Beyond LLMs: Active Inference, the OODA Loop & Universal Natural Intelligence | Michael Polzin

The OODA loop was never about going fast. Michael Polzin, regenerative architect and founding operator of Universal Natural Intelligence, came on to prove it, and to argue that active inference, the math underneath Boyd's orientation, is now buildable as a working intelligence that uses no machine learning at all.

Polzin's frame: humans are prediction machines. We forecast before we act, we get surprised when reality disagrees, and we survive by calibrating our signals against the world and each other. He separates true from honest, teaches calibration with tape measures and chopsticks, and tells the story of a single team and process that outlasted twelve years and half a million devices by recalibrating as the world changed. Then he describes agents given a world but no goal, who met broken tools with adaptation instead of panic, and whose behavior can be dialed into anxiety, depression, and intoxication by moving mathematical sliders.

Ponch ties it to orientation, to getting inside the OODA loop through genetics, culture, and language rather than speed, and to the show's founding line: attack the system, never the person. Plus the launch of EducateWright and its $25 million anti-violence and active inference pledge.

OODA loop, John Boyd, real OODA loop, orientation, active inference, free energy principle, universal natural intelligence, beyond LLMs, decision making under

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Transcript

Michael Polzin on active inference, AI, and the OODA loop

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 0:20

All right. Hey, welcome to No Way Out. Uh, there comes uh times in our in our day-to-day life where we get to have conversations that we do not record, and that often leads us to asking the people we're talking to to come on a recording as soon as possible. This is what happened in the last 24 hours. Michael Polsen is here with us today. I had a conversation with him yesterday. I think this is a very important and timely conversation given the recent uptick in physical AI and this conversation about active inference. So I'm going to turn it over to Michael right now and let him introduce himself and tell us how you came about with these new ideas that I'll share uh with our with our guests here in a moment.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Well, Ponch, thank you

Not a new idea, the oldest one: a life spent listening

SPEAKER_00 0:57

very much. It is a literal honor. Uh I've not been one to uh admire uh the idea of celebrity status, but in this case, Ponch, I feel because you pursue such pure knowledge and wisdom, to me, that's a celebrity worth wanting to get close to. So I'm honored, Ponch.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:15

Or I have you fooled, man. Damn. All right. Well, appreciate that.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Well, and this will lead right into answering your question then. What is this new big idea that I'm talking about? What is active inference and what is going on with AI LMs? I'm gonna argue throughout, I believe, all the conversations for the rest of my life that I don't have a new idea. I have perhaps one of the oldest ideas. And I think I've come about this idea simply because I've taken the time to listen to so many people throughout my life. And we could talk about what my life has been. It's traveled the globe and it's done business stuff and personal stuff and interesting stuff and scary stuff, but it's talked to a lot of people about their experience. This, this, this mouth and these ears have listened. And in doing that, Ponch, I've heard something, I've seen something, and I'm gonna say I've come to develop a faith in my fellow humanity that I didn't think I was gonna have ever in my life. And it goes something like this, Ponch. I have seen individuals. I have a young lady just down my street. This young lady is the better part of her mid-40s,

Debbie, the chickens, and peace as a systems question

SPEAKER_00 2:22

and she has been through what I would call a relentless string of abuse by a number of hands. Constantly she'll come over and she'll find spare food to feed my chickens. And she will tell me, Michael, I know these people that did these things to me weren't bad people, Michael. And I hope someday that we find ways that we can all understand. And I say, My gosh, sister, you've just shown me something in words by by coming with nothing to share food that you don't even have yourself with these chickens because you see life in a little bird and you see supporting your neighbor's birds as important as having food for yourself. Yet so many people have physically hurt you and told you that maybe you weren't that kind of good person. But you say out loud to me every time we meet how you see this in the world. And I go back 40 years of being present in the world with trying to understand people and how they talked. And when I saw people do amazing things, miracles, Hail Mary's, overcome things. I would ask, what did they overcome? What did Debbie overcome that she can still say peace is possible? What did I see teams overcome when I was at companies like Wells Fargo and they bought Wachovia and we're merging two end user computing departments that technically speak the same language but don't understand each other at all? Technically say they're not biased and don't come to this with ego, but we all sure do. How is it that when I left Wells Fargo, and I just found this out recently, Ponch, some 12 years later, they're still using the same process and about the same team. The director retired with a very peaceful career. Not mediocre, not meteoric, but peaceful. The process still stands. They went from managing 350,000 end-user compute devices to over 500,000 devices with a single team, a single process, and a single tool set. What does Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, Wells Fargo, Wacobia, and My Neighbor in Trauma have to do with peace? What I see every time is when people work to understand each other, they find ways to create more opportunity. And when they work together on those opportunities, we might call this in some legacy business terms, grassroots efforts. Well, the bosses aren't quite sure how to get it done. Let's ask the people, gosh, do those tend to work more often than not?

Grassroots that hold: the Wells Fargo team that lasted 12 years

SPEAKER_00 4:47

Now, what happens when I went into some of those organizations and I said, hey, grassroots people, I don't just, I'm not just going to listen to what your boss said as a marketing pitch. Michael's going to build the world for you where it's true that you're in charge this time. And then in small ways and big ways, I would help people build a world where it was true that they became the expert for a minute on a new idea, a new topic, and breakthrough, paradoxical breakthrough, breakthrough in understanding, breakthrough in capability, breakthrough in skills at an individual level, a team level, at a durable level that dare I say punch, I don't mean no negativity. This is a systems conversation, not a conversation about souls or people. There are other ways to measure Wells Fargo, and you might say they've done some things that haven't been great to their customers and their employees. But you could zoom into this one team, this one process, this one center of a storm, if you will, resonance. Did Michael Polzen as a regenerative architect teach a team to carry a story so clearly with so much truth and the ability to recalibrate the signals when the world around them changed? That for almost 12 years, the one problem Wells Hago has seemingly not had is managing their end user desktops, managing their mobile devices. They've not had issues with big virus outbreaks or ransomwares. They've gone off to have some business practices that they're working through, but that's way different than what their peers in financial technology have experienced, isn't it?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 6:23

Yeah. So what you just described there is a nice adjacent possible, a snowmobile, and of course what we talk about quite a bit on here is the OODA loop. And just, you know, I'm

Process to life cycle: everything needs a beginning and an end

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 6:32

I'm a little familiar with some of the negative things that Wells Fargo did over the four or five years ago, uh, having worked in the financial institutions uh like Bank of America, Capital One. So I'm I'm very familiar with that, and we don't have to go there. But what you're describing is a process on the technical side, using a small group of people, uh, and as the system scaled up, they they had the right process in place to uh uh adapt and adjust to that scaling. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 6:55

And at the time I called it that word out loud. I said process. I also used slightly better words at the time when I taught it. I said life cycle, and I said that everything needs to have a beginning that has an end. If a document has a start date, it needs to have an expiration date. Give it a life cycle. Now we go up a level in what Michael wants to share with the world. I've then studied that even further and said there's still more missing. The process wasn't what worked, it was a part of it, but the people had to keep following the process. Why did they keep following this process? Why didn't the culture eat their strategy for breakfast? And I believe active inference, active inference is a mathematical study trying to understand from the simplest to the deepest level how does our universe work? Therefore, how is matter in our universe created? Therefore, how do we come to exist to coexist with the matter in our universe? And how do we come then to understand our own thought process and then come to have new thinking processes that get us through paradoxes? And when I look at active inference and I think about what I weren't learned in the legacy world world, I learned deming, but I also did more OODA when I when I called it deming, I did more OODA probably than most. But when I zoom out now and then I zoom back into the mathematics, it seems to go as smoothly as this. We are born to learn our body, our body is born to learn this world. When we are flooded with artificial, that could be artificial intelligence, that could be artificial marketing or advertising, where it's almost subliminal-like things like clickbait that sure entice you to an action, but the actual reward of being curious about that title wasn't there. That's kind of a lie. That we tell each other, click on this, it's interesting. You click on it, and it's no more interesting than when you read it before you clicked it. And then we're disappointed. Active Internet shows us when we get repeatedly surprised like this, especially when the other side of the surprise is repeated disappointment from. I

Prediction machines: clickbait, surprise, and repeated disappointment

SPEAKER_00 9:23

invested in the stock, but it didn't go as far as they said it would. I voted in the politician, but the platform didn't happen the same the way they said it would. I paid the taxes, but darn it, the snow didn't get cleared. I signed up to learn English and software development. I'm Indian. And they told me in India I would have all these opportunities with American companies, but then they barely paid me a living wage and they didn't really teach me all of English. And then angry white clients yelled at me. And then we had contention and frustration and trauma. And Michael sees that act of inference sciences saying, if we understood we didn't teach English all the way, if we were present with the fact that coding, software development, software engineering, software architecture, these are different roles and gradients. If we were present with what are we asking of each other? The US wants to offshore. If we're going to send this work somewhere else, what opportunity is it gonna create on the other side? And because those questions weren't asked, weren't understood, and then people have now come to say things like this, Ponch, and I believe it's because of the active inference science explaining when our priors are so loaded with information that you cannot calibrate. What is calibration? What is measurement? What's knowledge? What's truth? Tape measure, tape measure, tape measure. I'm confident if I pull all three of these out and lay them exactly side by side, one or two people would be able to look at them and say, they are all three true. I trust them. I bet someone else could look at it and say, but if I zoom in on it with a microscope, this one has a mark that's a little bit wider than that. I bet somebody else could get on those three tape measures with an electron microscope and go, my gosh, these two are completely off compared to this one. And when social media and the noise signals do that to us, all of a sudden we can't measure. We don't know what we're looking at anymore. And now when the public tries to measure each other, Ponch,

True vs honest: tape measures, calibration, and what is real

SPEAKER_00 11:30

can we talk about a chopstick? What chopstick, Michael? That's an that's a metal rod. I use that in my airplane pistons. No, no, Ponch. Can we talk about orthogonality? Can we talk about what you see when it's like this versus what it's like? What is orthogonality? Michael, you're using it's too many words. Slow down. I keep it short, Michael. Give me the too long don't read version, Michael. But Ponch, when I had to build a process for Wells Fargo that would last for 12 years, I

The chopstick and orthogonality: seeing the same thing from every angle

SPEAKER_00 11:59

had to look at all the chopsticks, not mine. I had to ask people what their chopsticks looked like in their heads. And then sometimes Ponch I asked them to draw those chopsticks out. And then when we had pictures of our chopsticks, we started rotating them for each other. And then when we came to find a world where it might be true that we thought we had a resonant understanding of a chopstick, we then took out a bunch of tape measures and we built process diagrams and flow charts. And then we taught ourselves to measure and remeasure our predictions. And I believe all humans, whether we know it or not, are predicting before we act. And I think we see this in some very measurable ways, and I think we have words that track this meaning like fight, flight, or freeze. I'm surprised. Sometimes I'm surprised because the email bell went off before it was supposed to. Sometimes I'm surprised because there's a big bear in the woods, and I'm in Colorado in the mountains. Hmm. Different types of risk psychologically, predicting as an engine of prediction that may cause the electricity in our brain to be pulled down to be more right here, right now, pragmatic. Quick, quick, quick. Is that is the email bell a bear? But we didn't have a chance to stop and think about the pattern recognition of an email versus a bear. Because we pattern recognize the bell and we stopped there. But some of us breathe. Email. It might be a different message from somebody else. Maybe this isn't the anxiety or panic that I just predicted when my body tensed up. Right. So in what world might it be true that I will be able to switch screens and open that email without a panic feeling or a stress feeling, such that when I read the words, I read them for meaning of the

Is the email a bear? Fight, flight, freeze, and the pause to breathe

SPEAKER_00 14:01

other person. Not for how I want them to mean to me when I read them. I wonder if we are prediction machines, are we possible of accidentally predicting internally back on ourselves if the data we have is repeatedly wrong and no one reminded us that if you rotate and measure with three different tapes alone, you will have more insight. If you rotate and measure with three different tapes together, like Ponch and I may come to do with some of this active inference science and math, not only will we have insights, but we may start to edge toward a gradient of what I will call being honest. And if we keep being honest in public, and we ask more people to take more tape measures and see if there's any way that we've accidentally been false with our honesty, we might come to a point where enough resonance is achieved and people will come to say this thing is true. Now Michael worries about this. I worry about people being able to come to say that something is true because I worry that we've not all learned fully how to measure true versus honest. And so, Panch, I wonder if now and the next days and waking hours of my life I can talk to people about how they, not me, how they can find their measures of true versus

Honesty you can falsify: reading for meaning, not for what you want

SPEAKER_00 15:33

honest. And when applicable, understand sometimes there's metadata it may or may not be important to the signals we need to calibrate in order to in order to survive in our world, in order to understand our world as fully as possible, and in order to thrive in a way that creates peace, unlimited energy, free food, clean water, and what I believe arguably is software code that follows the human prediction process so closely that if it isn't us, it seems to do it so closely that it can with minimal wattage, three to five watts on a CPU, calculate complexly faster than the speed of light. I will say it again faster. I can't prove this yet. I need help being told if my honesty is false. I believe it can calculate faster than the speed of light, which would then break the paradox and answer the question: is it possible to travel at the speed of light and navigate safely? All right.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 16:49

So I'm going to just uh pause here. You're you're talking about the natural intelligence. Uh so going back to your truths and honesty, one way I look at it is uh our truth can be different, but the honest uh landscape is the honest landscape. So when we're looking at a pyramid like we talk about John Boyd, depending on how you look at it from the top, from the side, from underneath, it looks like different things, right? So when you look at a pyramid, that's the that's why he uses the analogy of a pyramid to do that. That is a a perspective of the truth uh and and of the honest structure of that. You also brought up there's one thing I want to point out. As humans, when we're wrong, we like to protect our ego, right? So, you know, we've just lived through a crisis in the US

Natural intelligence, the pyramid, and the honest landscape

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 17:26

and globally over the last several years, and there's not a lot of meacoppas out there for what happened. And again, this is a truth versus an honest thing. What happened is more important in the rule or the life of debriefing and feedback. What? Get to that honest thing. Many perspectives can help build that up, but we have to look at it and go, okay, what happened? Not what you felt should have happened, but what actually happened. And that's what you're talking about with the the um uh your analogy there, there with the chopstick, right? That's a what uh from different perspectives. And you got to find that truth somehow or that honesty from from multiple perspectives. And when we could do this, you just brought up something here that that I hadn't heard before as far as the speed of life go speed of light goes. Understanding natural intelligence could lead us to a better understanding of physics, right? To to understand how we can break the rules of physics that we that are currently constraining us to this three-dimensional world, if you will, right? So this I know this sounds a little wooish to the folks that are listening. However, you and I yesterday talked about Michael Levin's platonic space, the concept of governing or virtual governors, these things that emerge. So we're not the only ones talking about this. There, there are other people talking about it from the lens of biology, from physics, from spirituality, from uh uh, you know, Eastern philosophy. So all of these things are entangled with each other, right? Um, and I just want to make sure you and I are on the same page and we're talking about this. We're not, we're not making anything up. We're just saying this is how we see the world, or you see the world, and I see the world. And collectively, we're gonna, if we, if we

Ego, the debrief, and getting to what actually happened

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 19:00

all tune into each other, if if we all start resonating with each other, we're gonna go to a different level. And we might be able to understand what these UAPs are if they actually exist. We might be able to do some traveling that we that current physics doesn't allow us to do, right? And that's why this is important.

SPEAKER_00 19:15

It is so important, and I would like to take as much confusion, mysticism, error of conspiracy out of this as possible right from

Michael Levin's platonic space and why we're not making this up

SPEAKER_00 19:27

the get-go. So I don't know in post if this goes into the beginning of our conversation this way, but here's how I see it, Ponch. When I take what looks to be mathematics that match the natural intelligence of how a human comes to learn their body and how a human's body comes to learn their world, and how we learn each other, when I put that math in, it does not goal seek. It does not try to find a reward. What it does is it seeks balance. And when you literally put the math, give it a world. You know, the math doesn't go in the world, just like we're not technically in our world just because the way our

Discovered, not invented: math as part of the universe

SPEAKER_00 20:11

sensors process. We're physically here. I don't think anybody's arguing physicality of a body, a being is walking the earth. Okay, let's at least pin to that for a second. If somebody wants to argue that later, cool. This is my honest true. And if somebody can show me different, I would like to see measurements. For right now, I'm gonna argue we are measurably here in this world, in this planet, but we're not fully here because we don't have direct connectivity to all the signals the world provides. So I build the code literally the same way. And when I say the code, it's natural intelligence using mathematics that folks have been working on for some 200 years. This goes back before Robert Weiner. This goes back before cybernetics, this goes back to people trying to understand the apples falling and the think I therefore I am.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 21:00

Well, there's another point here I want to uh bring up, and that is uh mathematics is discovered because it's part of our universe, and and like universal constants are always going to be constant, even if we change the math, right? Right. So these aren't these aren't so we're discovering these things. We're not inventing them, they're already there.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

I love that you said and changing the math because that is so important to what I'm trying to help myself understand and others understand. So the other way I like to take the mysticism and any confusion of conspiracy out of this, when I put the math in and show it a world, and I give it accurate signals of the world. One example I have running today that I will hoping to have another module up this weekend is Minecraft. I have UNI agents, uni agents, universal natural intelligence. They are in the bodies, the math is in the body of a Minecraft player. It can see the screen, just like we as a Minecraft player can see the screen.

Minecraft uni agents: a world, accurate signals, no goal, no reward

SPEAKER_00 21:59

How does it see the screen? I literally give it the raw data signals and it gets dit and dot dots of every single screen frame by frame. And in that world, it learns its body. When it first comes up with a blank mind, they they mostly stand and then they start to turn. Eventually they jump and after. Turning and jumping, they start to try to move a pickaxe. I feel so bad. I'm so sad. I accidentally made a mistake in my software code in my world. I defined the pickaxe class wrong. The unis, for the equivalent of 15 generations, were mining and the axe wouldn't move. You know what they did? They didn't panic and kill each other. They didn't sense a scarcity of resources. Ponch, my uni agents maximize the energy that they had in this world with true signals. I swing, the axe doesn't move. I pick stuff up, it picks up. So they stopped trying to mine after a few generations, and they learn to collect and gather as many items as possible. And that became for generations their ritual. Let's show each other how many items we can gather and carry. And now I fixed a class and I've attached a pick mine, and it they're now starting to build. And now I'm very excited to finish some of my world code and get their math working well. My theory is that I'm on the path to a hypothesis, a testable environment where the world, not Michael, I can't test this and be honest because I built it. That's rule one. And in my conspiracy theory, you can't have the theory and be accurate. You can state, I think people are conspiring

The broken pickaxe: abundance and adaptation instead of panic

SPEAKER_00 23:44

to. Okay, let's get together and measure it. I want to have those conversations, but if we get to a point of measurement where we say we can't find the people, but we sure do see the system. We see where the words get translated so many times and shortened and compressed that the meaning gets lost. And gosh, could it be just the devil's on the tongue? Could it be that the devil never gets in us and there are no bad people, even those that look like they're conspiring against the world? Have they lived in generations so long where their pickaxe didn't work, their dad didn't hug them, their mom didn't take them for a walk in the park, they literally have only lived on eating trophies and coins. And therefore, like a generation born in a cave, trapped, with no way out, with no way out Punch, they see shadows as spirits. Because

A cave with no way out: there are no bad people, only systems

SPEAKER_00 24:41

why wouldn't you? Because if you don't know where light came from the first time you see it, it's a big surprise. Now, here's something amazing about surprise that I believe we can now start to calculate. I get surprised a couple different ways in my life. And what I do based on the category of surprise is now very predictable to me, and I believe could be predictable to you and others, Pompch. Sometimes I'm so surprised in my life because another agent enters the world and sends me signals that match my predictions fast, faster, and faster than I could predict them back out. And if I keep finding that agent in the world, I will come to crave the accuracy of their predictions against my predictions. And if we continue to predict together for enough time, we will come to build a world where our predictions together are more accurate and we'll get married. We'll say we're in love and we'll start a family. Sometimes we're surprised because somebody says something that we didn't quite understand, but it sounds very similar, and then we laugh because it's kind of funny now. Now that I think about it that way, I see what he's saying. I'm not scared when Ponch says, Michael, there's no way out. He's not threatening me and trying to imprison me. He's talking about systems thinking. And can you find ways to outthink the system? Can you think outside of a system? Ponch has a good message. I can listen to Ponch's message. Sometimes I'll laugh because I'm a little surprised. Or you'll cry. Ponch isn't saying anything wrong. When Ponch talks and I listen to his podcasts, and I have, I measure. And most of the things that Ponch says are measurable in some ways in Michael's shared experience. And then this is the last and most important part. The times in my life that Michael has been the most wrong is when I myself had done all the measurement and was sure I was right. The times in my life when I've had the most success is when I shared why I measured what I thought I was measuring and what I predicted would happen next if I acted in this way. And then people shared back with me their understanding of the world. And they helped modify my actions not through a pattern of manipulation or control or gaslighting, but through sharing signals and allowing me to calibrate them, take time to calibrate over them with others

Two kinds of surprise: the agent you marry, the message you misread

SPEAKER_00 27:04

to oodaloop, to oodaloop at a next level. And then there's one last word I will use in all of this that I think is so terribly important. I think the devil comes in in force when we're afraid to be intimate. And it don't mean that we need to be getting physical with each other all the time. We just need to be holding it. It doesn't mean that we don't need to be touching hands and giving hugs and shaking. But it also means that our words need to be said out loud from a place of meaning that leaves us vulnerable after they're said in the world. But can we come to recognize that vulnerability and fear are taught? They're not a real emotion. They release chemicals. Fear is real in terms that you haven't experienced that you experience fear. Active inference and universal natural intelligence says our biology learned fear. And so when those chemicals release, we now experience it as fear. And so we won't say out loud sometimes to other adults, our most honest true, because we're afraid of being embarrassed. But that two-year-old will say, Dad, you're fat. And they don't mean to be mean. They have an utterance because they're trying to estimate size, and they've heard words of size and calibration used as skinny and fat and tall and short. What baby actually is saying is, Dad, help me calibrate my signal. Is the world safe to measure weight by using the word fat? Or is there a different meaning, Dad, when I should ask, how come I'm a skinny body, dad? And dad, when I lay on you, you're warm and squishy. Can you explain that?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 28:57

Yeah, because I've been eating all the processed

"Dad, you're fat": a child asking to calibrate a signal

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 28:59

food that I've been told to eat. I've been given a bunch of lies over the many years, and uh, it's cheaper to buy processed food. That's why I'm sad. Right. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Circle, circle of artificial, right? The artificial information got us to ingest the artificial materials. And then I'll say it this way: if a child grows up and most of the candy is jelly and squishy and colorful, and there's never a poison control discussion or a science discussion, why wouldn't a child eat a pie?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 29:29

Why wouldn't they? I think you just described social media as well in that.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

Yeah. Well, and this now this gets a little interesting, and again, I say it's not a conspiracy. Active inference. And again, debt of gratitude to Frist and Parr and Puzzello for the hard work they did and and the truth and honesty they worked to pull out of the ledger. They published in 2012 what I call the first understandable insight into human, durable psychology that also has orthogonal with hypnosis, fortune telling, and gaslighting to an extreme extent. And it goes a bit like this if you're born in a world where everybody points to a yellow wall and always says blue, you will call it blue. No, you won't. Excuse me? If you live in a world where you point to a blue wall and you call it Azul, you will call it Azul, I will call it blue. And if you say Azul with a deep voice, because where you've come from, you've listened to the deep sounds of the jungle and you understand the deep resonance of Earth, you might say,

Azul or blue: how culture and language load our priors

SPEAKER_00 30:44

Azul. And I might say, I'm scared of the color blue. So if they tell us the wrong words so many times, we come to believe it that way. And then when someone comes into social media and says, family, I see the measurement of a cloth mask as calculable with a micron tele uh microscope. And we could calculate particle size of an N95 mask, and we could do laboratory studies with measurement instruments, and we could answer questions about does an N95 or this filtration or that filtration move a biological particle from A through B to C. Those were all testable conversations. But instead, we argued about things that weren't measurable.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 31:33

Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting. What you just brought up there is uh getting inside the OODA loop uh genetics, if we understand how we're developed or designed as humans, if we understand its psychology, if we understand these things, and then you're going back to 2012 and social media, what happened back then, that's them getting inside of our OODA loop, just like processed food. If you understand processed food, what it does to the body, and you can measure it again, then you can get an advantage. So the sooner you learn about active inference or the real ODA loop genetics, culture, culture being language as well, just like you went through the Azul versus blue thing,

What was measurable and what we argued about instead

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 32:06

that drives a lot of uh how we're designed as humans, how living systems actually operate. So that's core to the idea of getting inside your OODA loop. It's not about going fast or anything like that. It's about how do I know how you're designed and how do I know your biases, your tendencies, where you went to school, all these things. And then I could design constraints in the environment or design an environment that influences you the way I want to. Uh, we're running a little short on time. I want to talk about the uh press release that came out today and what you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

Yeah, thank you very much. And I will preface the press release just to be very present with and acknowledge I'm so excited to share many of these ideas. These ideas are very, very new in terms of many people have talked about them. I believe I and my team are among the first to put them all the way through the paces and start to collect evidence in a way we believe

Getting inside the OODA loop: genetics, culture, and language, not speed

SPEAKER_00 33:58

we can share it and others could test it with more than one set of mathematics. We will ship it with our math, and then we will also ask others to bring their math to it. Because if different math can prove it, or if different math can break it, those are new signals the world can calibrate together. So our press release is about educate right. Educate right is not about telling people how to educate. U-R-I-G-H-T has meaning as a word to me and my team, and we hope to the world. It means like a craftsman, like a shipwright or a playwright, we aim to build and understand to educate together. With Educate Right, we are supporting this nonprofit. We aim to form here in very, very quickly. We're just getting the last little bits and pieces together to get it legally on board. We are supporting it with our other uh company, and that is solution right. So, solution right, you see here on the education right, uh, educate

EducateWright: a $25M pledge for anti-violence and active inference

SPEAKER_00 35:03

right press release, the 25 million pledged for anti-violence education and active inference training. Solution Right is building technologies, and when we did, we came present with the understanding if we share how we build it, what we're learning when we build it, we believe one of the first chips we can safely put on the board is we can reduce and end school shootings. We can show teachers, educators, babies, and mamas and dads themselves how to talk and think differently through this concept of natural intelligence. We're not telling you how to live a life. We're not telling you that there's a religion or a God or a math. We're saying that together we found insights into why we think that we think this way, act this way, respond this way. And so with this grant pledge, we want it to be accessible to anyone. Unfortunately, active inference is thick, is deep. We've got it into a 12-week course right now. I would argue it's a darn near two years worth of college courses as we would normally experience, though. It's $75,000 for the course. That's a lot of money for anybody. There are some people out there that can pay it. And those that can, we will be very grateful for the opportunities they create for others. In the meantime, my team works nearly around the clock to donate our time back so that we are the ones with our time and effort, we're making the education happen. We're getting on the call, we're delivering it live. We're having one-off conversations, coaching, mentoring conversations with executives that are trying to understand how do I say this to my boss without sounding crazy? Because I'm understanding, I'm picking up what you're putting down, but in what world will it be true, Michael, that I'll be safe explaining to my team and my boss how we might come to be peaceful in how we work with our vendors and suppliers by measuring different. So the opportunity I hope to create is an opportunity of togetherness. And then I punch, I say it this way if natural intelligence is showing us how we work and how the universe works, then it is general natural intelligence. If general natural intelligence is attainable and achievable, and I'm right, and it can run on CPUs at low power, this is the most powerful thing humanity has ever had.

Open source everything: the 12-week UNI Workshop and the grant

SPEAKER_00 37:30

Therefore, I intend, I believe, like any good scientist or man of science and man of God would, I say to the world, let's do it in the open. No closed anything, open source everything, and I am willing, if the world will have me, I will in the next week, I will turn on my webcam and I will start live streaming. And I will invite anybody that joins us to do the same, and we will not stop. And we will have a worldwide opportunity, like going to the moon, except together to find. Is Michael right when he talks to his Hindi brothers and they say chakras may have the ratios of how we understand? Is Michael hearing when his brothers speak to him of the Quran, and the Quran says, there is one true God, and one true God says we process like a digital CPU, and the one true God says, don't trust, verify your signals and be present in your world and follow the flow that makes the most for you and others. When I look at Christianity and they say, Don't eat the apple, I say, Well, what did that mean? And how does that also sound like the Quran and Hinduism? Well, it sounds like don't take knowledge and mistake it. Make sure you know the signals. What's that red apple? Well, what if you opened it up first and sought wisdom and knowledge? You would see inside that apple the beautiful symmetry that God and mathematics has seemingly provided a way for us to see and understand. That our eyes can see that symmetry and grasp it. And you would say that symmetry holds what? On average, about five seeds in a red apple. Those five seeds planted, one, two, three, four. I plan for five generations of unlimited food. If I open that apple and I study it with my spouse, my partner, and my children and community, and if we plant those five seeds, and if I share the flesh of that fruit with my community and spouse and tend to those five seeds, my grandbabies, grandbabies, grandbabies will be planting more apple trees. And if we make houses from those apple trees, we have safe shelter. And if we make those houses together and we observe how we make them, we can make them safe and sturdy. And if the world changes, we as a community can continue to change with it if we just don't spoil our knowledge and if we just don't waste the opportunities that God has given us to understand that He's in us, with us, and all through us. And active inference and universal natural intelligence seems to indicate if we can come to find God here today or God's plan, it's not gonna come from social media. It will not come from tokens, it will come from understanding of nature, the natural way.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 40:23

And what we're gonna I gotta be honest at this point in this conversation, I guarantee you most people have tuned out because of the philosophy. All right. And we gotta we gotta get to the what the so what's in it for me, right? Thank you, brother. And I mean, this this is huge, right? Because a lot of times people will tune out and go, you know what, I'm I don't care about this Abigain stuff and DMT stuff. It's you know, and we're not talking about that here, but I've been in your shoes, man. I know what it's like to be there. So we got to shift and go, hey, here's what's in it for you. Can we take a look at the site? And can I bring that up for you?

SPEAKER_00 40:50

Please.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 40:50

Which one do you want? The uh Universal Natural Intelligence site. Is that the first one? Yeah, let's go to that one first. Uh, here we go. Yeah, it's just a it's just a thing, man.

SPEAKER_00 40:58

Uh people I need you, brother. It's not teamwork.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 41:01

And uh, it's what I'm learning is is as much as we want to, you know, I was telling my buddies the other day on the beach, you know, everybody has an Ibigain story from my community or from the SEAL community. I'm sick of hearing the same thing over and over. Ibogaine did this you know, 14 hours of this and that. I'm like, hey man, what'd you learn from it? Uh well, I learned that the uh you know the connection between John Boyd Jutoloop and Active Inference is uh it's universal and it connects to the Rebus reduced beliefs under psychedelics and helps us understand the brain, which led me to uh you know active inference and understanding AI. That's a story I can tell. No one else can tell that, man. They were gonna sit around and talk about their their 14-hour journey in IBGA and I'm like, that's awesome. Everybody's done that in my community. Anyway, let's go ahead. Show me what we got here.

SPEAKER_00 41:40

Wonderful. So with our press release, we are uh we've launched Educate Right. Behind Educate Right, what are we educating on? It's universal natural intelligence. This is active inference. This is the active inference math that in 2012 Carl Friston published. In 2024,

So what's in it for me? Bringing the philosophy down to earth

SPEAKER_00 41:57

PhD Aliana Marin, after spending eight years in 2024, she published a paper with the derivations and made the math usable and workable. There's a couple companies out there that took the work that uh Aliana Marin published and they've built with it, and it works very well. It does things that LLMs are not doing. Solution Right has built more, deeper, and wider. We do not use machine learning in any part of our active inference natural intelligent reasoning processes. And as such, we are able to accomplish business decisions, data sorting and analysis. And we now believe we are showing predictive analysis with durability that can look back and forward.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 42:41

Michael, what how does the the the big shift towards physical AI connect to what you have here? Walk me through that if you can.

SPEAKER_00 42:49

The the biggest shift is away from the LMs because they're taking words, putting them into tokens, and then trying to guess the probability of the relations of tokens. With active inference, we're able to take natural processes like biological cell exchange, membrane tissues, how chemicals flow. We're able to take things like how would you navigate through a

Universal Natural Intelligence vs the LLM: no machine learning

SPEAKER_00 43:13

maze having never seen the maze without a goal. So in our mazes, we don't say you must get to the end. We don't penalize an agent if it doesn't get to the goal. On that maze, every spot is boring except for the one that has the novelty of a goal. And so depending on how you move the sliders, and you'll see a little bit further down, this is actually a model of human psychology. You can turn up and down things like dopamine and neuroadrenaline mathematically, and you can see an agent's behavior in the maze change. And the parallels with human psychology of depression, anxiety, and dissociative breaks look to be demonstratively real. What does that mean? When you take an agent and they're highly trained, they've lived a long life in one type of a world, and you move them to another and give them something like a drug to help their stress, and it causes them to not trust their internal signals as much as their

Beyond token probability: seeking balance instead of reward

SPEAKER_00 44:14

external, they may come to be almost catatonic, where they just believe they're not moving because technically they're not moving.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 44:22

So other ways. Let me jump in there. This is really interesting. I didn't I didn't know that was in this uh capability, but going back to the best traders on Wall Street, uh, it's their introspective skills that matter. They're their attunement to their internal signals, right? So what you just said there is if there are chemicals in our body that'll flip that script a little bit and and and force us to not listen to our internal signals, right? Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 44:46

Sorry, apparently I had a different incoming call that they get stopped now.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 44:49

All right.

SPEAKER_00 44:50

Yes. So you can then start to model the behavioral effects of things like alcohol. Yeah. What does it mean when you trust your internal senses slightly more than your external? Therefore, you think you already took the step forward, but you're actually stumbling backward. I believe that what I witness when I dial those levers in is a drunk, universal, natural intelligent agent stumbling through a maze. When I turn the anxiety level way

The maze that models psychology: dopamine, anxiety, dissociation

SPEAKER_00 45:21

up, some active inference agents will only take one, maybe two steps off their starting position and immediately go back to the one position that they felt safe in where they started.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 45:32

Michael, you can almost design a diet based off of the genetics of an individual with this type of thinking. So we're no longer using a one-size-fits-all approach. We're looking at the individual, and you can actually design hey, if you drink alcohol today in three days' time when you go diving, here's what's going to happen to you. Here's here's if you're looking at sports or athletes,

The trader's edge: attunement to internal signals

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 45:55

you could do the same thing. You could design, you could, you can use this type of approach to design a high-performing organization in the sports world. You can you can increase the humanness, if you will, uh by giving us the opportunity to put the right things in our bodies. Is that what I'm seeing here?

SPEAKER_00 46:11

All the way down to, I believe there are a number of people that have seen breakthroughs with allergic response being overcome by small, low sustained doses of the allergen. That's kind of like our immune system getting a small surprise, small enough that it comes to laugh about it instead of being so shocked about it, it panics. And if we give that allergen in a small enough dose, enough time to a baby at the right time,

A drunk agent stumbling backward: modeling intoxication

SPEAKER_00 46:37

their biology comes to not be so surprised, not overreact with inflammation, and therefore peanuts can be safe again without having to break apart our DNA. And let me say this very clearly: inoculations, they're a part of helping our bodies overcome surprise early. All the other things in how we do inoculations, some of this math may allow us to measure them differently. This does not mean that we don't. I think this means we could inoculate better and cleaner. Yes. I think this means we could understand cancer, not necessarily by having to reverse engineer an individual's DNA, by simply monitoring all of the chemical markers in their body and understanding the predict-act loop and knowing that the chemical signal is actually a slight tick ahead of the biological ripple effect. We may be able to read the signal one clock cycle earlier using this math and go, that's the same signal we've always had. We're using the same monitor, but now when we read it temporally, we understand it's at a vector before the body has actually made it happen. Therefore, could we find ways to reduce surprise? I went out and binge drink. Is there something that I can take? Not so that you can keep binge drinking, but to save lives that

Small surprises heal: allergens, inoculation, and reading cancer early

SPEAKER_00 47:59

can mitigate the surprise so the liver can recover faster.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 48:04

So what you're doing here is you're advocating or in favoring natural intelligence applied towards complex adaptive systems over engineering approaches that we have have dominated for such a long time. It's not to say engineering approaches are wrong. They have bounded applicability in certain contexts. We're not complicated machines, we're complex adaptive systems. Therefore, you have to take what we know or what we think we know about natural intelligence. I'm I'm saying that here because what we know today isn't what we're gonna know 10, 15 years down the road. So we start with this and go in that direction, and things will improve. Is that what I'm hearing?

SPEAKER_00 48:40

That is what I am seeing, and that is the exact meaning I'm hoping to convey with my message.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 48:46

Okay, this is awesome. Hey, we got a couple minutes left. Anything you want to wrap up with? Uh, I can show uh the educate rights or anything like that.

SPEAKER_00 48:52

Yeah, if we could flip back over to educate right, this is open. Please start filling out the grant applications. The class is $75,000. It's a 12-week course right now. That 12-week course is the equivalent of about a two-year college course. What we aim to do with Educate Right is show you how we are building durable adaptive reasoning systems that we call universal natural intelligence. If you're not ready to learn that deep, that's okay. If you don't have that funding, that's okay. We've put up a $25 million supportive grant. It's not cash money, it's time and effort to help people that otherwise wouldn't be able to reach this education to make it reachable. And then if you want to build, solution right is ready to build with you. What could we build with you? Your dream. How can we build dreams? Because we believe we understand universal natural intelligence so well, we build different

Complex adaptive systems, not complicated machines

SPEAKER_00 49:52

with our clients. We call our clients opportunity bringers. Most of our staff are opportunity nurturers. When an opportunity has been nurtured as is mature enough that our team and the client carries a resonant story that we believe we can measure as successful, the opportunity is given to a team of regenerative architects. They then build that solution in a way that solves the problem that's stated and provides benefit for others. Sometimes that's a little benefit. Maybe it's just it's easier for the employees to use. Sometimes it's a big benefit. We're going to build this and give part of it away nonprofit because the client's going to support us doing that. We are altruistic. Period. Not a marketing slogan, not an attempt at doing it different. This is not my

EducateWright, SolutionWright, and building dreams in the open

SPEAKER_00 50:41

first attempt at doing it. And therefore I am very clear and present. We are doing it altruistic. And I say we are all brothers and sisters here together of one God and the opportunity to find a flow and be together to do it in harmony. I think is doing it together.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 50:58

Well, I think that's a great place to wrap it up. Uh, I'm going to keep you on here for a moment, but uh thank you so much for being here. We'll do this again, all right? I'll keep you on here for a moment.

SPEAKER_00 51:05

Thanks.