Battlefield to Boardroom: Applying Boyd's OODA Loop with Storytelling | Angus Fletcher

What if the human brain isn’t a calculator but a story engine built for action under uncertainty? That single shift reframes strategy, leadership, and the OODA loop. Angus Fletcher—neuroscientist, author of Primal Intelligence, and advisor to special operations—joins us to explore how narrative becomes the decisive edge: not as marketing flair, but as the way we chain actions, break an adversary’s plot, and write a better future faster than our rivals.

We unpack why planning trains the planner, how Commander’s Intent gives the ending and protects agency, and where intuition really comes from. Hint: it’s not pattern-matching; it’s detecting exceptional information, the mismatch that signals new opportunity. From future-backward exercises and counterfactuals to Red Teaming and honest debriefs, we map concrete methods to keep Orientation supple, shift risk to the opponent, and avoid the brittleness of optimization. Fletcher shows how culture and literature (yes, Shakespeare) expand cognitive range, building the empathy and range leaders need to operate in complex, fast-changing environments.

We also examine the cognitive war—how associational feeds erode narrative capacity—and why truth is the most effective long-term PSYOP. In markets, boardrooms, and battlefields, the winners hold multiple viable plots, switch quickly as reality shifts, and align teams with ambitious, possi

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 OODA Loop, Entropy, And Story
• 3:40 Meet Angus Fletcher
• 7:10 Brain As Story Engine
• 14:56 Planning Trains The Planner
• 21:31 Increasing Their Entropy, Not Ours
• 27:56 Animals, Culture, And Narrative
• 32:36 Future-Backwards And Model Flexibility
• 39:56 Commander’s Intent As Ending First
• 47:26 Training Fight Over Flight
• 55:26 Intuition Is Spotting Exceptions
• 1:03:06 Taylorism, Leadership, And Learning
• 1:13:41 Systems, Optimization, And Fragility
• 1:24:06 Guerrilla Logic And Cognitive War
• 1:30:26 Winning Narratives And Truthful Psyops

Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:20

All right, we'll start this one a little bit different. We're here with Goofy, uh Moose and Punch. So we got three characters on our show. I do want to start off uh the way we previously started off, but uh not everybody here on the show knows that. And that is uh what's the simplest way to explain John Boyd's oodloop to your kids? Um, well, I don't know how to do that. So uh I'll tell you how I'm I'm talking about it now. The purpose of it, starting with the what, is really to uh for an agent to take some kind of action on the environment and and the the how, how they do that is we go through this whirl of reorientation um where we build off of our genetics, our culture, and our previous experience, so our priors, if you will, and update those through something. Uh another way to think about this is uh if you're if you're leaning towards the neuroscience application, towards AI, there's something known as a uh partially observable Markov decision process. You can think of it this way that the agent doesn't have complete access to the external world. So we have to come up with a way to understand what's going on in the external world. So why do we do this? Well, that's why we named the podcast No Way Out. It really connects to the never-ending threat of entropic erosion. As agents, we have to go through this role of reorientation to avoid death. So one thing uh that's very important in this uh aspect and something we haven't talked much about on the show, is the power of story or and or narrative. Uh so our guest today knows a lot about the brain, knows a lot about uh story, uh, Professor Agus Fletcher from Ohio State University. Welcome to the show. I'm totally thrilled to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Uh thanks for doing this. Uh I I I asked you earlier in a conversation: is there a relationship too between you and a movie called S-E-R-E? Between Sear?

Angus Fletcher: 2:02

Yeah. So back a long time ago, we did do a movie called Sear as a kind of like fun thing. But that was kind of the beginning of this journey that I had where I got to go work in Hollywood, uh sort of work with a bunch of big name actors, a bunch of big name studios. And that was just kind of my own process of learning about how story works from the professionals.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 2:20

Yeah, I'm just curious. You picked Sear, so survival escape, uh, help me out again. I went through SEER school up in Maine. Resist, evade. Evade, thanks. Right. So things that we're trained to do, um, you know, what at Moose, did you go through SEER at all?

Mark McGrath: 2:33

No. I I was a field artillery officer in the Marine Corps, so I we we were taking prisoners, not becoming prisoners.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 2:40

Yeah. So so on our end, yeah, all aviators and special operators, I believe, have to go through SEER training. It's uh it's intense. It's pretty uh you learn a lot of great things in there and like how to resist. Um, I think that's the most important thing. So how do you not punish yourself in an environment where people are trying to punish you? But anyway, um uh interesting connection that I came across recently was your work on that movie. And then again, uh your recent work with um you get to work with our special operators, um, maybe some Delta, maybe some Devagrew, maybe some 160th, is that right?

Angus Fletcher: 3:12

Yeah, well, uh, for the record, there is no Delta, but uh hypothetically I do work with the United States Army's two JSOC units, for those who know what that is. And I also work quite extensively with the Green Berets.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 3:21

So why would uh that the military want somebody with your background in neuroscience and storytelling to come in uh and help them out?

Angus Fletcher: 3:28

Yeah, because basically for years I was kind of a rogue neuroscientist. So, what do most neuroscientists think? Most neuroscientists think that the brain is a computer. And they think that the way the computers work is they're giant sense-making machines that take on all this data and crunch that data to arrive at probabilities and predictions and so on and so forth. But here's the secret about the human brain: the human brain can be really smart with limited information. And that's something that a computer cannot do. And so the question is, how is that happening? And so basically what we did at my lab for years is we said, well, actually, what's unique about the human brain is its ability to initiate new actions, to do something that has never been done before, and to do it without input. And if you're a special operator or anyone else in the military, you know what that is. You go somewhere, the plan breaks, your radio is down, comms are down, you've got to initiate action. You gotta do something. You know, where does that come from? It comes from within. And the human brain, right down to the level of the individual neuron, what every single neuron in your brain is doing right now is initiating action. It's not taking inputs, it's initiating action from nowhere. It's the same thing that happens in a democratic society, which is like a collection of little individuals initiating action. And for a long time, people have been scared of that because they think, oh, it's gonna lead to chaos, so on and so forth. But actually, if you understand how actions that are initiated can be chained together, what is a series of actions that are chained together? That's a narrative. And another nerd, another word for narrative is a plot, is a plan. So essentially your brain is a giant story-making machine. And the purpose of those stories is to invent the future faster than your adversary. And so talking about the ODA loop, essentially what's happening in the OODA loop is your enemy's got a story and he's trying to make that story happen. You know, he's got a narrative that he wants to impose on you. And what do you do? You break his story. You break his plan, and then out of the fragments of that collision, you create a new plan faster than he can, and you kill him. And so that's essentially the way in which human beings can survive in chaos. That's why we can do things that AI cannot do. And that's why, as we see ourselves walking to this world increasingly of volatility in markets, in politics, in everything, humans are gonna have the edge over computers.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 5:37

So you're saying that we just don't simply go through the observe, orient, decide, act stage. We actually have a plan or maybe some intuition as well. So break, break, surprise, surprise. That's what we talk about on here is we we use the four Ps. I'm not gonna go through them today, perception, planning, and uh perception. Uh hopefully I got that all right, and then uh flow, uh being the third or the fourth P with the PHLOW, uh, which is actually just intuition again. So, what plan does is it's internal to the system, um, and that action realizes that plan. So, uh what we're trying to do with a plan is reduce risk or minimize risk uh based off the information we have. And more importantly, and I think you you cover this in your book a little bit, and that is um when we talk about planning, when we talk about planning, Moose and I talk about planning. Planning is continuous, it's it's always updating with the information we have from the external environment. We don't set a strategy and just let it run, you know, hey, here's a strategy that McKenzie gave to a company and let it go. That's that's a bad way to plan, by the way. So um the way we talk about planning, and Moose, um can you bring your color into this as well as to how you explain strategy? But we always talk about building a good map of the external world, and we know that all maps are wrong. Right? Moose, do you add some more to that?

Mark McGrath: 6:51

Yeah, I mean, that's why the way we approach teaching Boyd in Oodaloop is so different because we're trying to follow what he authentically prescribed and taught, you know, that we're the Oodaloop sketch is merely an illustrative abstraction of how the orientation functions inside of you know complex nonlinear environments, which is the universe. And therefore, strategy also is not linear. So that there's that illustrative abstraction, but then strategy also becomes instead of a plan or a mission statement or whatever, it's a the way he defines it is a mental tapestry of changing intentions to achieve uh to achieve an objective.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 7:38

I'm gonna add this to this, uh to that, Moose. Um, in within the Oodaloop, when we talk about the OODA loop, we also talk about counterfactuals as far as a connection to plan, um, right, and stories. I believe stories would connect to that as well. Story plot, plan, uh, solid connection, what-if scenarios, counterfactuals, um, co-selection. Uh so we're always going through that process. And those that do I hate to say planning better, but plan better. Uh, and again, it's not about developing a plan, it's about the process of planning. The higher quality planning you do, the more Yeah, the orienting, reorienting. Yeah, all the time. So uh Angus, is there is there is that connect to how you you you looked at this as uh with your Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Angus Fletcher: 8:15

So by the way, what we talk about a lot, and I gotta so first, just full disclosure, I got thrown out of the Marine Corps when I was 18 years old. And that's one of the reasons why we made that movie Sear, is I went through OCS and they were like, You're a loser, man. We don't want you here in the Marine Corps. And then Army Special Operations picked me up and were like, we want to work with you. So that gives you some indication, I think, of the relative quality zones of the Marines and Army Special Operations. But what we talk about in Army Special Operations is what we talk about is plan or not the plan. And so what we say is you gotta plan like a madman. You gotta plan out every single counterfactual. You gotta go into this situation and say, what if my enemy does this? What if my enemy does this? What if my enemy does this? And you got to have counter plan, counterplan, counterplan. You gotta get that all done in advance, and then you gotta plan for catastrophic success. You gotta say, what if I destroy my enemy so totally? What do I do now? What's my next move? I can't hesitate in the moment of victory. So you plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, plan, plan. And then the moment that reality hits, all those plans break. But it doesn't matter because by planning, you have trained the planner. Right. You have increased the muscle in your brain. And we see this again and again and again. You get faster and faster and faster at doing uh, you know, um, whatever the situation requires if you've gone through a whole variety of those different situations. And why is that? Well, because you're basically practicing all these story mechanics in the brain. And that certainly maps over the oodle loop. These are just kind of different languages. We're talking about essentially the same mechanical process, which is what do you do in a violent environment when you're when you have an adversary who's trying to impose their reality on your reality? Um, and to that extent, planning isn't just about decreasing your risk, it's also about increasing your adversary's risk. Right. You're saying, what can I do to move risk into his domain so that all of a sudden that's starting to disrupt him? And I'm getting inside his head and he's getting inside his head. And so this is all basically, I think, out of the same tree. It's just sort of different languages and uh kind of vernaculars.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:01

Right. So how do we increase their entropy their entropy while decreasing ours? Right. And that's that's the same.

Mark McGrath: 10:06

So let's go back to destruction. Yeah, it's destruction and creation.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:09

Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 10:10

Yeah. Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:10

Uh let's go back to story a little bit more and understand uh why, as living systems, and in particular as humans, we use story. Um so let's build this up into two phases if we can. Genetically, uh, I think as humans, we're predisposed to tell stories and use them for something. Um question to you, do animals do the same thing? And then what about culture? So can you kind of expand that a little bit?

Angus Fletcher: 10:34

So, first of all, story is not primarily for telling, it's for thinking.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:38

Okay.

Angus Fletcher: 10:39

And we know this because animals do have narratives. They just don't communicate in narratives. Sort of a simple example is how we know that that animals have narratives, is because crows, birds, can use tools. Tool use is an indication of narrative because you're basically saying if I do this, then this other thing is going to happen. So they're telling a little story in their brain that they're able to play over and over again. If you go back to the common ancestor of the crow, the Caledonian crow in humans, that goes back before the trans source wrecks. So narrative exists basically in the brain of any single animal that you pick. Um, that animal is essentially thinking to themselves a story of their life. Like, I want to do this, I want to do this. When that happened in the past, this thing happened, cause and effect, that's all story. So, why does culture exist? Your other question. Well, culture exists both as a repository of stories, because it's useful for us to trade stories as humans, for me to say, hey, when this thing occurred, that other thing followed. And I can give that to you, and you can say, Oh, okay, I'll store that story in my mind because I could use it later. But also, more profoundly, culture makes us better at story. So there are certain stories when you listen to them, you don't just remember the story. They actually activate your brain's power to tell stories better. The classic example of this in Western culture is Shakespeare. So millions of people have, you know, read, listened to Shakespeare, and gotten better at storytelling. But you know, if you do near uh term sci-fi, this is something we do a lot with the operators, is we do these kinds of sci-fi stories that are set 10, 15 years in the future. The more time you spend consuming those stories, the more it makes you able to imagine things that might happen to you in the next 15 minutes because those stories are boosting your brain's deep storything ability. So animals can do story, culture exists to amplify that natural ability. Story, as we talked about earlier, is essentially just your ability to make plans to tell a story of the future faster than your adversaries and make it happen.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 12:24

Really cool. Um, in your book, you you write a little bit about um we call it complex facilitation. We use a uh an approach called the future backwards. So starting somewhere in the in the future and working backwards from that. Can you talk a little bit about why force, you know, forcing folks, or I hate to say forcing folks, but using that constraint to allow creativity to flow. Why does that work? You're reverse engineering.

Angus Fletcher: 12:47

You're reverse engineering, you're going backwards from an effect to a cause. So basically, the way that narratives work in real time is they go from causes to effects. The simplest story is a cause to an effect. So it's a beginning to an end, essentially. But what you're doing when you go backwards from effect to cause is you're reversing that natural relationship and you're falling, you're forcing the brain to pause and identify the mechanic beneath it. And there's a lot of different ways that we do this. Um, you know, so a simple way that we do this all the time with operators is say, oh, you've got this model. Well, based on this model, this thing should have happened, but it didn't. Why didn't it happen? And that's because your model is essentially over-predictive, you know? And so these are all different ways you have of playing things forward, playing them backwards, and sort of always tightening and tightening and tightening that model, not because that model is going to last, but because you have to practice the process of tightening faster and faster.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:38

Okay, so a rigid predictive model probably is um not anti-fragile, right? That's exactly right. Yes. All right. So what we're asking folks to do when we talk about orientation, so orientation inside Boyd Zoodaloop, you can think of it as a world model or a generative model, right? Uh genetics, culture, and experience, and all the things that are connected to that. So the more rigid it is, um, uh, if you want to look at like the default mode network or the way we operate or see the world, that acts as a filtering system. And what it does is it prevents you from seeing new evidence or new information of what the world actually is, right? Or what we think it actually is. Um so what we want to do is we want to relax that to um allow you to see the world or more information to update that orientation as we go. And story, if I understand it correctly, is a great way to do that.

Angus Fletcher: 15:26

That's right. Okay, so first of all, um that what you're talking about there is sort of breaking your world model, whatever we want to call that world model. What that happens according to the army is through the detection of something known as exceptional information. So exceptional information is basically any exception to a rule that you have in your brain. And why is it that you become interested in a story? It's because there's some interesting character or some interesting world, something that's breaking your preconceptions of what can happen, opening a new possibility. Stories, by their very nature, are not boring, right? I mean, at least stories that work are not boring. So at the very elemental level of creating a story, you've got to figure out what's a piece of exceptional information to give my audience? What's something that would surprise them and hook them and pull them out of the tedium of their day-to-day? This is why people who are good storytellers are very good at identifying stuff that's weird and then very rapidly tying it back to relevance. And that process of seeing the weird and realizing how it can be connected to actually kind of the ongoing flow or mechanism of life. That's also a power we see in special operators and in most kind of effective military commanders, is they're able to rapidly see, okay, that's weird. Okay, now how do I connect that to my existing plan? Okay, now that allows me to see opportunities on the battlefield that I hadn't seen before. So story helps you practice that. That's why typically when you're walking soldiers through kind of tactical or strategic training, you tell them a story of a battle. Yeah. Yep. And you release information a piece at a time. And the point of each piece of information is to cause hesitation because all of a sudden it conflicts, right? Because what you notice with with kind of like, I would say, sort of young or inexperienced kind of commanders or tacticians, is they very rapidly grip onto a strategy that they want to use in a particular battle. You know? Yeah. And what you've got to do constantly through these role-playing exercises is start to disrupt them and see do they actually just get stuck on this plan, no matter how much information I give them? Or the alternative is if they don't get stuck, a lot of them just freeze like deer in the headlight. There's like there's too much happening. And so, you know, the what a good storyteller is able to do is disperse information at the right speed so that the audience never gets confused and never gets aggressive. And that process of exercising those muscles, those are the same muscles that help you kind of develop a plan, right? If they help you develop a story.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 17:34

But this is not just about uh special operators, it's about everybody. Um, so you you bring up commander's intent and make a connection to Hamlet and Shakespeare. Um, and and can you talk a little bit about how important storytelling is in the concept of commander's intent? And we call it there's another level there. We call it mission command, right? So we have mission command, commander's intent. We call it leader's intent as well. But what what is a connection that uh business leaders can take away from this conversation and connection to Hamlet?

Angus Fletcher: 18:01

Yeah, first of all, I just want to say that everybody's a special operator. If I can be a special operator, you can be a special operator, right? I mean, that's like the whole point of the Green Berets is to force multiplies to take everybody, every regular person, and turn them into a green beret. To your question about commander's intent, what's happening there is you're telling people the end of the story. You're saying this is where the story has to end. The story has to end with this outcome. Now I'm giving you, the person who I've given my intent, the ability to write the rest of the story. You're at your beginning. I've given you the end, create the middle. And that process of storytelling is both incredibly powerful for organizations because it unleashes the creativity, the autonomy of your teams, but also because it allows them to be flexible. They're on the ground in the way that you're not. And when I see bad organizations, what they're trying to do is they're trying to tell not just commander's intent, but also the middle of the story. So they're trying to say, here's where you're going and here's how you're gonna get there. The moment you say, here's where you're going and here's how you've got to get there, you've just turned your human into a robot. It's eliminated their ability to think autonomously.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 19:03

So agency is removed the moment you start telling them. So this is very important, too. And and Moose, um, I I know you're you're you got some ideas in your head, I could see it. Um Moose, can you bring us back to the loot loop on this and Boyd?

Mark McGrath: 19:18

Well we're biased, right? So we've been in the Boyd archives, and we know that the Army stole a lot from Boyd and and called it other stuff and didn't credit it.

Speaker 2: 19:35

Come on.

Mark McGrath: 19:35

Wait a minute. Okay. So box box fourteen of the Boyd Archives. I've been there, I've seen it with my own eyes.

Angus Fletcher: 19:41

As a as a um uh as a flunky from the Marine Corps, uh let me just point out to you that actually Boyd, I believe, was part of the Army Air Force originally, right? Because you know the Army invented the Air Force. So really all this stuff goes back to the Army. The Army's the granddaddy of the Trevor Burrus, No, no, no, no.

Mark McGrath: 19:57

The Army's the granddaddy of the Space Force. They're the daddy of the Air Force and the granddaddy of the Space Force.

Angus Fletcher: 20:04

Um That's an unfortunate result that maybe the Army, you know, isn't it?

Mark McGrath: 20:09

Well no, just for context, though. So you you were Green Beret. No, I'm not a Green Beret. I'm a professor at Ohio State. No, I know that. But you I work with the Green Berets. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So so what I heard you say when you say like exceptional information, I mean that's what we would call a mismatch. So when you're scanning your environment and you encounter a mismatch, you you either have to interact with it in order to isolate it or you're gonna get isolated by it because you didn't interact with it. Um well, also too, I think another thing that really resonates with me, it's no secret, by the way, you know, because maybe another episode, but the we had Bing West on, and the Green Berets and the Marine Corps combined action program were the two forces in Vietnam that really tapped really tapped into this. Yeah. Yeah. That totally uh were highly successful. But back to the Air Force, the arm, you know, the institutional army, the institutional air force, institutional navy, the the idea of aligning inside of villages and aligning with tribes and aligning with culture, culture disseminated, and working from within to push out, that was a To you know dumping tonnage on things to get to get body counts, right? That's right. So so the Green Berets in the Marine Corps, I think, have uh an akin to thinking that Boyd himself uh tapped into because it was Andrew Krapinovich, who we'd love to have on the show, still around, uh, whose book The Army in Vietnam, Boyd talked, he talked about this exact thing, but Boyd would mention that book and discussing powers of conflict. And I would think that a lot of what you're speaking about, Angus, is that when when you have a cultural officer uh or a program like CAP or the Green Berets or others that are assimilating into, say, guerrilla forces or uh like a Lawrence of Arabia, you have to understand stories and you have to understand tribes because tribes are wired for stories and stories are are are how tribes uh how tribes communicate, and it's even how Boyd communicated. He didn't publish books and he didn't, you know, he he did it all through oral briefing culture. Um and and it and it changed every time. Um so I think the the resonance is pretty is pretty clear.

Angus Fletcher: 22:23

Yeah, yeah. And to be clear, I think Boyd's a genius. I think so what you're talking about there when you're going to another culture is first of all, every culture has its own narratives. Yeah. And that's kind of what you got on the list. But also every individual within that culture has their own way of spinning those narratives and has their own narrative capacities. And so a big part of what you have to do as a Green Beret, or you got to do as a Marine when you're when you're engaged in these exercises, you've got to get inside the head of your ally and think like them, or you've got to get inside the head of your adversary and think like that.

Mark McGrath: 22:49

I mean, there there's the there's the million-dollar point is that you it's all in the cognitive space. The war is always, always, always in the cognitive space. The ultimate weapon.

Angus Fletcher: 23:00

This is the ultimate weapon.

Mark McGrath: 23:02

Well, I'm glad. So I you know, I know your PhD is in English literature, so I know I'm I'm not the only liberal arts guy here today, but it that that exact frame of thinking that you have to have of interdisciplinary perspective, uh is exactly what you need to thrive in chaotic, nonlinear environments to get out of that uh sort of typeset mindset. You know, we start from the left, we go to the right, we start from the left, we go to the right. 100%. Um we haven't brought his we haven't brought his name up, but I think one of the things where we've broken a lot of ground on was compounding uh John Boyd with Marshall McLuhan. Because a lot of the things that you've been saying, it makes me think of it makes me think of Marshall McLuhan talking about how even things like the phonetic alphabet, even things like the written language and the printing press and all those things, those those media have a direct effect on how we interact with our our environment, how we interact. It shapes us as it shapes us as humans.

Angus Fletcher: 23:59

The media is the medium. Yeah. The medium is yeah, the medium is the same.

Mark McGrath: 24:02

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Angus Fletcher: 24:04

Yeah. Yeah. So um 100% agree with all these things. And I think the question is is like, well, how do we help people get better at this? Because the thing about what we what we see, uh, you know, this is my opinion anyway, what we see is that, you know, these are natural processes. You know, anyone, you know, is born to a degree with a certain capacity to imagine like other people or learn stories or things like that. But we see that certain groups are better at it, and we also see that certain groups are better at training it. And you know, I think Army Special Operations has an incredible training pipeline. I also think the Marines, to be honest, probably has an even better training pipeline because the Marines doesn't have the same selection sort of process, right? So they just take everybody and train them to be a Marine, right? Whereas Army Special Operations, you know, it's a little more than that.

Mark McGrath: 24:44

Well, there's a little there's some nuance behind that. I mean, I would say that um I would say that, well, officers are selected. Marine Marine officers are selected by Marine enlisted that train us. Um Marines have to go through a transformation process of 90 days at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, where you take a kid off the street, you break them down, you build them up, and 90 days you have a Marine. What General Gray with warfighting tried to get the point across, and Boyd was there for all of this, was that being a Marine is not a thing per se. It's a state of mind, it's a cognitive operating system, it's an orientation. And that's that's the distinguisher, I think, between that and looking at a lot of other things. They don't think of the, they think of the Marines Corps, Marine Corps in technical terms, not the Marine Corps in in cognitive terms, because that's really what it is. It's a way of thinking.

Angus Fletcher: 25:38

Well, I can tell you just based on my own limited experience at OCS, one of the gifts that I got from the Marine Corps is the Marine Corps puts you in these threat situations. And so you go into a fight or flight response, and the Marine Corps teaches you when you're in fight or flight to fight. And it's really effective at doing that again and again and again and again and again. And I think that's a kind of training that we could benefit from giving a lot of young people because I think a lot of young people, when they go into a threat response, are more likely to quit nowadays than they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Whereas to go through uh basic training for the Marines is to start to understand your threat response and start to shift over to fight. And I one of the things that I really loved about my you know brief contact with the Marines is to a certain extent, the Marines don't even care what you're fighting for. You know, they just want you to fight. Like that's kind of the basic training, you know, and and and and you know, they they allow a great deal of autonomy within that, right? Because it's it's an American institution, right? It's not like a conditioning system. But that's the basis, really, of your autonomy is when you get into a situation when you're really scared, you don't give up. Instead, you say, you know what, I have this other option, which is to struggle. And even if I don't know exactly where I'm going, I'm just not gonna give up. I'm gonna struggle, I'm gonna struggle. And I don't think anyone is better at teaching that than the Marines.

Mark McGrath: 26:48

Just like how not to quit when you get in a situation where And there's way, well, the SEALs would be on par, I think, but and there's uh um there's ways to do it where you've never you don't even have to have you can learn fight or flight response with uh with breath work. And you can learn you can learn how to do it without having any any any time in the in the Marine Corps at all, but it teaches your body and your central nervous system that same response that you're uh that you're talking about.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 27:15

Yeah, I think I think this is an opportunity to really give away some secrets here on building that adaptive capacity to understanding the environment, right? I think that's what you're talking about, both of you, and that's intuit to me, that's intuition or process or adaptive capacity. Now, we've had folks come on from ecological dynamics, talk about the uh perception action loop and constraints-led approach inside of sports, which we think is fantastic, perceptual control theory. Earlier we we talked a little bit about hey, we don't want to take an engineering approach towards humans and say that we're computers. We don't want to take the same idea, but we are seeing natural intelligence go back into AI or what we think uh the way the brain works through things like the free energy principle, active inference, and high product perceptual control theory as well. So can you help us understand how we develop that intuition or what John Boyd called finger spliting of fuel? Okay, yeah. So how do we do that?

Angus Fletcher: 28:03

You gotta be prepared, however, is that I'm a I spent 10 years working in AI and I think it's largely a hoax. Same. I think I think okay. So and I think that I think that the reason that humans are smart is because we do things that AI can't do. And so I think we've got to think of so let me give you a quick question.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 28:17

Well, let's build, let's build on that first. So Boyd brought up people, ideas, and things, right? Always in that order. So things are AI. Um, we're not gonna take an engineering approach and apply it to a human system. We don't want to do that. But we I think what is better is taking a natural intelligence approach, what we think we know about how the brain processes, the living things process, and try to create AI off of that. So large language models are really just the closed oodaloop, the the linear basic approach to what everybody gets wrong about John Boyd's work. So so we're with you 100% um with on this thought. And I don't think the military, the department of war is. I think a lot of folks in there don't understand that these engineering approaches are not how we're going to win war. So I want to put that in there. That's how the Chinese fight.

Angus Fletcher: 29:00

The Chinese are all in on AI because they're communists, and communism is a top-down system which is based on statistical inference. Yes, exactly.

Mark McGrath: 29:09

Well, also, also, too, what we were talking about earlier, uh the the just the difference between Green Berets and marine combined action in Vietnam versus the the institutional military that was all about body count and technology and metrics uh and whiz kids and all that happy horse shit. That's right, rock back and arrow.

Angus Fletcher: 29:30

Yeah. So okay, so let me give you a quick kind of just example of the difference between human intuition and computer intuition. So if you go back and you, you know, you if you read your Daniel Kahneman or you look at any computer science textbook, they'll tell you what intuition is, is that it's a pattern match. They'll tell you that. And there's a problem with this, which is that computers crush at pattern matching. You won't find any human that can pattern match like a computer can, but computers are terrible at intuition. They're unable to see the leading edge of the future. Meanwhile, children have pretty high intuition. Children are able to spot. I mean, this is why young kids are always spotting the next action trend faster than adults, right? So, you know, there's a certain kind of prime area where you see kind of in your teens, where you're sort of like maxing out your intuition, your ability to kind of anticipate the future. That's why entrepreneurs are typically younger, yada yada yada, right? That's why people who get Nobel Prizes are typically younger. All this, or you know, they discover the Nobel Prize from there because you have this intuition, which is not actually data-driven. What's actually happening there? Well, human intuition is the ability to spot exceptional information, which is the ability to spot an exception. So actually, intuition is your ability to see something that does not fit, not your ability to detect a pattern. It's the opposite of that. How do you train that up? There's lots of different ways to train it up. The simple and most basic way to train it up, which every green beret does, is just to travel. And by traveling, I don't mean, you know, like going to a resort and eating McDonald's, you know, in another country. I mean literally living in someone else's house, getting yourself immersed in other culture.

Mark McGrath: 30:54

Yeah. Why is I have to tell I have to tell you, so that actually came up at this event that I was here here in Manhattan last night, um, where one of the exercises that uh Dr. Anna Yusome, who's a psychiatrist at Yale, um who has been a guest on our show, and she's talking about spirituality and consciousness and these sorts of things. And she had us go through three exercises, and and one of one of them was, you know, like what is it about you that makes you you, makes you, you know, different or distinguished versus others? And the thing that I brought up was growing up the son of a career army officer that went to West Point, that we lived all over the world, and both of my parents had had itinerant lifestyles growing up. My my grandfather was an executive uh with Exxon, so they moved around a little bit and lived in other countries. And then my mother, uh her dad, who's also a Yaley like you, um they he was a uh he was an Episcopalian priest and they, you know, moved around from place to place. And then having that military experience as a kid, you were constantly in immersion, re-immersion, immersion, re-immersion. So you were learning different cultures, different languages, going to different countries, meeting. Now I interacted with a lot of kids whose moms were from Vietnam because their dads that had fought in the Vietnam War, they brought back a wife from Vietnam or their moms were Korean. So you're constantly exposed to like other cultures and and other perspectives such that it's not like, oh, I was born here and I lived here my entire life, and that's my that's my uh that's my worldview.

Angus Fletcher: 32:28

And so neurologically, what does that do? It does a couple things. So, like, um uh first of all, the reason that children are so good at spotting exceptions is because they're born into a world where everything to them is exceptional. So you're essentially putting yourself back in your kind of like child state of mind, where you're constantly being immersed in a place where everything is exception to you, exceptional to you. And all those kinds of parts of your narrative hardware and your brain are starting to pop in that situation. The other thing is you're discouraging what is the adult response to exceptions. So, what's the adult response to exceptions? The adult response to exceptions is to do what a computer does and regress them to the mean, or to skip over them as an exception. This is what computers do. So they basically discount exceptions. They say, oh, that's an inefficiency. You know, I need to I need to not pay attention to that because every second you're spending focusing on an exception is a second you're getting away from your core mechanism, your core productivity. So when we look at top executives, they spot tailorism, right? Tailorism, yes. Oh my gosh, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm uh definitely not a tailorist when I go to foreign countries. So don't don't be tailored. But a lot of the institutional thinkers are. Are they the foundation of Harvard Business School? And you know, and I by the way, I have, thanks to Army Special Operations, one of the most popular articles in HBR last year, a big feature article on how to become a leader based on special operations. But I will tell you that 99% of the world gets their business training from Harvard Business Review Online, and it's all tailorism. And we would do a lot better to send some of those folks into some military training or just get them to travel more.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 33:59

So yeah, so can you say that again? Can you can you say that all again? Because uh please, that's what we're trying to explain to folks is get away from Harvard and learn from Yeah, yeah.

Angus Fletcher: 34:08

Yeah, so so Harvard is great. So, like as I said, you can you can look this up. I have um I have a big feature. So they publish only a few features a year. I have a huge feature. It's called uh, you know, lessons on leadership from U.S. Army Special Operations. I talk about kind of all this brain science and all this kind of stuff. So, you know, I love Harvard, love the editors there. But I will tell you, based on my experience with Harvard Business Review, is that 99% of what they publish is a version of Taylorism or organizational psychology or all these things that grow out of tailorism, design thinking, all these things. These are totally fine in stable environments, which is to say they're fine for managers, which is to say they're fine for being inside a company which is data rich and its processes are not changing. The moment that you are confronted with anything new, you need to shift from management into leadership. You need to have initiative, you need to have imagination, you need to have common sense, which is something that Taylorism does not teach you. These are all things that you learn automatically almost your first day on the job uh in the military because the first thing, because what's the basis of the military? It's it's something called inherited problems. What are inherited problems? They're problems you didn't make. United States uh people made a problem for you, right? Welcome, you're welcome, military. Take this problem and solve it. And you're like, I don't have any training in solving this problem. It doesn't matter. You better solve it because now all of a sudden it's your job. And so you've got to get very, very quick at learning. You've got to get very, very quick at opening yourself to your environment. You've got to very, very quick because you also have inherited talents, right? Which is a kind of nice way of saying you're stuck with the people who happen to be on your squad. You've got to get very, very good at identifying what their strengths are. And one of the things that I love about the military is the military almost never throws anybody away. Now, occasionally you get some people, right? They just keep transferring them around and hoping that they stick somewhere. But for most good leaders in the military are able to look at individuals who haven't been activated yet, who nobody else has been able to figure out, and they're able to find out what makes them work. That's totally different from business where you just fire people immediately. So the entire purpose of the military is to identify what's exceptional in your environment, to identify what's exceptional in the members of your team. That's what powers leadership, that's what's different from management because that's what allows you to have an edge in a changing world which prioritizes innovation and initiative as opposed to optimization, efficiency, and just kind of squeezing a couple more numbers out of the system.

Mark McGrath: 36:19

So you do were you familiar with uh One Tribe at a Time? Yes. And and James Gant? So why didn't that catch on then? Like why didn't that work? In in the in the business community you mean? Or well, let's start with the army, but you know, you know, again, you could take the same concepts to the business community, which which which Ponch and I have talked a lot about and and tried to demonstrate. But like why why did something that seemingly a thing it seems like there was a thinker that was doing what you say and was pretty good at storytelling and pretty good at uh at interacting and and and pretty good at dealing with exceptional information and the model was working, but why how did it not?

Angus Fletcher: 37:03

But but the system didn't accept it. So here's the thing. So I don't want to get in trouble from the army for saying this, but this is true. Is when I praise the army, I praise the people in the army. I do not praise the system of the army. There we go. And I've spent an enormous amount of time watching all the work that we've done get thrown out of the system. So I've spent like the last couple of years with the army getting these like just really, you know, these phone calls from people who are like, oh my God, you know, they just threw out this thing that we did, they just threw out this other thing that we did, and so on and so forth. And so I can't explain the army. It's the largest bureaucracy in the entire world. It's totally dysfunctional like any bureaucracy. But what I do know is that those ideas stick around in individuals. And when individuals hit a crisis, they pull that book off the shelf and they learn from it. And that's my sense of how the military generally works is it's unable to systematize these insights, but they kind of stick around long enough in the culture that when people need them, they get them from word of mouth to somebody else.

Mark McGrath: 37:54

So do you think then that the reason that like that idea which General Purchase has told everybody to integrate this and operationalize this, so it was the system, because we, you know, Punch and I aren't aren't going to disagree with that. Like we know that systems drive behaviors, but so that so the system didn't allow that kind of thing to flourish.

Angus Fletcher: 38:15

Systems exist to perpetuate themselves. Yep. And what perpetuates a system is stasis. And so, you know, the thing that I think has always been the amazing thing about the military is that it's always managed to win despite being a system. It's not the system that helps it win. And you see this again and again in the military. I mean, the the smart folks that that that you know in the military always figure out ways to like bend the rules, break the rules. Everybody figures out how to kind of get it done. And you know, the military has this culture, which is per, I think, you know, maintained by the sort of senior NCOs, which, you know, when the system is helpful, and sometimes the system can be helpful in peacetime in terms of getting you your funding. I mean, there are ways to play the system, to work the system, you know, and certainly good NCOs know exactly how to do that. But the moment you get into a conflict space and the system is working against you, you just see everybody just kind of pushes it aside. And, you know, that relies again on common sense. Because if people push the system aside and just go totally rogue, you end up with like anarchic, violent, destructive behavior, right? You know, you end up with vigilante behavior. I mean, and there are instances of that obviously happening in special operations. But for the most part, there's a culture of special operations which is essentially the good outlaw. You know, you you've probably heard this term before, you know. And basically it's like, you know, we go outside the rules to kind of respect the rules in a way, right? You know, we we we we we we break the law in order to make the law, essentially.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 39:36

So the a lot of the constraints or rules are designed for a complicated domain. And I think you you it sounds to me like you're very familiar with complexity theory and you use a lot of unknown and unknowns and things like that. So yeah, neuroscience, complexity theory, and storytelling. Um, the connection to AI, what I'm hearing from you is hey, these things are really good in the complicated domain. Humans are fantastic in the complex domain. Uh, relationship between cause and effect is only known in retrospect. Um, and therefore, um not just only not just intuition, but common sense allows us to navigate that complex domain. Is is that ring true with you? And and do you have any more? That was an amazing synopsis.

Angus Fletcher: 40:12

You didn't need me on this podcast. You could have just said those words, you know. Um No, we need you on this podcast. No, no, we really do. Uh what interests me is how you train common sense. And this is another thing because like I went through so special operations actually has a common sense course. They have a course for common sense, and they essentially put me through it and I scored a negative. I scored a negative on common sense. And they were like, whoa, they're like, we we get people in here all the time. Because I think a lot of young people go into the course that essentially score zero, but scoring a negative is is is is amazing. Well, congratulations on that. That's amazing. I have negative common sense. And you know, of course, it's because I spend all my time in front of a computer or in a classroom. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I don't have the ability to make intelligent decisions when I don't have a lot of information, which is what common sense is. It's like, how do you make the right call?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 40:55

Let's put a pin in that for a second. Are you saying that people that spend a lot of time in front of their computers that don't go outside and engage with the external world probably don't have a lot of common sense? I'm telling you they probably have negative common sense like I do. Let's take it a step further. I've been told that you know every village has an idiot, but the internet brings them together.

Angus Fletcher: 41:11

So are we is that is I think that's mostly accurate, except I think it would be more accurate to say the internet makes them.

unknown: 41:18

Ah.

Mark McGrath: 41:19

Okay. Angus, so here's my question then. So we're we're talking about dealing with complexity and we're talking about how um you know the the m the Green Berets and the and the USMC cap and the in the complexities of Vietnam with a you know a a different you know in an Asian culture, an Eastern country, an Eastern language, an Eastern way of thinking, how they were able to thrive in that and and yet their dependence on what the on on what it was that was empowering to thrive was not technical, was not computers, was not munitions, was it was something else that engineers don't learn the way liberal arts people do, the way linguists do, the way psychologists do, historians, et cetera, philosophers, et cetera, et cetera.

Angus Fletcher: 42:09

Aaron Powell That's certainly right. And it and I will say, however, that over the last 20 years, kids who are getting a liberal arts education are learning less of it than kids who got a liberal arts education, you know, 40 years ago or 60 years ago. There's been a real narrowing of this. The main reason for that is what does school teach you? School teaches you that there's a right answer and the teacher has it. And even in liberal arts. Well, increasingly now in liberal arts. Yeah. You know, it used to be the case that you would kind of, you know, you take a class in philosophy and then you go over to literature and the two classes would be different. And so it'd be like going from one world to another. I mean, that's the basic idea. Is that you're constantly exploring all these different cultures. But increasingly, the humanities has narrowed in on a smaller and smaller set of truisms. Why? Because the humanities is detached from reality. And so you get this artificial culture that's essentially starting to replicate itself like any system that needs, I think, to kind of be disrupted. And people are trying to disrupt that now by adding this kind of, you know, these, you know, you know, right-wing ideologies into it. The problem is much more fundamental than that. The problem, the problem is that it's ideological at all, really, right? I mean, you know, I mean, the humanities should be a place where you explore different perspectives in a in a democratic way.

Mark McGrath: 43:12

Do you think that so disclosure, I'm I'm of the Jesuit system, so liberal arts, and my my BA was in history. So do you think that when open inquiry in a worldly view, exposing people to all those sorts of things, that when we've shied away from that or moved away from that, that actually hurts us in complexity, not helps us?

Angus Fletcher: 43:35

Yeah, absolutely.

Mark McGrath: 43:36

Yeah.

Angus Fletcher: 43:37

Yeah, no, 100%. Because you you've got to understand that that other people think differently than you. That's it. And why do other people think differently than you? Well, it's a biological thing. Every brain is different. And beyond that, biological success comes from the ability to surprise your adversaries. So the human brain evolved to think differently because that's its edge. So anytime a human is going into an environment, it's like, what can I do differently than other people? That's like your basic thought, you know? And and so, you know, repressive regimes try and suppress that by programming everybody and making them think the same. Whereas democratic environments say, let's use that. Let's use the fact that we're all thinking differently and figure out a way to have conversations. So a big part of a classroom, the idea there is you have conversations with other people who think differently than you. And the classroom is going to nurture those differences of perspective, not try and gain consensus, but actually allow you to understand somebody else at the same time as you remain yourself. And what that's doing is the same thing that, you know, the Marines or, you know, uh Mac V. Sog or whatever were doing in Vietnam when they were going in and and and and you know, building across cultures. They weren't creating Americans, they were allowing that culture to remain distinct while at the same time they were having a conversation.

Mark McGrath: 44:41

Ooh, absolutely. So what do you think we've given up then? Do you think it's our educational system that's that's emphasized more STEM and pulled people away from those things that allow for creativity and imagination?

Angus Fletcher: 44:54

It's standardized testing, which is infected high schools. It's basically what I would call kind of careerism, which is the idea that college exists to give you a stamp, a rubber stamp. So people aren't interested in learning anymore. They're just interested in getting the stamp. And also it's about the kind of ideological consolidation of the humanities. Um, you know, and there was a period of time, I would say kind of a sweet spot in the 90s, where you had the kind of older, more conservative humanists and you had the newer, kind of more progressive humanists, and they were just like fighting like cats and dogs inside departments. But that was great for students because you could go back and forth between like your 70-year-old professor who was like, Let me tell you the great books and the great classics, and you could have your new professor who's like, I'm gonna use some radical ideas. Now all those radical professors are the old guard, and there's no new radicals. And so as a result, we just basically have this ideological conformity, and that's the death of any system.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 45:42

So I'm curious about this. Uh, you in within the army, I'm sure you are aware of University of Foreign Military Cultural Studies, UFMCS, and and their now defunct red teaming school, which was created by Colonel Rodkoff. So why did it why did the military army get rid of that? If you're insane.

Angus Fletcher: 45:59

Steve, Steve. Because they're insane. Yeah, no, I mean, this is first of all, I mean, I I don't know the individual decision makers, and I'm sure the folks that I've talked to about this have all expressed heartbreak over it. So I know it's not like, you know, but I mean, getting rid of red teaming is nuts. Absolutely nuts. And I think everybody knows it. I mean, if you go into any sports team in America, any professional sports team, they spend all of their time red teaming. Right. That's why they're good, right? You know, you're always trying to kind of, you know, bring your adversary into the building to break you down. And the moment you stop doing that, and I think, you know, there's been this whole shift, and I don't know exactly why it is, but this shift towards optimization. The problem with optimization is it gives you this idea that there's a right way to win everything. And if we somehow just get that right way to win, then we're okay, you know? Yeah. Optimization biologically leads to extreme fragility. Any organism, any organism that's optimized to its environment is the first organism that goes extinct. Yep. You know, the human hand, not optimized, right? Totally not optimized, right? But good at a million things, right? It's adequacy, it has maximum adequacy. And so I think, you know, there is a culture of optimization, of efficiency. These things tend to take over. Over specialization. Over specialization, all these things, right? You know, and they're they're not good in militaries, and they're really, really bad for kids, which to go back to our earlier part of the conversation is what's the problem with schools. And they're also disasters for businesses. I mean, you're seeing now with businesses, there's this loss of growth, there's this loss of productivity. There's something called the productivity paradox, which I'm sure everybody who's a business person knows about, which is that we keep dumping technology into companies that doesn't increase their productivity because we're not accessing the human potential inside companies, and humans are becoming widgets.

Mark McGrath: 47:34

And all isn't that the isn't that the Vietnam example? We'll just keep throwing more money and tech and sensors at all the problems. That's right.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 47:43

Well, let me ask you that. This now is is that happening now in the DRW uh in the US? Are we are we becoming more dependent on more tech or people?

Angus Fletcher: 47:52

I mean, you know, again, I I don't want to speak out of turn and I speak for myself, not for the Department of War. Right. But I mean, all I see everywhere is how special operations is going to suddenly get into cyber and how this is the future. And there's no question that cyber is a great tool. But the moment you start thinking that all of these battles are gonna be fought in this kind of technological zone of IT and the rest of it, right? You're taking away the human edge. Yeah. You're taking away the fact that if you drop, and there's a uh a buddy of mine who's a uh um who just recently retired from special operations. His name is uh Colonel Gaines, Tom Gaines. He just wrote a great uh novel called Quantum Dagger. So I'm just gonna promote that here on your podcast. Go read Quantum Dagger. It's basically about a bunch of green berets who have to go up against the Chinese AI. And it's basically a story about how the AI is like winning and winning and winning and winning until all of a sudden catastrophic, right? Problems. And so, and and and this is the thing, is we're losing what made America America and what made it prosperous and what made it succeed, which is this ability to be different uh in a positive way, you know?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 48:53

We just had uh Fred Stein on the show. He's the co-author of Network Centric Warfare. He worked with Admiral Zabrowski years ago. So the bottom line was in 1999, early 2000, we were trying to figure out um how to use information, information for the external environment. How do we improve organizational and individual performance? That got lost into hey, we need better systems, better technology, and and so we're this isn't changing. That's what I'm getting at, is no matter how much we push people, ideas, and things, um, the systems can be driven towards things, technology. That's the systems want the things.

Angus Fletcher: 49:26

And there's no question that intelligence is really important. So if you if you get great surveillance on your adversary, that's incredible, right? If you can get eyes inside, that's incredible. But the problem is increasingly, the more we've shifted to tech, the more we've lost human intelligence, which is way more valuable than surveillance intelligence. You know, I mean, if you look at this operation that just happened in Venezuela, that was essentially a single human on the inside, which gave us all of that information. And you couldn't replicate that with a billion satellites spying and spying and spying.

Mark McGrath: 49:54

What do you think of like say 9-11, where 19 guys with box cutters, they defeated the system with all the sensors, all the satellites, every all the tech, all the security, everything.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 50:05

Humans are always going to beat systems. And and then that led to a more rigid system now, right? I mean Right.

Angus Fletcher: 50:10

And now we all have to do this insane thing at the airport. We all take our shoes off for no reason. Like there's no one putting a bomb in their shoes. And yet, I guarantee you, over a billion shoes have been removed and scanned for no reason whatsoever because the system has decided this is how to keep people safe.

Mark McGrath: 50:24

Yeah. Unless you have TSA Pre. Right.

Angus Fletcher: 50:27

Well, that's a way for the system to extract money from from you for its stupidity, right?

Mark McGrath: 50:32

Right, for its own survival, as you say. So, so you you don't then foresee, I don't know, I doesn't sound like it. I mean, guerrilla warfare will still work.

Angus Fletcher: 50:44

Yeah. Of course, yeah. And you know, when you're fighting a conventional army, you're gonna use conventional uh, you know, response to some extent, right? Because that's how you balance and pause it. But then the guerrilla warfare is what allows you to get inside and disrupt and create chaos inside. So in any conflict, there's gonna be guerrilla warfare. It's just a question of how much. And you do need some conventional response. I mean, if China shows up uh with you know, thousands and thousands of warships and planes, we need some way to knock those down. We can't just all of a sudden be running around. You know, we you got to balance your enemy to some extent, you know, but you can't rely on that to create victory. Um, that's just gonna get us back to World War I and the stalemate and this kind of you know, um, two giants just basically engaging in a war of attrition.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 51:28

And and and that's a disaster. I want to get your thoughts on this. We talk a lot about being in World War III now. It's a cognitive war. It's happening, you know, the battlefield is our mind. So fifth generation warfare um, you know, PsyOps. How does your work tie into that?

Angus Fletcher: 51:44

Yeah, well, I did in fact work quite a lot with PSYOPS units inside special operations as as you might imagine. And, you know, to your point, essentially, what you're trying to do there is you're sort of trying to win the narrative. You're trying to figure out how to win the story. And if you can win the narrative, you can win the story, then you get people on board without fighting because they realize that they've already lost and they realize that you've already won. And I think for a long time and that's Sun Tzu. That's boy. Exactly. Sun Tzu. No, I totally agree. Yeah, yeah. And now that but the problem is that people don't understand what a winning story is anymore.

Mark McGrath: 52:14

Why do they so you're saying that they always want to see a trigger pulled or a bomb fly? They they don't realize that you could, you know, like we're seeing some of the ex posts now. It looks like there's going to be a deal on whatever, but there didn't have to be a shot fired. There didn't have to be a a life taken.

Angus Fletcher: 52:32

Well, what I think it is, is I think the military in most cases would prefer not to pull a trigger, but I think that they don't know how to make the stories effectively. And I think that they always default back to what doing what they do well, which is pulling a trigger, because it's easier to pull a trigger. I mean, it's easier to send in Delta Force, hypothetically, if they exist, than it is to come up with a, you know, a counter-narrative that shifts South America onto our side. And the reason for that is because, you know, when you look at how people use narratives nowadays, they don't engage with their audience. So they're just telling a story of how I, the storyteller, want it to be, as opposed to engaging with my audience and figuring out how to connect with them. The reason that in the, you know, after the Second World War, the reason we were successful at rebuilding Germany, rebuilding Japan is we were able to find narratives that work for those countries. And as a result, they became huge economic engines, which then boosted the city.

Mark McGrath: 53:17

Oh, what a great point. So, so when so we've had, we're Punch and I were just talking about this in our little gap there, about Charlie Pratzman that was talking about how uh MacArthur brought over all these statisticians and whatnot to really reinvent the Japanese economy. But what it was was is a fusion of respecting their culture with sort of the greatest hits of of Western culture. Whereas when I heard you just now say, it's a lot of time we're going around to enforce our culture or our template on something where it can't, it can't even flourish anyway, and all it does is create more conflict.

Angus Fletcher: 53:56

I mean, we all know this is the story of Iraq. We went in there, we then ripped out their entire operating system and tried to replace it with our kind of operating system, and then the result was ISIS and chaos. And what you got to do is you gotta go in there and say, what story is being told here? How do we make that story better? Because we're America, we make everything better. We have Hollywood, right? You give us your story, we make it better. That's what we do, you know? And we could do that again and again and again. And when people see a story that's not only better, but also possible. Because, you know, a lot of what happens with, you know, I would say bad stories, you know, the stories like emanating out of Russia or whatever, is they're lies. So, you know, they they say, oh, things will be better, but they're not possible or they're not gonna happen. Whereas America creates better stories that can work. Like that's the key. Another name for that, right, is a plan, is a strategy. You know you've got a good commander when they give you something that's ambitious, an ambitious narrative, but you know it can work if everybody just gets on board. And that's what motivates people to try hard. And we've gotten out of the business of doing that. Instead, we're trying to sell quick fixes and big fantasies. Yeah. And if we go back to this narrative project, like you're talking about, as you're calling World War III, if we go back to this project and say, all right, what can we actually do to get on the same page as everybody in South America? How can we build a story of what it looks like to have an America, right? What would that look like? How would we all gain from that? What are the steps we've got to take? You know, um, that's uh a future which can happen. Whereas, you know, whereas, you know, um what we're doing now is we're is is is is is we're not putting in that kind of like deeper psychological work and we're just trying to drop systems on top of things and act as those systems can fix it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 55:30

So Angus, how familiar are you with uh Dave Snowden's work on complexity theory and Kinevin and narrative? Are you briefing? I'm relatively convinced. Yeah, okay. So the the so we've worked with them in the past, and and the idea is to amplify the stories that you want and dampen the ones you don't, right? So as leaders in a complex environment, we want to collect those narratives, the stories that people are telling uh each other at a water cooler or what have you. So this is fundamental. What you're telling us is consistent with what we've heard from others. It's consistent with what we understand um on how the brain works from both neuroscience and cognitive science. And it's very consistent with uh sports, too, right? You don't want to go in and and impose your your your approach onto the context. You want to understand the context first, understand where you are, right?

Angus Fletcher: 56:13

Why are the Seahawks doing so well this year? Because they had a coach come in and activate these latent narratives inside all those players. You know, the the players are basically the same, you know? Um, the coach just kind of helped them find that bigger story.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 56:24

And that's that's the role of a leader or a coach, and a coach is a leader, to do that. So, so I I I I don't know anything about the Seattle story. Can you go a little bit more? Like now that we're gonna be coming up on Super Bowl or Championship weekend?

Angus Fletcher: 56:35

I I just mean that they have a relatively young coach who does not have amazing new schemes, does not have anything particularly special, but just went in there and, you know, rebooted what Pete Carroll had there before and was able to find a way to get everybody to buy in collectively, particularly on the defense, the idea if we just do this, this is gonna work. I'm gonna tell you a narrative of the future. And any good and effective coach is gonna come in there and say, Here's your story. And I'm gonna tell you your story to you so well that I teach you things about yourself that you didn't know, but that you realize them as yours, right? That's what a good coach does is they unlock something about you that's true, and you're like, okay, this guy knows me. And then he says, now I'm gonna do it like Shakespeare did. I'm gonna take all these different characters and I'm gonna put them together in one play. We now have one play, and that one play is gonna connect us all, and it's gonna be better than the other guy's play because all of us are gonna be connected into this one play, whereas the other guy, he's got half the guys on board on their play, right? And he's telling the other half he's trying to force them to conform to the play. And so good leaders elicit the narratives, the stories, the lives of the people in their organizations, combine them into a larger narrative that's going the direction the leader wants. And that kind of organic process is what leads to victory.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 57:45

Yeah, you ready for this? I want to switch it up a little bit and talk about the market because we we fall a lot on the market in here and we know that there's always a narrative as to why the market went up or down, right? Um the day we're recording this as 21 January, 20th of January, we had a pretty big down day in the market. And the narrative was um, I think Greenland and everybody forgot about what was going on in Japan with the yen and everything going on there. So why, why, why are narratives so important in the market and why are they always wrong? I'll give you that thesis.

Angus Fletcher: 58:14

Well, okay, so um we've already talked about broadly why narratives are so important generally. I mean, a narrative is making you think that you can see the future, is essentially what it's saying. It's saying, like, here's the effect of this cause. And so uh the moment you lock in on a narrative and say that this narrative is true, then you know, and if that narrative's negative, you're like sell, sell, sell. That narrative narrative is positive, bye, bye, bye. This is fundamentally misunderstanding how narrative is supposed to work in the brain. The purpose of narrative is not to tell you what's true or even what's probable. The purpose of a narrative is to multiply possibilities, it's to increase the action space. And so, really, as a successful investor, you want to go into the market with five different possible narratives of things that could happen. And then you want to be able to kind of rapidly shift between them, or because you've got those narratives, you want to be able to be more able to come up with a sixth or seventh or an eighth, right? Once you've got those initial five. And so I think the problem is that most investors don't understand how narratives work, and so they get caught in them. But if you're losing money, somebody else is probably making money. Yeah. So even if the market is going down, there's probably still somebody out there who's making money off that downturn. And that person is the person who's able to see more narratives than you.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 59:20

I mean, I try this. If the systems drive behaviors, then it's um probably a good thing for those that are making money off you losing money to tell you a narrative. Uh so, right? So we're talking heads. Totally agree.

Angus Fletcher: 59:31

Yeah, no, and that's what systems do. Systems try and create narratives and they try and make it seem like those narratives are faded or predetermined because that shifts all the power into the system and it takes all the power out of you because then you can't make your own story.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 59:43

Let's let's get a little bit uglier here, if we if we don't mind. And that is get back to the cognitive war, the AI space, the um access to more information, information flow. And and I want to include in that the um our attention spans and maybe memes. How do they all work in this cognitive war that we're that that we claim we're in right now?

Angus Fletcher: 1:00:02

What they're doing is they're disrupting our ability to make our own narratives. So computers cannot think in narrative. This is a mechanical fact, and they will never think in narrative. I can explain this to you in technical detail, but basically, computers think in equations, and equations cannot be narrative. Um, so because computers think in equations, they also think in associations. That's why when you go in your note, your news feed on your phone, it's always just like flashing you a whole bunch of stuff, you know, that it associates, you know, this word, this keyword makes it think of this article, makes it think of that article. The more time you spend interacting with computers, the more time your brain starts to respond like they think. And so you lose your narrative capacity and start thinking associationally, which is to say you're thinking in this space of constant distraction and things that are just tangentially connected because they have a word or an image in common, you know? And that destroys your common sense. It destroys your ability to maintain and sustain an action over time. So what we're seeing, particularly with young people, is they're spending so much time on technology, they can't make plans for their own lives. And if you can't make a plan for your own life, you go into a threat response faster, you panic faster. When you panic, you look to somebody else to give you a plan. And so that's why young people are becoming more and more deferential. Same thing if you're spending too much time on your computer staring at the market, you know, you're seeing all these lights go off, you know, that's decreasing your ability to make long term plans. The good investors that I know usually make two or three. Major investments a year. So I know a lot of investors who are have values in the billions. Yeah. And they usually do not go on and make 45 trades in a day. They usually will make a few trades over the course of a year because they're building that long-term plan. And then when they see that moment for high leverage, they go all in.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:01:35

Trend followers. Yeah. What about tribalism? So is that is this um you said when children are can't think for themselves, they're looking for somebody to think for them, right? So that is that partially explained.

Angus Fletcher: 1:01:49

Yeah. So let's talk about why this is a normal behavior in children and why it becomes, you know, bad in adults. So what you want from a child is you want someone who is aggressively exploring their environment, you know, who takes a lot of initiative and is constantly pushing the boundaries. But the moment they get into danger, you want them to immediately listen to you. And so the way the children work is they're constantly happy, going around, going around, going around. But the moment that they get scared, or the moment you say, you know, you yell at them, they immediately go into a threat response, a fight of a flight response, which makes them susceptible to doing exactly what you tell them to do. So you see children become submissive very quickly the moment they get scared. The reason that that happens is because the brain has a bias to action. You know, the brain always wants to be acting. It always either wants to be generating its own actions when that's okay, or taking on an action that works in the outside world. Now, what happens when people form into tribes, essentially, where they all share the same narrative, and that tribe that gets divorced from reality is because they're all essentially in a state of group fear. It's another way of saying that is herd behavior. Why does herd behavior happen? Well, because a shock occurs to the system, people have been living inside the system for so long they can't think outside the system, therefore they can't come up with plans for themselves, therefore they just take the plan from the next person. And then they all take the plan from the next person, then before you know it, they're all acting the same way and they're a herd or they're a tribe. So that's where that comes from. And the moment you see a group of people just acting the same way, you know that on some level they're in a state of shock. Or they're subject to a psyop. Yes. Whether you well, psy-op exists to create shock, right? Yeah. I mean, the way that a psyop is effective. Now, I will say the most effective psy-ops actually tell the truth. And there's a small number of really effective psyops that go into it. Tell us more about that. Well, what I mean by this is I'm so so I've been going on and talking a lot about why I love America on this podcast. And to just to be clear, I'm an immigrant. I'm a naturalized citizen. And so when I say America, I mean that I chose to become an American. You know, I'm one of those people that gave up my own citizenship to become an American. And I think when you talk to, you know, if you talk to people who are, you know, refugees from, you know, the former Soviet Union, Soviet blocks, whatever, you you discover a certain kind of person who really, really likes America. And, you know, the reason we really like America is because America gives us the chance to tell our own stories. And so the most effective psyops, I've always believed, is to go out to the rest of the world and be like, here's why America's actually better. Like, we're not actually engaging in propaganda here. It's actually better. Like the food here is actually better, right? The opportunities here are actually better. Like we're not saying that there's unlimited opportunities or it's magic or the streets are made of gold, but we are saying it's better. And so the most effective psyops has always been we are better. And that's why I think when you look at Germany and Japan after the Second World War, we were able to convince them of that. We were able to show, look, you know, we are actually what we're doing is actually better. Get on board the democracy train. Get out of the, you know, the fascist systems that you're in, get in the democracy train. So the most effective psy-ops always lean into that. Now, I've seen a tendency in psyops to lean into fear, because if you can get people to be scared, as we've talked about, you can get them to kind of do what you want in the short term. So there's a tendency in psy-ops to not lean into America is better and instead lean into, you know, if you don't do what we tell you, you're gonna die. You know, your commanders are gonna murder you. You know, I've seen a lot of kind of like anti-ISIS kind of psy-ops, which is all about how, you know, terrible things are gonna happen to you if you stay in ISIS. But the most effective psy-ups is always here's the true story of what will happen if you become an American. Your life will get better. Your children's lives will be better. And the only thing that that requires us to do as Americans is live up to the American dream and keep making America better. You know, and I think at the moment we're sort of in a we're in a rocky batch here, you know? And it's unclear whether the next generation of Americans is going to be better off than the current generation.

Mark McGrath: 1:05:38

It's interesting. Uh the remark about PSY-OPS being about truth, it's interesting to me. I I I would always thought it like a PSY-op would be about influence.

Angus Fletcher: 1:05:47

Well, yeah, but what's more influential than the truth? Like if I come on here and tell you that so like there must have been moments in your life when someone sat you down and told you the truth and it prompted a conversion experience in you. They're like, whoa, because you realize, like, I I mean the first time you read Marshall McLuhan, maybe, or whatever, right? Or the first time you read about the Oodaloop, right? I mean, the most profound and sustained moments of influence come from somebody revealing the actual nature of reality to you.

Mark McGrath: 1:06:12

Um What what do you think then when you see I mean, I I I would say like social media is a really good example here in the United States, particularly when there is uh a chasm between two sides that seem to be heavily influenced, but saying the opposite thing. So then how would you how would you how would you square for that? Because, you know, it it as I look at it, it's I don't know if I call it a PSY-op, but it's certainly an influence operation that you could get people to look alike, think alike, dye their hair the same color, put it in the same septum rings, sit on the other side, have the same hats, have the same American whatever. Like, I totally agree.

Angus Fletcher: 1:06:53

I totally agree. But what we're talking about there is again that these are individuals who are caught in a state of shock and purposelessness and despair. I mean, if you're spending all your time doom scrolling, it's pretty easy to get influenced. And what I'm talking about here is first of all, let's start to influence the people who really matter, right? You know, the people who are not doom scrolling all the time. And second of all, if you can start to influence the doom scrollers in a positive way, then they stop doom scrolling because they're not going to be on social media anymore because they're gonna have found a deeper truth. And, you know, there's different versions of that deeper truth. I believe in science, I believe in democracy, you know, I believe in America, I believe in these kinds of things. These are the things I think we should be bringing to people. I believe in the OODA loop, you know, I believe in these kinds of, and I believe that the more that people find these durable narratives that are true, and when I say they're true, what I mean by that is that they actually work in reality. You know, um they make your life better, they help explain the nature of reality more effectively. They give you more power to do accomplish things you want to accomplish. I mean, that's what, you know, uh an effective narrative is. And I think what you see in social media is a lot of people who are lost because they're spending so much time on social media that they've lost their own momentum.

Mark McGrath: 1:07:57

Do you think it's complex more complex though? Like where there's certainly mental health is certainly an issue. So uh SSRIs, you know, um diet. I don't know. I mean, the is it more nuanced?

Angus Fletcher: 1:08:14

Yeah, okay. So to your point, yes, there's a lot of factors that are contributing to the rise of behavior. But I do think that just in general, the more you use social media, the more it pushes you in that direction that you're already going. Um it would be better if people ate better. It would be better if people exercised more. These are all important things. I don't disagree.

Mark McGrath: 1:08:32

Yeah. Let me ask you. All media are an extension of some human function. So here we find the electronic media, social media is an extension of the human human nervous system. And the suggestion would be that if you when you look at it and get a sampling, the human nervous system doesn't look like it's in very good shape.

Speaker 1: 1:08:53

I would definitely agree with that with that assessment, yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:08:56

Aaron Ross Powell I've got a question about podcasting now. This is kind of interesting. In the last few months, uh Moose and I have noticed that uh people are watching more of our YouTube videos, more they're watching more of the conversation, they are listening to it. So if that makes sense. Um so uh my hypothesis is that they are looking for connection. Um that that in the here in the near future, if if uh we do see the growth of AI and uh people become less human, if you want to go call it that, that they'll be looking for more connection. So, how do podcasts fit into the world of storytelling and narrative?

Angus Fletcher: 1:09:30

What I think is really great about podcasts is you get individuals talking honestly from a range of experiences. You can have pretty niche podcasts that allows them to be honest, candid, explore things that that they're experts in. And, you know, the problem increasingly with the way that big media is, is it it is it has to appeal to a broad segment of people, which means it can't do anything actually interesting. And as a result of being unable to do anything interesting, you're not gonna actually change anybody's mind. And you're not gonna be able to connect with anybody on a deep level. I mean, when I first started working with special operators, the first thing I did was I started listening to tons and tons of military podcasts. And those podcasts changed my life because all these folks would come on and start talking about their real experience in the military. And it completely, I was someone who before I started when the Army first called me, I was like, I'm not working with the Army, I'm not working with a bunch of killers. What are you talking about? You know, I'm a professor, you know, we don't like the army, we don't like the military. And then the more I started listening to these podcasts, the more I started to realize, no, I've completely got the military backwards. Like I don't understand any of this. And I do think that podcasts provide people with that opportunity to explore, to discover, to find things that are different, that are interesting. I mean, I'm really glad that you guys are doing the work that you're doing because I mean, if you'd asked me in a million years if there would be a podcast dedicated to the Oodaloop, that would never occur to me. But I mean, I think it's genius that you guys are doing it. So that's what I think. I think it's a place for people to come together and learn from experts in an authentic way.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:10:52

Aaron Powell The great thing is we'll never run out of content because the OODA loop is it to us, it really represents how living systems interact with the environment, not the not a decision-making process. And I think um a reason we we want you on the show is to make sure that military leaders understand that the way they look at the oodaloop, and I'll give you the example. NATO NATO just put out a document a couple weeks ago on cognitive warfare and then used the linear approach to the oodaloop, even though they had the correct sketch in there, a really good version of it. But what they're saying is, hey, this nonlinear thing that we're talking about in cognitive warfare, it it disrupts this linear thing called the OOD loop. And we're like, no, no, they're there, you're actually you're doing this wrong. You you need to use the nonlinear approach to oodloop, and that'll open you up to understanding peak performance flow strategy, the Toyota production system, AI, uh, large language models, which are, again, the linear oodaloop, and then the next generation of AI, which looks like it's active inference or something connected to uh three or four dimensions, um, which is really what the oodaloop is. So there's there's so many aspects I think military military leaders get wrong uh about this thing they claim they know so much about. And and you can see it on every news channel, they'll come out and say, we got to disrupt their OODA loop, and and sometimes they'll they'll get the acronyms wrong too.

Angus Fletcher: 1:12:12

Well, you know, what I'd like to say there is probably our military is just kind of doing a little bit of a dodge there. You know, they don't want to put the real truth out there uh in public because, you know, backdoors, they've got to, you know, keep the OODA loop to themselves. That's what I'd like to think. But you mean look, I mean, the moment I went into special operations, everyone's like, oh, you gotta read Klauswitz. Nobody has special operations for these Klauswitz. Klauswitz is brilliant. Everybody should read Klauswitz, but nobody does. So I mean, to a certain extent, there's always a small group keeping the torch alive. That's just always how it's gonna be, I think, in these in these environments.

Mark McGrath: 1:12:42

And that's we call we call them uh when they've written a lot, you can see it on the Substack, uh, the guardians of decay.

Speaker 2: 1:12:50

Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 1:12:50

That they make sure that the uh the entropy is well well in place. Like, but but it's almost like in you know, in markets, it's it's the uh the whole Keynes versus Hayek. Well, Hayek was right, but he lost. Why? Keynes was more influential. It's the same thing, you know, uh Clauswitz say versus Sun Tzu. I mean, Boyd eviscerated Clawswitz, he he debunked it, the the the entire the entire thing. Yet still it's the canon.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:13:19

Yeah. But I think uh Keynes read Shakespeare, is that correct?

Angus Fletcher: 1:13:23

Keynes read Shakespeare? Yeah. I mean, everybody, you know, everybody who has an idea has read Shakespeare, whether it's a good idea or a bad idea. Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 1:13:30

Do you find so you're a professor of, you know, in the English department, um, and as I mentioned, you know, being a liberal arts guy, uh my almost officially minored in British literature. I don't are people gravitating towards the English department, the history department, the philosophy department in state universities? Aaron Powell No, no.

Angus Fletcher: 1:13:50

We're so just uh like a quick thing here. First of all, I love English departments and I could only exist inside the English department, even though I'm not really an English professor, right? I'm like this crazy neuroscientist. And so I think we should put all the money in the world into English departments. But no, in my department, we basically have the same number of majors as we have professors practically. You know? Um and and that's that contraction has happened over the last 10 years. Like we've totally imploded. We've lost almost all. And I'm being essentially moved over to the business school.

Mark McGrath: 1:14:19

I mean business school. I I think that maybe you probably have more uh situational awareness on us than I do, but was it that in state universities, like the bottom major was mine, history. Um that then, you know, then philosophy, literature, linguistics, whatever, but like number one in state universities was exercise science.

Speaker 1: 1:14:43

Yeah.

Angus Fletcher: 1:14:44

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, we had for a while like the biggest major here was like communications, which is kind of a little bit of a pseudoscience, to be totally honest. Um, and I think in general, you know, the the challenge, as we've talked about before, is that people don't really come to university to learn anymore. They come to get a certificate. Yeah. And if you're gonna learn, you got to go into a classroom where you don't know anything and you're prepared to get a C. I mean, that's really the only way to learn. And if you don't have that, then what you get is this kind of slide towards students going into classes where they know they're gonna get an A and then they're not being challenged too much, and then everything just kind of homogenizes.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:15:20

You sound like most executives in organizations is they don't want to learn anything new. They just want to be told what they already know. That's exactly right. That's why they're so successful, obviously. Right.

Angus Fletcher: 1:15:28

And that's why what else do they have to know?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:15:30

And the consultants that you do that are no longer useful because AI can, you know, a large language model can tell a leader what they already know. That's exactly what I think. I love that, by the way.

Mark McGrath: 1:15:39

Do you think that universities, I mean, really, I mean, because you hear this all the time, that they're that it's less of an education or open inquiry or learning, it's more of an indoctrination.

Angus Fletcher: 1:15:49

I don't think it's really an indoctrination in the sense that I don't I think everyone's pretty skeptical about what happens inside universities, but I think it's an indoctrination in the sense that everybody realizes that they kind of have to go along with the ritual, you know, and and pretend like they learned something. And I think to that extent there's a kind of like giant kabuki theater thing happening. It's the university. Um, what I would say is I think universities are gonna come back. I think people have had enough. How so? Well, what I mean, so I'm the fact that they moved me over to the business school, basically what the business school is saying is they're basically saying we realize that AI has basically replaced most of the instruction that we've been doing here for the last few years. We've got to figure out something new. And what did the business school, which is the most successful unit at Ohio State, decide is new? They decided what's new is what I'm doing, which is basically the humanities. And they're like, we want to basically bring in someone who's gonna teach our students to think smart in low information environments, to be able to tell effective stories, you know, to role play, all these kinds of things which are really based at the humanities. So my sense is that there's going to be a bounce back because I think people have started to have enough. I mean, you know, from our moment, it just seems like, oh my goodness, where can we go? But there have been plenty of periods in history where there have been these kinds of blips and weird things that happened. Do you do you think so?

Mark McGrath: 1:17:00

I mean, this is what I wonder. I mean, the I mean, I could take right now, my master's is in economics. I could I could take right now and create a full-length graduate course on Google Notebook LM using using publicly available PDFs of things that I read. I mean, is the is the university in that sense is it is it proving that it's it's uh to your point about more of a certification or a rite of passage versus uh actual authentic learning because you can get everything online for free right now.

Angus Fletcher: 1:17:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this again goes back to what I really took out of the special operations pipeline. Because basically the whole thing about the special operations pipeline is like 5% is instruction and 95% is experiential learning. Like once we give you the instruction, we're then gonna force you through these exercises again and again and again. And that's what we're trying to do at the business school. And I think that's where you're gonna see colleges start to come back, is you need to have an experienced essentially trainer in the room. And, you know, I'm gonna give you the, you know, the slide from the econ deck or whatever, and then I'm gonna say, okay, you've got your company started and your investors have just walked away because this thing just happened. What do you do? You know, and then you're like, oh, well, I do this. I'm like, well, you know what? Your stocks just doubled. Now you have all this extra cash. What are you doing with that cash, right? You know, and we start to basically role-play these scenarios and put the economics into an actual simulation environment that allows them to practice before they get to the real world.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:18:22

It sounds to me like your business school recognizes that non-technical skills are more important in this environment than anything else. So you're gonna want to look at the interactions, which includes leaders' intent, telling the story, understanding um how to leverage cognitive diversity through those techniques such as red teaming, right? Yes. So so where I'm going with this is everything that a at this age of AI is doing to us is forcing us to go back to becoming more human. Is that right?

Angus Fletcher: 1:18:46

That's right. That's exactly right. I mean, that's always kind of the way that history works, you know, is we kind of go in one direction and then we're like, okay, yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:18:53

So you need some experienced trainers and people that may have lived in special operations or in a world of uh low information who have experienced things like teaming, uh red teaming, uh, who understand flow, who understand the oodle loop. And I'm just kind of throwing this out there as you know, understand sacrifice, suffering.

Mark McGrath: 1:19:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:19:11

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's best to learn from those people who have experienced that. And it sounds to me like it's it it's a good thing to learn from those that come from the military that have that background in teaming, in distributed leadership, and understanding complex adaptive systems, right?

Angus Fletcher: 1:19:27

That's exactly right. And we're we we have a bunch of special ops and military instructors that we use. And you know, the only thing I would say to someone who's in there in the military who's thinking about trying to, you know, you know, get into business or something like that is business is gonna attempt to socialize you into thinking like a business person. I see this happen all the time with folks when they transition out of the military, is they get this moment of like fear and they're like, oh, I've got to like do what the you know the civilians are doing. I'm gonna like figure out how to fit into the system. And when you do that, you lose your edge. Yes. And, you know, the folks that I've seen be the most successful in their transitions out of the military, a lot of them, what they do is they start their own businesses, they have this kind of you know entrepreneurial thing, or they're able to be brought into a business where they're actually listened to and you know, their experience is respected.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:20:08

So I'm gonna I'm gonna add to that. Sometimes we see folks come from the military, they jump out of the cockpit and they say, I know how to do this flawlessly. They use effects-based operations, they use things that are um have bounded applicability and say this is how it works everywhere. We're saying that's not true, right? So that's what Moose and I have have done with the show and what we've done with Substack is that, hey, look, these things have context. And I think you talk about um uh maybe let's go back to the uh Kinevin framework. So in the in the center there, you have confusion, uh, which has I think you wrote about this in your book, not necessarily these words, but when you know you're confused, that's a good thing. Um and what we call that is aporetic or aporia, and and that's actually saying I am not applying the wrong method in the wrong context. It's just saying I'm pausing right now because I don't know where I am. Is that true?

Angus Fletcher: 1:20:55

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, now you've got to, I would say, once you get into a state where you realize you're dealing with unknown unknowns, which I would call is kind of the ultimate form of confusion, you know, when your anxiety is kind of off the charts and you're sort of like, there's so much happening here in my environment that I don't know. What you got to do in that moment is you do got to take a pause and say, is there someone else in my immediate environment who I trust who knows the way? In which case, absolutely learn from them. But if you look around, To right and left, and there's nobody, then you know, run ahead. And I think that, you know, my experience with military individuals is they're far more emotionally comfortable with that experience than most business people. Business people freeze.

Mark McGrath: 1:21:31

I did actually, um, so I go around and unpack that more because I think that's a very incisive point.

Angus Fletcher: 1:21:37

Well, I just did a training the other day at a very large company that will remain nameless. And so a lot of what I get asked to do now is is go around and kind of you know talk about these kinds of special operation mindsets. And I'd gotten three words into the talk and I was interrupted and they were like, please don't use negative words. And I was like, What do you mean? They're like, you use the word failure. Like, please don't use that word here. And I was like, why, why, why would that? It's like, well, because negative words create negative thinking and then negative thinking creates negative outcomes. I was like, no, it's the opposite. First of all, if something is bad and you say that it's bad, that's called reality. You know, like, you know, and so what I think actually, when I experience what happens in a lot of businesses, is they practice things that I would call dissociative. So they basically, you know, when something bad happens, they just pretend like it didn't happen. You know, we're not gonna have a hard conversation right now because we're gonna pretend like that thing just didn't happen. This is endemic in in you. I actually have to teach classes on how to have hard conversations in businesses because people won't do it. Whereas if you go into any military environment, they're like, what do you mean hard conversation? I just yelled at that guy, he yelled back at me, then we hugged it out, and we went on, and then we yelled at each other some more, you know, and and so all of those level, what I'm talking about in terms of the level of emotional comfort. What I mean is that you've been in the situations, not just hypothetically, but you've been in the situations. And you understand that you have a capacity when you're confused to continue to act. You understand that you have a capacity, even when you hate the guy next to you, to talk it out and then bond tighter over that and then become brothers. You know, you understand that emotionally. It's not just a conceptual thing, but it's something that you've lived. And I think, you know, when you start to bring that, which I would call wisdom, I would call lived knowledge wisdom. When you start to bring that wisdom into businesses, it does tend to make people nervous because people at businesses actually have not experienced very much of the world. And they spend a lot of their time being concerned they're just gonna get fired or made redundant, you know? Um, and so the idea of acting with initiative is is is is is very low on the kind of order of emotional comfort.

Mark McGrath: 1:23:29

I was in asset management for 15 years after the military, and I once got told I I used to basically drive my business by teaching how to integrate John Boyd's thinking into you know building your business and your markets, things like that. I'll never forget this one portfolio manager who told me, he says, if this was important, it wouldn't have been taught in the military. I would have learned it at Harvard. So don't waste my time. I'd be like Yeah.

unknown: 1:23:56

Cool.

Angus Fletcher: 1:23:57

By the way, I mean something about elite institutions, which I think anyone who's been at an elite institution can understand is they're very self-regarding, just like they're very vulnerable. When you're self-regarding, you're very inward-looking. When you're very inward-looking, you don't learn. And you essentially just become very conformist. Yeah, they're closed systems. There's a closed system. And so actually, you know, when you're at Harvard, the safest assumption to make at Harvard is that you're actually not learning very much. Now you're getting a great badge and you're surrounded by a lot of other folks who probably have a lot of money and so on and so forth. But the more you're in those institutions, the less you're probably learning.

Mark McGrath: 1:24:32

Yeah. Do you think that those I mean, it I think again, as t as tech just gets better and better and AI just gets better and better, I I mean, I really think that a lot of those sort of uh old timey institutions that don't adapt, that they're a lot more vulnerable than they realize. Oh yeah.

Angus Fletcher: 1:24:48

And I think that some of them are starting to realize it, actually. I think I think there's this thing, but again, it's the we don't know what to do. And when you don't know what to do when there's a problem, you just pretend like it doesn't exist.

Mark McGrath: 1:24:58

They just double or double down.

Angus Fletcher: 1:24:59

Or you double down on what you're doing, yeah. But I think I think basically what you're seeing is a kind of creeping fear and anxiety that's infusing these places, and it's so intense they can't even acknowledge it.

Mark McGrath: 1:25:09

Whereas, you know, you're Angus, when I hear you say that, I I I remind that of Boyd, you know, he he k he uh well empowers the conflict and in organic design. He says that, you know, basically the the the way it's always been is like we just put a fresh coat of paint and a new name on what we've always done, and we'll just tell everybody we're doing something different, but we're not really. We're not. Yeah. So I I wonder in earnest if if those institutions are are actually making the right changes. You know, I I I look, yeah, I haven't looked at the military academies in a while, but I know that I remember reading that a lot of the humanities were getting purged out in f in in in favor of STEM type topics, and I thought that, well, how how are you gonna lead people? And how are you gonna how are you gonna interact with people by getting rid of humanities?

Angus Fletcher: 1:26:00

Yeah, I agree with you on that. I would say that the military academy has they they have a certain kind of you know like horse sense about them. And once they realize that that they need kind of more people leaders, they're gonna put the humanities back in. With these other institutions like, you know, you know, Harvard or or wherever, what I would say is I spend a fair amount of time across the pond, you know, uh, you know, I'm I'm I was born there uh in England and uh and you know, Cambridge, Oxford, those institutions are on the verge of collapse, but they're actually on the verge of financial collapse. Yeah. I mean, it is really bad over there, really, really bad over there. And so I don't think we're that far away from some of the same problems starting to hit American institutions. I think that really the only thing keeping most of them alive is the goodwill of their alums. Yeah. And, you know, it's not there. I mean, if you if you took away the alums and you tried to sell most of these colleges to students, most of them wouldn't go. Yeah. Um, so I think you know, we are at a moment where there's gonna need to be a change. And to your point, yeah, the humanities. I mean, philosophy, literature makes you smarter.

Mark McGrath: 1:27:06

Well, so I mean, I ask that because when I when I think of the the old curriculum at West Point, again, I'm biased to West Point only because my father went there and I was raised to be that, and and I was the black sheep going into the Marine Corps and a naval ROTC scholarship. Um that they, you know, in the old days, being a cultured officer was like a hallmark of an officer. So that you had to learn French, you had to take art classes, you had to learn Shakespeare. Um, in fact, the Shakespeare book that I have, the complete works, is my father's from West Point. I that I have his actual complete, uh, complete works. That was his textbook there. So I mean, it was a it was a thing. And it seems to me that for it, it's always like, oh, for practical purposes or for measurement or for metrics, we're we're getting a we're getting rid of that stuff and we're gonna be doing something else.

Angus Fletcher: 1:27:55

Yeah, yeah. Well, let me just give you an example from you know my own cultural background, which is Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill essentially invented special operations. You know, he was the guy who basically invented the commandos and that we sort of kind of got on board with that. And Winston Churchill, I think, is also generally acknowledged to be a pretty good leader and someone, you know. Well, his mom was from America. Let me his mom was from right here in New York City. So go ahead. So my point being is that who's his favorite author? Shakespeare. And you know, and the reason that Shakespeare is good is not because Shakespeare is amazing, but because Shakespeare includes the richest diversity of characters. That's the whole point about Shakespeare. I think people get Shakespeare wrong when they think, oh, I've got to like memorize and understand him. No, the point is just that no one has a variety of individuals like Shakespeare. So the more you read Shakespeare, the more you're just exposed to different ways that different people can think.

Mark McGrath: 1:28:41

Trevor Burrus, Jr. Well, stay on your topic there. So that book uh you've I'm sure you've read it about the uh the was it the ungentlemanly conduct or whatever was that the Churchill's gentlemanly, like like his commit like his uh special operator book. It's something called like uh his tribe of ungentlemanly men or something like that. Sounds about right. I don't know the title. I'll look it up before we go. But yeah, yeah. But basically the the point of the matter is that to your to your point, these guys that were in the intelligence world, the special operations world, the commando world, the uh OSS world, these were high cultured men that Ian Fleming based James Bond after, right? I mean, these only if you wrote about this in your book. But but these were not necessarily pure technicians. These were these were cultured men. One quote I saw something like, yeah, he could be he could be sabotaging a, you know, disarming a bomb in the morning and and dancing with a double-agent female at the at Monte Carlo at night, you know, like like they had this range, but how do you get that range without liberal arts? I don't I don't know. I don't know how you do it.

Angus Fletcher: 1:29:48

You know, no, I mean, because the point is that increases your imagination while also increasing your common sense. That's the duality that's really important. It gives you a broader sense of what can happen, right? You just start to see life is full of a lot of possibilities that I didn't learn about in math class, right? There's all because I mean all of special operations really is just going outside the existing channels, going outside the box, you know, just saying, what can you know? I'm just gonna move beyond the system. So there's that, but then also the common sense thing. I mean, you know, when you when you read Shakespeare at the end of the day, you've got to figure out how to make it work. I mean, that's the thing about Shakespeare. Like, how do I actually make this work? I gotta stage this, you know?

Mark McGrath: 1:30:22

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. That's it's a great title. Oh, and it's gonna be a movie coming out. And how about that? I can't wait.

Angus Fletcher: 1:30:29

Um But yeah, you get those things from books, essentially, from reading books and having conversations about those books with smart people, um, not from math. Math is great. I don't have any problem with math, but you gotta develop the other side of your brain.

Mark McGrath: 1:30:43

How many of those guys, too, like that were Oxford Dons, like like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were, I mean, weren't they they were also war fighters too?

Angus Fletcher: 1:30:52

Like they they had been in the Yeah, Tolkien was in World War I, actually. And we think, I mean, so actually the first screenplay that I ever sold in Hollywood was on Tolkien in World War I. I sold it to Bob Shea, the guy who did Lord of the Rings. Okay. Um, yeah. So um, so yes, to your point, yes, the there there's a there's a long history of that. Now, I don't want to make it seem like somehow if you read Shakespeare, it automatically makes you a great officer. There's plenty of bad officers who've read Shakespeare, but the point is it helps because it does help stimulate that ability to realize that there are just different ways of seeing the world, different people. Shakespeare, one of the most famous things that he did is he didn't just write comedies and he didn't just write tragedies, he wrote both. Prior to that point in history, he wrote history plays, of course. He wrote romances, relations, sonnets. Up to that point in history, he was thought, no, you've got to specialize in one kind of story. And he's like, No, I can tell lots of kinds of stories. And again, that's what it is to be an operator, so be like, I can tell lots of kinds of stories.

Mark McGrath: 1:31:43

Did did you have um uh there was oh I just I just blanked. We were talking about Shakespeare. There was something else I wanted to say about reading. I was gonna add, oh, um uh Norman Dixon's this uh psycho the psychology of military incompetence.

Angus Fletcher: 1:32:01

Oh, right, yes. I actually did read that book very quickly. Um that now that book is a little bit outdated. It's got I I forget exactly, it's got like a very narrow sort of like psychological explanation for everything.

Mark McGrath: 1:32:12

Well, no, he was a psychologist that fought in the British Army in World War II. And so, but then he was a trained psychologist. So a lot of it was his inquiry, like why were these incompetent guys in in command of us as we were all getting slaughtered on the beaches or whatever it was. And it's 50, you know, it's it it's the same year as me uh and and destruction creation, John Boyd, 1976. So it's 50 years old now, but the but the book is two parts. It would and it's all it's all uh British military escapades that he puts in it. Um but you could cross out military incompetence and you could put university incompetence or you could put neuroscience incompetence because the the concepts seem to hold across disciplines. So I don't know if you'd ever looked at that.

Angus Fletcher: 1:32:56

Yeah, well, there's no question that the failure of almost any individual is a failure of imagination or a failure of common sense or failure of intuition, you know, or a failure to understand your own emotions or the emotions of others. I mean, these are the basic problems, you know, and and they do recur across organizations, and they certainly occur in the military.

Mark McGrath: 1:33:12

Aaron Powell Do you find that with a a doctorate in literature, do you find, and now that you're in the business school, do you find that leaders are even reading authentic good literature, even if it's, you know, I mean, some so much of literature, I guess, over time is you know, various degrees of of politics. But do you do you find that people are even reading Hemingway or Kerouac or What I find is the most successful leaders generally are. Yeah.

Angus Fletcher: 1:33:39

But in general, MBAs are not. And so there's a kind of interesting thing there happening that we're I feel like we're we're essentially training a management class as opposed to a group of leaders. Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:33:50

So I'm wondering if you can bring this on for us today. Uh thank you for your time. But can you tell us a story about um what a future leader who is looking back at the failure of the organization six, nine months, twelve months down the road, uh, what they should be taking away from, uh, why they failed and what they could take away from the things we just talked about?

Angus Fletcher: 1:34:09

I would say the main thing is learn from the military and run an AAR, run an after-action review. Get everybody in and tell the honest story of what actually happened. Because the reason that most people do not learn from failure is they tell themselves the wrong story. They tell themselves the story that makes them feel good about themselves, that pushes blame away from themselves. Tell the true story of why you failed. Get everybody in the room together to tell the true story of why you collectively failed, have that honest moment, and you will develop true wisdom, which is what the military does every day.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:34:42

I can't uh think of a better way to wrap this one up because we're strong advocates of effective debriefing, retrospective AARs, understanding what happened from multiple perspectives. That's what John Boyd would say too. Uh, you because everybody has a perspective on what happened. Nobody really understands the true reality. Uh, therefore, we can understand the what, the how, and the why. And I think that why gives us the first principles. And I think that's uh what makes your uh your book, Primal Intelligence, and your book on creativity and other writings so powerful. So, Angus Fletcher, thank you so much for being here today. We're gonna stop recording. Uh, and before we do, where can our uh listeners find you on the web and what's coming up next for you? I'm pretty much the only Angus in Ohio, so you can just Google that.

Mark McGrath: 1:35:23

Yeah, you can uh Except all the cows.

Angus Fletcher: 1:35:25

Except cows. Yeah. Um just uh just look at my book, Primal Intelligence. It's now a national bestseller and it's published in like about 20 different languages. So if you don't read it, you'll be missing out.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:35:37

Thank you very much. We'll keep you on here for a few moments.