The A-Frame: A Navy SEAL's Extension of Boyd's OODA Loop with Adam "Guz" Karaoguz

Retired Navy SEAL Adam "Guz" Karaoguz has spent the last ten years building an extension of Boyd's OODA loop he calls the A-Frame. Attention, appreciation, action, with attunement as the goal.

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.

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…”

A promotional message for Ember Health.  Safe and effective IV ketamine care for individuals seeking relief from depression. Ember Health's evidence-based, partner-oriented, and patient-centered care model, boasting an 84% treatment success rate with 44% of patients reaching depression remission. It also mentions their extensive experience with over 40,000 infusions and treatment of more than 2,500 patients, including veterans, first responders, and individuals with anxiety and PTSD

Stay connected with No Way Out and The Whirl Of ReOrientation

X: @NoWayOutcast · @PonchAGLX · @NoWayOutMoose

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

Transcript

Top Gun Trauma And Survivor Guilt

Adam Karaoguz 0:20

Was, right? Like the media landscape wasn't fragmented. So I get it. I mean, the Top Gun was important to me joining the Navy as well. But like Same here. Maverick, though, it like I don't know. There's something about the new movie. I just I love it.

unknown 0:32

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 0:33

86, uh, like I said, May 13th. I think they're putting both movies back into theaters. Uh and then the third one's coming out sometime in the future. Hopefully they're gonna look at Maverick and and what happens to him when you know you lose uh you have survivor's guilt and you have uh all this trauma that happens to your lifetime, and maybe hands up down in Tijuana. That would be an episode I'd talk about.

Adam Karaoguz 0:51

That would be an epic Top Gun 3.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 0:54

Well, let's talk about that. Let's let's build that up. So let you look at Maverick's background, he he lost his dad in Vietnam, right? Yep.

Mark McGrath 1:01

And then he was defamed too. Like his dad was not only lost, he had the the the weight of the of the BS story or the classification of the story.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:09

He struggled with alcohol, had a lot of relationships, probably had a sex addict addiction that isn't in the movie. Right. He feels guilty for losing Goose, you know, so survivor's guilt, and then just has a series of bad relationships or many relationships, and then you get into uh Maverick and all that other stuff. So there's a lot of trauma in there. And again, I think that would be the perfect plot for the movie is looking back at the trauma, maybe there's a little bit more, and then going down to uh Tijuana to do some Rab Again and Five Mio.

Flow After High Performance Teams

Adam Karaoguz 1:37

So, yeah, so he's at the stage, yeah, he's at the stage of character progression where it's like, you are enough, Maverick. Yeah, you know, it's okay, like you can rest. It's okay, Maverick. Yeah, you know, you stood the watch, buddy. But yeah, he so he needs to, you know, because you see that in the beginning of the movie where it's like Mach 10 is not enough for him. He's got to push it a little bit more. And well, that's a great place to start, Adam.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 2:00

So so uh there's a story that I've learned from Jeff Sutherland, the guy that created Scrum or co-created it. And he mentioned that hey, once you're on a high-performing organization, once you find flow in an organization, you always want to get back there. And so you're always finding or trying to find other ways to get into that sense of flow. And I think uh a guy like you, with your background in the SEAL teams, um, you know, you guys are trying, you're always at peak performance or trying to get there. But once you leave, you kind of lose that. So we talked a little bit about that.

Adam Karaoguz 2:29

Yeah, so I think it's definitely that is a struggle for everyone when they retire. They have to make peace with that, and then they have to figure out how to meet that need for flow, you know, now that you're kind of taking a step back from such a demanding environment. So you know, guys do different things with it, you know, they get into extreme outdoor endeavors, they, you know, they take it different places intellectually. But yeah, the big thing is finding finding something that uh allows you to find flow, you know, individually and collectively if you're looking for that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 3:01

Well, I was wondering, can we talk a little bit about your experience down in Tijuana? Um, and the reason I bring that up is uh I got an image or a photo that had you standing next to Slider, and I'm like, who the hell is this?

Adam Karaoguz 3:13

Yeah, yeah. My hair was, yeah, my hair was frowned. It's like a hairband uh 1980s guy making a comeback tour. So I'm trying, yeah, I'm trying to just evoke that, you know, this is Spinal Tap or uh yeah, any of those any of those big big groups from the 80s. So yeah, so I I went and uh I you know I did the same treatment that you went through paunch uh you know several years after. And uh it was I I wrote about it uh on my Substack and I wanted to be careful, you know, I still want to be careful how I talk about it because I think it's it's a very I believe it's a very sacred thing, and um I don't want to have you guys seen the um the Rob Riggle uh Navy SEAL skit on Funnier Die. No, there's there's like a skit of Rob Riggle was on the bin Laden raid, right? And and he's like, you know, discretion assured, sir, I'm not gonna talk about this, and then immediately he's like telling everyone. So um that's I want to avoid that with the you know the IBegain experience.

Mark McGrath 4:12

So um we do have to point out that he is a Marine.

Adam Karaoguz 4:15

He is a yeah, yes, that must be said whenever we invoke Rob Riggle's name. So yes, he's like a reserve 04, I believe. Uh maybe 05 by now, but but it's a great, it's a perfect video for, and then it just shows you like the shadow side of the frogman. Uh, you know, we can definitely that's that's a place that we can go. Uh so yeah, so went through uh great cohort of other guys with me, you know, other former soft types, uh, and then we'd have Pierre Ambassador uh go through, which was you know wonderful to kind of help guide us through everything. You know, it's not you know, the point I make in my essay about it is yeah, the experience itself is is you know, you know, sacred and holy to me, but really that has to be situated within the larger construct of you know how you're gonna um how you're gonna contextualize your experience, how you're going to use that experience to improve yourself. So, you know, we go into it, we've decided, you know, what our intentions are for using the insights that the medicine's gonna give us. And then we've also reflected and decided upon things that we want to leave behind as we move through the the process. So, you know, the the medicine is important, but it's it's situated within this larger framework to to heal yourself. So that, you know, for me, you know, I've tried to meditate for literally decades and just have utterly failed. You know, I've done Sam Harris's like waking up uh class, you know, his like whatever, how however many uh meditation sessions, I've done that like probably three times through, and it's never really stuck. Yeah um, you know, doing some of the mindfulness uh that came out of you know the the treatment post uh you know vets and ambio. Uh I'm really developing a practice now, and and it's very uh it's pretty cool to see the kind of it's actually sticking with me. And it like I'm I'm getting to that like you know, kind of pleasurable state after meditating where I'm like, wow, I really like the way my mind feels right now, so that makes me want to do it more and more. So sorry, so that's just you know, that's kind of like my initial thoughts. Like, what in particular do you want to dig into?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 6:18

No, well, you you brought up Sam Harris, and just in the last 48 hours, 24 hours, he released that uh short documentary called Unraveling the Dream, which features uh work by Anil Seth, Robert, Robin Carhart Harris, Carl Friston, who we have on the show as well. But it really talks about how the brain, how we perceive reality, and maybe we'll get into this with you as well. Uh, but what psychedelics do, and and Carl Fristan talks a little bit about that on our podcast with them as well. But uh it's it's just an interesting connection that you brought up Sam Harris in the last 24 hours or so he released that documentary.

Adam Karaoguz 6:49

Yes, and I'm looking forward to watching that. I read his wife's book, Conscious. You know, it's a real short book, uh, where she's trying to like grapple with the same thing Paul and like trying to grapple with like what is this thing? And yes, so I think I'm very, I'm very excited about you know what you know, there's just so many reasons to be excited about psychedelics from the addiction standpoint, from the PTSD TBI standpoint, and then you know, there's neurodiver yeah, neurodiversity, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and there's really just a lot of possibilities that we're kind of opening up. And yes, so the recent executive order is very encouraging on that front.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 7:25

I think there's another aspect, Adam, and that is uh it helps us understand not you know peak performance as well. So when you go back to your your time in the SEAL teams as as a special operator, you know, my time in the cockpit, when we talk about peak performance with sports teams, we now have another discipline, if you want to call it that, to pull from to understand uh, you know, the fractal nature of the universe. How how do we create better performing athletes, better performing performing soldiers, airmen, airmen and marines? How do we do that? And I think that's what this allows us to do. And that's why I'm excited about it is we get to use this research to understand ourselves better and potentially AI, right?

Adam Karaoguz 8:03

Yes. I mean, it's it's definitely and there are other you know methods of altering your consciousness, obviously, that don't involve you know, drugs. There's holotropic breathing and there's meditation. The the point is you're changing your you know default state of consciousness and you're allowed to access reality in different ways. So um I just yeah, I was just on a trip where I was getting in long, you know, long conversations about you know the nature of consciousness, and and I think you know what psychedelics do is really open us up to other possibilities. So, yes, there's one argument from the materialist perspective, these are just neurons firing, and it's all very like you know, cut and dry with you know chemical. The other interpretation more on the idealist side is you know, we are getting access to different forms of perceiving reality, and that and we can then take those insights and bring it back to, you know, normie, you know, pedestrian views of reality.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 8:56

Hey, I'm curious. Uh in your preparation for the medicine, did you what did you read? What did I mean, did you dive deep in anything or what what what you how did you get ready for it?

Adam Karaoguz 9:05

I I think I wanted to um so I I did, you know, I did have like different books. The ones I the one I read after that I wish I would have read before was uh The Crown and the Root, which is you know written specifically tailored to um the experience because it talks about the Ibigain Said, it talks about the DMT side, it talks about the integration process throughout. It's a real it's a short, very readable book, uh written by one of uh the the counselors that Ambio uses. I can't remember her name right now, but um it's called The Crown and the Root. Um yeah, I've got like my my uh psychedelic library.

Mark McGrath 9:39

You don't read much. I mean it's a psychedelic library for years and you really don't read much.

Adam Karaoguz 9:44

Yeah, well, yeah, I I do collect a lot of books, so I mean I probably um yeah, the psychedelic, and then I get a lot of recommendations from you too, Ponch. Um you know, some like I haven't read Death by Astonishment yet, but it's on the it's in the queue. I know. Yeah, it's right, it's right by my feet. I've got it like you know, I'm trying to think exactly what I read before. I think I just had some generic books on how to prepare yourself, you know, how to set your intentions. I'm not I'm drawing a blank for exactly which ones I read ahead of time. Listen to the doors. No, that's good.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 10:16

Andrew Gallimore's work is is interesting because it can he in it, he writes a I think you you read or you're you're familiar, familiar with reality switch technologies, one of his earlier books, or uh, I think I forgot the name of his other book, but it gets into complex adapted systems, fitness landscapes, attractors, and things like that. And once you see that in a book about DMT and and how uh our perception is altered through these medicines or psychedelics, you you start to realize that the science that we're exploring for how uh high-performing organization work or works, how do you build strategy, they're all the same. I mean, it it's it's amazing the connection between these. And before we start a recording, I think you pointed out that uh it's guys like us that aren't diving too deep in the one discipline. We're cutting across multiple disciplines.

Mark McGrath 10:59

Yeah, go go ahead, Mark. Oh no, I was just gonna say what I wanted to attack on the what Ponch just said specifically around strategy. Strategy is one of the most misunderstood and bastardized concepts out there. And what Boyd said about it being a mental tapestry of changing intentions, I think that lines right up with changing your consciousness, your states of consciousness.

Adam Karaoguz 11:20

Yes. It definitely helps you, it just breaks you out of you know the typical pattern. So just like Boyd says, you know, unstructure, restructure, you know, or whatever, structure, unstructure, restructure. Uh, you know, it's the same, it's the same process. You're destroying your old models and then you're reforming a new one that's more, you know, has a more optimal grip with reality. Continuously.

Mark McGrath 11:42

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We had occasion to be asked, you know, what what does the world of reorientation mean? Well, that's what you just described. It's constantly breaking and revising and updating your perception of what you is what it is that you encounter and building on top of that. And it comes straight out of conceptual spiral. It's not in Boyd's own words. But I mean, that's where the title of the substack comes from, and that's where the title of the podcast comes from, the exact same paragraph. Yes, there's no way out of that.

Adam Karaoguz 12:07

Yeah. So there's there's a Jordan Peterson quote that I like can't find. I heard him say it once where he said we are we're like tap dancing on the back of a snake that's like moving. Um, and I can't find it. Like I've tried to go back. I know I didn't hallucinate it. I like I know he said it, and I'm like, okay, that like that's like what we're doing because you know it's so dynamic that we have to stay dynamic to be coupled to it. Did you see snakes in Tijuana? I did not see any snakes in Tijuana. No, I didn't.

Mark McGrath 12:36

No, in your experience, no, the only reason I asked someone I knew, she went down years ago. She's no longer with us. Um, but she went down to an ayahuasca retreat, and she said that the one thing that came is that snakes appeared and informed her. And that like apparently like the snake is like there's some kind of some symbolism behind the snake.

Adam Karaoguz 12:52

Yeah, there's definitely, you know, archetypal, you know, in a Youngian sense. I'm sure there are you can make interpretations of what a snake means. Uh you know, the general, you know, you the general recommendation is, you know, what you resist persists. And, you know, when you encounter situations like that, you're wanting to the only way is through. You know, you gotta like go through those things, even if they're painful, uh, to get to the other side.

No Way Out And The Moral Level

Mark McGrath 13:16

So because you said the only way is through, not to change the subject completely, and we don't want any spoilers because we want everybody to get it, we want everybody to read it, and I have not yet finished it. I will tell you the beginning is riveting. So the only way is through is the tagline of the book that's over what I suspect from this angle is your left shoulder. Yes. The infernal tower.

Adam Karaoguz 14:36

Yeah. So, and it's I I love that you guys say no way out, and then I was saying the only way through, which like they're both like contradictory, but they also they're both pointing to the same thing, which actually it's like a very Taoist, you know, you've got to find the contradictions.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 14:50

Which matters. And let's talk about the, you know, the the name of our podcast is No Way Out. And most people think, well, the only way out is through. No way out refers to the environment. We can't, we can't eliminate it, right? Yeah. Yes. And that's so it to they are complementary. They they to me they actually mean the same thing. Yes. No, that's I agree. Yeah. But I I do we get that feedback from time to time. Your podcast is no way out. I'm like, it's because it's referring to the environment. That's why.

Mark McGrath 15:11

Yes. Which that's that again comes back to the it's why it's in the same paragraph as the world of reorientation conceptual spirals. There's no way out of the environmental realities. And if you don't maintain the world of reorientation and constantly update your perception, you're screwed.

Adam Karaoguz 15:26

Yes. And that's the like, you know, dancing on the twisting snake thing. Like we've got to uh we've got to meet the external complexity of the environment with like internal complexity. And that's what I think. So that's and we're all just like, how do we do that? How do we best do that? How do how do we develop that interior complexity? Yeah. So yeah, so the novel, you know, I wanted to just write like an action thriller, you know?

Mark McGrath 15:49

Actually, let's back up before you jump in. So so you and I have been friends for since COVID, I think. So like we're talking, we're going on like six years, and I think that our original connection point was the uh Stephen Pressfield Mastermind. We were you were part, or I well, somehow we got connected. I know you were doing the uh story grid.

Adam Karaoguz 16:11

Yeah, so no, I was doing story grid. I think I met you, I met you on LinkedIn for my master's thesis. You're like the book. So I wrote a so I went to Naval Postgraduate School in 2015. I wrote, and you know, I'm like trying to figure out like what do I even write about a thesis? You know, like how do I do this? How do I be a value to like my community? So I started looking at decision making, and then in particular ground force commander decision making, you know, the guy that's you know, he's he's the senior officer on an operation. So, you know, I wanted to see like how are we making these decisions and what are the best practices to get that? And then so I basically, you know, Naval Postgraduate School at that time was like the perfect, like, you know, uh test bed environment because I had all these dudes that were just right off of like almost 10 years of just straight deployments. So I got Marines, I got special forces, I got SEALs, I got international SOF, and I talked to them all like, how are you making decisions and how are you doing this? And you know, obviously a lot of connections to Boyd with how people prioritize in in the heat of uh you know stress and combat and make good decisions.

Mark McGrath 17:15

So yeah, that's how we met. That's how we met. And then then the other synergy around the Boyd stuff was then we both wound up in uh I came at it through Pressfield's mastermind, which I was part of. That's how I came aware of this uh Sean Coin's uh story grid. Yeah. And then you were actually in the story grid cohort, I believe.

Adam Karaoguz 17:37

Yes, and and he uh you know Sean Coin's a very Pressfield, by the way, U.S.

Mark McGrath 17:40

Marine, have to say it.

Adam Karaoguz 17:42

Yes. So so Coin is was Pressfield's editor, but you know, Coin really he approached it from a storytelling perspective, but he's like us, like he's a very great synthesizer. So he was bringing in complexity science, he was bringing in like alchemy, he's bringing in all kinds of stuff into the art of story. So, you know, I started looking at it, I started looking at UDA, I started looking at um, you know, the you know, the the fry tag pyramid of story, you know, inciting incident, turning point, crisis, climax, uh resolution, right? That five-stroke it's like the five general uh cycle. And you know, different people will critique that and say that's predominantly like a western narrative of storytelling, but um for our purposes now, like I've you know, I'm I was I'm saying like this is like the way to tell a story, right? In sighting incident, something happens that kind of disturbs things, a turning point where the protagonist of the story realizes like what they're doing is not working, so they need to either like double down on what they're doing or do go a different method, a do a different way. And so that so that turning point realization leads into a crisis where it's like they have a choice, the climax is them enacting that choice, and then the resolution is like dealing with the aftermath, and then that feeds right back into the new inciting incidents. I was looking at that cycle of story because you know what Coin will say is story is a psychotechnology that humans have created to make ourselves more adaptable to the environment. So we're sitting around a campfire. I'm saying don't go down in the valley, there's this big lion by the big tree, and you guys are like, oh, check. Like if I'm down there by that tree, watch out, right? So now I have used that technology to get into your minds and make you better, right? So what I realized, you know, I was I was writing this essay and going back and forth with Mark, and it was like so long ago, I was thinking about it. I'm like, my youngest daughter was on my ear, on my shoulder, like screaming, and I was holding her, but I was talking to you, and I'm like, oh man, like you're trying to give me feedback on the on the article. She's just and that and now she's like six. So I'm like, dude, this is.

Mark McGrath 19:43

Can I at least say publicly what the greatest picture, the greatest dad move of all time I've ever seen? And it's just even more ironic because it's from a Navy SEAL. Yeah, go ahead. Someone led his family team to Sesame Place dressed as the Count, and the picture is worth platinum. I mean, it is absolutely platinum that you should put in the book and autograph it. It's that good.

Adam Karaoguz 20:10

Yeah. So we had a couple years we were doing, I don't think we did, we didn't do it this last Halloween, but like normally we're doing like a group costume. So we had, so I was a count, yeah. My wife was Big Bird, my daughter was Oscar the Grouch, my son was like, what was my son? I'm drawing a blank for my son, and then my daughter was Elmo, my youngest daughter. Um, and it was good. It was, it was, yes, it was an enjoyable.

Mark McGrath 20:32

I just remember showing it to friends and be like, take a guess. I'll give you five guesses. What do you think this man does for a living? Naval special warfare never came up.

Adam Karaoguz 20:40

No, that's not a normal, yeah, that's not a normal uh guess.

Mark McGrath 20:43

It's the best dad move of all times.

Adam Karaoguz 20:45

Thank you. I appreciate that. Um anyway. All right, what yeah, what else, where else do you guys want to go here?

Mark McGrath 20:50

Well, I mean, so I mean, how how you came to the um well, how we got together, but then like how you know how you came to develop this book and going through um, you know, iterations and going through the story grid and learning from other artists and things like that.

Adam Karaoguz 21:04

Yeah, so this book has taken me, you know, decades to write. So I I first wrote a draft of it in 2011, and then just going through the process of learning how to be a writer, you know, it is it's like destruction and creation. Like, you know, I I did two page one rewrites, which means I'm not just revising it, I'm like starting from scratch. Um, and those those were like both of them are very painful, but because I started from scratch, I was able to make the story much stronger in the new um drafts. But but yeah, so you know, the initial feedback is is favorable so far. You know, I'm like story grid will help you. What Story Grid did for me was like I always had like the desire to write, like the discipline, and then I always had like the imagination of like thinking of ideas, but in the middle there was this big gap, which was like the technical craft of like how do you plot, you know, how do you do this and that. And so StoryGrid gave that to me, and I was very grateful for it. So that helped me, you know, I can tell a story that is on the on the physical material plane, like an action-packed story, you know, like a diehard. And then I've got like a mental level where I'm I'm discussing a lot of ideas, um, you know, particularly like, you know, the polycrisis, the metacrisis. And then, you know, I'm trying to put in that, you know, that higher level, the transcendental level with like values where I'm talking about different themes, you know, like trust and redemption, and trying to kind of salt those in so that like as you consume the novel, you're getting like, you know, the Brussels sprouts and you're getting the Sour Patch Kids like together.

Mark McGrath 22:33

Yeah. I mean, it's I'm not you and I have had this conversation a million times. And I have in fact, I actually had I mean, I have asked you repeatedly, like, help me read science fiction without like just taking the book and tossing it, because I, you know, help me, help me understand how to read science fiction. And I'm still struggling with it, uh, because everything I read is basically nonfiction. But uh your book, your book, the way it's laid out and the way it's written, for someone like me that doesn't necessarily enjoy fiction, it actually actually works out really well. So, because it's real, it's it's like there's a I guess there's a realism and there's a humanity behind it that's very relatable.

Adam Karaoguz 23:15

No, I I thank you. I appreciate that. Well, I think it just depends. With science fiction, like different people are reading for different things, right? So some people are there for the hard sci-fi, like the engineering concepts, and like so that appeals to them, but other people read more for like character interiority and story. So, you know, different genres are gonna kind of appeal to different readers.

Mark McGrath 23:36

Well, it's like the one the one I'll never forget was like altered carbon. You got me like so I saw the Netflix thing, and then like but like I I guess the episodes were fine, but like I'm struggling to the reading. I'm like goddamn.

Adam Karaoguz 23:49

Yeah. I so that's just I love Richard Morgan. Like I'll I will read anything. He's I think I've read everything. He's got he's just a very uh it's very noirish.

Mark McGrath 23:59

Well well, the other one, the other one I've always I guess I I because I was a kid, I guess I did read Red Planet, like Heinlein, who you quote in your your Substack, you know, it's one of you like your your like sort of your manifesto of your Substack. It's actually a naval academy grad and a naval officer. Yeah.

Adam Karaoguz 24:15

Yeah, no, Starship Troopers again is like Yeah, I read that.

Mark McGrath 24:18

Yeah, it was on a commerce list, yeah.

Adam Karaoguz 24:20

Totally different from the movie, like, but I love them both like in different ways. Yeah.

Mark McGrath 24:25

Yeah, the the movie's a little wild, but the movie's amazing. Yeah. Um, no, that's I mean, I don't know. I mean, uh, fiction, I I always try to extract the concepts, right? Like I I did I did labor through and finished Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead and all that stuff. I think you you can pull out these ones that have like these sort of grand philosophical uh concepts. And that's I guess that's why Heinland was a little easier for me, just because I could connect the dots, uh like Fahrenheit 451 or whatever. But I I've never met anybody that I've known personally that that is like as into science fiction as you are.

Adam Karaoguz 25:01

I mean, I'm not like I'm alright. Not like a trekkie, like you're not a let's be fair. He's not a trekkie. No, I like so I do I mean, I like Star Trek, uh but uh you know I haven't I haven't w been into Star Trek since like the next generation. So that's kind of my you know, I haven't there's some good, you could juxtapose like Star Trek versus like Battlestar Galactica and have some good like you know different visions of like where man mankind should go.

Mark McGrath 25:28

Do you remember the TV show? I mean, we were young, and I guess it was reruns, and we're we're the three of us who are born in the 70s, we're Gen Xers. Here's one for you. Do you remember the Jason of Star Command?

Adam Karaoguz 25:39

No, I don't think I do.

Mark McGrath 25:40

That's obscure because I know that you and I have the share for the Tales of the Golden Monkey. Yes. Oh yes, absolutely. Then the other thing that you kept pounding me on was the word attunement. And I heard you say it with attunement.

Adam Karaoguz 25:55

I listened to the Fristan uh interview and you said uh I'm like, you were saying attunement. I'm like, yes.

The A Frame And Attunement

Mark McGrath 26:00

Yeah, you you finally, yeah, you got me. So walk us through. Well, I guess it's probably uh since we said the A word, what a great time to walk us through the the A-frame.

Adam Karaoguz 26:09

Oh, yeah, yeah. So, and again, like I did not want to get into this game. Like, I was I was working on my novel, and I'm like, I want to just do fiction, but I kept getting this like, you know, this thing kept coming to me. And it was like, you know, I don't know if you've read uh Rick Rubin, his book on creativity, but like he talks a lot about resonance and attunement, and like I lost track of how many times I circled the word attunement in his book on creativity, but um this idea kept coming to me, and I'm like, I don't like why am I doing this? Like, why do I need to think about this? And it just kept coming. So I'm like, all right, whatever. I'm just gonna write, write it out, and then I can keep working on my fiction novel. And so I think going, you know, from looking at storytelling, that five-cycle uh fry tech pyramid of storytelling, and then looking at the OODA loop, you know, the conclusion I came to in that essay that I sent you was like, you know, the storytelling five-cycle beat is inside the OODA loop when you're trying to make orientation, but then the OODA loop is like inside the narrative because the narrative is showing you a human agent that's either effectively navigating the environment or is failing to. So, you know, the lesson is either prescriptive, do this, or um, you know, proscriptive, uh, don't do this, right? Like in a story. And that helps us, you know, like don't go to the watering hole by the tree because there's a lion there, right? So as I was looking at those two things, I'm like, maybe there's like an inside pattern to this that is like you know, Trinitarian in nature, you know. So I know I know Ponch is here for the the sacred numbers and the uh the sacred geometry. So, you know, I'm I really like I like the Trinity model as like a stable model, right? So I want to take UDA and see if there was an interior, um like a deeper pattern to UDA. So, you know, the A-frame very much like stands on top of of UDA. And I think why is it different? Let me just cut to like because I've been asking myself this question, like why, like, what is this? Like, why, like, why waste everybody's time with the A-frame? Like, why is it different than Uda? And I think what I'm getting at is first of all, I'm like, I'm making this plane like mid-flight. So I'm definitely like open to like feedback on what this thing, what I'm trying to discuss here. But uh what I think I'm trying to do is I was looking at uh by the way, like so. One time I hit up uh Mark and I'm like, hey Mark, have you um have you heard of this book called Science, Strategy and War? Yeah, it's just like the funniest thing. It was like, you know, it was very like early days when I just met Mark, like, you know, little did I know that like he's read it like 50 times. Like I've only read it twice. It goes with me everywhere I go, man. So but I'm reading that, and like Osinga is saying, he's Asuda, sorry, Osingha is asserting UDA is like an epistemological framework. And so what I think I'm doing with the A-frame is like trying to like back discover like the ontological framework behind UDA, like what is what is this goal here? So, you know, Boyd says, you know, improve our capability for free and independent action, right? Like that's the goal, but I'm trying to like, okay, so survive, right? You know, like okay, that's a pretty good goal, but like why? Like, why are we spreading, you know, and it's like okay, complexify to become more fit to the environment? Like, so I'm trying to like unpack like, is there a telos like behind UDA and like and that whole thing? So what I'm getting at is like there are these things, and then you guys talked about Levin. Um, you talked about platonic space last week. Um, so you know, is there a space, you know, where the where the true, the good, and the beautiful reside in platonic space that we are like homing in on and we're trying to seek that fitness landscape. So the A-frame is like my attempt to show, and but you know, Boyd talks about the moral level, right? And and you know, harmony, like we've got to be in harmony with our group and we want to create disharmony with our opponents, but like, you know, I think I'm trying to focus in on that, like that spiritual level. And I think, you know, going back to like you know, the Tijuana time, it's like, you know, as you kind of get broken open and discover that, you see that like that spiritual level is like the most important level, you know, the moral level, the spiritual level, it's almost like the pyramid should be inverted, you know, and it's like the physical is like the smallest part. Yeah, that we have to align that moral and spiritual level. So that's what I'm trying to draw on. Because Boyd, I you know, my sense is Boyd was probably atheist to like agnostic.

Mark McGrath 30:26

I don't know, but no, he was so Mary talked about this on the show. You know, he was baptized and raised Catholic to the point where his father died, and he wasn't his catechism didn't finish, so he didn't get confirmation and things like that, but he but he died, he received the last rites. And and and the description of Boyd's life was non-practicing religion, but agnostic. Like he believed, yeah, he believed in he believed in God. It's interesting that you mentioned that too, because when you when you look at the the visual epistemology that Chet Richards created, you see at the last part of it, there is a massive injection of Eastern philosophy. You know, don't forget in DNC, um, I'll just I have my copy here, I'll just double check, but I'm pretty sure Alan Watts is one of the uh yeah, Alan Watts is the uh source number 35 for um for d destruction creation.

Adam Karaoguz 31:13

So so that always did play into his uh so I I actually flagged that from the Friston talk because you met you made that point, and I was like, I wanted to go back and see specifically how he was incorporating Alan Watts.

Mark McGrath 31:27

Yeah, destruction right in destruction creation, but then um he also we when you go in the archives and you look at the list of the books that he had and he read, um not only Alan Watts, but there's a there's a shitload of them. But the other one that is really remarkable is uh Tayard Des Chardin talking about the newest fear and everything, you know, and he was a he was a Jesuit priest, uh unsuppressed, but then with the with the um unsuppression under uh Pope Benedict XVI's with like, yeah, we should have been listening to this guy all along. I mean, he was he was basically telling the truth. But yeah, Boyd, when the the next archives trip that we we want to go back in, we haven't seen that copy. I mean, I've looked at this copy on War on War, and I took a picture of every every bit of his marginalia. Phenomenon of Man would be the one I'd want to really look at because the more that you read that book and the more that you talk about those ideas, the more that you actually do see those reflect in Boyd across a lot of the later stuff, specifically around conceptual spiral, essence winning and losing a strategic game.

Adam Karaoguz 32:22

And I call it Herv, but I think you guys you do use like ver high, right? Like veridity, rapidity, harmony, initiative.

Mark McGrath 32:28

That's what he did. Yeah.

Adam Karaoguz 32:29

He I call it Herv because I like to say it like as a word.

Mark McGrath 32:33

Variety, VHR I, variety, harmony, rapidity, and initiative. Yeah.

Adam Karaoguz 32:37

I mean So I actually I didn't tell you about this. I so I wrote a paper at Naval Postgraduate School because we were trying to make a sequel to McRaven's Spec Ops book. So me and the civil affairs guy wrote a paper trying to say that uh Boyd's, you know, Verhee is better explains why special operations are successful than you know McRaven's six principles. You know, so he has like rehearsal, purpose, surprise, speed, security, and simplicity. Those are like the six uh principles that McRaven uses in spec ops. But uh, we made the case in this paper that it was actually variety, rapidity, harmony, and initiative that causes like a special operation to achieve that relative superiority and like succeed.

Mark McGrath 33:18

Yeah. I mean, that that that's what is lost on what I would call popular Boyd, you know, or bastardized Boyd or bad, you know, you've seen me write about a bad boyd, is like stuff like that, like we're talking about that Boyd actually did and that Boyd actually said, nobody even says that. You know, and you write a book or you, you know, you talk about things and you don't cite Osinga or you didn't use Osinga or you didn't use Grant Hammond or whatever. I mean, these these things are academically challengeable pretty easily just using Boyd's words. Like you don't have to take what Moose said or what Ponch said. You can just take what Boyd said, and you can clearly see that he's never talking about some linear bullshit. Now, if you read, if you read patterns of conflict and you only read it, you could you could assume that, well, say he's talking about Udaloop, but yeah, he never drew it and he never talked about he never talked about the way that he evolved. That's the other thing, too. His thinking evolved, and and people don't allow for that, and they don't they don't accept that.

Adam Karaoguz 34:16

And well, yeah. So that's an interesting like reflection on you know process philosophy like Whitehead and you know, flow, Bay John, and and then you know, the left hemisphere, we want to look at things as like static snapshots instead of the right hemisphere is like looking at the flow of things and the relationality of things, and that's what I think you're getting at.

Mark McGrath 34:36

Did you did you look at Watercourse Way by Alan Watts? Because that's that's one of the books that he used.

Adam Karaoguz 34:42

Yes, I had so I have a copy of that, yeah.

Mark McGrath 34:44

So what was interesting to me about that book was it's talking about uh Chin the Chinese language. The ri you know, we have the phonetic at you know, eighth alpha through Zulu, right? 26 letters, whereas the Chinese characters are like, you know, bazillions. But what what what Watts makes in that like the case that he makes, I think you could start to tie in McLuhan even to this, is like they're not looking at something linear across as like this has to be a verb, this has to be a noun. These words, these words have depth and space and and value beyond just the the linear application of it. So the more that he talks about that as a way to illustrate sort of, I guess, the impact or the scope of Taoism and why Taoism is important, then you realize that and you look at Chet's visual epistemology, Taoism is a massive input into Boyd's later thinking that gets us to where he even can draw the Oodaloop sketch.

Adam Karaoguz 35:35

So I'm excited, yeah. So whenever I leave on a trip, I like come home and there's like a stack of books waiting for me. And uh I just picked up uh Gene Bolton's The Tao of Complexity. And I think I got that, like, because Snowden now has, you know, internationally renowned curmudgeon. Snowden is um he's he's on like a Taoist like kick now. I think and maybe he'll say I was always into Taoism, but like he's talking about Taoism a lot more. And I think it's particularly that nexus of like Taoism and systems thinking is really helping us understand the environment uh in better ways than just the you know, the Descartes, you know, the Descartes dualism, enlightenment, reductive materialist paradigm. Well, that was I want to share something here. This is important.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 36:14

Uh this is this is very important. A core reason we got Carl Friston on the podcast was because of Dave Snowden's comments about our use of active inference. And that's what uh really helped us bring Carl on. And Dave isn't completely wrong. He isn't completely right either. And so that is actually revealed in the podcast with Carl Friston, and I'm pointing that out on this podcast because we're not gonna, we don't, I don't I don't talk to Dave anymore. But the point is thank you, Dave, for commenting and being wrong. And I want to share something else with you, Adam. The very first question I ever asked Dave Snowden is the very first question was here coming out of Norfolk. We went and did a NATO thing. I asked him, you know, what have you been wrong about in the past? And he couldn't answer that.

Adam Karaoguz 36:56

So I I love, no, I mean, I love him. Like I will say, like I love like giving him a hard time. Uh I sent him so the stuff I sent you with like so I was trying to take you know the Kineffen model and then some other models like Stacy, you know, where you're dividing the world into like simple, complicated, complex, chaotic. And I tried to make it into like a globe, like a 3D sphere. And I put coherent as trying to explain like the yeah, this one. So I put coherent and he did not like this. I sent him a picture of this. He was not a fan. He's I think he said I messed, I was mixing up categories as a category area, but I was trying to bin it into a trinity of chaotic, complex, coherent.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 37:33

Yeah, and this this when I saw this reminded me of this Stacy matrix and all that. And you know, that and and I I don't I don't have a problem with it. I'm like, yeah, it makes sense. If we're trying to introduce people to this type of thinking, I think it's fine, right? Is there a right and wrong?

Mark McGrath 37:46

It's not a dumbing down. It's not it's not like it's it's not a mischaracterization, like saying linear OODA is the hook to get people interested in Void. It's not it's not the gateway drug, it's the gateway drug to like the downward spiral of what you want your competitors using.

Adam Karaoguz 38:01

Well, yeah. I think I like I uh I taught last week and I used the example of you know the Latin roots of complicated and complex, right? So complicated plicar folding over. So it's like something's folded over, it's complex. So just like a car, we can take the car engine parts all apart, put it back together, and then complex is plectea, which is interwoven. And so that's you know, a human body or raising a kid, right? Or kayaking the rapids, those are all like complex endeavors. And so trying to educate people on the difference between those two.

Mark McGrath 38:33

It's that's that's apt, though, because Boyd uses unfold. We're trying to constantly unfold our enemy and we're constantly looking for, you know, how do we deal with unfolding circumstances? I think that that is the uh, you know, what Ponch and I have said from day one is like that, you know, Boyd is a a leading scholar of complexity. He's not a leading scholar in like, you know, decision making. It's it's a totally different ballgame. But I was gonna say the other way, because you said the term systems thinking, you know, you and I both really connected on Detmer's book, Systems Thinking, which does does have you know a really good approach to Kinevin, to to Boyd, to um uh Boyd's take on maneuver warfare to an authentic understanding of the of the Oodaloop. And has the bet he has one of the best quotes. I often pull it up to get excited, but he but he basically calls people that reduce Boyd dilettantes. You know, these are these are dilettantes.

Adam Karaoguz 39:25

Well, yeah, and then the whole like the analyst, you know, that's only you're using half your brain. Yeah. Because you're not synthesizing things back up. But yeah, so real real quick, let me just lay out just so instead of UDA, right? Observe orient decide act, like I'm I'm breaking it down into a trinity, and it looks like a four-sided die, like um, you know, that little triangle when it's a three-dimensional shape. So you have attend, appreciate, and act as, you know, just as UDA is nonlinear and recursive, so these three are non-linear and recursive, going back and forth, right? Into this triangle piece here. And then I'm foregrounding attunement as like the goal, like the telos. And yeah, and and I'm not like I'm not the guy, like I don't have the answers. Like, I don't know what it means, how you would attune more effectively. I'm just saying, like, that's the goal.

Debriefs Teaching Attention Under Stress

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 40:11

I want to build on this. So with leadership and appreciation, uh, is connected to John Boyd. Same with action, attention as well. Uh, attunement and attention, uh, I want to make sure I get this right. So can we step outside of uh Oodaloop and and your A scaffold for a little bit and talk about let's go back to debriefing in the special operation community or fighter aviation. Can you talk about uh the difference between attention and attunement and what you did uh in the SEAL teams?

Adam Karaoguz 40:40

So yeah, I think our you know our debris processors are probably similar to yours. I think I think the aviation community is more regimented, which I think makes a better debrief product. You know, ours are a little bit more in keeping with our roguish personas, you know, our our debris processes are like a little bit less structured than the aviation community, but the points are, you know, rank is, you know, you're leaving your rank at the door, you know, no matter anybody's anybody can speak uh honestly about stuff that happened during the operation or the training because the goal there is like we're trying to achieve like correspondence with actual ground truth. So we're not trying to blow smoke up each other's behinds and tell us like your farts smell so great. Like we're trying to be like actually like very honest about, yeah, hey, you did that, that was a stupid move because this, right? Um, and we can all be honest, and there are people that still, you know, they get defensive and they're making excuses. Well, I did it because blah, blah, blah, you know. But um, the goal is for us to look at our performance objectively, and because we're all able to speak honestly, you know, we're trying to get at that shadow. You know, we each have that blind spot right behind us. And so our goal is to help each other with those shadows and call attention to um shortfalls in order to make the group performance like to go towards that ideal of you know, kind of group flow.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 42:00

Yeah. So I I want to share something with you. So I'm looking at your uh another slide here, and I'll bring it up in a little bit. Perception is connected to appreciation, and you have intuition and connected to attention, discernment with action. So going into the world of perception action coupling, like we talk about with constraints-led approach in sports, psychological dynamics, actual ecological psychology, the idea is there is to help create or connect that perception to that action so that that you when your kids are playing a sport, they're actually doing something that they are going to experience in a game, right? It's the same thing we did in fighter aviation and and what you guys do in the SEAL teams. Um, but that coupling is important. And and the way I look at it is it when you're an instructor, uh, like when I'm an instructor in the F-14 or when I or when I was, it was I would help them understand what they need to be paying attention to. Hopefully I'm getting the language right. And that way they could be attuned to it later on. Then I'll give you another example. Today, while I'm teaching my daughter how to drive, same thing, you know. Hey, did you notice that lady was walking near a sprinkler? And she's like, No, I didn't, Dad. And I'm like, What is well, what does that mean? Well, that means she could jump out if she doesn't know that water's gonna hit her, right? And it could be a problem for us. So that's a that's I want to make sure I get the language right, Adam. Attention and attunement.

Adam Karaoguz 43:15

Yes, no, that's great. And um, and yeah, like a lot of this is built on a giant iceberg of like, um, so I think how I built this was like, you know, a mix of me as a practitioner through three decades in naval special warfare, a mix of me as like a you know an independent scholar, and then a mix of like artistry, right? So I so it's gonna probably have elements that are like dissatisfying for like various elements. If you're just like a scholar, you're gonna be like, well, this is too woo-y for me, right? If you're an artist, you're gonna be like, oh, there's too much, you know, science in this. So yeah, it's a great point. Uh, and with my master's thesis, one of my recommendations was to go to uh Gary Klein's shadow box methodology. So exactly what you're talking about, like, what do we pay attention to in this situation? So he you know he created recognition prime decision making. I know you guys are very familiar with that. And the shadow box method is like whatever the domain is, you you give you give the like novice a situation, and then you're like, okay, now write down what you think are the most important parts of this situation to make your decision. And then the novice writes down what they think, they turn the page, and then there's an expert, you know, the trainer has written down, okay, you need to focus on X, Y, and Z. These are the most important components of your decision making in this sit this moment. Um, so yes, I'm a huge fan of that. And I did the same thing with my daughter, like while I was teaching her to drive, I was trying to make all the implicit explicit. So, like, I was trying to actually, like when I would drive, I would say what I was looking at and what I was doing. Like, okay, I'm looking at that guy. He's he's gonna look like he's gonna turn, he's gonna pull out in front of me. Okay, the light looks like it's probably gonna, it's getting a little stale.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 44:51

So you're narrating this as you're driving, right? Yes, because I'm trying to show her like what I'm focusing on. Yeah. And and and I I do the same thing, but it what I'm finding is it overwhelms them, right? Now remember this when I was flying around a carrier with a student for the first time landing on an aircraft carrier. We did a fine brief, you know, what to pay attention to. And as we're going downwind on the on, you know, on the ship, I say, Hey, look, the elevator's open. He's like, Punch, I have no idea what you're talking about. And that's when I realized his awareness was right here. Right.

Adam Karaoguz 45:19

He can only handle so much. Well, that's how it is when we first jump out of an airplane. Like, you know, they'll like the instructor will be like, you know, it's normally out in like Arizona somewhere. So there's like mesas and little plateaus, and he'll be like, hey, jump out and take a bearing on this rock. You know, it's like off the throne. And like you jump out the first time, and like you're all you're doing is looking at your altimeter. You're like, yeah, I'm just I'm looking at my altimeter until it's time to pull. And then over time, you know, those blinders begin to come off, and you kind of can read the environment.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 45:48

Well, let me ask you this. We talked about trauma earlier at the beginning of this uh recording. There's positive trauma too, right? So we're we're kind of traumatized as as military officers and what we did in the past. And that means we are more aware of what's going on around us and it our scan is up all the time, right? And I I find that to be a curse as well as a gift. We just I would I would agree with that. We just tend to see things that others wouldn't pay attention to.

Adam Karaoguz 46:13

Because I do think it's it is cognitively exhausting if you're going through life with that posture. So you have to kind of, and that's what going back to like the Maverick and Top Gun 3, you know, you are enough, you know. So, you know, you you don't want to tell somebody to like not pay attention to their surroundings, right? Like, but but to your point, like if you are on that heightened state of vigilance 24-7, you are gonna become exhausted and burned out.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 46:37

Yeah. Well, I I would say right now the the meditation, mindfulness or you know, breathing exercise and working out takes care of that. I I do want to ask another question to you, and that is the again, I want to make sure I get attention and attunement correction.

Adam Karaoguz 46:48

Okay, yeah. Sorry, all right, all right. So so with attention, what I'm getting at is so I wrote down like kind of deliberately noticing and observing what is present. Ian McGillchrist, who's a big influence on my thinking, you know, he says attention is a moral act, right? So he, you know, your act of attending, you are you are selecting, and and John Vervake calls it uh recursive relevance realization. So this, like, I'm figuring out, I'm picking out the salient stimuli in my environment to pay attention to. So uh and that's gonna then how you know how we attend is gonna then color the other parts of you know the loop as it goes through. So attention is basically like what I am putting my cognitive you know spotlight on in the moment. And then, you know, appreciation is kind of a combination of orientation and decision, like a when you you know, when you we speak of like terrain appreciation, right? And that's how Boyd, when Boyd says leadership and appreciation, not command and control, he's saying you need to appreciate the context, you need to appreciate your people, the culture of the group, and then let that guide your decision making. So why I have appreciation is the second level is like you're taking in the information, you got a little time. You know, we used to say that like officers had state rooms so that they could like think about the decisions they were gonna make, you know, and they needed that time as well. Wasn't to play spades? Well, no, normally the spades were the spades are on the mess decks. So uh yeah, that's that's where we handle it.

Mark McGrath 48:14

I think the other thing about the appreciation point is that you're surfacing what others in, you know, bad boy they completely miss, you know, right is the you know, the recognition of worth and value that that he states.

Adam Karaoguz 48:26

So and that's and again, that goes back to a lot of the my work is informed by Zach Stein and Mark Gaffney. They're looking at value. And then Brendan Graham Dem Dempsey and Greg Henrique's uh they're they're all kind of putting forward these models that value is what at every level, at every fractal level of existence.

Mark McGrath 48:43

So talk more about value because that's I I think that that's crucial when especially looking at Boyd when we're when we've applied it to business and other things, and we've had guys on like Hunter Hastings, and he and I co-authored a paper to talk about that, that by orienting, entrepreneurs are actually creating value by recognizing gaps and things and seeing what others don't.

Adam Karaoguz 49:04

Yeah. And so I'm looking at value from not-I mean, that it's one definition of value, right? Like market value. But from my view as like an artist, you know, I'm like, that is a very left-emisher way of looking at the word value. And I want to look at value that's in that platonic space, right? Like the transcendentals, the true, the good, the beautiful. And so Dempsey and Henriques and Stein and Gaffney are all making the case that there is value. So at every level, if we're talking a you know, multicellular organism, and this would probably even with uh Prigogen's dissipative structures, right? Like they are seeking like an energy gradient. So they're looking for value. They're at even at that level of like a non-human process, it's looking, it's sucking towards value. And so then you, you know, you get into like cellular organisms, you know, and then you start to get mind and culture. All of those levels of analysis are seeking value. So, and this connects to Sto Snowden with you know his like estuary model, right? Like, you know, it's about like reading the environment and then finding the gradients that are moving towards value. You know, Snowden would say, like, you know, you're looking at stories and you're trying to, you know, we want more of these stories, less of these stories to lead us towards, you know, virtue. So that's what I'm I guess what I'm getting at with value is there there is value. And so why this would be different than Boyd, maybe what I'm talking about is I'm trying to share, like, you know, uh, you know, Uda is like the epistemology. How are we like making making sense of reality? But but this A-frame is like the ontology where it's like this is real, like these values are real. Yeah, like we can't poke them with a stick, but they exist in this platonic space. And you know, we want to be attracted to these states. These states are more advantageous than not.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 50:49

Okay, so the attractors and values are connected. Um, so if we're if we're talking about like a fitness landscape from biology, um, the the values you just describe are the attractors in the land are both internal and external. Um, this is interesting because the I'm gonna do a keynote using the concept of attractors that I'm borrowing from um actually Neil Howe wrote about it in his book, The Fourth Turning, to talk about how society is go to the different attractors. So you get into the sakulum and things like that. But that attractor model is the same approach that um uh Gallimore uses to explain DMT. It's the same one that uh Friston explains, it's the same one that Car Carhart Harris explains. So we're gonna use these models, this type of thinking, this attractor thinking, to help people understand that this is a fractal way to think about how we move through how living systems engage with the environment. The low energy approach or the low energy thing of a marble, if you want to think about marble and a bowl, that marble is attracted to the bottom of the bowl. That is like uh rumination or um experiencing something in the past. We got to get out of that. And the way we do that, we need higher energy, we need more entropy to get out of that valley to get to another peak or basin, right? And that's that's that's what I think you're describing there with the attractors and the connection to Udaloo.

Adam Karaoguz 52:00

Yes. And so, yeah, Verveke would call that uh parasitic processing when like your brain, you get in that cycle of rumination, and it's it's you know, uh on the mental level, it's the same thing as uh, you know, in the physical world, you know, a tractor, you know, like a race, you know, uh race to the bottom, right? And so, you know, in in a uh, you know, multipolar, what do we call it? Like a multipolar trap, right? Like where, like if we, you know, if we've read our butter battle book from Dr. Seuss, you know, that's showing you uh, you know, kind of this arms race between two agents, and it's just a race to the bottom. You know, the what we need to figure out is like, you know, what are these higher attractor states? And you know, Snowden, I think the point Snowden's trying to make with the estuary model is like we want to make these gradients like more favorable and like easier for people to do so that the energy expenditure to achieve them is less.

Mark McGrath 52:50

How about two other A-words? Because you mentioned one, artist, and it triggered in me both McLuhan and Boyd. And McLuhan said that artists were like our early warning detection system because they were able to see things and put things in uh and in sensory capabilities that other people were missing, and that that eventually comes. In other words, for second A-word, anticipation, anticipatory, which is also when I'm reorienting, I'm trying to anticipate things to understand things.

Adam Karaoguz 53:19

Yes, no, and that's exactly right. And you see it with you know, McLuhan started out as English teacher, and then like Ian McGilchrist started out as a literary theorist. So they were looking at narrative and saying, like, huh, this is weird. Like, what is this doing? And then both of them kind of retrained, you know, in different disciplines, but they brought that literary flavor to what followed. And yeah, you know, you know, McGilchrist in particular, he's looking at, you know, how narratives can either push us towards left hemispheric or right hemispheric perceptions. And those hemispheres are uh, let me just say, like, there's a lot of, you know, all the LinkedIn, you know, left brain, right brain, like all that has been debunked, right? Like there's plenty of people that are like neurobolics, right? Both hemispheres do everything, but um, the case that McGilchrist make makes in a very, you know, well uh well-cited argument in in his books is there are two different ways of attending to the world. So uh the left hemisphere is very fine-grained attention, it's about apprehending, it's about grasping and reducing and optimizing. So we're using the left hemisphere when we're trying to like get very discrete specific things and achieve them. But if we only had that mode of attention, other predators would eat us for lunch. So we have the right hemisphere, which is a wide vigilance scan. So he uses the analogy of the master and the emissary. So the left hemisphere is the emissary, the right hemisphere is the master. And hit the case he makes about modern society is we are overweighted to the left hemisphere, extract, get metrics, succeed. Yeah, and we don't have the uh you know the implicit right hemisphere to give us the holistic vision, to see the forest instead of just seeing the trees.

Mark McGrath 54:58

That I just posted it today, Joe Boylan's thing on good, he had a thing about basketball and Goodhardt's law, about those like the dire focus on measurements, open up things that you hadn't thought of before. But one thing that's missing from that argument was like he's not talking about speed, he's not talking about linear processes, he's not talking about any of that. He's talking about reorienting at a higher level and start to see things that others don't as kind of reminds me of like John, I I've said this before, John Madden used to have uh this story of going to Vince Lombardi had a class for coaches, and they would just go over the sweep over and over and over again. He's like by hour eight on the same damn play, you start to see shit that you never thought you could see before because you realize there was all these blind spots, and you were basically re-or you weren't going through a linear process, you were going through a reorientation.

Adam Karaoguz 55:45

Yeah, no, that's definitely interesting. And I've seen, you know, like what was it, 49ers coach? Was it Steve or Bill Walsh?

Mark McGrath 55:52

Bill Walsh's books, by the way, are the are the are arguably the best non-John Boyd books written about John Boyd's concepts, I think.

Adam Karaoguz 55:59

Yeah, so it's like you know, the score takes care of itself, right? It's like the idea of the city.

Mark McGrath 56:03

You actually can't even get his coaching book. You try to find it for less than like $4,000 or I mean, it's like it's so rare and hard to find. Yeah. Because I think it's that powerful. Where would it go ahead? No, no, go ahead.

Adam Karaoguz 56:17

No, it just it's getting it's getting at like that level, you know, the heart level, the moral level, like that's where you have to impact the players. And so they have the internal character to want to improve themselves. And then, you know, I I believe like individual character aggregates to kind of group culture in a nonlinear way. You know, it's obviously like the leaders are gonna be a big part of that, you know, aggregation to culture, but everybody is contributing to that. So we can either like be dragging the culture down or raising it up with our individual character.

Mark McGrath 56:46

So if I'm looking at the A scaffold, I'm looking at the pyramid, Boyd uh, you know, used the pyramid too, uh looking at it from different angles. Would a fourth leg be anticipation? So anticipation, attention, appreciation, action yields attunement.

Adam Karaoguz 57:00

So yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I mean, I think I I'm I I can see anticipation coming from you're appreciating and then you act, and then you're acting to like spur new, new, you know, novel uh outcomes in the environment. So, you know, you can definitely like take action looking to create something, but I yeah, I I think I'm trying to keep it trinitarian, uh, but I think they're all you know, they all it can fit in there, definitely. I would say anticipation is like part of like as you're appreciating, and then you move to act.

Mark McGrath 57:36

Okay. Well, the Beatles had four, so come on. Four, you can use four. You can use four every now and then.

Adam Karaoguz 57:41

We're gonna agree to disagree on this. I'm gonna I'm gonna base it in a Trinitarian way.

Mark McGrath 57:45

Well, that Zeppelin had four.

Adam Karaoguz 57:46

And again, and again, like I don't know why I'm doing that. That's like I'm like, I think I think I feel like the tr the Trinity is better than the quad. I don't I can't give you a solid like logic with the reason.

Mark McGrath 57:57

I I don't disagree with that.

Adam Karaoguz 57:59

I just think that in some cases you could yeah, I mean, there's plenty there's plenty of examples of four cycle things. You know, like the you know, the panarchy cycle obviously is a great model of how organisms go through a life cycle, and and we can extrapolate that out to like the US and connect it to Turchin's work and Strauss and Howe, in that you know, we are in the you know, the reorganization phase of the panarchy cycle. So we're like shedding things that don't work, and that's gonna be a very painful process as we do. That's why everybody feels like they're gonna ape shit.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 58:33

Like yes, yeah, I was I was kicking around the idea with Slider to overlay the plan brief, execute debrief cycle that we have for teams with the flow cycle. And and they don't overlap perfectly, and the flow cycle would be uh struggle release, flow, and then recovery. Recovery is basically what psychedelics can help you do, meditation can help you do, and all that. But recovery, we discovered, is not the same as debriefing, right? There's there's a difference. Um, sometimes you need to, and and we had uh Guido Bernacci on recently and you talk about leading the blue angels and the debrief, and then you know, there's a you need a little gap between the actual action and the debrief. And that's the recovery moment for these guys that start processing what just happened. And there's a lot of things involved there. But again, another four-step process that is very popular these days, and that is the uh the flow cycle.

Adam Karaoguz 59:20

So I mean, I definitely agree with you. And so as we I guess I look at these things like nested uh Russian dolls, right? So I'm I'm putting like attunement at the top and then the the triple, the trinity of attend, appreciate, act, and then below that, like, yeah, I would definitely see recovery as kind of the resolution phase of the FryTag pyramid. And then you kind of so you need to take that pregna pause and then you go back into like inciting incident again, and you're like going going through the spiral.

Mark McGrath 59:47

So I think the the nesting with your your your model, I mean, that's not linear. I don't think I don't see that as linear. I think that's the world of reorientation kind of.

Adam Karaoguz 59:58

I mean, yes, it's I mean, yeah, it's part of the world. Absolutely.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:00:02

I think what I'm hearing from you, Adam, is um, and I really appreciate this because you know, a few years ago I struggled with attunement, and I think I'm getting uh a grasp on it now, especially from the sports side of things and what we've learned in in in the military. But what's important here is there's a lot of theory that we're talking about, frameworks, models, things like that. But when we deliver something to somebody, we pull from these toolkit and go, okay, what I need you to do is pay attention to the environment with my daughter today driving and that type of thing. That's still part of the larger body of work, right? We're not gonna come out and go, yes, here's everything you need to know. It's it's okay, we're gonna pull this thing from here and we're gonna use it for your context. And your context for fighter aviation or or uh you know building a you know one of the SEAL teams around Virginia Beach. These are contextual things, right? Or if we're using stories or we're using SenseMaker to understand the narrative that people are putting out in at in Tijuana, which by the way, I I I talked to Jonathan Dickinson about a few years ago. He's using SenseMaker down there to capture this, what's actually happening, that that narrative and that quantitative and qualitative approach to uh uh SenseMaker. These are tools that we can use. I mean, we're we're we're and you're just adding more to this and saying, hey, here's another way to think about this situation. So I I really appreciate this uh A-frame, man. It's it's pretty much it.

Adam Karaoguz 1:01:15

And I like, and again, like I did not want to like come up with this. Like I this is like an I I but you know, I believe you know the creative process is like you are tuning into a frequency and it's gonna just gonna come through you. So I don't really even like with the infernal tower, I'm like, this is just a story that came through me as the writer. So that's my relationship with like ideas. So with the A-frame, I'm like, I this just came to me uh and I just tried to capture it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:01:41

Well, I I know somebody who will go through your book and maybe decode it and find the codes that are in there that you didn't know they were coming through if you want to do that. Yeah, we got a guy.

Adam Karaoguz 1:01:48

We got a guy. Uh yeah. I yeah, I would definitely be curious to see. Oh, and the so what's funny is like there's this, you know, I will say there's a psychedelic component, and I wrote I so I wrote this book. I mean, I've been writing it since 2011, but I decided I'm like, I need an obscure plant from Africa that's like a psychedelic. So I find Tabernanthea Boga. No, this is in like this is in like 2021. I decided I'm like, I need a random psychedelic to put in this book, like way before I had heard of vets, ambio, anything. So I'm like, oh, it's just a variant of the Tabernanthia Boga plant. And then I I was like rereading it, I'm like, oh shit, I'm like, no way. How did I like come up with it? No accidents, but years, yeah, years ahead of time. So uh it definitely I'm kind of glad that that's in there.

Speaker 3 1:02:33

No accidents.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:02:35

By any chance, did you get to meet Jonathan down there?

Adam Karaoguz 1:02:37

No. So, but I do um they saw the the essay I wrote on the experience, and they sent me, I got his book as like an early reader. So I'm going through it now and um just kind of re reading his book. Okay. Hopefully, kind of give him like ear, you know, try to give him like early reviews on it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:02:53

Yeah, I was texting with him earlier today to try to get some. He actually sent me some nice photos for my brief on uh Iboga and Abigain. Yeah. But I was trying to get the book from him so I can make sure it's handy for the people that need it. Yes, no, I'm definitely it's I'm looking forward to it hitting the I tell you, man, I I over the over the weekend, you know, it's Saturday afternoon, I think it was after the EO. I'm working out and I'm just like, I was crying, dude.

Adam Karaoguz 1:03:16

I was like, this is fucking awesome. We did it, dude. Yeah, oh yeah. No, so I it was funny because the night before I was talking to a guy and I was I was evangelizing and proselytizing, and it was just hilarious that that's what I was talking about. And then like the next day that you know that order came out. I'm like, yes.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:03:32

Yeah, I and just to see the folks that are in the room and and just go, okay, we're we're getting somewhere. And you know, having those conversations with Slider. And you know, the we've had a lot of folks on the podcast that talk about it, but I tell you what, you know, we've been uh you know, working with General Steele on this behind the scenes. General Steele was a big fan of John Boyd. Um, General Steele's running VA VMHLLC, Adam Maher. I mean, we've been connected to this for many, many, many, many years. And I've had many folks come at me and go, ah, this is all bullshit. This is all nonsense, Mike.

Adam Karaoguz 1:03:59

Yeah. Well, so I think what's great about I think the fighter community and the soft community is most of them are not into the woo. Most of them do not suffer bullshit. They have no time for it. The woo, they don't want to hear it. So to see all the guys go through this and to see the specific concrete gains and just miracles that happen as a result of this treatment, you see them like become true believers while going through the process.

Mark McGrath 1:04:27

Yeah. Oh man, I'm I'm fired up. I thought Ponch, when I first met him, when I first met Ponch, he's like psychedelics. I'm like, you're kidding me, right? Like, what the fuck are you talking about? I mean, you know, I was a Grateful Dead fan when I was a kid, but I I wasn't into that part of it. I mean, you couldn't be in the in the military, right? But then but then like you you you start, I think what really hit me was the PTSD angle, knowing so many people that suffer from it, knowing knowing so many people that have, you know, ended their life on it from even as far back, you know. My my mentor that influenced me to go to the Marine Corps, he was Vietnam vet, and he he took his own life from trauma that he just couldn't get rid of. And then like you start to really think about it, you're like, oh, holy shit, like this makes complete sense. And then then comes the education part, which nobody does. Nobody takes the education part. That's I think that's the failure of a lot of things, is people just don't reorient to um and and educate themselves.

Adam Karaoguz 1:05:20

Well, we've got an existing paradigm that's kind of out there like an iceberg, where it's like, you know, reefer madness, like all of the, you know, we you know, dungeons and dragons, all with these like scares about psychedelics that they're gonna melt your brain and this, that, and the other. And you know, it's the Beatles and pigs. I mean, that's like the you know, taking it recreationally is totally different than taking it like in a critical setting where you're mindful about your intentions and you're kind of going through it as part of a ritualistic process. No, those are like two different things. So helping to re-educate people on exactly what's gonna be. Oh, yeah, this is the uh basically.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:05:56

This is the attractor basin behind the bull. So this is part of the keynote because we're gonna make that happen. And then the snow globe analogy that I'm gonna uh kind of walk into. Hey, it's a little bit more complex than just that that bull at the bottom or that marble at the bottom.

Adam Karaoguz 1:06:09

Yeah, no, that's that's good. And I think really yeah, really trying to help people to think more about the environment, like fitness landscapes and attractors, so that they see, like, oh, okay, well, this is why our you know, our attention is being monetized and commodified by these social media companies because this is what's incentivized. You know, outrage and fear and anxiety are being incentivized by these platforms. So they're gonna, it's like scratch and poison ivy, like they're gonna like do it more and more. So we've got to change the incentives, that fitness landscape of the systems that we interact with. And that just takes kind of educating people to see what they're dealing with.

Mark McGrath 1:06:45

People have to stop learning to know and they have to start learning to understand. And I think that that's one of the biggest distinguishers of Boyd and the people that Boyd interacted with and the people that Boyd read and studied. These were not people just learning to know and do rote memorization. These are people that are looking to understand what's actually going on.

Adam Karaoguz 1:07:03

Yes, and there's different, you know, there's different ways of knowing. You know, I'm a big fan of Verveki popularizes Francisco Varillo's, you know, you know, propositional knowing, you know, just a rote fact, perspective sorry, uh procedural knowing, like, okay, how to change oil. Perspectival knowing what it's like to have a kid, and then participatory knowing, like actually getting in the flow. And you know, they they roughly connect to the you know for e cognition, that sort of thing.

Mark McGrath 1:07:28

Use your Heinlein quote that you have on Renaissance Human Substack.

Adam Karaoguz 1:07:31

Yeah, no, I mean it's like the idea is that uh, you know, we're kind of in this age of specialists, but we really need generalists. We need people that are just multi-purpose humans that can do different things. And so as I think about like raising my own kids, I'm like, I need to help them not just be specialists, but be generalists and and kind of be good at the gamut of of things, be a man for all seasons or a woman for all seasons.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:07:57

I can take a better of a better model, um, better role model than John Boyd to be that uh generalist, right? I mean that's yeah, what he did.

Mark McGrath 1:08:04

Well look at all the guys that he read, too. These were not.

Adam Karaoguz 1:08:07

Yeah. Yeah. So I am I don't know as much about his his his parenting styles as you all, but I I think I don't know, I don't know. You know, I I don't know if he if he was I don't know how he was. So you you talked to one of his children, so you might have a better idea than I do.

Mark McGrath 1:08:23

Well his biography is pretty clear about about you know he was extremely focused on his work, and that was Yeah.

Adam Karaoguz 1:08:30

So I think that would be my only He didn't have the balance.

Speaker 3 1:08:34

Yeah, yeah.

Adam Karaoguz 1:08:34

Yes, yeah, that's what I'm getting at. Like I think when I think about my life, uh, you know, I'm like, I need to my children are like the most important thing I'm gonna do here. It doesn't matter what novels I write, you know, or what I've done in my career. It's like, do I set them up to be good humans in the next generation? So I'm trying to focus, you know, my attention now. And you know, it's like you know, your attention and your there's a guy, Sean McFaith, uh, he's a professor at Georgetown. He wrote like the new rules of war, but he said something like, uh, your calendar and your budget are moral documents because they never they don't lie. And I, you know, you can like look at your daily calendar and you're like, how did I allocate my day? Okay, now I see what I'm what's important to me, even if I if I say this is important, but my calendar says this, you know, and the same thing with the budget, you you're like, what are you spending your money on? So I guess that's you know, being mindful of those things.

Mark McGrath 1:09:27

One saved round, uh it was just I had it written down here. So that the actual quote from Detmer in that book, Systems Thinking, I think the three of us could could respect and relate and and and purvey, you know, push this out a lot more. The quote is this dilettance and the subject of John Boyd would consider the OODA loop to be a tool. That would be a superficial opinion. The OODA loop is a way of looking at reality, reacting and adapting to it. Simply put, it's a way of thinking.

Adam Karaoguz 1:09:55

Yes. And that yeah, that it's a reality navigation template. You know, I think that's the and you're trying to, you know, help humans navigate better. I think that's why I was drawn to the storytelling connections with it, because it's all that storytelling, you know, it's just like you know, fighter pilots telling sea stories, right? That's all feeding into the orientation and you know, that culture and background experience that helps you decide faster and better.

Mark McGrath 1:10:20

Or well, because you oriented or attuned well, then you become faster, then you become better. It's it's always downstream of orientation and attunement.

Adam Karaoguz 1:10:33

Yes, and that's yeah, and that's that's helping your ability to you know separate the signal from the noise and kind of get at the ground truth.

Mark McGrath 1:10:40

Well, tell us, okay, so I mean, we're an hour and almost 15 into it. We could go for days, which we do. We just don't record punch, punch Adam and I go on for days and days and days. I think after Punch, Adam is the person I probably talk to the most um around these. Not always sometimes I text you and I'm like, where are you?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:11:00

Yeah, I randomly I randomly see him in my backyard from time to time.

Adam Karaoguz 1:11:06

Yes. I will yeah, I will I will lo lurk. I do so that is another funny connection between us that yeah, I know your neighbor, but uh yeah, I met you in our backyard or my backyard.

Mark McGrath 1:11:15

You help perpetuate you help perpetuate all the myths about SEALs, you know, being uh covert and sneaky.

SEAL Movies Hot Tuna Gen X

Adam Karaoguz 1:11:21

So well, that is so that is rule number one is that we must perpetuate the mystique of the team guy. So that is, you know, it's built into our uh charter.

Mark McGrath 1:11:29

All right. So, you know, all three of us come from very different communities within the naval services, and we've all three of us have phenomenal movies, I think, from our respective communities. We've already talked about Top Gun. I could go on and on about Full Metal Jacket, a few good men, Sansi Wojima, you name it. What's your personal favorite that involves the Navy SEALs?

Adam Karaoguz 1:11:49

Oh man, that's tough. Uh so I will say so. I we would all go to Hot Tuna. Uh so down in so Ponch knows. So there's gonna be there's gonna be frogmen, there's gonna be Marines, there's gonna be naval aviators there. Uh that we will all collect at Hot Tuna together.

Mark McGrath 1:12:04

Yeah. So favorite movie about and by the way, let's be clear, like Marines, SEALs, and and naval aviators don't I mean that that's a that's a pretty cohesive, if if if anything, loosely. That's not like having shoes around or like uh, you know.

Adam Karaoguz 1:12:21

I so I do I did have, I think I had one aviator joke in the novel uh about like you know who who is more attention seeking, you know, frogmen or aviators. You know, there's definitely like we will give each other a run for our money as to who who has higher self-regard.

Mark McGrath 1:12:37

All right, back to the movie. Come on.

Adam Karaoguz 1:12:39

All right, so so so you know, first of all, like I love the movie Navy SEALs.

Mark McGrath 1:12:44

Obviously, that's Michael Bean, Charlie Sheen.

Adam Karaoguz 1:12:46

So, yeah, and and I will t I will ask people, you know, Michael Bean played a SEAL in three movies. Can you?

Mark McGrath 1:12:52

I know the answer. I know the answer. Yes, Navy SEALs, The Rock, yep, and The Abyss, which is one of my favorite movies.

Adam Karaoguz 1:12:58

That's the one most people don't get. Yes, The Abyss is also one of my favorite movies.

Mark McGrath 1:13:01

Hey, sideshow, sideshow. He was in an underrated classic, The Lords of Discipline. If you've ever seen the Lord, the Lords of Discipline from 1983 is one of the most sleeper underrated movies that I highly recommend if you have it. It's a Pat Conroy book, but anyway.

Adam Karaoguz 1:13:16

Okay, I'm gonna have to take a look at so I so Navy SEALs uh was written, the script was written by a guy named Chuck Farrer. Uh it's like PHFA F or A R. Anyways, he was a SEAL, so he wrote the script for Navy SEALs.

Speaker 3 1:13:31

Yeah.

Adam Karaoguz 1:13:32

Um, so I think for me personally, uh I the movie Navy SEALs, which is like uh you know cringy to admit, but I I don't care. I really like I'm at a life stage where I don't care. Like I love it unabashedly. All the cheesiness is in here for Bill, what's his name?

Mark McGrath 1:13:47

Bill not Coleman.

Adam Karaoguz 1:13:48

Lots Bill Paxson. Yeah, he's a sniper, you know, nothing on Starlight, switching to thermal. Yeah, yeah. Great one lighters. I am so jacked. I am so jacked. It's flowing right through me, boss. Um, you know, there's I came in through a skylight, you know, like that line. Uh there's plenty of uh great lines uh from the I vaporize hostiles, yes. Did you engage hostiles? I vaporize so and I think for me, you know, it's like the like the romance of being a frog man, like that was the the attractiveness and the first part of Navy SEALs, like they're like, where's Hawkins? Where's Graham? He's getting married in 45 minutes. And like, you know, that moment in the movie, I'm like, I want to be one of those guys. That's when were you in Virginia?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:14:31

When were you here in Virginia Beach?

Adam Karaoguz 1:14:33

What was your uh from like 2000 to probably 2020 okay? So it's funny.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:14:38

Uh so I was there when Slider met his wife at the hot tuna.

Adam Karaoguz 1:14:41

Okay, very nice. Yeah, yeah. And uh many, many a miracle match was had there.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:14:45

And I remember there's one one moment we were just liquored up. This is uh when we were instructors at 101, everybody was back from the 14D squadrons. But you know, you're in the tuna, you're hanging out with all the fat gays that are coming back from Afghanistan, and and the room is you got bearded folks in there, you got these avian, and we're we find we're starting to find out who's who on the radios and all that. We're like, and it was just like, oh my god, this is fucking phenomenal. That's cool. So there's a little bar down the street here, uh, a little strip mall, is uh is is ground zero for a lot of things.

Speaker 3 1:15:17

Yes, it absolutely is. Yeah.

Mark McGrath 1:15:19

Many, many a child has been sired from connections there. Yes. Not always legitimately either, but that's okay. Yes. But yeah, I I agree with you. I think Navy SEALs is it's it's one of those movies. There was also, too, I think you and I had a conversation one time because the Marines certainly had this. I know I know that naval aviation has had these just these just phenomenal, like 10-minute little recruiting videos that they would show college kids or whatever. Yes. And the SEALs had that one where like these dudes are dressed up as like bad Russians.

Adam Karaoguz 1:15:49

So yeah. So we're gonna be like, that seed that was running down the hallway and he just like drops this guy. You know? I don't yeah, I don't remember that part, but like there's one called uh Be Someone Special. Yeah. So there's there's a recruiting video you can find on YouTube called Be Someone Special. That's it, yeah. It's that one. It's that one.

Mark McGrath 1:16:06

Yeah, ours was called Warriors from the Sea. I was totally hooked when I saw it.

Adam Karaoguz 1:16:09

Yeah, and we don't have to get into like the Marine Corps commercials from the 80s and 90s. Those are phenomenal too. I mean, those, yes. So I definitely like I wanted to be a Marine in fifth grade, and then I be then I discovered Frogman, and I so I still have a deep and abiding love of Marines.

Mark McGrath 1:16:23

Why is it? Because like, I mean, even guy like Jocko says all the time, like I mean, a lot of like uh like on his podcast and whatever he gets asked, and I've heard this from a lot of SEALs, like they always say, like at a branch level, we love Marines, like we love the Marine Corps.

Adam Karaoguz 1:16:36

You guys like you do you do like organizational culture better than other services at like the service level? You you inculcate this love of being a marine, and it's like you don't you don't need financial incentives, it's just like the the honor of being a marine is like were is like you know uh benefit enough. Yeah, and and I just love the way that you bring people into the organizations, you know how you make your officers, everybody goes to like platoon leadership course, everybody goes to the basic school. So you get like this baseline of like officer knowledge that's just very respectable to me. Like the product you have as like your default officer is top-notch.

Mark McGrath 1:17:15

I also think we get pushed together, we we wind up finding ourselves together in so many things. Like when I remember when I was deployed and I was going through shellback ceremony, the standing order was Marines and SEALs are not allowed to hate marine and seal shell shellbacks are not allowed to haze ships company. Marines and SEALs are only allowed to haze marines and seals. So basically the Marines and the SEALs go off and like like beat the shit out of each other all day.

Adam Karaoguz 1:17:40

So I had a uh so when we were up at sear school, like I went to seer school in Maine and in the middle of winter, right? I went to that one, and uh, so we everybody had snowshoes on. And so I was matched up with like this air crew guy, and then there was a Marine matched up with like another guy, and we're we're everybody we're doing the evasion, we're trying to like evade you know that little scenario, and my guy keeps falling over, my partner keeps falling over, and the Marine's partner kept falling over, and we looked at each other in the the Marine and I looked at each other and we're like, let's go. And we we like part, and I'm you know, and I and I'm like, this is kind of like that's kind of fucked up.

Mark McGrath 1:18:18

We always found ourselves like, I mean, even on Liberty, like Marines and SEALs just always wind up fighting each other.

Adam Karaoguz 1:18:23

It's like I don't know how it works. So we so we jetted, but Marine and I jetted and we we made it through like with the evasion thing and like got to the little like um shed at the end. I blew it up in my mind that it was this beautiful cottage, and like you know, it's gonna have this nice like fire going in the fireplace. There's gonna be like warm soup, and you go there and why the dwarves are gonna be there. It's like an outhouse, it's like the size of an outhouse, and there's like a white bread like bologna sandwich there. I'm like, uh, this is not what I envisioned at all of this success. But um, yes, I felt bad. We so the Marine and I deserted our our partners as I still I still bear some guilt for it.

Mark McGrath 1:19:01

Like I said, like that that phenomena emerges in so many shapes and forms, whether it's liberty, crossing the line, deployment, who knows? It just happens. Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:19:09

I don't I found myself 10 feet away from a moose in Maine in Sear School. Really? Yeah. Wow. That was terrifying. Not this moose either. Now you're working on the city. Those things are what, like eight feet high?

Adam Karaoguz 1:19:20

Like, how high are those things?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:19:21

Well, fortunately, I I smelled so bad, I don't think he knew I was there. Man. What was that movie about Sears School?

Mark McGrath 1:19:28

Speaking of like naval, naval lore. I I don't know if he was Navy, might have been Air Force, but it was Tom Scarrot. It was about it was a Seer School movie, and it had Tom Scarrot as the as the star. I don't I don't remember the name. Oh yeah, it's but random 80s shit popping in my head. And it was uh and then it turned out to be real. Like it was like these then they end up killing all these people. I'll find it. It was a Tom Scarrot Seer School movie.

Adam Karaoguz 1:19:56

So I'm just watching the last season of Cobra Kai now, and it's it's ending it's ending with a bang. So that's definitely our wheelhouse because it's like these middle-aged dads trying to like pass on wisdom to the next generation, and how do they do that? And they're just as flawed as everybody else. So it's a great, it's ending the series in a great note.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:20:15

Well, that's why we have a podcast, right?

Mark McGrath 1:20:16

It was called Opposing Force.

Adam Karaoguz 1:20:18

Okay. Opposing force.

Mark McGrath 1:20:20

Yeah, Tom Scarrot. Let's see who else was in this. Lisa Icorn, she's a female Air Force lieutenant, volunteers to go Sear School. Uh together with her partner Logan, they reached the goal, but then it turns out to be not a simulation. It's it's uh the Sear School staff uh become sadistic madmen. Really?

Adam Karaoguz 1:20:40

Oh, so it's like got like a Stanford prison experiment inside headquarters.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 1:20:45

Man, we could write some good movies, couldn't we? Yeah. I think so. Yeah. I don't I don't have enough time. Hey guys, I gotta do that.

Mark McGrath 1:20:53

I think we we gotta go, but like I think that that's another gift of Gen X that I think is lost on generations that came after. You know, they don't have the the the the quality of movies with the quality of the well the writing and the quality of the quotability, and even the cheesy ones are so I'm definitely trying to do my part to educate my children with uh cheesy 80s movies.

Adam Karaoguz 1:21:15

I have a whole long list. Golden Child, Big Trouble in Little China. Yeah, you know, I'm definitely like you know, Terminator, you know, predator. Any airplane? So yeah, been in a Turkish prison.

Final Laughs And Sign Off

Mark McGrath 1:21:26

Yeah, that's one of the beautiful we go on and uh we'll stop it here. Goose, thanks for uh coming on with your bros. And uh we'll have you back. And uh thanks for opening minds and enlightening people in the way that you do. Thank you, brother.