Reclaiming Your OODA Loop: Counterintelligence & Narrative Control with Kit Perez

Outrage is cheap. Orientation is priceless. We bring a counterintelligence lens to the daily firehose of headlines and hot takes, showing how narratives are built to hijack your attention, flood your emotions, and outsource your decisions. The pivot is simple and powerful: stop fixating on what was said and start asking why it was said, what feeling it tries to evoke, and what action it wants from you.

We walk through a practical debriefing method—collect the what from multiple angles, restore context, then probe how and why—so your judgments rest on ground instead of fog. Along the way, we unpack the subtle levers of influence: phrases like “everybody knows,” aesthetic edits that recast a subject, and the way identity fusion turns politics into a personal creed. Counterintelligence isn’t just for agencies; it’s everyday OPSEC. Your bumper stickers, stick-figure family decals, and oversharing posts are an intelligence feed. Trim the signals you broadcast, and you trim the attack surface others can exploit.

Then we get tactical about building better systems. Manipulation is neutral; intent and constraints decide ethics. If you want disciplined initiative, design environments that reward it. Mission command isn’t a policy you announce—it emerges when trust, clarity, competence, and moral boundaries are present. That’s where Gray Cell Protocols come in: an orientation-first framework for creating the conditions in which decentraliz

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 Framing The Problem Through A CI Lens
• 1:30 Why Over What: Debriefing Reality
• 5:00 Language, Binaries, And Belonging
• 7:30 Outsourced Orientation And Mob Dynamics
• 10:44 Intelligence vs Counterintelligence In Daily Life
• 13:35 Narrative Control And Media Framing
• 17:24 Manipulation, Influence, And Human Value
• 23:51 Who’s In Charge And Donor Incentives
• 27:46 Systems Drive Behaviors: Boyd’s Lens
• 32:36 Truth Over Sides And Identity Fusion
• 37:31 Emotional Work, Determinism, And Worth
• 42:46 Reorienting To Reality And Decision-Making
• 47:31 Designing Environments That Shape Behavior
• 53:06 Mission Command And Gray Cell Protocols
• 58:46 Conditions Before Decentralization
• 1:03:56 Trust, Identity, And Team Design
• 1:08:06 Business Constraints And Personnel Systems
• 1:11:41 Boxes, Constraints, And Leader Discipline

Transcript

Mark McGrath: 0:20

Yeah. All right, Kit. We got a lot going on in the world. You tend to look at things the way that we do from a from a Boyd lens and maybe some McLuhan. And your background in counterintelligence is fascinating. You're doing a lot of work lately on gray cells. You're co-authoring a book with a mutual friend of all three of us that we want to talk about. But why don't why don't we start from when you look out and you turn on the news and everybody's freaking out about X, Y, and Z from a counterintelligence lens, what are you looking at and what are most people missing?

Kit Perez: 0:57

Why are they saying what they're saying? What action do they want you to take? What do they want you to feel? What do they what do they want from you? And that I said last week on another podcast that I don't care so much about what people say. I care about why they're saying it. I care about what their goal is in saying it. And once you start looking at it through that lens, it changes how you see things. Because instead of because you can go on X any time of the day or night and get all riled up about something within 20 seconds. And even and it doesn't matter what side you're looking at, both sides do it. And it's not just breaking news, this happened. It's oh my goodness sakes, this happened and it's so bad. And they want you to get riled up. And so once you start looking and asking, okay, why why are they putting it this way? Why are they using the words that they're using? It allows you to not get riled up and start seeing past, I guess, past the rhetoric to use a trite phrase and uh see what's really going on.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 2:07

So you brought up something very important here, and it was, it wasn't you basically said start with why. Most people start with what. And then, you know, there's a lot of folks that follow Simon Sinek and all that, and the the what, how, and the why. Well, I'm gonna share with you some very important information. When we do an effective debrief, we want to get to the why, but we start with the what? What happened from multiple perspectives, right? There is no that video shows one thing and one thing only. That's not true. You forget about the context. Context matters, right? How did that happen? What happened? We saw somebody get shot. Okay. What happened? You know, I saw this. What'd you see? What'd you see? How did that happen? Well, there's a guy that had an open carry permit that brought a gun to there. There are people that had weapons that were holstered and they were, you know, maybe in a hostile environment. Those are how. How do we get there? Why did that happen, right? That's that's important here. I think what many people miss, um, and these are human factorists, these are complexity theorists, and I think they're purposely missing this, is they're missing this opportunity to explain the very things that they profess, right? I think uh, you know, complex adaptive systems where the whole is greater than the sum of parts, there's unknown unknowns, there's all these things. They conveniently step aside from this conversation, and they're the ones projecting to everybody that this is what happened. And you're like, well, so you go in an organization, you teach them about complex adaptive systems, you talk about human factors, safety things, but you forget the most important thing, the why, the how and the why. And when you get down to it, and this is something we talk about quite a bit on the show, you create the conditions, you set the conditions for the system to create the behaviors that you want, right? And I think that's where you're going with this kit, is many people on our show, they'll come in here and tell us how things work, and they're on social media telling you, we need to get rid of guns, we need to do this, we need to do that. I'm like, bullshit, you're full of shit, and you need to be called out on that. And that's what I'm doing right now, and I've done this before on the show. People that come up and start broadcasting, former fighter pilots, by the way, and they say, Ponch, what you saw is you're full of crap. Everybody knows that that lady was murdered. And I'm like, I struggle with that. Or there's a last shooting. Everybody knows he was uh, you know, murdered in cold blood. I'm like, well, last time I checked, when when I took an open carry class or just a carry class, right, there are things that they scared the shit out of you with. One was when a police officer comes to your window in your car, where do you put your hands? What do you say? What do you do? Why do you do that? Because you want to avoid any, any um chance of them shooting you. Right? Because right. So, so having watched the video from the day, I don't know if it's true or not, but watching a um video from I think it was from the BBC where they pointed out you could see his weapon from a couple weeks ago, and I forgot the guy's name already. Um, but yeah, he was kicking the window or kicking the uh car of uh maybe ice or border patrol.

Mark McGrath: 5:13

Hey, kid, another another way to think of it is we have people come on and describe universal systems within the complexity of the cosmology, yet somehow when their politics matters, those things no longer apply.

Kit Perez: 5:24

Yeah. You know, you pointed out, I just made a note here, you use two phrases that I want to hone in on. The first one is purposely missing. You can't that that phrase doesn't work, right? Because if you're purposely doing it, you're not missing it. Missing implies that you missed it. It went by me and I missed it. But if you're purposely doing it, that's not purposely missing. That is purposely crafting, right? And I think that's important. Um and also the phrase everybody knows that sets up a binary if you do not agree with me, you're not agreeing with anyone else. Therefore, you are alone, you do not belong. And there's almost an inherent value statement in that that a lot of people miss. We're basically saying, well, everybody knows that. So if you don't, what are you even worth? And that is why it works so well.

Mark McGrath: 6:24

Yeah. Yeah, they understand it explicitly or implicitly the laws of influence, but again, they think that whatever they're being influenced by or whatever their uh political bend is, it somehow makes the laws of gravity, the laws of physics, the laws of economics, the laws of persuasion, all of a sudden those disappear.

Kit Perez: 6:46

Right, because they fuse their identity to what they believe. And it's kind of like I have to matter, and therefore my choices have to be good ones. So whatever I choose, whoever I choose, must be right, because if I made the wrong choice, my value is now lessened. Everything, everything goes back to human value. And that's the the number one leverage point. It's the number one fulcrum for getting people to do what you want to do. You just have to give them what they want and make yourself the source of more of it.

Mark McGrath: 7:21

So when you so when you look out and you scan and you see uh, you know, what's going on in the news or what's in the next feed or what's in a Reddit feed or whatever, do you you know you were using the term they? You say they a lot. And would that suggest that orientations are being written externally and people are going along with it because of uh crowd behavior or pack behavior?

Kit Perez: 7:49

Well, yeah. It's you're outsourcing your orientation instead of it being a self-determined, self-disciplined thing, you're allowing other people to orient you.

Mark McGrath: 8:00

Right.

Kit Perez: 8:00

And then you're locked into whatever actions, whatever beliefs, whatever. And it doesn't help if you're standing in a crowd that's getting super riled up, like that's happening in real time. That outsourcing, that feedback, and you're gonna go along with it. There's a reason why mob behavior is a thing, right?

Mark McGrath: 8:16

Right. Yeah. And it's yeah, there's a reason why, you know, when I was a kid, I may have told this story before on the podcast, but when I was a kid, my father was in the army. We were stationed in West Germany, which doesn't exist anymore, but we were in the region of Bavaria, which is a very unique region of Germany, very different from northern Germany, very Catholic. Yet at some point that was the that was the flourishing point for Nazism, was, was, flourished. And it always perplexed my parents, and they would ask Germans, like, how is it that seemingly reasonable people could all of a sudden just latch onto something and it and it flourish? Well, I think it goes back to the things that you're talking about. It's orientation gets outsourced and then mob behavior takes over, and you you you certainly don't want to be right on your own versus wrong with the entire crowd. You know, like you you're you're more comfortable. I I'd be more, you know, they would they would think you're like people find more comfort being wrong with everybody rather than right on their own.

Kit Perez: 9:19

Oh, for sure. And I think too, there's a phenomenon that happens. Say you're in this crowd of people and they're just breaking windows, or we'll back up even further. They're just yelling and screaming, and you're okay with that. And then they're just breaking windows, and you're uh, but you're still okay with it. Well, now they start beating somebody up. But you've now realized that you've kind of crossed the Rubicon, so to speak, where you can't come back from it because now you're in this crowd. And if you stand up and say, Hey, this is going too far, what am I doing now? I am now going to turn that on me. Well, that's the ultimate in discomfort, right? Because now you've moved from just being part of the crowd to being the person that stands up against the crowd. And that's not gonna happen. So do I think that every single person out there is, you know, down with the cause to the point where they're willing to beat people up? No, I don't believe that. But I also believe that they are not going to say anything, and I don't even know that that's out of weakness per se, in the way that we would call it that. I think it's something deeper than that.

Mark McGrath: 10:24

Paint us the picture. So not everybody that listens is a veteran and doesn't have a good working definition of intelligence or counterintelligence. So why don't why don't you paint a picture of what is intelligence and then your background? What is counterintelligence?

Kit Perez: 10:40

Intelligence is me trying to get your info, and counterintelligence is me making sure you can't. I mean, that's really the simplest.

Mark McGrath: 10:51

Give us some working examples that people might be able to relate to that are not military people.

Kit Perez: 10:57

Um well, I just wrote about this actually. Putting bumper stickers on your car that tell everybody what you're into, what you believe in, how many people are in your family. Those stick families on the back of cars just make me want to bang my head.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 11:10

Um My kid went to a Larrying Center. Uh my kid's an honor student.

Kit Perez: 11:19

But but somebody showed up and stole all the student records, yes.

Mark McGrath: 11:22

Yeah.

Kit Perez: 11:23

Um even in military families, which obviously I support, right? But there's a certain sometimes the pride of what you're doing gets in the way of your safety, if that makes any sense. Where you're putting these bumper stickers on your car, my heart is deployed, you know, my husband's in Afghanistan, so you can drink your latte, you know, things like that. Well, for me, if I'm looking at a a SUV with three little kids and a wife, that's a bullseye. Yeah, it's a big one. That is a target and we don't think about things like that or posting posting every single stinking thing you do on Instagram.

Mark McGrath: 12:05

So let's so because let's let's unpack this. This is great. So if hard targeting would be considered counterintel, correct? Sure. Yeah. So when we were deployed overseas, we were told we we hard target. Now, in I could tell you, living in Japan as a six foot three, you know, white dude with short hair, everybody knew we were Marines, right? Like you really couldn't hard target. If you're looking for the Marines, they were really easy, they were really easy to find. Um yet at the same time, you know, we had to burn our mail. Like we would bring our mail and our credit card statements and things to the S2, the intelligence officer, and they would they had a burn bag and you know, things like state credit card statements and personal correspondence that you wanted, you know, destroyed because in Okinawa, apparently North Koreans go through the trash and they and they would uh they would find stuff.

Kit Perez: 12:59

People here go through the trash.

Mark McGrath: 13:01

Yeah.

Kit Perez: 13:01

You know, how many people just throw away things, you know, credit card offers or or whatever else without really thinking about the fact that once it's in the dumpster, it's fair game, legally speaking.

Mark McGrath: 13:13

Aaron Powell So let's go back, let's keep unpacking around counterintel. So here's this guy, Alex Pretti, I think is his name, or pretty, and there's this narrative that's coming out about him that he, you know, he was a peaceful person and da-da-da. Yet at the same time, his social media footprint and and all the the footprint around him is so replete with examples that are the exact opposite. So, really, for people that are listening with their social media accounts are a tremendous source of intelligence.

Kit Perez: 13:44

Yeah. I actually just saw a tweet by Mays Moore, and I admit to laughing, not because he died. I don't think that's laughable. I don't think that's a good thing at all. I think he's a human being who lost his life, and that's a that's a bad thing, right? But it was Elizabeth Warren reading her statement about, you know, he just exuded kindness and all of this, but it was her reading it superimposed over the video of him kicking the crap out of the vehicle.

Mark McGrath: 14:15

Yeah. And and breaking the breaking the tail lights and then the then the ice age.

Kit Perez: 14:20

Screaming and so that to me is a really good example of well, don't believe don't believe what you're watching. Just believe what I'm telling you.

Mark McGrath: 14:32

Let me ask you let me ask you this then. So certainly you've seen the real picture of the guy and then the modified picture of the guy. So is that a form of counterintel on the on the part of the news media?

Kit Perez: 14:44

No, I wouldn't call it counterintel proper. I would call it narrative control.

Mark McGrath: 14:48

Narrative control, yeah.

Kit Perez: 14:49

Where you are you're basically saying, I'm going to frame the information that you're getting because I want you, again, going back to why, I want you to believe a certain thing about this. And really, what does it say about whoever did that video or the powers that be that, you know, whatever's behind that?

Mark McGrath: 15:10

It's like when Joe Joe Rogan was doing uh when they made a picture of him as if he was like a green and jaundiced from taking ivermectin.

Kit Perez: 15:20

But right, but what does it say about them that they wanted to make him more brown? And they wanted to make him more attractive. Well, because humans like facial symmetry.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 15:36

So they wanted to make him more like Punch, brown and attractive. Gotcha. No, no, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

Kit Perez: 15:42

Less hairy, though. You're a lot less hairy than he is.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 15:45

Okay.

Mark McGrath: 15:46

Yeah. No, it's just interesting. So, I mean, with as you know, um, because you're uh a substack that recommends ours, and vice versa. You're a founding strategist of uh of ours, and we we recommend yours, of course. Um, you know, a lot of the things that we talk about beyond Boyd and orientation also have to do with Marshall McLuhan and Tara Deschardet and others, that really what you're talking about is like groups are people become subject to influence. And if they don't challenge those assumptions, the given the nature of the environment and the systems that are created around those environments, they're likely acting in a way that's synthetic to their own recognizance and it was influenced by somebody else.

Kit Perez: 16:29

Well, they're acting emotionally.

Mark McGrath: 16:31

Yeah. Well, I'm saying I guess what I mean to say is that somehow that's those emotions and that psychology or whatever is being tapped into and and exploited by X.

Kit Perez: 16:44

Oh, absolutely. That's it's the core of influence, right? Like that's how you get people to do what you want them to do. You have to know what they want and provide it. And to some extent, and so here's something I say all the time manipulation is neutral. It's the intent that makes it bad or good or whatever, because parenting is manipulation. There's even a certain amount of manipulation and friendships and relationships, and that's not necessarily bad. Good behavior gets rewarded, bad behavior gets punished. You know, like that's that's how humans work. It's transactional. But when people are approaching it from the purpose of, okay, I see what you need. I see that you need to be needed, you need to feel like you're the smartest person in the room, you need to feel like you um have value because you don't believe that you do. And so you're waiting for me to give you that value. I'll give you that value if you behave the way I want you to. That's how it works.

Mark McGrath: 18:44

Well, I find with a lot of your work that when you read it and when you start to explore and examine the concepts that you can actually start to train your mind to not be subject to these sorts of things, not to be you get. One would hope. One would hope. Yeah. One would one would hope. One one that particularly stood out, uh, I pulled up on your on your substack, the shepherd scale, was what why good people become infiltration vectors. You know, and we're talking about hard targeting, or we're talking about people putting out so much intelligence via their social media feeds or their bumper stickers or whatever. You know, if if you're a skilled infiltrator, you're you're giving them lots of material to work with to look for a common uh attack vector or not a common attack vector, look for a soft heart, you know, look for a soft vector to to hit. What what is it about people that make them so readily voluntary, you know, be uh readily volunteering all this information that could in theory be used against them?

Kit Perez: 19:50

If I were to distill it down to one sentence, I would say lack of emotional internal work. And what I mean by that is we've all got stuff, whether it be a bad childhood, a bad relationship, a loss. I mean, we all have stuff. And if you have not done the internal work to figure out, okay, who am I? If you you would not believe how many people cannot answer that question, or they answer it in such a way that is something that they do and not who they are. Well, who are you? Well, I'm an attorney. No, that's what you do. Who am I? Well, I am someone who that sentence is a really big deal. And if you haven't done the work to figure out who that is, what you know, something Kyle Shepherd just wrote about this morning in his I love his morning reflections, reflection questions. You know, what what patterns are you hanging on to that you shouldn't? What things are you doing? And who determines your value? You would be surprised how many people, even in my counseling office, because I do trauma counseling now, um, can't answer that. Who determines your value? Well, uh, and they'll just look at you, and it's not because they're bad people, it's because they have been trained through experience, through whatever else, that someone else determines that value. And it's not intrinsic, it's performance-based, and that's a really big one, especially in in groups. You have value as long as you go along with or do the things that we're asking you to do. And if you don't, you don't. And if you can't have that belief, unshakeable belief that you have intrinsic human value that does not change, well, you're subject to someone else giving you value. And that means you're programmable, you are manipulable.

Mark McGrath: 21:49

Determinism, in other words. Determinism is such a uh, if I recall, I have to go back and pull out my college philosophy nuts, but it seems like communists were really good at determining, like using determinism to say, like, oh, what was your background? What were you bourgeois, were you working class? And they would determine your character, but kind of like social scores, right? Like you see these things in China, like social scores. Like they're gonna determine your value or worth based off things that could be determined by your upbringing or your family or what what what part of uh you know, what part of the country you were from or whatever.

Kit Perez: 22:26

And I would argue, and I have to be very deliberate about how I say this so it doesn't come out wrong, and it'll still probably come out wrong, but whatever, we'll work through it.

Mark McGrath: 22:34

Well, everybody's gonna misconstrue what you say anyway.

Kit Perez: 22:37

I believe that everyone has intrinsic human value because I am a Christian and I believe that. That being said, value to your creator is not the same as value to society. In the earthly plane, so to speak, for instance, a pedophile has no value to society. They have value as a human, they are a created being and their creator you know ha gives them value. But in terms of society, nah, bullet to the head. Sorry, that's a bit forward, but you know, that's I believe that I stand by that. So the problem though. Is that when you start like communism does, giving people value based on their quote unquote value to the society, that makes it the only value there is. Does that make sense? Am I explaining that correctly?

Mark McGrath: 23:34

Yeah, I think so.

Kit Perez: 23:37

So when you look at, like you were just saying, communists say, well, you come from this family, um, you have skills in this area, and we need those or we want those. And therefore, for instance, gymnasts, right? That was a big thing back in the USSR and Romania and all of those uh block countries. 12 years old, you know, we're training you, and this is your family's gonna get a better house because of it, you're gonna enjoy all of these privileges as long as you keep winning. So therefore, it's not about human value because communism doesn't believe in such things, right? But it's about what you provide to us. And that's a very dangerous confusion of value.

Mark McGrath: 24:24

So so when people behave in mob rule or or they uh are swayed to do things, or you know, we've seen nurses go on and and wish death or or serious bodily harm to Caroline Levitt and her baby, is it just as an example?

Kit Perez: 24:40

Former nurses.

Mark McGrath: 24:41

Former nurses, right. Well, so well, I guess what I guess what I'm saying is like when when when people are moved to do such things, they've they've eliminated the value of somebody, or they've they've they've decided to have somebody's worth determined um based off of their their beliefs, their their values, the people that they associate with, or or whatever. I I think it was uh Potch, remember Molly? Well, actually we're all JetXers here. So Molly Ringwald, remember the actress? Yeah. Like like she she said something. She said something like, Hey, one day we're gonna be in charge and we're gonna we're gonna be trying and executing people as collaborators or something like something along those lines.

Kit Perez: 25:26

Um gave me World War II vibes for a second. Like you're gonna shave my head.

Mark McGrath: 25:31

I think that was her term, was collaborationists. They're gonna be viewed as collaborators. Um which luckily, you know, Molly Ringwald's likely not gonna be the next president of the United States, but um or or or have any kind of political influence. But I guess you're you're seeing um scale. And I know that you closely, you closely look at this, and I just wonder, like, um where does it where where do you think it leads? Like where do you because I think you can make the argument not only on the left, but you could also make the argument on the right that there's there's there's certain blocks of the right that are just as moved and pushed uh externally from their orientation as much as there is on the left.

Kit Perez: 26:14

Yeah, I I don't think I don't look at it in terms of sides. I look at it in terms of what is the truth, who has it, and who's getting influenced by the crap, if that makes sense. So it's too easy to say I'm part of this box or I'm part of that box, or I think it takes a lot more work and a lot more critical thinking to say, for instance, I appreciate a lot of what Trump is doing. I don't have to like him as a person. I don't have to like every single thing he does. And so when I see these, for instance, you'll see memes where you know Trump and Jesus, you know, and he's being touted almost as this quasi-Messiah. I'm like, no, number one, that's trash. Number two, you've just negated any belief I had in your ability to think with any kind of anything, right? But obviously the left does that too. And so I don't think it it's a oh, I'm part of the right or I'm part of the left. No, I care about what is true. I care about what is true. And there's a I'm I'm censoring myself because I don't want to get all Attila the Hunt on you. But I think that the left, if you look at their eyes when they talk, for instance, the the videos of the nurse that was saying that you should go on dates with ICE agents and drug their food. Yeah. You should, you know, it literally inject your patients.

Mark McGrath: 27:55

Inject them with paralysis drugs.

Kit Perez: 27:57

Right, exactly, which will kill them, right? If you don't intubate, that's what they use. So look at their eyes when they're talking. There's a very interesting, and and I'm not trying to diagnose people or anything like that, but it's a very very interesting look on their face that they have. Same thing that Molly Ringwold had, same thing had, and it's almost like this complete and total buy-in to an ideology that is so like, and and I'm not looking at it like these people have crazy eyes. It's more like their identity of who they are is fused to that cause. Therefore, the cause must win above all, and I will do anything in its service because that's my identity.

Mark McGrath: 28:46

Yeah, and that's how I mean that's what I'm saying. But you do see it on the right, too. Yeah. Right. Well, I was saying, well, that's what happened in Germany and Russia and other places where people go along to a point people were useful, and then when they were no longer useful, they get rid of those people too.

unknown: 29:06

Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 29:06

What I mean by that, like, you know, in in in Russia, you know, when the czar was deposed, it wasn't the Reds that took over, it was the white Russians. It was like the I think the Kerensky government or whatever. And they were useful in helping get the get the the czar out, but then there was the Red October, right? Then there was the Red Revolution when Lenin took over. Or like in China, how you know Chen Kai-shek and Mao were okay to work together to fight the Japanese, but then when that was all over, they they turned on each other. Um, the other side of the.

Kit Perez: 29:38

I just read that that quote, and I'm trying to remember who it was, I'd have to pull it back up. But when he says, you know, we shoot them in the head too when we're done. Yeah. And eventually the system has to eat itself.

Mark McGrath: 29:50

Yeah.

Kit Perez: 29:51

Because the people out on the streets of Minneapolis, for instance, they're not the ones in charge. They're just the ones doing the dirty work for the people who are in charge.

Mark McGrath: 30:00

Yeah.

Kit Perez: 30:00

And once they have no use, they're not going to be any more important than those of us that they're going to be looking at targeting and killing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 30:10

I've got a question. Who's in charge?

Kit Perez: 30:16

Do you really want to go down this road?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 30:18

I don't know. I mean, somebody are we being who's manipulating us? That's what I want to know.

unknown: 30:21

Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 30:21

I mean, or or or or yeah, is there a is there a collective, like, you know, George Carlin used to say, it doesn't have to be three guys in a room with the door shut plotting to kill it. It's it's people that their thinking aligns so deeply because they go to the same schools, they go to the same country clubs, they live in the same neighborhoods, they they start to think the same way, even though they might be on opposite sides of the political party line, they're still they're still going to the same schools, they're still thinking the same way, they're still having the same professors, they're still reading the same books.

Kit Perez: 30:55

There was a uh thing that came out yesterday that was looking at the donors for Thomas Massey, for instance. And they were pointing out that his largest donor also gives to Ilan Omar, also gave to all of the super far left politicians. Well, why would you do that? Because when you think about it, and some people are using that, oh see, Massey's a closet leftist. No, it's not that. It's that you don't give to one side if you and then you don't give to both sides if you truly believe in one side, right? There's no logic in that. I'm not if I'm if I'm super in favor of the Democrat Party, the last thing I'm gonna do is donate to Trump or donate to, you know, some pick pick a Republican, right? Like it they just don't do that. So why would you donate to both unless you're fomenting the conflict? You know, maybe that's what you're actually getting off on is the conflict of it.

Mark McGrath: 32:05

Well, you want to benefit when either side's in too, right? I mean You know, here here in Manhattan, um I think you could say the same about Mandani, like he was getting donations from both sides. I mean, you don't you don't know what's gonna happen. Um I mean, w isn't like uh isn't that one of the things that Trump has pointed out about Charles Schumer and others, that they used to donate a lot of money, you know, he used to donate money to them. Well, wasn't he a Democrat? Yeah, he's been long time. Yeah, he's been both, I think, because I think what he was always doing was what's best for my businesses, what's best for my companies to grow them and build, you know, build build businesses. Does it it didn't so much matter? Um Oddly enough though, like if you go back and you know, again, we're old enough to remember um I forget if I was 10 or 11, but I got the art of the deal for Christmas. Um I say I was like 10 years old or 11 years old. But you watch those old Oprah Winfrey videos of of Donald Trump in the 1980s or late 70s, or you know, it it hasn't changed what he says at all. Like what he's what he says is very consistent over over time. Um and it's interesting how it flips, you know, how as you say, I mean, things people who once loved him now hate him, and vice versa, right? Like it it it really does seem to I can't imagine a red-blooded conservative being for Donald Trump in like the year 2000, you know, or like in the mid-90s.

Kit Perez: 33:44

Aaron Ross Powell But what I guess what my question would be then is did he change what he believed or did he change the application of what he believed?

Mark McGrath: 33:53

Aaron Powell The medium is the message. I think that things you're right, the environment, the environment changes, the technology changes, and all of that works us over completely. And some people get it and some people don't. I think what we're talking about is the better you understand that, the less susceptible you come from any influence that's undue to you as a as a human being, um, regardless of where it comes from. But I think what Ponch was pointing out earlier is your your politics, so-called, could be wrong. And if you if you sit there and you explain things that are universally true, but think that they no longer apply when your your politics are brought into it, that that's an that that is an error. You know, I would think that that's a that that that's a that's a catastrophic error.

Kit Perez: 34:41

Absolutely agreed. And something I wanted to point out is that you see a lot on the internet about, well, the Democrats, for instance, were totally look at this clip from X number of years ago when they were totally against illegal immigration and now they're not. And so what now? Where was that? And Tom Holman actually said it this morning in his in his uh press conference where he was saying, Oh, you guys were all against you know, you're all against us deporting people or whatever. Well, where was all of your care when there were women being sexually assaulted at the border or there were babies getting thrown in the river as a diversion and all of these things? And yes, that's a good question to ask because it points out the discrepancy, but there's I think a deeper question it's why did it switch? Or did it switch? Right? Well, it switched because they want something different now. So were they lying then or were they are they lying now? Or were they not lying? And they're actually, if you pay attention, just being pretty open about what they want.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 35:55

Or do systems drive behaviors.

unknown: 35:58

Right.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 35:59

So Eisenhower warned about the military industrial congressional complex, uh, so M I C C what 80 years ago, 70 years ago? How does the MIC factor into all this? And and you we talked about donors too. So those donors that are donating to our congressional complex uh plan this as well. How does that fit into what's happening today as far as manipulation?

Mark McGrath: 36:28

I think Congress is probably some of the worst manipulators out there.

Kit Perez: 36:34

And unless that's not really what you're asking. No, I think.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 36:38

No, no, no. No, because earlier we asked about who who is in charge, right? So it uh what I'm getting at is it might be the Mick, right, right? So wars are profitable for many reasons. Um to stay in power, uh, you you want to do things. Um fortunately, you can do go into Congress today and you can outperform Warren Buffett, and nobody cares about that, right? You're I don't know how that's possible. You can outperform many of the smartest hedge funds in the world and not be that intelligent. So I don't know how that's happening. Um, but how how is it I don't know is it do you not know how that's happening? I mean, I can figure it out. I mean, I can figure it out, but but just to to somebody who goes, Well, these people have our best interest in mind. We're not gonna fight wars just for the heck of it. But how does the mix fit into all this?

Kit Perez: 37:24

Uh are they the ones driving this this um uh you know what's going on in the not just in the US, but globally I think that they are maybe an arm of a greater entity because I think it's there are very few people let me let me rephrase, there are very few critical thinkers at this point who think that Congress runs the country, or even thinks that the president runs the country, or because everything's an arm for something else at this point. You know, you've got the globalists, you know, uh, and you could ask 60 different people and get a hundred different answers about what that even means. But um it's funny that you put this evil and corruption definition of boyfriend.

Mark McGrath: 38:11

Yeah, this is boy, this is John Boyd from uh the strategic game, the very last slide. And and we Ponch and I talk about these definitions quite a bit because they're very accessible, and they don't suggest that you know there's a cabal in a room twirling their mustaches, you know, planning the world's destruction. These are actually very visible and identifiable traits that you can see across the spectrum.

Kit Perez: 38:34

Well, I think that you do see both of them. I mean, obviously, I've said for a long time that I think that corruption, it's not something that you get into Congress and you are corrupted by virtue of being there. I think that's the price of the game. You don't get elected unless they either have something on you, and by they I mean, you know, insert they, whoever the higher, higher things are. Um you don't get into the game unless there is something that they can either leverage or they recognize again a trait in you that they know they will be able to hit later, whether that be that unmet emotional need or something else. So there's not a single person in Congress that I look at and go, well, that person, they actually really have values, they really have this, that, and the other. No, because they wouldn't be there if they did. I don't believe that. And I'm certainly open to being wrong. I'm certainly open to being proven wrong. But show me one person who went to Congress and said, okay, I'm gonna do the right thing, and they're still in office 10 years later. And what have they done? Ted Cruz looking at you.

Mark McGrath: 39:49

Or whoever. Yeah. I mean, it's it it doesn't how many how many go to Congress to be public servants and then become multi-millionaires? I mean, I think that that's where you know Boyd was pointing out a lot of these things because there was a lot of things that he was opposing as a defense reformer. There were there were uh you know certain weapons systems, certain aircraft, other things. Um the movie Pentagon Wars is, I think uh it's it's based off of his uh uh accolade uh Burton. I can't I also want to say Richard Burton. I know that's an actor, but I think he might have also been called Richard Burton. Um and it goes through that the that movie with Kelsey Grammar, it goes through the story of how the Bradley fighting vehicle was a complete bit of graft and and and corruption. It had no it had no value. But again, it doesn't have to be a cabal of people, you know, again, sitting around, ah, what are we going to do today? It doesn't have to be that. It just has to be people with converged interests that go to the same schools, they come up in the same systems. Maybe they're uh, you know, more of a uh uh a careerist uh to be person versus a doer like like a John Boyd. And and the way where these things converge, uh the evil emerges or the corruption emerges. And nobody, I don't think anybody sets out necessarily to be. They probably go in with the best intentions, thinking, well, there's three equal branches of government and I represent the people from my state or my district or whatever. Um, and then it seems like they're met with some kind of realities. And again, as Ponch says all the time, this you know, the systems drive behaviors.

Kit Perez: 41:22

I it's it's one reason, everything that you've just said is is one reason why I spent a really long time kind of looking side-eyed at JD Vance. Um I know everybody loves him, and I'm not saying that I dislike the guy. I am also not but, but and looking at okay, you went to Yale, right? You went to all of these schools that we know are pipelines, went to all of these places where various agencies recruit from, right? And it's at this point, do I think that he's doing a bad job? No. I also keep that other info in the back of my head, if that makes sense, where you're just like, okay, I see this, this is good. Also, I know that this is there, and I just I observe.

Mark McGrath: 42:16

I think the big takeaway is always challenge your assumptions.

Kit Perez: 42:19

Always.

Mark McGrath: 42:20

Yeah.

Kit Perez: 42:20

In fact, I was gonna ask you, what do you think of adding two words to your definition of evil? Well, that's Boyd's definitions, but I I know, I know I'm messing with sacred text here. No, that's okay.

Mark McGrath: 42:35

No, no, we we're we're here to develop it and advance it. So tell us what you're thinking.

Kit Perez: 42:39

Occurs when individuals or groups embrace or enforce uh occurs when individuals embrace codes of conduct.

Mark McGrath: 42:50

Yeah, I like that. So add or enforce.

Kit Perez: 42:54

Because just because I embrace something doesn't necessarily mean I enforce it. And obviously, as the definition points out, it certainly doesn't mean I live by it.

Mark McGrath: 43:02

Oh, I like that. Maybe there's a there's a collaborated article for us right there. Not do it in corruption.

Kit Perez: 43:16

I think that that one actually stands as is because once you enforce, that's when you cross the evil.

Mark McGrath: 43:24

Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Well, um there is Kit Perez on evil and corruption. I mean, again, I I think that the one thing that Boyd really did a service here um is to define them in ways that are again accessible, they're relatable, they're visible. It's very hard to hide those things.

Kit Perez: 43:57

I think that people would shy away from people on both sides would shy away from these definitions though, because if you apply them without emotion, they apply to both sides. They apply to the people that we like, but that gets into emotional trust versus structural trust. That gets into trust equaling uh likability, which it should not ever.

Speaker 5: 44:23

Yeah.

Kit Perez: 44:24

I have people in my life that I trust and I do not like them at all. But those are two separate things.

Mark McGrath: 44:30

Yeah, well, I mean, I think that that's the the point the point that Punch was making at the outset is that you know these things are universally either true or they're not, right? And and and if you believe something's true and you believe something is, you know, rooted in authentic science and you could you could demonstrate it, you can prove it, you could develop and build off of it, you can't just go selectively negate things based off your politics.

Kit Perez: 44:53

Oh, for sure. And I think that's something that people talk about with with human systems a lot, is people talk about, you know, social sciences or soft sciences or you know humans are squishy people, they're this, they're that. No, humans are very predictable. And they act in predictable ways in predictable systems. And so if you want them to act X way, you Create a system that forces it or you know rewards it and they will act that way. But if you don't bake that into the system, they will not act that way. Right? We were just talking about this on my Substack the other day with Ashby's Law and all of that, where if you do not create a moral framework in your system, people are not gonna act morally. They're not gonna act ethically because they will default to comfort and ease and you know good behavior is not comfortable or easy.

Mark McGrath: 45:56

Wow. I mean again, and you're you're you're fusing a very interesting background to illuminate this for people. Yeah, between not just being it not just being in counterintel or having you know having degrees in Intel and having worked at counterintel, but also um uh counseling trauma and and actually seeing the uh the firsthand effects of a lot of these things.

Kit Perez: 46:29

Yeah, it's very interesting when I think about merging these fields because they're not related in the classic sense. When you when you think, well, why would you get into this? But interestingly enough, when I explain it to people, um, it's because I have trauma, right? Like most people do. I have uh loss of a child and and some other things that have happened. But when you are unhealed, or at least in my case, I can't speak for other people. But for me, being unhealed led me to counterintelligence, it led me to criminal profiling because I want to see the threat coming so that I'm never hurt again. But as I healed myself and did that internal work, now I'm looking outward because now I'm okay. So now I can say, let's move into trauma counseling, because it's really kind of the same principles, but used in a different fashion, if that makes sense. So your I understand what motivates people because of this other training that I had. I understand why people do bad things and and why they think the things that they do, and I know how to manipulate it in a positive way to get different results than you might because, for instance, a profiler can answer, why did this person do this? Some of the time, not all the time. But a trauma counselor can say, okay, I understand why you're making these choices and where that comes from. How do we change the system that you believe in instead of live in, right? I use the term believe in. What's a system that you believe in? Because that's what's driving your beliefs, or that's what's driving your decisions, I should say. And so a lot of times humans say, don't make emotionally based decisions, except we all do. There are many, many, many times that you will say, I believe X. Really? Then people say all the time, Well, I believe I have value. Really? Well, then why is it that you act as though you do not? Because you really don't believe it. You think you believe it, and there's like this gap between what we intellectually believe and what we emotionally believe. And that's where your decisions are getting make, getting made. So, really, the trick is to reorient to reality. Are my feelings true? Well, feelings are real, but they're not reality. And so you have to constantly do this work to get your emotions to match reality because that's the only way you're going to be making decisions that are oriented to reality.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 49:07

So this is interesting. There's a lot of connections here. So internally, we can run a simulation that uh drives our emotions. So we can replay the experience, the traumatic event, or we can have shake it up in like a snow globe and look at it from a different angle, and that actually influences our emotions. So that that is a part of um you can call that some type of inside out or outside in control, right? Uh same thing with um uh the environment. And uh we'll talk about autism, we'll look at uh sports too. We know that the in order for uh athletes to perform the best, you have to manipulate the environment to create the constraints or conditions that they will see in a game. You don't just do the random nonsense that most coaches do. We know that we that that's the evolving science is really powerful. We also know that for um uh autistic children or anybody, uh you don't change them, you change the environment, right? You you create the conditions that allow them to thrive in in that world, right? It's it's it's it is um you know, it's it's you don't try to change them. So where I'm going with this is the environment really controls us. So when we say create the conditions, we don't tell people what to do, right? Um, or excuse me, we don't tell them how to do it. We tell them what needs to be done. That's the mission command. So how do we do that? We create the conditions, we maybe push some bricks out somewhere, or we find some uh device that connects uh folks and and amplify the messages that we want amplified in there, and we let the things emerge in that direction. And if it isn't going in the way we want it, we suppress it or we dampen it and we find another probe, right? So all this complexity theory people uh stuff that people talk about, they like I said earlier, they conveniently forget to have this conversation when we see something like um the events in Minneapolis going on, right? They're they're absent from that. And they were absolutely absent from the the uh COVID crisis, right? They were the ones telling us to go get a COVID shot and stand six feet apart apart from each other. And I'm like, well, that doesn't make any sense. Well, you're canceled, right? That's how things worked. And now here we are. Um, and and you know, we I I lean a little bit to the right, and I'm not a big fan of Trump. And one of the things Trump says all the time is everybody knows, right? We just brought that up earlier. Yeah, we're aware of that. Uh, we we do see that. Um, and you don't have to like him. Uh and I don't like a lot of leaders that I worked with in the past, right? But I do like the things they set out in front of us. Do they know how to set the conditions? Do I care what they do at home? No, I really don't care what you do at home. I care about what you do for me, right? What do you what kind of conditions are you setting for me to thrive? And here in Virginia, you know, our taxes are going up, or it looks like they're gonna go up, right? Why why? We have a surplus. So yeah, it's it's the environmental control. If you can figure out how to do that, and this is what good leaders do, and I love what you brought up about manipulation. Um, we're doing that all the time as leaders, right? We're manipulating something, we're doing something to the environment to get the behavior that we want. This is fundamentally true. So the moment when you learn Boyd's work or anything connected to it, and I was telling my father-in-law and my dad at lunch today that it's not about John Boyd, it's about the things he identified. And he said, look, this connects to that over here in this philosophy and this physics, or this connects from uh Heisenberg and certainty principle to the second law of thermodynamics, right? He just took us on a journey to go look at how these things connect. Now it's your job to go figure out how to employ them against this environment, this VUCA environment. And and I told my father-in-law, it's not about the, it's not about John Boyd.

unknown: 52:42

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 52:42

It's not about John Boyd.

Mark McGrath: 52:43

Yeah. Boyd and Boyd and McLuhan and uh Tayard and Hayek, these are discoverers. They explored, they discovered, they were very they were not easily swayed by uh you know political parties, you know, that that sort of a thing. They did not uh I think one thing that they uh also had in common is in Boyd, especially and McLuhan especially, if if they had found something that negated what they believed in or found something that uh showed that it was false, they'd let go of it fast and move on. They wouldn't hold on to it. And I think that that's a big problem that we observe is people will hang on to something all the way down to the bottom and and ruin themselves over because they can't uh they can't let go when brought into the face of new facts. I mean, you know, you you see things on uh we're all no stranger to political arguments at Thanksgiving dinner tables and and whatever. And I I've realized facts don't matter. Like nobody cares about your facts. They it it and there's nothing that you're ever going to do to convince someone of of the facts. You know, um you can only influence their orientation. And and and and at some point they have to be willing to let go or be open to the fact that they could be wrong and that there's more to learn, um, which by and large, I don't I don't think that that's that's what we see.

Kit Perez: 54:04

It's interesting. There's a an exercise that I go through with clients sometimes where I take a piece of paper and I have them draw a line across and and I say, okay, well, what would you like to be in terms of I want to be somebody who, right? And so they might say, I want to be somebody who's honest, I want to be somebody who's um kind and and all of these things. Okay, awesome. And now I want you to write underneath the line, what do you believe about yourself? And as you just keep asking the questions, right? And you're not judging, you're just observing, like whatever comes out of your mouth is what comes out of your mouth. And they'll write down all of these things. Well, I don't believe that I matter, I believe I'm unlovable, I believe I'm bad, or you know, whatever happened was my fault, all these things. And I say, okay, these are the plants you're trying to grow in this soil. And so how does that happen? How you can't you're you're you're literally trying to grow good things out of bad soil, and and you just kind of let that sit. And and people are forced into this position, like what you were just talking about, where you're presenting their own thinking and you're almost having to generate the mismatch for them. And then you just back up and go, okay, what are we gonna do with that? And I've had people have this aha moment where they're like, wow, I don't want to do that anymore. Awesome. Let's talk about how we move forward. But I've also had people say, I know what you're saying is true, but I still feel X. And there's just like they will not get off the X, so to speak. And that's that misorientation where they just, nope, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna hang on to this.

Mark McGrath: 55:47

So our our mutual friend uh John Robb uh posted on his X feed. Uh, and anybody that listens, you know, we recommend John Robb. And they're no stranger. If they've been listening to us regularly, they're no stranger to John Robb, who's been on our two of our founding strategist briefs, has been on our show, I don't know, three, four times. But his X account is definitely one worth following in addition to a Substack. And he says one today. Uh, when people tell you what we must do, we all must do X, ask them what does success actually look like? Give me explicit details. What does the world you're telling us we all must create actually look like to something living, to someone living in it? And I think that kind of goes in what you're saying is that so many people don't even know they're influenced and they're swayed to say whatever it is that they're swayed to say. Um I saw one earlier that was saying, you know, who's better on women's rights, Donald Trump or Ayatollah Khomeini? And all these women were saying, oh, hands down, the Iranians are so much better on women's rights than than than Trump. Okay. And then they were saying, well, you know, like, well, well, what is what's so bad for you as a woman here in America that you know you would have in Iran? And of course, none of them can answer. And I think that's what Rob is getting us to do, is like he's what he's saying is like, well, have you thought about it? Do you really understand what it is that you're saying? Do you do are you thinking about it? Are you do you know what it even do you know what it even looks like? And I don't think most don't. I think or I think most don't.

Kit Perez: 57:23

I think that you could even take his tweet a step further. Show me what success looks like for you and for me, because I promise they're gonna be different.

Mark McGrath: 57:34

Yeah. Yeah. Tell us about uh, you know, in the remaining minutes, bring us home with uh the book that you're working on.

Kit Perez: 57:43

I'm so excited about this book. It's coming together so awesome.

Mark McGrath: 57:47

All right, let's hear it.

Kit Perez: 57:48

It's go ahead.

Mark McGrath: 57:50

Oh, I was gonna say just disclosure. I've been asked to edit it and I've I've I've taken uh I've taken a few looks, passes through it. So, but in your words.

Kit Perez: 57:59

Um, well, it's called Mission Command and the Great Cell Protocols, creating the conditions for mission command or for decentralized command. And essentially what we're doing is And tell us who we are. We, meaning me, and uh Donald Vandegriff, who is by the way, a joy to work with. Absolutely a joy. And he's really we've both been working pretty hard on it. But essentially, the in fact the way that we're designing the book, rather than it being, I I told him we didn't want a shelf queen. I don't want a book that people are just gonna put on the shelf and never read again. And and it just it shows up, you know, in the background of their Zoom calls as I have this book when nobody really cares. I want it to be something that's functional, that people can actually, yeah, see, there you go. And uh I didn't want that. I wanted something that people can take down and go, okay, I see myself in this, I see my group, my workplace, my my church security team, whatever the case may be, because these principles apply across the board regardless of what environment you're operating in. And so every single chapter, we we break it into sections, and every section has a takeaway right up front. And then every chapter has a takeaway right up front. That's the first sentence of the chapter. So technically, we're structuring it so that if all you do is read the table of contents, you will already know everything that's in the book, but that way you can go through because now you want to know why is this true? How do you get to say this? Um, but what we're essentially arguing is that when people talk about mission command failure, it's not that mission command failed, it's that it was never actually present. Because mission command depends on certain psychological things being in place already, certain conditions, right? Well, if the conditions aren't there, it doesn't matter that you've announced that we're now following mission command, it's not gonna happen. It doesn't matter if you're, oh, well, we're gonna empower our people or whatever new agey language they're using these days. It's never gonna work because you don't have the conditions in place. So Gray Cell Protocols is basically our proposed framework for creating those conditions. And essentially what you're having is you almost have a teeter-totter in which we're arguing that a an effective leader is gonna understand what environment his team is in. And he's either gonna apply GCP to create conditions or he's gonna apply he's gonna allow mission command to emerge and back off the GCP. And so you're constantly doing maintenance on the system that if I don't have the conditions necessary for mission command to emerge, then I need to apply this until I do. And then I need to back off that and allow this to happen. And so we basically walk through exactly what the conditions are, exactly why you need them, and how to know which side of the system you're in at any given time.

Mark McGrath: 1:01:04

Give us give our listeners a good working definition of gray cell.

Kit Perez: 1:01:09

It's it's basically it's an orientation-based doctrine that was born in resistance. Um, it's designed for high-stakes groups. I have come up with it over time. And and here's the thing, I didn't invent it, right? These are things that exist, but what I'm doing is systemizing them, I guess you could say, and naming them. And so what you're doing is you're creating kind of what Panch was talking about earlier, you're creating the conditions, you're building these things into the system. Because mission command can't just be adopted, it has to emerge as a consequence or benefit, depending on how you look at it, as of the system that has been created. So if the three of us, for instance, make a resistance cell and we're gonna do decentralized leadership and we're gonna use you know uh beams, decentralized leaderless model or whatever. Okay, that's great. Except we don't trust each other, we just like each other. And that's gonna fail over time because eventually Mark's gonna want to do something that Ponch doesn't want to do, and and and all of that. And so GCP allows you to say, okay, it doesn't matter if we like each other. What matters is do we trust each other? Okay, well, go back further. How do you trust somebody? What is required for that trust to exist? And you're taking it all the way back to arguing that you need to know who you are because in order for the three of us to be effective on a team, or 10 of us or 50 of us, I would argue that 50 is too big a team, but you know, that's a whole other discussion. I have to know what drives you. I have to know what your weaknesses are in the sense of where does your orientation come from? And we're kind of arguing, I need to know what your orientation comes from. Like, did you have a good childhood? Not so I can lord it over you or compare it or make you feel bad about yourself or anything like that, but just so I understand how you get to where you are.

unknown: 1:03:23

Yeah.

Kit Perez: 1:03:24

And that way I can, for instance, say, okay, I am gonna be clear about the part where maybe I struggle, I need to be seen as smart. You know, maybe I'm coming from a female perspective, being in male kind of dominated career fields. That's that's where I struggle. That's my thing. Well, if you know that, you know where somebody can come at me. And so you can cover that weakness. Does that make sense?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:03:51

Yeah, kid, it does. One of the things that I'm thinking about as you're walking through this is um in the military, we understood human factors at a different level. Because we we we had to know our troops. When we had to go in to their, you know, visit them in the barracks and all that, and you started to learn who they were. That's not true in business, right? You don't they they just don't do it. There's many reasons why they don't do it. So the advantage that we had in the military is uh we had to know our troops. We had to know, I mean, they're 18, 19-year-old kids, and you're probably 24 or 25 at the time when you're learning this stuff. Um, and you're still an 18 or 19-year-old kid yourself, but you're 25 years of age. Uh, you have to go through this whole progression to really understand how that works. In the business world, because we've been trying this for years, right? We, you know, teaming skills, understanding strategy, understanding psychological safety, understanding these things, creating good debriefing content and approaches. Um, what ends up happening is these people will never know their people. Uh, and and it's it's a it's uh the way the system is designed. You if you ask questions like that about your childhood and all that, um, you might get in trouble, right, with HR. So um, and what we're I I think you're asking folks to do is we need to look at the system again. That system is preventing us from creating um the conditions. It may be, right? Uh my guess is you have to look at the system to understand, hey, what's preventing us from creating the conditions? Do you have a reward system that rewards independent uh performance over collective performance, right? So all these things matter. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm I'm I'm advising here because I mean, this is very important. This is what organizations need. I'm not saying they don't need this. I'm saying you have got to be serious about this before Kit or Vandergriff or anybody else comes in and says this is what you need to do. If you're not serious about it, if you can't change the system, yeah, you're just wasting your time. Go to BCG, go to uh McKenzie, go spend millions on them, and you'll end up dead because I guarantee it we'll be coaching your uh your opposition, right? So uh it is I'm sorry, kid. It to me, you you hit a you hit a spot here with all this, and it's it's my it's it's an uphill battle for leaders to understand, right? You have got to be able to change the situation in your organization. Yeah. Uh not just in your span of control, but you know, if you can, you got to get executives on board with this. Otherwise, you can fail.

Kit Perez: 1:06:07

Absolutely. And I think that starts with you as an executive doing that internal work yourself. Why do I make the decisions that I make? What do I need from my people? And not in the way of what do I need them to do? But why do I need their approval? Or do I need their approval? You know, what what are they feeding me emotionally? And then you once you get all that straightened out, then you can start looking at hiring because that's how you change your system, is you start creating a system that self-selects for the type of people that would thrive under mission command as opposed to people who thrive under not that anybody thrives, but that want ego-driven command.

Mark McGrath: 1:06:56

Well, knowing Don, too, one of his things he's always pointed to is the personnel system, the behaviors that it drives is the enemy of mission command.

Kit Perez: 1:07:04

Oh, absolutely. Because again, like you guys have talked about a million times, as Don's talked about, the system rewards bad behavior. It rewards the careerism, the me first, the I don't really care about the Mission. And I think that's where a lot of people fail when they apply decentralized leadership. Is you have to assume, like if I'm if I'm the boss of the two of you and I say, okay, I'm going to empower you guys to go make decisions. I have to assume you know what the mission is because I've given it to you as clearly as possible. You care about the mission. You are going to discipline yourselves because I can't babysit you. Right. And there is constraints in that that I have given you that these are the lines you cannot cross. But one thing that Don and I have talked about a lot is a big part of this is once you have those pieces in place, you have mission command. I have to also be okay as a leader with saying, I've given you the box, I've told you the shape, the color, the sides, where they are, all of that. You can do whatever you want in that box, even if it is not what I would have done. And that I think is a really big part of failure on the part of leaders to think that they're running mission command or decentralized leadership, because really what they want is they want you to do it the way they would have done it. Well said. Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 1:08:34

That's good. That's right on the money. All right. Send our listeners where they need to go. We're gonna, I mean, we could go on for days with you, um, and we will, of course, we should probably be doing some, maybe some live casts on Substack and or X as uh some of these things emerge so we can talk about uh, you know, the concepts that you talk about that that jive with what we're talking about that uh are designed to help people thrive in all of this. So where should we send folks? Now we know because we're subscribers, but let's let's get Shepard Scale. Let's get more.

Kit Perez: 1:09:10

Shepherd scale.substack.com.

Mark McGrath: 1:09:12

We'll spell Shepherd because there's different ways.

Kit Perez: 1:09:14

Ah, yes. S-H-E-P-A-R-D scale.substack.com.

Mark McGrath: 1:09:21

Excellent. Kit Perez, thanks for taking the time to come on No Way Out and illuminating uh how we could be using CounterIntel. And the great thing about all the things that you talk about all over your your Substack, which we highly recommend. You do not have to have been in the military to use this. This is this is as valuable to business leaders as it is to anybody else. So um for those that are open to learn, to to thrive, you definitely want to check out Kit's work. And we're uh we're honored to be on the on the path with you. And thanks for uh thanks for being part of our tribe too. Oh, thank you. Thank you.