I said it at Hedgeye Live. I’ll say it again.

The purpose of a debrief is to confront reality.

Not accountability. Not lessons learned. Confronting reality. Those are different things and most organizations never make the distinction.

Here is the problem. You can’t directly access reality. No one can.

Immanuel Kant understood this two centuries before neuroscience caught up. He called it the gap between the phenomenal and the noumenal. The noumenal world is the world as it actually is. The phenomenal world is the world as it appears to you, filtered through your senses, your history, your priors. That bridge, Kant said, is unbridgeable. You never get the thing-in-itself. You only ever get your best inference of it.

Karl Friston has operationalized this in mathematics. Your brain is not a camera. It is a prediction machine. It generates a model of reality from the inside out, sends predictions downward, and compares them against incoming sensory signals. The gap between prediction and signal is a prediction error. That error is the only mechanism available for updating your model of the world. Friston calls this the Free Energy Principle. He has also stated that the OODA loop is isomorphic with active inference, a direct corollary of that principle.

John Boyd understood this intuitively decades before the equations existed. Orientation is your generative model of reality. It shapes your phenomenal world, determining what you perceive, what you ignore, and what you are even capable of seeing. It holds your priors shaped by genetic heritage, cultural traditions, and every experience you have accumulated. It generates top-down predictions about what you will Observe. And it is wrong. Structurally, inevitably, always partially wrong.

This is not a failure of intelligence. Boyd read Gödel, Heisenberg, and the second law of thermodynamics to make this point. Any closed conceptual system will eventually fail to map onto a changing environment. The more tightly your Orientation is calibrated to yesterday's reality, the more it blinds you to today's.

The debrief exists to force the loop open. To drag the noumenal world into the room.

In naval aviation we had a tool for this. The Tactical Aircrew Combat Training System (TACTS) range. Precision position, velocity, altitude, and orientation data on dozens of aircraft simultaneously. Full mission replay in 3D. Quantitative data on tactics, positioning, weapon performance, and errors. The closest approximation of the noumenal world we could produce.

That data didn't make the debrief easy. It made it honest. You couldn't tell a story that contradicted the replay. Your phenomenal world got tested against something that did not care about your ego.

Here is the harder truth. Almost nobody actually wants to confront reality. You are too busy protecting your version of it. The ego constructs a phenomenal world and then defends it with everything it has. We rationalize. We reframe. We remember events in ways that preserve the coherence of our prior decisions. This is not weakness. It is how the predictive brain works. Orientation defends itself because updating is metabolically and psychologically expensive. The system prefers the comfort of a wrong model to the discomfort of rebuilding one. A debrief that does not account for this will be colonized by ego before it starts.

Most organizations don't have a TACTS range. What they have is a room full of people, each carrying a different phenomenal version of the same event, each with a strong incentive to protect their version of the past. This is where debriefing methodology matters enormously.

Last week we ran a Flow Learning Lab with a Wall Street client. The simulation we use is built on NINECUBES’ Interpersonal Skills Lab, probably the first digital serious game to focus exclusively on behavioral training. It began as a visionary training tool for pilots and has grown into a still-unique method for developing the skills that matter most in high-stakes teams. Combined with The Flow System, it becomes something closer to a miniature TACTS range for organizational behavior. It is intentionally low fidelity. The software is poorly designed by design. It ignores the lessons of human-centered design, and that is the point. It forces players to communicate clearly because the tool will not do it for them. Each player holds incomplete information. No one person can see the whole unfolding reality. They are entirely dependent on each other. This is a reciprocal team in the truest sense. We add time pressure and what Gary Klein and Dave Snowden call anthro-simulation, human and machine manipulation of the environment deliberately designed to drive teams toward failure. The constraints shift dynamically. Coaches, AI, and a behavioral marker system called ZONEFIVE capture the communication, the decisions, and the interactions in real time. When the debrief starts, we can replay what actually happened. We can go back to any moment and ask: what were you thinking right then?

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I brought Steve McCrone with me. He was visiting from New Zealand. Watching him go through Boyd’s material was something else. A grown man reverting to kid-at-Christmas energy. That’s what the archives do to serious people.

Here’s what I need to share.

Boyd was working on a presentation he tentatively called “Interconnectedness” — listed as (I) in his own notation. I reached out to Chet Richards this morning to see if he had any awareness of it. Could be connected to Revelation. Could be something else entirely. We don’t know yet.

What we do know is this: the Marine Corps Archives Division will be publishing online access to certain boxes from Boyd’s collection soon. The books likely won’t be included because of copyright, but the intellectual infrastructure is coming. The world is about to get access to Boyd’s codex.

I can’t overstate what that means.

Here’s the thing about most people who write about Boyd. They don’t go to the archives.

Look at the footnotes in some of the recent books on Boyd’s OODA loop. Wikipedia. Surface-level sources. That’s not research. That’s cosplay. When you actually go in, when you sit with the marginalia, you see a completely different man. A voracious, cross-disciplinary thinker who would call out an author mid-book for contradicting themselves two chapters back. Boyd didn’t just read. He interrogated.

I was trying to trace what he knew about Mandelbrot. There’s a reason for that, and it connects to markets, to fractal structure, to things that go deeper than tactics. I looked for Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man too, which is referenced throughout the collection. It’s not there. That’s a real loss. Capra’s Tao of Physics though? Present. Well marked. I have video of some of the marginalia. That book is doing work.

Now here’s the piece that stopped me cold.

I found a memo, short and handwritten, written by Boyd to someone whose name appears to be Jim. Dated 3 November 1992. This is Boyd telling you exactly how to read him. I’ll give it to you straight:

Read that again.

Boyd is telling you the reading order. He’s telling you the architecture. D&C and the Conceptual Spiral aren’t supporting material. They are the foundation. Everything else, Patterns of Conflict, ODCC, Strategic Game, flows from that base.

And then there’s Interconnectedness (I).

A presentation that, as far as most Boyd scholars know, doesn’t exist in complete form. But here it is, named explicitly, in his own hand, as the destination. The next thing he was building toward.

This is why the archives matter.

The OODA loop you’ve seen online, four boxes, linear, iterate faster, isn’t wrong because someone misunderstood a diagram. It’s wrong because people skipped the foundation. They skipped D&C. They skipped the Conceptual Spiral. They pulled the loop out of context and handed it to the business world as a productivity hack.

Boyd’s OODA loop sketch represents how living systems comprehend, shape, and adapt within an unfolding, evolving, uncertain reality. The loop is the capstone of that, not the starting point. He didn’t even draw it until 1995.

Interconnectedness was where he was heading next.

Think about what that title implies. Not faster cycles. Not better decisions. Interconnectedness. The relationship between systems. The entangled nature of orientation. The way that what you perceive is already shaped by what you are.

That connects to everything we’ve been saying about the Free Energy Principle. Karl Friston didn’t invent this. He formalized it. Boyd was already there, circling it from a different direction.

The archives are the proof.

Go there. Or wait, because access is coming. When it does, the conversation about Boyd changes permanently.

We’ll be ready.

-Ponch

Whirl of Reorientation | No Way Out Podcast | AGLX

Cynthia Fluck graduated from the Naval Academy in 1998, earned her wings flying helicopters in the Navy, and transitioned out of the military — through Lockheed Martin, into real estate, and eventually into a practice combining functional medicine with energy healing. She now works primarily with women in midlife, treating causal factors rather than symptoms, and approaching the human body the same way Boyd approached any complex system: as something that cannot be fixed by a linear model.

In this conversation, Ponch and Cindy reconnect after more than twenty years — two Naval Aviators who spent time together in Europe during their service years and arrive at this conversation having taken completely different paths to the same underlying question: what does it actually mean to reorient?

They cover the healthcare system as a system problem — one that rewards sick care over root cause resolution, the same way any organization rewards outputs over orientation. They get into nervous system regulation and the vagus nerve as the body's feedback loop. They explore breathing as a performance tool for high-stakes environments, the distinction between functional lab analysis and conventional medicine's "normal range" standard, and the idea that the brain does not process linear time — which means unresolved trauma from the past is, physiologically, still happening now.

The OODA connection runs through all of it. Cindy's approach to her clients is explicitly a probe-and-adjust model: form a hypothesis, try it, get feedback, revise. She describes her intake process in almost exactly the language Boyd used to describe decisions as hypotheses and actions as tests. Neither of them planned that. It emerged from the conversation — which is the only way it ever does on this show.

Website: crescentholistic.com

No Way Out is produced by AGLX. Learn more at aglx.com. Book a call: aglx.com/book-a-call-na.

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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Stay connected with No Way Out and The Whirl Of ReOrientation

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Substack: The Whirl Of ReOrientation - www.thewhirl.substack.com

We’re saddened to learn of the passing of our friend Jim Rutt, who died at home on May 27. He was 72.

Jim was one of our early guests, and one of the first to take seriously what we were trying to build. We’re grateful for that, and we’ll stay grateful.

What we loved was the engagement itself. Two hours with Jim — on nested OODA, Game B, the Santa Fe Institute, why so much of what moves a market is “fancy noise” — and you walked away sharper than you came in. He argued the way a man argues who had lost bigger fights to better people and enjoyed every one of them. He never closed himself off. CEO of Network Solutions, the man the New York Times once called the Internet’s bad boy, and still, at the end, more curious than anyone in the room.

We were lucky to know him and have him on No Way Out.

You can watch the epidsode here:

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Richard Brennan is a trend follower, complex adaptive systems researcher, and author of The Fractals of Finance and Complex Adaptive Markets. He joins Mark McGrath and Brian "Ponch" Rivera on No Way Out for a conversation about why the market cannot be predicted, why it can be aligned with, and what that has to do with John Boyd, Karl Friston, and the free energy principle.

Rich came to trend following through a science background that would not let the standard economic assumptions go unchallenged. The conversation covers the market as a reflexive complex adaptive system, why calm markets build hidden fragility, phase transitions and nonlinear change, fat tails and power laws, why volatility is not risk, and the geometry of wealth. Ponch and Mark connect Rich's aligning with price to Boyd's orientation and Friston's free energy principle, and the convergence becomes the conversation.

Jerry Parker, who wrote the forewords to Rich's books, introduced him to the show. 

Find Rich at atstradingsolutions.com, the Traders Outpost.

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Shawn Myszka, founder of Emergence and co-author of Enhancing Skill in American Football, joins us on No Way Out to walk through why the dominant model of NFL skill development is failing and what the constraints-led approach offers in its place.

The conversation moves from a 2008 origin story about an NFL veteran whose physical metrics exceeded his draft year while his game did not, into the deeper framework underneath Shawn's work. Perception, cognition, and action operating as an integrated system. Practice design that builds adaptive players rather than drilling isolated movement patterns. The constraints-led approach to skill acquisition. Coaching the player, not the method.

We bring the OODA “loop” sketch alongside Shawn's constraints-led approach, and the convergence becomes the conversation. The episode closes with where this goes next: AI in active inference, the shift from alignment to harmony in NFL strategy, and why football has to evolve from a game of attrition to a game of cognition.

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Adam joins Mark McGrath and Brian "Ponch" Rivera to walk through the framework, the work behind it, and the personal experience that shaped both. Naval Postgraduate School thesis on ground force commander decision making. Years of synthesis through Iain McGilchrist on the divided brain, John Vervaeke on parasitic processing and relevance realization, and Gary Klein on recognition-primed decision making. The conversation moves into Adam's ibogaine treatment in Tijuana at Ambio, the integration work after the experience, and the moment he realized he was going for himself, not just for Slider.

Adam also discusses his novel The Infernal Tower, the Story Grid framework he learned through Steven Pressfield's mastermind, and why storytelling and the OODA loop are the same pattern operating at different scales.

Find Adam at the Renaissance Human Substack and on LinkedIn.

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The conversation builds the framework from first principles: the irreducible features of the environment, the Markov blanket as the boundary defining a self, the generative model as the cognitive operating system Boyd called orientation, and the two implicit pathways Boyd drew but few have explained. Friston then formalizes what Wall Street intuits: risk as a KL divergence between prior preferences and predicted outcomes, ambiguity as volatility, expected free energy as the mathematics of risk under uncertainty.

The episode also covers perceptual control theory, ecological psychology, predictive versus prospective control, flow states, the Rebus model and psychedelic-assisted therapy, autism and consciousness, the platonic space, and why current large language models cannot orient: they do not encode uncertainty, cannot plan over counterfactual futures, and therefore cannot truly act.

This is the episode the show has been building toward for 163 conversations.

KARL FRISTON, FRS
- UCL Profile: https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/2747-karl-friston
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_J._Friston
- Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=q_4u0aoAAAAJ

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John Boyd spent the last twenty years of his life working on a problem most people couldn’t see clearly enough to even name. How does a living system — a pilot, a company, a military unit, a market — stay current with an environment that never stops changing? His answer wasn’t a framework. It wasn’t a consulting model. It was a sketch. Nonlinear. Orientation-dominant. Built from Gödel, Heisenberg, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.1

Most people who’ve encountered Boyd’s work have encountered a reduction of it — a four-box cycle taught as a speed formula in leadership retreats and military staff colleges. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. Faster. That version leaves out everything that made Boyd’s insight worth having.

We have been arguing for years, on this platform and on the No Way Out podcast, that Boyd’s actual sketch — the one he drew once, around 1995, two years before he died — describes something far more significant than a decision-making cycle. It describes how living systems process reality. How the internal model shapes what gets observed before any conscious deliberation begins. How the organism acts to test hypotheses against the environment, not to execute steps in a sequence. The capacity for free and independent action is the end goal, and orientation quality is the variable that determines whether you get there.2

Last week, we spent two hours and fifteen minutes recording with Professor Karl Friston.

If that name is not immediately familiar: Friston is a Professor of Neuroscience at University College London, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the most cited living neuroscientist on the planet. Over ninety percent of all published brain imaging studies use the statistical tools he built. Beyond that, he is the architect of the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference — a formal mathematical account of how living systems stay alive by minimizing surprise.3 His work is cited across neuroscience, psychiatry, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, and financial markets. If you have read anything serious on consciousness, psychedelics, peak performance, or AI in the last decade, his name is in the footnotes.

He had never seen Boyd’s sketch.

We spent the first hour walking him through a visual model of his own framework — element by element, no equations — and asked him to explain each piece in his own language. The fitness landscape. The boundary between organism and environment. The internal model. Prediction and prediction error. The simulation loop. The reflexive action pathway. The deliberate planning pathway.

Then we showed him John Boyd’s OODA “loop” sketch.

His reaction was not a polite acknowledgment. It was recognition. Immediate and specific. He identified it as addressing the exact misconception he spends his career fighting — the idea that cognition flows left to right, step by step, phase by phase. He named the circular causality. The non-linearity. The dominant role of orientation. He said Boyd’s framing of decision as hypothesis and action as test was, in his exact words, isomorphic with active inference.

That was the opening.

What followed — on orientation failure, on the two kinds of surprise that determine competitive advantage, on why large language models cannot act in any meaningful sense, on markets as open systems that cannot be modeled with equilibrium physics, on the formal mechanism behind why expert intuition fails — is what paid subscribers access below.

This is a record of an independent convergence of a retired U.S. Air Force colonel working from thermodynamics and mathematical logic in the 1970s, who drew a sketch in the 1990s, and the most cited neuroscientist alive, working in 2025 on statistical physics and Bayesian mechanics, described the same structure without having seen it.

The convergence is independent. That is what makes it matter.

This recording is here below, and available exclusively to Operators and Founding Strategists.

If you are reading this as a free subscriber or Observer, what you’ve read above is the frame. What’s behind this wall is the substance: two hours and fifteen minutes of the actual session, uncut.

Upgrade by clicking here to access the full video below and join the tier that gets everything first.

Founding Strategists and Operators, continue here to the video.

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Robert Gallery was the second overall pick in the 2004 NFL Draft. By 2019, twenty years of head trauma had left him in a daily fog of brain damage, rage, and alcohol, with no clear way forward. He had the brain scan, the neurologist, the hyperbaric chambers. None of it moved the needle. Then he heard veterans talking about ibogaine and flew to Tijuana.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera, Mark "Moose" McGrath, Gallery, and Mark "Slider" Keller — who has personally supported over 400 veterans through ibogaine treatment — cover what reorientation looks like from inside the process. Not the policy. The experience.

They bring the Boyd frame: the flow states Gallery found on the football field, the orientation that collapsed after twenty years of grind and injury and retirement, and what ibogaine started and integration had to finish. Slider explains why he now calls ibogaine an oneirogen with psychedelic side effects — not a psychedelic — and what separates the people who hold their healing from the ones who don't.

Gallery built Athletes for Care to take what the veteran community figured out and bring it to athletes who are still suffering in silence. The executive order just made the conversation easier to have. This episode is the reason it matters.

Guest resources: athletesforcare.org | vetsolutions.org |

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Gourley is the founder of OODA LLC, co-host of OODAcast, and one of the sharpest observers of the intersection where cybersecurity, geopolitical risk, artificial intelligence, and decision making under uncertainty collide. He runs OODAcon — an annual event he describes as less about OODA and more about orientation: what do you need to know to survive the next 12 months?

In this conversation with and , Gourley draws a direct line from the intelligence cycle — collect, process, analyze, disseminate — to the same linearization error that has plagued every corporate OODA training in every hotel ballroom in America. The cycle fails for the same reason the four-step loop fails: because the adversary is moving while you’re still in phase two.

The conversation ranges from consciousness and psychedelics to AI’s destruction and creation moment across the technology sector. Gourley names what most executives are missing: supply chains built on helium, chips built on radioactive decay, and bond markets that cannot be managed into submission.

He also issues a direct challenge to anyone teaching the OODA loop as a sales process: they are going to suffer in life.

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