punishment so that his his men could would not have to and I don't know if if anyone's ever looked at his story from the perspective of John Boyd but I think so so here here's an archive trip that Ponch and I took so we first of all when you say the name James Stockdale the throat titans the chest titans the the the goosebumps come up because I I think that there's no there's very few examples of leaders certainly in the last century in the military that that merit the the courage the charisma the selflessness everything you'd ever want a leader James James Stockdale was. There's absolutely no doubt about it. To see him you know when when when when he was the vice presidential candidate with Ross Perot, you know, reduced and disregarded I think was one of the great tragedies of our culture that that someone like Stockdale was not revered, that he was instead mocked to your point Stockdale's book in Love and War, not only that also the philosophical fighter pilot you can't recommend those books enough the Boyd Connection we're sifting through the archives on one of our trips I can't figure out how to put it up on Chrome. Maybe Ponch has it but one of the things that we found in the notes handwritten notes was that John Boyd actually did interact with Stockdale and he had his home address and his phone number. So we found we found the actual card with with Admiral Stockdale's name and phone number and address on it when we I don't think I can find it, but I'll look on it. Yeah, and I would have to we'd have to ask Chet or or Chuck about any inter like what was the depth of their interaction, but I do know that they did interact indeed. Maybe Mary Boyd might have some insight on that. But these were men cut from the same cloth. Now, now Boyd didn't get his chance to go into combat the way Stockdale did. And I think that that was something that war on Boyd or that he, you know, that he took with him throughout his life. But I know that I know that Boyd had a lot of respect for Stockdale. And a lot of the things around the Stoics and other things, those were all things that were on Boyd's list. Matter of fact, I'll look to see, I'll check really quick the Boyd archives if he even had. I think he may have had uh a Stockdale book in there. But anyway, but that, you know, that's that's a great that that it's great to bring him up, Ed. Thanks for doing that because that's somebody that P. If you're a leader, you should read about James Bond Stockdale, Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale. You should he was the carrier air group commander and he got shot down. He was leading from the front. He he was not a uh he was not an armchair, armchair quarterback. He was out there leading from the front. And that's that's how he pounded up. That's how he wound up where he he wound up.

unknown: 1:02:36

Right?

Mark McGrath: 1:02:37

Isn't that right, Punch? Wasn't he the CAG carrier group commander when he got shot down? I'm pretty sure.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:02:42

Usually the commander, I'm not sure if he A4 is right. I got I I totally forgot.

Mark McGrath: 1:02:46

But he was like the CAG. Like he he he was out there doing the missions just like any other any other.

unknown: 1:02:52

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:02:52

I I'm not sure certain about that.

Mark McGrath: 1:02:54

Like here's uh, you know, we won't have to go, let's let's not go into details on this because it could get really political and we don't we don't want to give that impression, but it's a shame to me that Stockdale is not as well known and understood and memorialized the way John McCain, you know, another another naval aviator that we should be talking about Stockdale, not McCain.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:03:14

Yeah, I agree. So he was a CAG, he was a CAG on their response. I mean CAGs are gonna lead from the front and get shot down on a mission. Well, I mean, CAGs fly, just so everybody knows. When we're uh right currently, 06 is fly combat missions. And and I've seen it firsthand where CAGs will go, the CAGs that I serve with, the D CAGs too, will be first night strike type of thing. So so this isn't this is pretty normal for the senior flying officer, uh current senior flying officer of an air wing to go or of an aircraft carrier to go feet, you know, feet dry, feet in front and go right in front of everybody.

Mark McGrath: 1:03:50

Yeah. Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:03:50

It's very, very common.

Mark McGrath: 1:03:52

Oh, go ahead, Ed. I was gonna ask Ponch to tie something else in with go ahead.

Ed Brenegar: 1:04:11

Saying, okay, we're gonna be out of here by Christmas, we're gonna be out of here by Easter, we're gonna be out of here by the Fourth of July. Never entertained that sort of optimist. Yeah, he says that the optimists are the ones that burn out every day, you know, and that's the hope that is real. I can get through whatever they bring to me today, I can get through that. Yeah. And tomorrow I'll deal with the same thing. I'll deal with that tomorrow. And I think that's see, that's where I see Boyd's work really coming into becoming something very practical for people who are caught in a very challenging, stressful, maybe even traumatic kind of situation is that they provides them a way for them to work through the conflicts that exist that are sometimes difficult to identify. And that's why I love both those men.

Mark McGrath: 1:05:03

Yeah, I remember Stockdale saying, you know, like the the one who was doomed and their their goose was cooked was the optimists. They versus the stoics. Yeah, and I just I wanted to tie in another cultural thing. So we're talking about, you know, a carrier air group commander who's a captain or you know, the deputy who might be a commander, you know, 06, 05, out there leading from the front. This is another thing I love about culture in naval aviation, I think naval aviation, but you know, we we had it in the Marines too. If you're an six fighter pilot and you're coming in and you have a sloppy landing, and the landing signal officer who's grading you is an 0-3, you're obligated to take his feedback or her feedback. You're you're you're not allowed to say, I outrank you, you're stupid, you know. You know, you're not allowed to do that. And that's, I think one of the things that gives cultures like that an edge is that it goes back to what we were saying earlier about decisions go down to the lowest level, but leadership goes down too. Leadership goes down and up. And and and that cag that screwed up a landing, that wasn't safe or did something unsafe, that's getting feedback from someone that maybe you know has been in the military half the time that they have, being open to that and making the adjustment, that's so critical to the mission of the whole. I know you probably have a lot to add on that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:06:27

Yeah, yeah, just on that, uh, don't forget that the greenie boards up on the wall, too, right? Everybody knows the grading. Everybody grades are. It stays right there. But the moment a senior officer pushes back on that, then that just that doesn't work well in an air wing. So it is quite amazing. You're bringing back so many memories, Moose, about flying um in that type of culture. You you realize that on a on a s in an aircraft carrier, there are very similar squadrons out there. Currently they're F-18 squadrons, right? But back in the day, A6s, F-14s, prowlers, and so forth. But the culture of naval aviation is driven by the commander of both the air wing and then the uh individual squadrons. So it is a so similar activity. It's a fractal approach to building high-performing organizations, but every individual squadron is going to have a different culture based off of their history and their current commanding officer and all that. So it is it is a phenomenal place to go learn about high performance uh and teamwork and leadership.

Mark McGrath: 1:07:23

I can't speak for the Army because Marines are similar. And I would say, Ed, to back to your question earlier. I mean, what would distinguish advice that we would give leaders that other consultants might not is the things that Ponch and I are talking about. You can bring this to a civilian organization filled with 100% zero veterans, right? You can actually teach these concepts to people. You don't have to have been an able aviator or a marine artillery officer, you don't have to have been those things. You you just have to be open-minded, learning, and willing to, uh, you know, curious enough to do the discovery.

Ed Brenegar: 1:07:53

I did not serve in the military. My father did. He was a turret gunner on a B-29 during the Second World War. My grandfather did. He was in the First World War. He left his law practice after 10 years to volunteer. And my great-great-grandfather was a regimental regimental commander of one of the North Carolina regiments in the Civil War. And their stories and their their mindset got translated into my life. So I may not have served, but I have been affected by those that have. And I think that's a message for people who are watching this who did not serve, and they see you all as, well, they're just they're just military guys, you know. No. These things are generational and they translated from generation to generation so that we have been affected by them. So for me, my core value is honor, which is a very military uh value. And so I live to uh be a person of honor in all my relationships with people. And to me, that that core core value as a leader means that I'm going to treat everyone who if I'm say the head of an organization, I'm going to treat everyone that works for me with honor. And what does that mean? I want them to have every opportunity to succeed. I want them to know that I appreciate them, I acknowledge them, I recognize their service to the organization. I think those are things which your ethos of of being in the military has given to us who are civilians. And that that's a very positive thing that we should elevate as we continue to try to work through what kind of world we want to live in.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:09:52

And I want to add something else to this conversation that I and this is you know, we just had the Venezuela thing happen the last couple of days or so. And going back to the question about the DCAG and the CAG going over the over the beach, now let me point out something very, very important. It is very likely that in the last week an 06 was part of a strike or package or had something to do with it, but he was not, he or she was not the mission commander. Right. And this is important in this type of leadership environment is you may be the leader of an organization, but this thing that's being taken over the beach is going to be led by a lieutenant, somebody who's 27, 28, maybe 32 years of age. That's a mission commander out there leading it, a younger leader. And that's what's phenomenal. And again, I appreciate this conversation, but I just want to point that up. What's that?

Ed Brenegar: 1:10:42

You know what that's called? It's called mission command.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:10:47

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We it's it's mission command. This is what Boyd was talking about as well, is is this is how we do it is the senior person may be part of a team, but may not be leading that team.

Mark McGrath: 1:11:01

And that's we've seen some there are there have been some gross violations of that. We had Asad Khan on to talk about gross violations where where basically the the unit commander, who, of course, per the Peter principle, became a four-star general one day and oversaw the downfall of Kabul. Yeah, they wanted to get their picture in it or get their credit or what have you. One of the things that we brought up on that podcast was, if you recall the trap mission, tactical recovery of air air personnel, one of the Marine missions to go get Captain O'Grady out of Serbia or wherever he was shot down. The mute commander, who is a colonel, had zero business of being on that helicopter, but he did it. Now we could make the argument. Maybe he did it to lead from the front, but likely not. He did it, he did it, he did not probably did not do it. You know, I guess it's plausible deniability, but but to Ponch's point, some of those things are better left to the person on the ground to do it, you know? The trust, the system is a high trust environment that allows that to happen.

Ed Brenegar: 1:12:04

Wasn't there a movie about that incident?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:12:07

That Scott O'Grady incident? Yeah. Yeah.

Ed Brenegar: 1:12:10

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:12:11

So just some background on that, given the context of what's going on in the world today. One of the things you never that we're taught to do when the Marines, a trap team, comes to pick you up, is you don't run towards the Marines with a gun. Right? No matter who you are.

Mark McGrath: 1:12:25

Okay. Okay. Whether you're a you're a if you're an aviator that got shot down, if you're anybody, don't ever run towards Marines with any weapon. Don't ever do it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:12:35

Yeah, yeah. And it's just, it's just a reminder, you know, when when that environment, when these these well-trained Marines are there to recover an aviator, they their assumption is that they're in a hostile environment. They're not in a friendly environment picking up a friendly naval officer, right? So this in the or in this case, Scott O'Grady running out of the Right, right. So you don't come running out with a gun. And that's one of the first things we learned from that incident is don't ever do what he did, right?

Mark McGrath: 1:13:05

You shot the guy you're supposed to get. Sir, he was waving a pistol at me. I don't know what you want me to do.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:13:11

I was just doing what you trained me to do. Right, right. Yeah. It's it just remember it's an orientation, right? It's an orientation. What's happening today in the last 24, 48 hours is for you're forgetting about context. Context matters, orientation matters, constraints matters, conditions matter. Um, I don't know what's going on in the mind of people um that that are in a video that I'm watching, right? I don't understand.

Ed Brenegar: 1:13:37

What you don't know matters. And there's a lot that we don't know. And that's always going to be the case, particularly with things that are reported by the news media.

Mark McGrath: 1:13:51

From a concept standpoint, I mean, you know, we're talking about recent events, and you look at that Venezuela event, that forget the tactical part of it. That was a strategic shattering of orientations across the board because something happened so rapidly, so precisely, and by the time it was over, people were still trying to process. They had no idea what had what had happened. And when, you know, when we're coaching organizations and we're coaching, say, basketball coaches or whatever, we're teaching them this stuff, the other side should have no idea. They should have a complete and utter inability to process what's actually happening to them to the point where they can't even, they can't even operate or function. That's the back to your thing about metrics and back to you know Boyd's artist success. That that's really what that should be an end result where where you can just look at people and say they have no idea what we're doing at all. They're completely frozen. They uh they're gonna double down on what they think they know, or they won't do anything, you know.

Ed Brenegar: 1:14:54

They they're not gonna be able to even move. You know, the ground is prepared for them to enter.

Mark McGrath: 1:14:59

Well, the orientation, so just I again I take it to the orientations were different. So the the the you know the That's right. Yeah, the orientations were different. So, you know, the implicit guidance and control, sense-making decisions, actions, and learning from the one side was far superior than than than that of the uh than that of the other side. But I'm sure a lot of people are thinking in other countries that you know provided the air defenses, like how did they get by everything that we have defending us?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:15:30

Or how did that work? It wasn't like it's a surprise. I mean, we were sitting off the coast. It's you know what I mean? It's like it was pretty telegraphed.

Mark McGrath: 1:15:39

Yeah, yeah. And even then it happened. Or, or think of, I mean, do you think Ponchet was this? Like something was being telegraphed, but they were expecting a big large-scale, you know, marine expeditionary unit coming ashore and like creating a they they probably never thought a quick f like like that with all that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:15:59

Well the whole team about it. I think the conditions sorry.

Mark McGrath: 1:16:04

Yeah, the home team, yeah, they they were like, here, take them.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:16:07

Yeah, I think the conditions were set in the past because to be honest, in the US, we talk about you know, we talk about we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that, but we never do anything, right? We're just gonna write Stern lets letters and say you can't do this, and then we just walk away. That's shifted, right? This the the orientation now is there's a strong message to the world. Hey, we're not what I'm what I how am I gonna say this correctly or without it It's the Monroe Doctrine.

Mark McGrath: 1:16:34

We're not powering.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:16:36

Yeah, this isn't like ah, we're gonna say strong words to you and and run away. It's no, we've got we've got really big sticks now, and we're gonna use them, right? We have to. Uh I mean, going back to the orientation of what's going on, I don't think you or I or Ed have any inclination of what's actually happening, how this connects to to global things. I have an idea, but I'm not in the I'm not in the know anymore. I'm not a you know, I'm not at Paycom, I'm not at Southcom, I'm not at or um Northcom. I'm not at these places. I don't know.

Mark McGrath: 1:17:04

Well, you know, we in the Marines were the first to go, but the last to know. So I I wouldn't have known. At least you had crayons, right? Well, there's that too. But yeah, first to go, last to know. I I don't know. I mean, I think, you know, if we're talking the enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine, I mean, let's just back bring it back to Boyd. I mean, that that that's an orientation. That's a that's a perspective that's been around for a long time that a lot of people don't understand because you know, John Robb was with was with us with our founding strategist the other day at the world for our monthly brief, saying that uh, you know, that that sort of thing is so lost on the modern world or it's lost on the modern mind because of globalization and and everything else. The the idea that we would enforce our own borders or that we would enforce our own sphere of influence, which was the standing policy, as far as I know, it was still a standing policy in the United States. That's just just because it's news to it's like Harry Truman said, the only history right the only news is the history you don't know. And if you don't understand that history of intervention in the Western hemisphere in the Monroe Doctrine, well, you're gonna have a really hard time understanding the situation.

Ed Brenegar: 1:18:17

I'm not interested in the politics of what's going on, but I am interested in the behavior of Trump and the way he makes his decisions and the way he acts. You know, and he's been called a uh PD chess player, but I see a lot of Boyd in him. That he's, you know, he people expect him to do one thing and he does something different. And he's constantly doing that. And he and he constantly is is disrupting. That's the word I would he has been doing that all along. And and so I'm curious as to, and I'm really not interested in whether you uh support or or but just your uh opinion about how that is manifested and what is the effect upon the larger public as as a result.

Mark McGrath: 1:19:00

There's an article that James Fallows, who wrote the book National Defense, which features John Boyd, um, about the defense reform movement back in the 80s. There's an article by James Fallows in The Atlantic, which is not really a conservative uh rag, um in 2015 about Trump's comprehension, inherently or aware, uh, his comprehension of of UTA and uh in OODA loop and and how good he was uh at it. And this was before he was elected president the the first time. I would think to this day, you know, I I listen, I always use my, well, I'm not gonna name names, but people I've known in my life pretty much my entire life from the minute I was born, that would say, Oh, he did this, or he said this, or this wasn't like, you know, because because something at their orientation is crashing that wasn't the same way when Walter Cronkite read the news or or like whatever. And and and it just proved, it just more more proof to me that people, their orientation is getting shattered because someone's being able to cycle through things quicker. They're able to that implicit guidance and control allows them to sense faster, it allows them to act faster, and it's catching a lot of people off guard and they're uncomfortable with that. But the reality is, is maybe that's what we need. Who knows?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:20:21

Moose, you're not saying he studied the oodaloop, he just uh intuitively knows how to use the principles of things.

Mark McGrath: 1:20:27

One would think that he does think that there has been a briefing on it, I would think, but just based off of again, like when a guy like Fallows writes an article in The Atlantic and says that that clearly Donald Trump understands the Oodaloop, I mean, one would think that he's been briefed. I mean, you know, it does go back to what we know. Successful people are inherently doing this, whether they know it or not. It's when they become aware of it that get even they they get even better at it.

Ed Brenegar: 1:20:52

Property developer in New York City over the last half century is gonna learn how to negotiate all kinds of influences which are counter counterproductive for him. And I think that's that's where he's learned it. He may not the technical of it, but that's that's an interesting point.

Mark McGrath: 1:21:12

I mean, let me so let me can I can I can I push on that a little more, Ed? I mean My my I can't remember. It was either my 10th or my I think it was my 11th birthday. My 11th birthday, I got the art of the deal for Christmas. And I read it. Oh, is that right? I still have it. And and and back then, Donald Trump was extremely popular with everybody. He was a rich real estate developer. He was big in fashion. He owned a USFL team or, you know, this and that and the other thing. He was not uh Hitler or whatever he became when he decided to run for president. But you can find any number of videos of Donald Trump going as far back, I think, as like 1978, 79, of him talking about his beliefs. He hasn't changed. There's not a lot of variance on what he was saying then and what he's saying now. He hasn't, he hasn't changed. So people that are surprised about this, shame on them because they they haven't done the research or or they weren't looking at what the guy was saying. Again, go read the book, The Art of the Deal. I mean, it's not. Well, I don't understand why people are surprised. You know? It was there's that famous uh White House correspondence center that Obama was speaking, and and and Donald Trump was a guest, and Obama was mocking and ridiculing Trump in front of everybody. He said, I heard that Donald Trump was running as a Republican, but I I just thought he was running as a joke.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:22:43

And the irony is setting the conditions. That's setting the conditions as a leader. So that is what we're talking about here. You set the conditions for this to happen. Because it wasn't that much longer after that that that guy had your job.

Mark McGrath: 1:22:54

He he was the next guy to have your job. But, you know, I I think he can say that apolitically, because this is the problem with this is the problem with people. Now they're gonna take what we said and think, oh, they're a bunch of Republicans or blah, blah, blah. No, I'm not. I'm I'm watching the game. And and I have to watch it with observer status to show these patterns, right? Just like James Fallows did. James Fallows is not a Trump supporter in the Atlantic is not a Trump supporter, but he was able to write that article and say, this guy gets booed and gets the oodaloop inherently or or explicitly, he understands it.

Ed Brenegar: 1:23:28

So let's let's do some imaginary looking back. What if if someone like Trump who is an Oodaloop person?

Mark McGrath: 1:23:39

Everybody's an Oodaloop person, really quick. May I say, everybody's an Oodaloop person, it's whether they understand it or not, because everybody is doing these things, whether they accept it or not.

Ed Brenegar: 1:23:51

Okay. I take your point. Well, what if someone like Trump was the president when 9-11 happened? What do we think would have happened that is different than what did happen?

Mark McGrath: 1:24:06

But I think that depends on who you ask, right? I think, again, it's it's the present influencing the past. I think that would it would depend on who you ask. You could ask a Republican would answer one way, a Democrat another way, a conspiracist a completely different way. I mean, you know, I don't, I don't know. I would think I don't think that had he been president during 9-11, I uh I I mean maybe I would maybe I'm wrong. And Ponti, what do you think about this? I I don't think the response that we had to 9-11 would be very different because I don't think that he would have been uh accepting a context matters. Context matters. And by the way, in reality on 9-11, where was Donald Trump? He went down there and he had volunteered all his organization to help with that. I mean, he was he was down there on the deck, you know, breathing in the the shit. So um again, you can find these videos on YouTube and people forget that. But but yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:24:59

But let me build on this. So the system we talk about the system driving behaviors. So you have the military-industrial complex, right? So that is driving a lot. We know that. We understand that. I don't think it matters who was in there at the time. It the system that we've designed collectively is driving a lot of behaviors, and leaders need to understand that that that's what's driving the behaviors of your organizations. The United States is at large, has a large oodaloop, right? That orientation is was being driven and may still be driven by the military-industrial complex. Now, break, break. Let's look at what's going on in Europe at the moment. A lot of European leaders, I'll say that, want war. Why do they want war? Well, they're they have failing states. Let's be honest here, right? So their context is we need a war to get out of our the mess that we all created. Now, I'm not saying I want that. I want to be really clear on this. So the context matters for leaders, but leaders can control the context by creating conditions that change the system and that change the behaviors. And I think that's what we're seeing now, right or wrong with with our current administration, the conditions are being changed to allow behaviors to change. And and it it might be too late, right? Yeah, it might be too late.

Ed Brenegar: 1:26:05

Well, I I and but I think it leads to more of these uh another iteration of this. This is not the end story. This is just an interim set of changes, and there will be more that will come uh because the conditions will will have changed.

Mark McGrath: 1:26:25

Yeah, I mean, you know, he he he won't be he won't be the president at the end of his term, and and who knows who will be, but it could be somebody that comes in here and undoes, does everything they can to undo everything that was done. I mean, when you look at the last transition from Trump to whatever, I mean, a lot of the things that Trump had tried to put into place were undone pretty quick through executive order. I mean, executive orders are one thing, so a lot of it, I guess, is just window dressing, but but but the reality is, you know, someone has different different aspirations of what they want America to be or what they want it to look like.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:27:03

Let me throw this out there, guys. Uh so if if one of us was in Congress, could you say with with certainty that you wouldn't participate in type of in any type of insider trading? Because I mean, I don't know how some of these people can outperform Warren Buffett, uh outperform the market unless they know how unless they're doing something, right? So what I'm getting at is that context is yeah, we're I I think we're all good. Would you vote for your own pay raise? Yeah. I mean, you put yourself in that context, that that would change. Are you going to vote for your own term limits? But what's the difference of that situation and somebody getting promoted in an organization where their income goes up by a factor of 5x or 10x, right?

Mark McGrath: 1:27:45

It goes back to evil and corruption. I think it goes back to evil and corruption. And that's that was the article that I put out on on Monday that, you know, that was, you know, quote unquote, my article about Somali daycares that never mentioned Somali daycares is to really understand Boyd's definitions of evil and corruption because once you start to understand, I'm I'm pulling them up right now, but once you understand those, you realize that evil is not what you think. And nor is corruption. And they're a lot more accessible and they're a lot more um, you know, they're they're a lot more real. Evil occurs when individuals or groups embrace codes of conduct, standards of behavior for their own personal well-being and approval, yet violate those same codes or standards to undermine the personal well-being and social approval of others. So, in other words, I'm throwing morals and standards in your face all the time that I'm I'm violating them. Whereas corruption is for my own benefit, I'm violating those standards. Evil adds the aspect of, yeah, not only am I doing that, but I'm throwing the opposite in your face to make you look like a bad, you look like the bad guy. And you know, and these were things, these were things that he was observing, because remember, and and this is that was interesting, I brought up James Fowles earlier. I mean, this is what Void was doing inside the Pentagon to do in the defense reform movement, was to point these things out. If you've ever seen the movie Pentagon Wars and how we were getting a lot of these weapon systems, it it was for the personal gain of of generals, not for not for the the war fighting gain of you know, protect soldiers, protect Marines, protect airmen. You know, it's not for that. It's it's because, well, I want that board seated general dynamics when I'm when I'm done, you know.

Ed Brenegar: 1:29:30

And this is the I think the real challenge that we face. Because the motivation to do anything is as continually eroded from I'm going to be a person of honor, I'm gonna act nobly towards my country, I'm gonna serve my country as as an elected official. But what what we see is the exact opposite, which is uh to be elected into Congress uh becomes a pathway towards uh self self-advancement. And um and the and this is this is the issue that I and maybe this is a issue for for us to talk about is a noodaloop question, but what what I see is that the systems that we are living with now make it almost impossible to hold people accountable. Accountability is really missing, and I think it's it's because the complexity of the systems are such, but it's also the stakes are so high that to hold someone accountable I mean they tried to hold Trump accountable by impeaching him, and that that didn't work. But the stakes are so high that the accountability thing is kind of pushed off to a side and we we just have to s kind of stay the course, stay the course, but that say the course is to a large extent full of this kind of corruption that we that we've identified here. And I I don't know what what to do about that. I was in Nairobi in 20 February of 2020, and I spoke to this one group of uh business leaders and at the end of my presentation we had a Q ⁇ A and and the first question that was asked of me was so what do we do about corruption in government? And here here's a here's uh an African, a Kenyan, asking me what what as an American I recommend to them to do with corruption in their own government, you know, and I'm wondering to what extent is my government providing that corruption to you? You know, what yeah to what extent are we paying your president and your your Congress or whatever their terminology, your assembly? How much are we paying? You know, what is I didn't have an answer. I didn't have an answer. And so I came home and I I spent time kind of working this thing through, and I really came to the point of recognizing that that there's this break between authority that people have and the accountability that needs to be applied to them to ensure that the higher values for the higher purposes of the higher principles of the organization are supported and upheld rather than whatever it is that the individual and authority decides that they want.

Mark McGrath: 1:32:18

Yeah, I mean, they uh you know, the memes of the both I don't know. It seems like for whatever reason the right wing and the libertarians are better at memes than than than the left. But you know, one of the memes that I saw with this whole Maduro thing was people were it was saying you can turn in your no more kings sign for to defend Maduro, like you know, like no more kings, but we've now transitioned, right? And I I think what you're pointing to, Ed, is like these things do come down to tribalization, you know, like what what what what McLuhan said was the retribalization, what what some of the things that John Robb talks a lot about that he was talking about on our founder's brief the other day, that you know, people see these things through tribal lenses, not through not through moral and ethics. They don't see it that way. They see it through what's in it for my tribe, what's in it for my group. Yeah, that's I mean, you know, again, this is where the facts we remain to be seen. Who knows? But you know, my question is why is some why is a uh a a mother of three, why is she in a a car trying to ostensibly ram an ice age? I don't know that. Like, why would someone do that? You know, I I don't know. And it again, I could have the facts wrong, but I don't know. But it's like, why are why are these sorts of things happening? Why would people think that I need to go to these extremes? Now, Rob talks about it, about this was a ways back during when the when when the you know the global war on terror was really picking up about like fealty, you know, it's like I have to express my fealty to the group. I have to show my my group, my tribal fealty to do something. Do you ever see that video on YouTube of the of the tech the tech CEO or the the tech executive going through the drive-in of Chick-fil-A and basically he it's to film and put on YouTube and basically crap on Chick-fil-A for their policy about I don't know what it was, trans or not celebrating Pride Month or whatever? And he go and he goes on and he films himself getting a cup of water because Chick-fil-A will give you a cup of water, anybody that goes there and and he isolates this poor young girl working the window, and he's unloading his political beliefs on this woman, and then he puts it on YouTube and he winds up losing his job, he winds up getting fired from his job or whatever. Well, what is it that drove that guy to that extreme to think that that's what he had to do? It goes back to McLuhan with retribalization and the medium being the message, and all this available to him to do that and be his own, you know, uh personal moral vigilante via his iPhone and via a social media platform ended up ruining his life.

unknown: 1:34:54

Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 1:34:55

Hey Ed, I want to talk about it. In the attempt to ruin someone, in the attempt to ruin someone else's life.

unknown: 1:35:01

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:35:01

So so Ed, you spent time in Kenya. I don't know if you know this, but I was a foreign area officer for US AFRICOM. My area of responsibility was Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, Tanzania, right? So what that means is a guy like me has to learn about the culture, the economy, the geography, political environment of the uh of those countries, right? So here we are talking about Somalia and all this other stuff, and there's all these experts in the world that know about Somalia all of a sudden. Um and I'm not gonna say I'm a Somalia expert. I work with State Department folks on the dual track policy and all that for for Somalia. Where I'm going with this, culture. Culture, uh the second layer of of uh orientation, right? Genetics, we're all pretty much the same. Culturally, we're gonna be a little bit different. And and I also spent some time in Casal the Princip, Italy, uh, my first overseas assignment, which was uh big area of the Kimorra, right? The the mafia. Uh so in that space, you learn as an American that you pay cash for things, you pay cash for your house, you pay all that stuff. It's kind of like a little bit of bribery. Um, you know, there's there are no bank accounts to transfer money. Similarly, in in East Africa, different culture, right? Bribes are kind of normal. That's that's how business is done. And I'm not saying as an American, you're over there bribing folks, but that's kind of going back to your point. How does our government affect that? Well, we have to assimilate to their way of life. You start handing money over and things like that. And we saw this in Afghanistan too. So um you bring that that that type of I hate to say mindset, but that type of thinking to the US. And you see our system, right? And you go, hey, I'm gonna work this system. Well, they're doing exactly what uh they think is right. And that's sort of that's that's how this works, right? So again, you create the conditions for the behaviors to emerge, right? So orientation, genetics, we're all pretty much the same on the planet. There might be a few, I don't know, Palladians out there, whatever you have, whatever they may be, alien type folks. I don't know. Genetically are all the same. Culture, it starts to shift, and it clearly experiences, education, sleep, dinner, what you had for dinner last night, breakfast, and all that. All these things matter. That's our orientation. But having you're you sharing that story about Kenya is surprising because I'm shocked that somebody from Kenya would ask that question, right?

Ed Brenegar: 1:37:15

It's it's a signal that Africa is changing. And they they recognize the Western influence has made them dependent upon the Western countries, the Western culture. And and one of the things when I went there, I've spent I've been there twice, and it was really clear to me that I was entering into an environment where colonialism had had a significant impact upon the cultures of these countries. I went to three different countries Kenya, Uganda, and Benin. And I would tell people, I am interested in developing African organizations with African leadership funded by African money. And I and uh and then I would say, don't ask me for money, because I will not give it to you. Because as long as you think you can get money from me, you will never develop the network and the resources to fund the things that you want to do there. And I I'm convinced that that those funds are there. And I had time after time, you know, people who say, Well, I got a project I want to do. Can you give us some money? I said, nope, you have to find it there. I'll teach you how to to create the network of people where you can fund the things that you want to fund. Because you're not totally lacking in money. You have some money. What you need to do is collect uh uh you know, enough people who support your idea so that they will fund what you want to do. You know, and and this is very grassroots kind of ground level type of economics that um that they actually understand. And um you know and the problem was is that that is there the problem was the same as what we were talking about at the very beginning of our conversation, which is that I don't really want to change. I want to be, I just want to keep doing the same things. I just want to get rid of my problems. I want someone else to take care of me. I want so, you know, that sort of thing. You know, and I see that here in the U.S. I see it, I see it in elsewhere. So, and so I, you know, that's what I was I was telling people. And and one of the organizations I work with is called Empowering Lives International. It's uh the Christian mission out of Southern California, and they've been operating there since the 90s. And one of their programs is a rural economic development program, and that that was the group I was working with. And I was training their leaders, they they have a five-tier level of uh leadership, and they were operating in 15, 18 countries, and um, and they're basically teaching rural people and poor people how to farm. And there's they start with chickens and they do vegetable gardens and dairy cattle, and and then they they go into forestry. They train them all to do this. And on on my trip there in the February of 2020, my host, a guy named Isaac, took me out to this one of his uh coordinators, one of his teachers, farms where these people come to be trained. And at that point in time, at that point in in uh they were in the midst of a cohort of women, about 45 women, who are being trained to farm. And so we go out there on a f on a Saturday, and he says, We've invited these women to come meet you. And I am, he said, Come meet me? Who am I? I mean, I'm I'm no one. I'm just I'm just an American person, you know, and and they don't know who and so they come and they begin to tell me their stories about why they're learning how to to farm. And I recorded this and it was and it became the first episode of the Piety Network podcast. But the things that they were telling me was that we recognize that if we do not work, we will find idleness and laziness entering into our families. And when that happens, crime enters into our families. And so we want to work, we want to raise chickens, we want to do all of these things so that we have money. And and one of the women, it was just amazing. To me. One of the men says, I recognize that in a few years I will not be able to do this this kind of farm work and I need to be able to save some money so I'll have money for when I I retire. And then they asked me, well, so what do you do, what do you do? How do you how do you make money? And I realized that they had no concept of what credit was. I said, Well, we have a lot of people, you know, I'm a kind of a teacher, I'm a minister. And they said, Well, you have a house, let's say, yeah, I have a house. And and how did you, you know, and I said, Well, I'm buying it. I had to buy, I have to get a mortgage, had to buy it on credit. They just they just thought that was just unreasonable because they knew that that was placing my livelihood and my future into hands of someone else that I was being forced to trust that they would honor the mortgage and and all of that. It's very is a very fascinating thing. So, you know, I I basically told them, said, Listen, listen, I think it would be great if you came to America and you taught us, taught us the values that you have, because what you're telling us is that we're gonna be self-reliant, but we're also gonna be a community. We're gonna be independent, we're gonna be, we're gonna take care of ourselves, and we're gonna we're gonna change the the course of our families by being independent and self-reliant.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:42:43

Moose. What did John Boyd say about being independent? Do you remember? I know you got this, man.

Mark McGrath: 1:42:47

What did he do to become independent? Well, the we we destroy create our mental models to improve our capacity for free and independent action.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:42:54

But didn't he get rid of as much stuff as he could? Well, he was free of debt and all that.

Mark McGrath: 1:42:59

I see where you're going. So so so Boyd was famous for this. Buckminster Fuller was famous for this. Buckminster Fuller more so. They went into an exile for two years or so to basically unlearn everything that they had learned, to relearn the way things actually were. Like in Fuller's case, you know, he'd been kicked out of Harvard twice, and he had to basically teach himself everything, and the end result is all the organic stuff that he created, like synergetics and geodesic domes and tensegrity and everything else. So Boyd was very similar when he retired, I believe in 74. He more or less re-emerged in 76 with destruction and creation and then started his his you know his his career as a uh a strategic influencer. It involved a lot, it involved the self-imposed exile to to go and unlearn and and and shed all of the things that were jading his th his thinking or uh steering biases, that sort of thing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:44:04

So, you know. When Ed was telling the story and the connection to Boyd, all I could think about is the dependency on our government, right? So there are people, folks that are completely dependent on our on our government. And we know about the story of epigenetics or the idea of epigenetics. Once you have multiple generations on that, that just becomes part of the culture of the genetics of the right thing.

Mark McGrath: 1:44:25

But see, but let me ask Let me ask Ponch. So I don't think that that's limited to welfare. I think that that's also you could extend that to political dynasties that that live off the government team. Yeah. Um, back to John McCain, you know, not to pick on the dead, but you know, he was born a Navy brat. He went to the Naval Academy, became a Navy officer, became a congressman, became a senator, and then died. His entire life was at the expense of taxpayers. Like his his his his dependency as a kid, his his salary at the Naval Academy, his salary as a commission officer, his salary as a congressman, like what did he produce? What did he what did he create? How did he generate, how did he generate wealth? Well, that that sort of thinking, I'm not picking on him to be mean or whatever. I'm just saying that like if if somebody's a uh a badass portfolio manager in quotes, because they have access to insider trading in Congress, they're to me as bad as the welfare person. It's it's not it's the same. They're reaping benefits that are afforded to them through the system at their level. So so you could run a corrupt daycare, or I could run a uh a badass stock portfolio. I think that the concept and principles actually hold across.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:45:38

Yeah, I think what Ed what resonated with me from Ed's story is that it's it's the idea that the purpose matters, right? Yeah to to have this free and independent life, to have the ability to learn and adapt. We need that freedom. And it goes back to what uh uh Adrian Bijan shared with us. You know, we everything evolves towards freedom. It should. And I I think that's the what I'm taking away from Ed's story, and it's just Ed, that's a fantastic story. Thanks for sharing that. It's it's amazing how all these things start to connect, and you can see this. And I don't want to bash anybody on welfare. I mean, I grew up on government cheese. I don't know if people know that, but I, you know, yeah.

Mark McGrath: 1:46:11

I the opposite conflict. I had the government pay for my college. I was a Marine officer, and it was until I left the Marine Corps I was finally on my own.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:46:20

But this is this is a key thing here is when that opportunity shows up, or you have that, or you create those opportunities for yourself, you do something with it, right? And that's all we want. That's all I want is I want people to have the freedom to do those things. I don't want to create a dependency where we don't need dependencies. And I think that's a good idea. Well, it's like what do you give back?

Mark McGrath: 1:46:37

You want to what's the what's the real service? What's the obligation, right? Is that is that is that a question? Can that come into play? Like if I'm getting those benefits, what what am I giving back to make the country better?

Ed Brenegar: 1:46:53

I think that I don't think it it's an effective motivation to give back in that regard. I think because you're not building something when you just see yourself giving back to, well, the government's giving me this, so I'm gonna give back to the government. And I'm not talking about taxes, I'm talking about in some other way. I I think what is needed instead is for people to see that they have a responsibility to their local community, that that their neighbor matters. I spent almost I spent how many years? Not quite, I spent 18 years living on a street that was a dead end. This is with my family, and there were thirty, thirty-five homes on that street, and in those almost two decades we only knew people in eight of those homes. And I couldn't tell you what in in ten ten or fifteen of those homes, what those people look like. I couldn't tell you. Um I'm not even sure what they what cars they drove. And I and so what I realized is that there's a there is an isolationist side to the modern human character. We want what we want, and we don't want to be bothered. We want to be successful, we want to have the freedom to to consume what we want to consume. And so we're we're intentionally handicapping ourselves from being people who matter in the lives of their community, the lives of their neighbors, their lives of their family, by simply turning life into something that is primarily self-beneficial. And I see that as how, you know, I I don't want to be overly critical here, but I see that as how businesses operate, the government operates. You know, it's all about motivating us to do what they want us to do because we're gonna get something from it. And I I think this is this is at the heart of why the OODA loop uh it matters, because the this changes that relationship that the individual has to every institution. Because if you look at every institution, it wants you to do what it wants you to do, whatever that is. I mean, I can even say that about churches, I can say that about schools, I can say that about homeowners association, whatever it is, the organization wants you to do what it wants you to do. And it really doesn't want you to say anything about it. I'm overstating this, of course, overstating it for a fact. But that's why the ODA loop really matters, is because what it does is it trains people to observe, objectively see what's there, then decide what action it wants to take, because because the person now has has a sense of purpose and a set of values which define the way they want to live their lives. And then they decide how they're going to act, and then they act, and obviously it's not a linear thing, it's a it's a mismatch of all those things happening all at the same time. But what it does is it grants that person a sense of ownership and a sense of dignity that their life matters, and that's where I see that John Boyd's long-term impact will have this kind of effect upon people because of guys like you who are constantly sharing this idea. And I and I think when people realize that most of the self-help material that they find online and they find in bookstores is not very helpful at all. They will be, and if they're so motivated, they will look for something else that will help them to uh actually establish the kind of life they want.

Mark McGrath: 1:50:53

We'll we'll close with this because we could go on for another three hours with you, Ed, and we certainly will we're gonna pick this up again at some point. But I I will close with this. And I think that you're right on about the Oodaloop. I would elevate it a little higher and say that when you understand destruction and creation and the need to do it and the need to reorient, that you know, then there's there's no way out of the world of reorientation. What he's challenging us to do is that because of the nature of the universe, of its uncertainty and other things, is exactly why we cannot allow ourselves to be jaded by prescripted mental models that come from somebody else. That we have to go in there, we have to shatter our correspondence with reality, we have to rewrite it because guess what? You know, anything that anybody said today about Trump or John McCain or whoever, all of those things we could say did, you know, that comes from, if that comes from the dialectic engine of shattering and revising, shattering, revising, then we're doing something well. We're doing what Boyd wanted us to do. We're, but if we're allowing that to jade how we see things, we're not doing this well. We're not destroying that model. So my what I might preconceive is my own political or traditional or cultural, religious, I have to be willing to shatter that and and I have to be able to test that and synthesize other concepts that I'm not currently aware of. Or I have to, I have to act as if I don't know everything. And if I think for a minute that I do know everything, I'm I'm going to fail. Any any final closure on that, Ponch? On on the uh the impertinence of destruction creation, which by the way, Ed, when we hear people talk Oodaloop, you know, uh, and I said this on uh I've said this on so many podcasts most recently with the debrief on John Becker, you can almost tell immediately, did they or did they not read and understand destruction creation? Because ultimately that's what Boyd is telling us to do. He's telling us what you see in the news is fine, but guess what? You need to shatter that, you need to break it down and you need to pull it apart, and then you need to shatter it again and pull it apart. And you guess what? You might think you love John McCain and then you realize one day you don't, or vice versa. You might think you hate John McCain and then one realize you you you love him or whatever, all because you went through that dialectic engine of shattering your correspondence with reality and revising and updating your cognitive operating system. That's all I got.

Ed Brenegar: 1:53:24

I know we're at we're at the end of our time, but I want to say one thing. One of the things that have come to become aware of has led me into my latest writing project. So I'm writing my first novel, and it and it is about a young man who comes to the conclusion that he has been given all these answers, and he he doesn't know what are the questions which brought about those answers. So the novel is called Answers to Questions Never Ask. And so he's going to go, he's he's gonna drop out of college, he's gonna drop out of his family, and he's gonna go discover what he's actually supposed to learn, which is a very destruction creation type of thing. He's gonna go create his life and and exactly in what we're we're talking.

Mark McGrath: 1:54:09

Love that. I love that. Well, I can't wait till that comes out, and that we will certainly promote that aggressively here on uh both No Way Out and The World of Reorientation. So thank you. We're gonna we'll uh we'll close the recording here, Ed. Um, you know, on be uh on behalf of the collaborative team of uh Moose and Ponch, we're we're deeply gracious for your kind introductions to people that we've collaborated with, including yourself, but uh not limited to you, which have included uh the great Andrew McLuhan and um and most recently Louise von Palmgarten. We're honored to have been guests on your show, which which which both uh Ponch and I have done, um, in some cases more than a few times. And I appreciate being refeatured. I know that you did a refeaturing, which was which was cool, but we're gonna point everybody to your Substack and your work, and we're glad uh to have you as a friend and a mentor and a collaborator in this whole fun journey.

Ed Brenegar: 1:55:10

Hey, we're in this together.

Mark McGrath: 1:55:11

All right, thanks everybody for listening.