Special Guest: Brian "Ponch" Rivera - Founder, AGLX Consulting

00:13
Speaker 1
Hi and thanks for joining us again for another episode of the Spatial Web AI podcast. Today I have a very special guest. Welcome, Brian Ponch Rivera. Brian is the founder of Aglx Consulting, the co host of the no Way Out podcast, and the co creator of the Flow system. So welcome, Brian. Welcome to the show.

00:38
Speaker 2
Thank you, Denise. Great to see you again. It’s been a few weeks. Glad to be here and hopefully we can have some entertaining conversations today. Who knows what we’ll talk about.

00:47
Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s funny. I was actually just saying to you that conversations with you are a blast. So I’m so excited to have you here today. So Brian, why don’t you start out just kind of giving a little bit of your background for our viewers, let them know who you are.

01:05
Speaker 2
Sure. We could start out where I was born, and I’m not going to take you all through that. I’ll just start with some of the basics, public school education. So be careful of what I say in this podcast. University of Colorado graduate, an MBA. I did that while I was working for the military full time. I did 16 years in active duty military service in the US Navy. Eleven years in the Navy Reserve. I’m still a Navy reservist today, where I worked for Defense Innovation Unit when I punched out of fighter aviation at 16 years. So I got to fly Tomcats off of carriers. I actually flew air shows. I don’t know if you knew this, but I got to fly air shows all around the US. That was a lot of fun. Everything.

01:46
Speaker 2
Yeah, I actually proposed my wife from the cockpit of the F 14 here in Virginia Beach 20 years ago. Yeah, so that was pretty cool. We’ll talk about that in a few months, on the 20th anniversary of that. Anyway, 16 years active duty, punched out, went to the Reserve, the Navy Reserve. Did some pretty cool things with them. And like I said, I’m with Defense Innovation Unit now as reservist. But on my civilian side, I got lucky. I’m like the forest gump of what I call agile, or the forest gump of agile. What that means is randomly I got to meet some really fantastic people inside the agile community. So software development. And one of the persons I met was Jeff Sutherland, the creator of Scrum.

02:22
Speaker 2
And he said to me, you need to start a consulting firm that stomps out all the bad agile in the world. I’m like, I don’t know what that means, but I’ll do it. So that’s what we did. That’s where we started. We wanted to stomp out all the bad Scrum and Agile. Meaning at the end of the day, it really comes down to interactions for building team performance and flow. Brought a lot of lessons over from the military. Met Nigel thurlow met John Turner. Short story long. Got together on a weekend down in plano, Texas around Plano, Texas, sketched out what we call the Triple Helix, which is complexity theory. Distributed leadership and team science. Built that on top of the Toyota production system and focus it on the customer. And what that is now known as the flow system.

03:08
Speaker 2
And that was created about three or four years ago. Now, book’s been out since 2020. Right at the beginning of COVID I.

03:15
Speaker 1
Saw your Ted Talk.

03:16
Speaker 2
Oh, thank you. Yeah, and that Ted Talk was kind of fun because I was out in Budapest where Mihai Chicksamihai is from, and Mihai Chicksamihai is the person that kind of coined the idea of flow from psychological flow. So to go into that part of the world and be there to talk about design for flow, where I borrowed a lot of lessons from complexity theory and the constructal law to talk about flow and flow systems, that was pretty fantastic. So that was my first opportunity to get up and do something like that. And again, that was in Budapest where unfortunately, Mihai Chiksha Mihai passed away since then. So we lost a very important person in the world of flow there. But yeah, so that was awesome. We created Aglx eight or nine years ago to stomp out that bad Agile and Scrum.

04:03
Speaker 2
We’re doing more than that today. Everything from safety to innovation to design, getting into artificial intelligence, fifth generation warfare, you name it. Psychedelic assisted therapy, different modalities on creating some type of flow, whether it be in a team or individual. So that’s what Aglx is doing. And then with the podcast we stood up the podcast about seven months ago kind of as a let’s focus on John Boyd, all the awesome lessons that he gave us through Azuda Loop and all his work behind that. And let’s see where that goes. And that’s really snowballed into what it is today, where we have some fantastic guests coming on board, including folks from Active Inference Institute, which is Daniel Friedman. We had adrian Bajon, Dave Snowden, Gary Klein. Other neuroscientists include Dr. Enos Hippolito.

04:54
Speaker 2
So we are becoming an attractor, it seems like, because John Boyd’s work is nothing more than a synthesis of all these disparate disciplines brought together in what could potentially be a unifying model for how we understand reality. Very cool.

05:12
Speaker 1
Yeah. The stuff you’re working on is fascinating to me. So let’s kind of take some of this apart here. Why don’t you dive just a little bit into what is the flow system? What made you develop it?

05:27
Speaker 2
Yeah, so there’s something known as the Agile Manifesto. It’s principles and values that were written 21 years ago ish in Utah. Snowbird Utah. It was that got a movement going where everybody wanted to create Agility in their organizations. Right? They called it Agile, we call it Agility. What we’ve known from fighter aviation and military is it’s really about the interactions, how you work together as a team that matters it’s not the way you work. All teams, by the way, go through the process known as plan execute, assess. That’s a team lifecycle. Many of the frameworks that are out there are kind of like that, but they just focus on the framework, not the actual interactions. So you think about this and we get into the spatial web a little bit later on. It’s interactions that matter, not so much the quality of the agents.

06:16
Speaker 2
So we knew this from fighter aviation. Team science happens to be tightly coupled with fighter aviation. It doesn’t come from there, but it kind of evolved there in what we call crew resource management. So that’s how do we communicate? It’s really built around decision making, assertiveness, mission analysis, communication, leadership, adaptability, and situational awareness, right? All these things are pretty important when it comes to creating teams. So the flow system is really a reflection of that connected to some leadership lessons from the military and elsewhere and something kind of unique and that’s complex adaptive systems thinking, right? So were borrowing a lot of ideas from the Knevn framework. Knevan being the house of multiple or the place of multiple belongings. It’s a Welsh word. Knevin was created by Dave Snowden. I’ve been able to work with Dave.

07:09
Speaker 2
Like I said, I was kind of like the forest Gump of Agile. I got to meet these fantastic people. I’ve worked with them over the last several years and Dave’s been one of my mentors and happens to be one of our company advisors at the moment. So he’s really guiding us through what complex adaptive systems theory means. And I think from recent readings in active inference and the free energy principle and even in autism and psychedelics, they’re looking at complex adaptive systems theory more and more. So a team by definition is a complex adaptive system. There’s emergent properties that happen from the interactions. And what’s happening in Agile right now is they’re not focusing on what matters and that is the interactions. They talk about it, they just don’t know how to do it.

07:56
Speaker 2
So we created the flow system as a system of understanding. So we can understand context and have these different tools, methods, ideas, concepts, whatever it may be, and use them in the right context, right? So there’s no one size fits all approach to creating agility, creating innovation, creating safety, or creating resilience in organizations. It’s all context dependent, right? So you don’t want to go copy what everybody else is doing or what they say they’re doing because that’s not how it works. So we created a system of understanding to help people along. One of the main components of that is John Boyd’s observe, orient, decide, act, loop, and that we may talk about here in a few minutes. But that really led me to complex adaptive system thinking, cybernetics, psychology, biology, you name it, I brought cybernetics already systems thinking, quantum physics.

08:50
Speaker 2
So a lot of things that underpin what’s going into the free energy principle on AI or active inference are there already underneath John Boyd’s voodoo loop? So hopefully I answered your question there on what the flow system is. We can use it from teaching kids to teaching adults how to work together as teams to helping them understand their external environments. They can develop better strategies or strategy to dominate or win. We can use it to help organizations understand safety. Safety, critical environments, you name it. But again, it’s an evolving thing, right? It’s a place to start. And since we created that concept, the flow system, we have learned so much in the meantime, including the connection to or potential connection to the free energy principle of substrate theory, construct the law.

09:44
Speaker 2
There’s all kinds of new things coming out there category theory, all these awesome things that are emerging from, in my view, starting the flow system and where we are today. So that’s why I’m here, I believe, is to kind of learn more and maybe help others open their eyes to see what’s actually going on around them.

10:01
Speaker 1
Yeah, okay, so you said it’s context dependent. What kind of context?

10:07
Speaker 2
Let’s try this. So let’s take a team, a group of people working together on something. So, using analogy, if you look on a spectrum, on the left side of the spectrum, it’d be a swimming team, right? A low level of task interdependence. Or maybe it’s a wrestling team, right? Same thing. You go out and wrestle their own match and they come back in. It has a low level of task interdependence. On the other side of the spectrum is a highly dependent activity where the interdependencies are there. And that game would be something that looks like rugby. It would look like soccer, it will look like basketball. You get the reallocation of resources going on there. People are playing offense and defense. You’re not substituting people in like you would in football. That’s kind of in the middle of the spectrum here.

10:52
Speaker 2
So that’s the context we want to look at. When you go into an organization, go, hey, do you need to use a team framework like Scrum, a very rigid one, or do you just need to know how to work together as a team and make work visible? Right? So that’s one of the contexts we look at, right? Just to kind of get people thinking about their context when it comes to teamwork, when it comes to understanding their environment, that’s absolutely critical, right? We want them to develop a map, if you will, of their external world. So think about this. We need them as a group of people to create an internal map of their external world, and that’s how we develop strategies, right? If you can’t do that, everything you’re talking about is not a strategy.

11:33
Speaker 2
So you start thinking about where we can make the connection to the free energy principle on active influence.

11:39
Speaker 1
I was just going to say, now I see the connection.

11:42
Speaker 2
Yeah. So you need to have that internal model, and that’s what the OODA loop tells us as well. So it’s context. Context matters. Nothing is context. Well, I can’t say that context free isn’t something we promote. It’s like your context matters. Right, right.

11:58
Speaker 1
Okay. Very cool. So then you mentioned the podcast and you’ve had me on your podcast. That was such a fun experience.

12:08
Speaker 2
It was a great time. Yeah.

12:09
Speaker 1
It’s called the no way out podcast. Why? Where does that name come from? No way out.

12:17
Speaker 2
Okay, so John Boyd had five briefs that he gave over 1500 times. Right. He didn’t publish a lot. He published one thing, maybe a couple of other things, but none of his briefs were published. He just was always out there standing in front of people and explaining what he knows about the world and getting to see things a little bit differently. So no Way Out is the original name of one of the briefs that he gave, and that brief was known as the conceptual Spiral. Right. He wanted to name it no Way Out, and then he changed it for whatever reason. But he identified features of the world that we just can’t avoid, that we just can’t eliminate. So he identified these features as uncertainty, entropy, mutations, ambiguity, novelty, irregular or erratic behavior, quantum uncertainty, numerical imprecision, and then something being incomprehensible. Right.

13:11
Speaker 2
So those are some of the basic features. You said, we just can’t eliminate these things. There’s no way out. But the truth is there is a way out. The way out is through these things and adapting to them, learning about them. Right. So it’s kind of a playoff of that there’s no way out unless you do this reorientation, unless you change your paradigms, unless you go out and learn. You have to go out and get this. You have to actively engage with your environment. Right. That’s what he was getting at, is you have to do something. You can’t just be passive about it. Large language models, right? Large language models are kind of passive. So that’s what he was getting at with the no way out idea, but he changed it to the conceptual Spiral, and that was a paradigm for survival and growth.

13:52
Speaker 2
That’s a brief he gave in about 1992.

13:54
Speaker 1
It’s a lot less fun of a title.

13:57
Speaker 2
Yeah, but some people look at it and I’m a little nervous about the name, too, because it’s not about suicide or anything like that. Some people are like, well, that’s not a great title. Well, there’s really no way out. You have to go through these things. You have to adapt to your environment.

14:13
Speaker 1
You have to no way out but through. Right. I mean exactly what you’re talking about.

14:19
Speaker 2
Yeah, that’s it. So that’s the idea behind the podcast. The way we came up with the name, mark McGrath and I were in the archives at quantico. And we came across a paper that said no way out. And we’re like, what the heck is this? And we found out later it’s the conceptual spiral. But the moment we picked up that paper, we’re like, that’s the name of the podcast, right there no way.

14:39
Speaker 1
Cool. Very cool. Now, I’ve heard you talk about the VUCA world. Why don’t you explain that a little bit? Because I think that’s going to play into what we’re about to discuss as well.

14:53
Speaker 2
Yeah, it’s just a way to describe the external environment. I can’t remember how many years this goes back into the US. Army in a war college, but somebody called it VUCA. Volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Right. Today, a lot of people are on LinkedIn going back and forth saying, it’s Banny. It’s banana. It’s Chocolate World. I’m like, I don’t care. I don’t care what you call the external world, as long as you look at it and try to do something about it, because people get fixated. Like, it’s got to be this, it’s got to be that. I don’t care. You call it what you want, but VUCA? Years ago, when I started off in agile coaching, agile teams, we used it. We got laughed at. Today, it’s about everywhere. All right?

15:28
Speaker 2
Everybody’s using the term VUCA to describe the amount of change in the environment, the external environment. That’s what it’s about. It’s not a model. People have tried to use it as a model to explain reality and all that. Like okay. Well, good job. And that’s what pseudoscience is all about, right? Is just making things up and trying to sell things to people. I’m not about that. Yeah.

15:48
Speaker 1
No. So how does all this play into your consulting business? What do you do? You go out to companies and you’re helping them to do what?

16:01
Speaker 2
We’re helping them do the things they don’t want to do, but they have to do. Right. There’s no way out. Right. Basic. Seriously. We may talk about this in a few minutes, I’m sure, but it’s human nature to be lazy. We’re pattern matching beings, and again, we’ll talk about that a little bit later on. So in organizations, it’s a lot easier to go after the blue pill than it is the red pill, right? Everybody wants a fast answer to doing something. So what we have to show them is through the flow system and through what we call high performance teaming, we show them a little bit about human factors, what makes us human, what makes us different than ants and data processors, the way we perceive reality. And we show them that through John Boyd Doodle loop.

16:44
Speaker 2
And we give them the context stuff through the Cadevin Framework. And we also have other tools that we can use with them, red teaming tools to help them mitigate cognitive biases and enable critical thinking. We give them these things so they can create psychological safety. They can leverage cognitive diversity. They can build on their dei program. They can do all the things they say they’re doing, but they’re not actually doing. We give them those tools and those techniques. Generally, what happens after three or three months with us or their initial engagement with us, they go, well, you’re the only people saying this. We’re going to go over here where everybody else is saying the same thing. So great. You’re going after the pseudoscience. We’re giving you the science. We’re giving you the practice based approaches to scaling, agility, innovation, safety, and resilience.

17:28
Speaker 2
The theories are there. The science is there. Everybody talks about settled science or set science, and this is right. But when it comes to human performance and things like that, people run away. Why? It’s human nature. We’re lazy. We don’t want to put in the work. I have kids. I know what it looks like to see them practice basketball. They don’t like doing the work. It’s human. We we kind of disrupt organizations. Yeah. So we disrupt organizations through showing them things that actually scale. Right. Remember, what Jeff Sullen said is you need to go out there and start a company that stomps out all the bad scrum and agile. Well, that’s how you do it, is you actually have to focus on the interactions. Right? It’s the interactions, the quality of the behaviors, relationships.

18:11
Speaker 2
And again, I think there’s another connection to the spatial web there we might touch on a little bit later on. Right. It’s about the relationships. It’s not about the objects themselves. So that’s a hard pill to swallow when you get into organizations, because the majority of pseudoscience leadership and teamwork approaches are not about fixing the interactions. Right. They’re about telling you how awesome you already are that you should continue to do this. We’re going to label that. We’re going to put this PowerPoint up. We’re going to put these eagles soaring over mountains and ponds and platitudes underneath it and just sell you on this nonsense. And that’s what people like. So not everybody wants to work with us because not everybody wants to put in the work.

18:50
Speaker 1
Yeah. So you mentioned something that I’m curious about psychological safety. What is that?

18:57
Speaker 2
Yeah, it’s a big term that was thrown around about seven, eight years ago. It’s pretty big today. It’s really the ability to bring your full self to work, to stand up and say, if you see a weak signal, you can raise your hand and say, this is what’s happening. Right. If you don’t feel psychologically safe, you’re probably going to hold information back. Right. So the way you create psychological safety is through leadership. Creating the right environment, a closed door or open door policy doesn’t create psychological safety. Red teaming does not create psychological safety. Leaders actions actually do. So how you respond to failure as a leader matters. That comes from the human and organizational performance, which is known as hop. It’s a principle of hop. How you do that matters. Right. So I give a great example of this from my home.

19:44
Speaker 2
My daughters are 13 and twelve right now. How I respond to failure matters. Now pay attention to this. This will be kind of fun. How I respond to their first boyfriend coming over will determine if I ever get to meet the second one, right?

19:59
Speaker 1
Absolutely. Okay.

20:01
Speaker 2
All right. So think about that. That’s some basic psychology. So in an environment as a leader, I need to be able to respond to failure and success. Right? Mainly failure. How do I respond to that? Because I want my people when there is a failure, I want to know about it. I don’t want to punish them necessarily. Other ways to create psychological safety is through the art of feedback loops. Debriefing. Right. As a leader you can create psychological safety by showing vulnerability. Fallibility standing up in front of people and saying over the last couple days or hours or whatever the time we’ve been together, I said this and I failed you. I did this, I failed you. What that does is it lowers the ego in a room so you can get to more novelty and people are more likely to speak up.

20:46
Speaker 2
So there’s a lot of awesome research by Amy Edmondson out of Harvard who’s done a lot of work on this and the concept of teaming. So we’re closely connected to teaming and teamwork and psychological safety and everything we do. But that’s an important feedback feature of any team organization.

21:03
Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned vulnerability because that’s something that I’ve known for a while. There’s two definite ways to make human connection with another human being. Actually, your brain. It’ll cause your brain to put out the chemicals that cause that connection. I don’t know toxytocin or which chemical, but one of them is vulnerability and then one of them is fight or, you know, the ship’s going down. We’re best friends, we’re all in it, you know, survival but vulnerability. And to me it’s like that’s why somebody like Jennifer Lawrence can trip on the red carpet and the next day know America’s sweetheart because she’s it’s. It’s showing that human vulnerability. I actually knew somebody who I remember telling one of my friends that a long time ago and he’s like, yep.

21:56
Speaker 1
Every time I go to speak I accidentally drop something as I’m heading towards.

22:00
Speaker 2
The microphone, get down and do a push up and then look like really cool. Yeah, you can do that. No, it works. Again, a lot of this came from my experience in the military. I’m not saying psychological safety came from my experience. I’m saying our culture in the military, in fighter aviation, we had a culture of debriefing. Right. This just happened. We were taught how to do these things. Nobody sat down and said this is how you do it. What we had to do is break this down through cognitive task analysis and go, this is how you do it. And by the way, the research supports that. So when we talk about effective debriefing, the most important feedback loop inside of a team, we demonstrate to leaders how to create or potentially create psychological safety through vulnerability and fallibility. So it’s very powerful.

22:43
Speaker 2
The same thing is true with planning too. As a leader, you have to provide good intent, you have to ask great questions. Again, a lot of this is in the flow System book, but yeah, that’s a critical aspect of what we do.

22:57
Speaker 1
So let me ask you, because you reached out to me probably like a month or more ago now, maybe a month and a half, and you saw some of the content and the work I was doing around active inference AI and the free energy principle and the spatial web, and you drew a connection to the OODA loop. Had you already been drawing the connection with the? So tell me what that connection is, tell me what excites you about go.

23:34
Speaker 2
We’Re going to go a little bit into Woolland, if you will. So it’s not Woolland, let me rephrase this. I grew up in Colorado at the University of Colorado. I drank beer. There’s a lot of psychedelics around there and things like that. I did not approve of that. So the war on drugs over the years, over being a child, growing up here’s, your brain on drugs, all those things are just part of your DNA now, right? You just don’t even think about psychedelics. That changed about four years ago or three years ago now when some of my friends who are fighter pilots went down to Mexico and they got help for their PTSD and TBI, traumatic brain injury, and there are some famous Seals in there as well. Marcus Latrell was one of them.

24:19
Speaker 2
Anyway, I got a back brief from Wiz is his call sign and I was just shocked to hear that. Here’s a person that was one of my mentors when I was transitioning out of the military, who went down to Mexico and went through psychedelic assisted therapies and then came back basically a different human being, a better version of himself. Let me say it, that I called up one of my buddies, sent him the brief and he said, when are we going? And I said, Dude, I can’t, I’m still in the reserve, I can’t go. But we found him money, we got him down to Mexico and he came back. The VA had put him on benzo, diazepines, all kinds of bad things. Yeah, so he was struggling quite a bit.

25:02
Speaker 2
Anyway, psychedelic assisted therapies, I started diving into books, michael Poland’s book, how to Change Your Mind, that led me to Robin Carhartt Harris’s work on rebus reduced beliefs under psychedelics and the Entropic Brain hypothesis. That led me to Carl friston. Right? So I’m looking all this stuff like, wait, I’ve seen this stuff before and I start mapping it out and playing with things. And what I have behind me is a little bit of that version of the OODA loop. But it was through psychedelic assisted therapies learning about them, reading about them, and understanding what’s going on in the brain with neuroplasticity and all that, and seeing the free energy principle and active inference, I start scratching my head quite a bit. So I actually have a document I wrote about two years ago. I haven’t published it. It’s right now 48 pages long.

25:50
Speaker 2
It’s a solid connection between John Boyd Doodle loop and what is I know now to be active inference in the free energy principle. It was more connected to Robin carhartt. Harris’work can you talk a little bit more in detail about yeah, we’ll dive into that on the connections here. That’s pretty cool. So the idea is, with psychedelics, it’s like a snow globe, right? It shakes up the snow globe and it kind of gives you access to more novelty. Right? So let’s go back to psychological safety. We want to remove ego in an organization. Psychological safety relaxes the ego in an organization or the default mode of operating in a top down command control organization.

26:32
Speaker 2
The same thing is true in your brain when you’re using a modality such as prayer, meditation, psychedelic, assisted therapy, you’re relaxing that ego, the default mode way of operating, and you gain access to higher entropy or higher novelty. And that allows you to reconnect things so you can remember things a little bit differently and see them from different perspectives. And that changes what we yeah, so it changes your internal map of the external world. Right. So that’s what’s going on with that piece. And the connection really was about the feedback loops in the OODA loop, which we can cover here in a moment. But two of the feedback loops that are in the OODA loop go from decide or prediction back to observation, which is really our sensory organs, right?

27:20
Speaker 2
That is the Bayesian inference or predictive processing, or what we now know as surprise minimization. How do we minimize surprise? That’s the first feedback loop that goes observe, orient, decide, which is also prediction. A prediction is a decision goes back to observation, okay? And that’s internal to an organism. So think about our brain or our mind, or whatever you want to think of that’s still internal to that system. There’s another feedback loop that goes from act and it goes from act back towards observation. And again, that’s internal to the system. And I learned this from Daniel Friedman. They call that a covert feedback loop. It’s covert. It’s still inside your system. It’s a planning, it’s a counterfactual, it’s a what if. That’s what’s going to help you rewire the brain. What if I think about this? What if I do this?

28:08
Speaker 2
What if I close my eyes? What if I start listening a little bit better. What if I do these things right? So that’s still internal to the boundary. It’s still inside of a boundary and that’s already drawn inside Boyd Zoodaloop. And of course, there’s two other pathways that are very important in there and that’s implicit guidance and control. One of the ignc pathways, which moves from orient, which is the internal model of the external world, the ignc pathway that goes from orient back to observe, if you will, is our schema, our mental models, our repertoire of the world. It’s our ego. It’s how we perceive reality. It’s already built in. And you also have another ignc pathway which bypasses decision or prediction or hypothesis. It’s an autonomic.

28:56
Speaker 2
It’s just how do I dribble a ball if I know how to dribble ball, how do I shoot? That’s how you get in a state of flow, actually. So there’s a lot to unpack there. But the overlap between what we saw with Rebus and Tropic brain hypothesis and by the way, that led me to reach out to Enos Hippolito, Dr. Hippolito, to have her on our podcast early to talk about this. And I got to spend about an hour and a half to 2 hours with her back in 2022. Just asked her to spend some time with me to make sure I’m not crazy. And she hasn’t talked to me since. No, I’m kidding. She really helped me out in understanding that the Free Energy principle built, which is now let me grab this book here.

29:42
Speaker 2
And that was before I got this book here, right? The active insurance book, the free energy principle in mind, brain and behavior. So she helped me out understand that a little bit more and that validated what I had in my paper. I gave my paper to some psychiatrists and psychologists who are in the psychedelic assisted therapy space and happen to have a background in the military. And they were blown away to see the connection. And we could talk about that connection through going back through Boyd’s work, if you want to do that.

30:11
Speaker 1
Yeah, so I’m actually really fascinated by that because all of the research that is coming out, unfortunately, because of that war on drugs, the research stopped when it came to psychedelics. But it’s fascinating to me to see all the research coming out over the last handful or so of years and just the idea of being able to maintain neuroplasticity. Because as you age, like, your brain sets to be able to have the level of neuroplasticity of, like, a child or a growing and evolving where things are a discovery, things are you’re open. That, to me, is really important. That’s important for learning and evolving.

31:03
Speaker 1
And I see that actually has a lot of value, obviously, in overcoming trauma or anything that would cause like, PTSD, but also in such a fast paced world that we’re in that’s changing so quickly and so rapidly with all this new information for us to absorb and adapt to. I see that there’s value in that as well. So maybe you could speak to that a little bit.

31:33
Speaker 2
Yeah, I want to build on that. So you brought up new information. To me, new information is surprise. It’s mismatches, right? You have the opportunity to accept that new information or suppress it, right? You can adapt to it, or you can try to change the external world. Sometimes other people make that choice for us where they suppress it, hide it, they cancel you. They’ll do something to prevent the flow of information getting to you. So that new information to me, is the surprise in the environment, right? So with that knowledge, new information from the lens of information warfare. Information warfare is all about the control of that flow of information. All right? So I can use narrative, I can use suppression, cancel you, block you, give you a low social credit score, whatever.

32:20
Speaker 2
I could do all these things to you to reduce your access to surprise. By the way, you as an individual, remember what I said earlier. Humans don’t like to we’re naturally lazy, right? So sometimes we like to remain in a stuck state. Sometimes we don’t want that new information because it’s going to force us to change our internal model. Okay? So new information is absolutely critical in what we call orientation. Orientation. Inside John Boyd’s, UDA loop is known as the Schwerpunt. It’s the most important piece of the OODA loop. It determines how you make sense of the world, how you decide and how you act, right? So perception, action, loop, all that stuff that we may talk about, it’s critical that it’s your internal model of the external world.

33:02
Speaker 2
We can get into affordances, we can get into aspe’s requisite, variety and all that stuff from this. We’ll just try to keep it simple. So new information is equal to surprise coming in from the external world. Okay? But there’s a couple of other components inside orientation. There’s something known as synthesis and analysis. It’s just to go through the process of breaking things down or creating snowmobiles, building things up and creating something new. That’s a simple process, if you will. We’ll kind of park that one for a while. There’s three other components in there. One is genetics or genetic heritage, cultural traditions, and then previous experience. Okay? So previous experiences could be things like what you had for dinner, what you had for breakfast, how much sleep you got. Did you experience something traumatic when you were a kid?

33:46
Speaker 2
Did you experiencing something that created trauma as an adult? It could be education. It could be so many things. Previous experience is critical in that orientation. So that blends with new information, goes through synthesis and analysis, and that helps you determine your external world culture. Culture could be anything from the type of games you play as a kid. If you play chess, play poker as a kid, or as an adult, maybe you play the game of Go, right? It just depends on your culture, where you are and how you’re raised as a child, who raises your aunts and uncles, things like that. Language stories you hear as a child. So culture, basic culture there. And the other component is genetic heritage.

34:26
Speaker 2
And you can think of genetic heritage as all those things that make us human from the biology, the DNA structures, the DNA we get from our or inherit from our parents. And you can also think about basic human factors or human biology, human psychology, right? So let’s start with something simple. 2% of our body weight is burning 20% of our energy, right? Our brain is a very expensive organ. This goes back to what creates or makes us lazy as humans, right? We like heuristics. We like shortcuts. We like these biases, if you will, these cognitive biases, if you will. They help keep us alive, by the way. They’re not good or bad. They just are. And you can’t eliminate cognitive biases. Anybody who tells you can run away from them, all right, we’re not here to eliminate cognitive biases.

35:13
Speaker 2
We can mitigate them and things like that. So 2% of our body weight is burning 20% our energy. That’s our brain. Humans are pattern matching beings. And let me try this with you. I’m going to try to share something on the screen with you, and I want you just to read it out. Hopefully this works real fast. Genetic heritage. Humans are pattern matching beings, right? We pattern match. Like I said, we have these other biases. We have things like inattentional, blindness. We only see what we expect to see. So genetic heritage, cultural traditions, previous experience, new information or surprise that’s coming in goes through a process of synthesis, analysis, and that actually generates a prediction about the sensory signals coming in from our observations or sensory organs, right? So see how that all works. That’s what John Boyd gave us many years ago.

36:56
Speaker 2
He said, hey, let’s look at quantum physics, biology, neuroscience, all this other stuff. And he fuses together and said, that’s what orientation is about, right? So that overlap is already there inside of John Boyd’s UDA loop. I think where went wrong with the OODA loop is many people drew it as a passive loop, where what I mean by that is it’s just observe, orient, decide, act, right? It didn’t have any of the active loops in it, if you and that’s generally what’s going on with large language models and other things, is most people think of the world as a passive. We observe the world passively, which we don’t. We actively engage with the world to create our reality, right? And that’s what active inference tells us, and that’s what John Boyd Doodle loop tells.

37:43
Speaker 2
That’s that’s that feedback loop I was talking about earlier, that predictive processing, surprise, minimization and all that. And let’s go back to the stuck state piece, right? Humans seek to maximize information that conforms to their internal model already, right, or we seek to minimize surprise, right, depending on how you look at from internally or externally. But that’s what we want to do. We want to minimize surprise or maximize evidence for our own model. So if you think about what’s going on in the world today, social media and all these other things, they’re targeting your biases already. They know what you already like, and they’re going to continue to feed that information to you, which allows you to stay in your stuck state.

38:28
Speaker 2
So if I come in with surprising information, and you’ve been hearing this the whole time, let’s go back to what we do as a consultant. We’re coming in with surprise and information, right? We’re going to show you something that you’ve never seen before. They’re not going to listen to it because that’s not what their world model is, right. They’ve been told by Mackenzie and all these other very expensive organizations that you just need a 24 year old MBA student to come in here and tell you what you already know, right?

38:54
Speaker 1
Okay. It’s so interesting that you say that because I’ve been writing about the spatial web and active inference AI and the free energy principle now for just about a year, and really in preparation for what versus AI is launching later this year. And to me, I saw that it was necessary. There’s a transition and there’s a mindset transition because of what you’re talking about. People are not they’re pretty resistant to change. And what’s really interesting is I have a lot of people in my network that are into AI, doing all kinds of stuff within the space and everything else. And it’s like they see what I’m saying and they see the content that I’m putting out, and they’re not coming up against it.

39:52
Speaker 1
But it’s almost like I can feel them, like, scooting it out from what they’re focused on, because all they’re focused on is the machine learning, the deep learning, and this is totally different, and it doesn’t fit in with their model of what they know AI to be. So they don’t know what to do with it. So they’re just kind of like ignoring it, spot on.

40:15
Speaker 2
So one of the things we’ve been trying to do is how do you get the attention of leaders and organizations in the first ten or 15 minutes? And that example I gave you from Jimmy Johns and intelligence thing, those are a couple of examples we can provide, right? So we can actually come in and use those human factors, some other things that we have, and I think I showed one to you last time, and we explain to folks what’s actually going on, not just in their brain, but how they’re making sense of reality. And then once they understand that, they’re like, wait a minute, so reality or my perception of reality is a controlled hallucination. You’re like, yeah, it’s constructed top down, inside out. Right? You’re not experiencing the world for what it is.

40:50
Speaker 2
You’re experiencing the world for what it is inside your brain from your advantage point, right, from your orientation. And we all are, right? So that idea that if we go look at a rainbow, if we’re a couple of feet away from each other, the rainbow is different everywhere, right? It’s not the same rainbow. Even though we’re all looking at a rainbow over there, we all see it differently. It’s kind of crazy, right?

41:11
Speaker 1
Yeah.

41:12
Speaker 2
So through that, we can help people understand how, I guess, biological creatures or humans perceive reality, which leads us to active inference. We don’t have to talk about active inference. We don’t have to talk about free energy principle. We can just demonstrate it, draw it out on a board, and what emerges? You get the OODA loop, and they’re like, what’s that? They’re like, well, that’s John Boy doodle loop. This is what Agility is based off of. This is what Scrum is based off. This is what big data, cybersecurity disinformation, misinformation, all these other things that people are talking about, the Lean Startup, all these things are built on. So wouldn’t you want to know what’s behind that?

41:47
Speaker 2
And that’s pretty cool, and I think that could lead to leaders and even people in the tech field understand active inference AI better is that they understand what we’re talking about. Because if I draw the passive ODA loop, which is observe, orient, decide, act, and maybe a connection to the external world, that’s a large language model, right? There’s nothing active in it. And if we draw the OODA loop, that’s actually active inference AI, a simplified version of it without getting into the maths behind the free energy principle and AI. Or active inference.

42:21
Speaker 1
So let me ask you, Brian, what excites you about active inference, AI and the spatial web in relation to your life, your work? How do you see it impacting you personally for the future?

42:44
Speaker 2
Okay, I’m going to try this. I don’t know if it’s going to work. So my daughters are learning how to play basketball. So they have a technical skills coach, right? They have other coaches, too. So technical skills training, what’s required? They need a feedback loop, a rapid feedback loop. So what do I want as an adult parent? I don’t have access to coaches all the time. I do see my daughter play basketball. She needs to see how she’s shooting the basketball. So how do I do that? Well, I need a camera that can track her. Okay, well, there are a lot of cameras out there that can do that. I need a camera that can track her. In a group of people, that’s a different problem. Right. So facial recognition, all that turn your back.

43:21
Speaker 2
Is that camera going to stay focused on her or not? So I need a way to track her if it’s a device or whatever. And I also need a way for something to take great good lessons from good coaches and synthesize that. And then when that feedback or that video gets pushed into something almost live, I don’t think it’s going to be a large language model, by the way. It could be, but that information could get passed back to my daughter on, hey, you pushed too hard with your shoulder or not enough wrist or all these things. So how do you close that feedback loop? And the same thing could be true in an organization. How do you close the feedback loop when a team is working together? And I’m going to give you a little secret. Teamwork is observable, therefore it’s measurable. Right.

44:06
Speaker 2
So if you understand teamwork, you can identify those things that good teams do and bad teams do, and you can kind of build a rubric around it. Well, you can use maybe an LLM again, or active inference AI to do this, but you want to be able to give people rapid feedback. Right. So how do I reduce the need for organizations to pay for high end coaches while providing a capability that is like I said, I don’t know if it’s an LLM or active inference AI, some type of machine learning or AI capability that can provide feedback to people about how they’re actually interacting with each other. Right. And so they can improve it for themselves in the future. So all these things are possible.

44:47
Speaker 2
I do believe active inference is going to have a little bit more to do with disparate data sources, meaning, again, focusing on the interactions. When I’m looking around and seeing what an LLM can do, a chat GPT Four can do, it can’t do a lot. People get excited about them, like, great, I’m so glad I’m reading your LinkedIn post on a book. You read that. You put a bunch of stuff in there. I’m not going to read it. Right. I’m not excited about that. But there are some pretty good things about large language models that we can use today. I just think with active inference, you start building that adaptable capability, which kind of mirrors or mimics what humans do. That’s fascinating and terrifying. But I think with the right ethics and all that, it’s going to be more fascinating and terrifying. Yeah.

45:40
Speaker 1
And to that point, that’s one of the advantages to me of the Spatial Web Protocol, is that security is baked into the protocol and through the HSTP, and through the HSML, they’ve already proven the concept with the drone project that Versus AI has been doing in Europe. Because with the protocol, you can actually take human law and make it computable and understandable by the AI. So then the AI abides by that law. So it’s programmable AI in the way that it’s not that way with these machine models. They’re very opaque in the way they’re actually performing. That to me is one of the most fascinating parts of this. Because through the active inference AI, you can also get explainable AI that can be introspective report on itself, on how it’s coming to its decision making.

46:46
Speaker 1
When you have those components with AI, you have a lot more. The AI itself is controllable, predictable, transparent. So then when you’re taking it and you’re putting it in this networked environment where it can actually perceive the world through sensors, cameras, different inputs, plus you’ve got the context that’s being baked into it to inform it of. Relationships between everything within the network and all those other things. Then you can create these systems like you’re talking about where it actually can take real time information and make sense of it and give you insights that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to get.

47:27
Speaker 2
Yeah, I think something like this, coupled with human performance capabilities, it could be diet or training, it could be some type of I don’t know what’s going to happen to humans in the future, but now you got AI working in sports teams where these players already know how well they can function in two or three days. If they eat this food and do this and this amount of sleep, if you could start to do that, then the games change. I mean, the competition levels go up, right. And now you have AI helping humans accelerate human performance. And I think that’s what fascinates me about this is at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is accelerate human performance in organizations. Technology just happens to give us another advantage point or vantage point to do it with.

48:10
Speaker 1
Right. Total optimization.

48:14
Speaker 2
There’s some downsides to this thinking too. You have cognitive warfare. The battle space for the 21st century is the brain, right? There’s a couple of sayings that John Boyd brought it, this should be pretty are well known. Number one is machines don’t fight wars, humans do. And they use their mind, right? They use their brains, people, ideas, and things in that order, right. So it’s always the human in the center is so critical. Cognitive warfare is going after our brains, our minds, the way we think, and going after those biases, those things we talked about earlier with the right. Just call it laws and ethics written into this, I think we have a pretty good chance to do some amazing things as a human race, right.

49:01
Speaker 2
Without those constraints, those smart constraints, good constraints, evolving constraints, whatever they may be, where humans have to be part of that system that could be a little dangerous without them. And then if you get a nefarious actor that has something, maybe active inference AI could be weaponized, but somebody’s going to do that too, right. So we have to figure out how to evolve our defenses against that, which is one of the things we want to do.

49:32
Speaker 1
To me, one of the things that’s kind of advantageous about the way this has been structured is the decentralized aspect of it, so that in itself can act as a guardrail against bad actors. It’s interesting because I feel like the components that are all coming together and the technologies that are all coming together to create this unified system, I feel like they’ve been well thought out. And.

50:06
Speaker 2
Yeah, we can’t think through everything. There’s going to be something that somebody hasn’t thought of. For example, in the cockpit, not just fighter commercial airlines. Over the years we’ve learned that it’s not always the machine that fails, it’s the human in the cockpit. The way we communicate, the way we work together as teams, 80% roughly, and I think 90% of accidents on the road are caused by humans. No kidding. Because we’re driving the car. Right? So it’s an open system. You put a human in a car. Yeah, you put a human in a car, it’s still an open system. Even though the car is a closed system, you have an open system working. Right. And the same thing, it could be true with active inference AI. Is it a closed system or are humans still involved?

50:49
Speaker 2
And if humans are putting input into it, we’re open systems, meaning we’re not perfect and neither are the machines we make. Right. And we’re never going to be able to think through all the potential safety failures or whatever or even successes that are going to behind it. So, yeah, I think what I’ve read about spatial web AI or the Spatial Web protocol and understanding about the semantic web and then learning more about the category theory, things like that, we have some very intelligent people working on that who favor the human race, you know what I mean?

51:23
Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. You’ve mentioned category theory a few times, so would you explain that a little bit, your understanding of that?

51:32
Speaker 2
Oh my gosh, I’ll give it a shot. Okay, so on our podcast soon we’ll have Brandon Baylor and Esteban Montero who talk about their journey through safety sciences and learning about category theory and what it’s really about. So it’s about the relationships between disparate data. I’m going to pull some ideas from them and from my wife. What I understand about data sources is you have data structures that are different, right. And they have context. And then there’s context over in this data structure or data approach or this museum or this company over here. You want to keep the context the way it is. You want to keep it contextual. So you have to focus on the relationships between them. And that’s what category theory does. I believe there might be some math behind that.

52:23
Speaker 2
So it’s the relationships between the data that matters, not the data itself. The data is important. I almost said my mom, I can’t believe that my wife, she’s doing a lot of data curation work right now. And what I understand from her is linked open data is, okay, the problem with that is you have a human in the system that may not understand the context of the data, and they’re giving it labels and things like that. What we want to do is we want to keep that context rich with that data without interpreting it, if you will. And we want to focus on the interactions, and that’s key there. And I think that’s what I understand category theory going. The direction it’s going is a focus on the interactions, which are built on complex adaptive system theory, which is about the interactions again, right.

53:16
Speaker 2
The quality of interactions. You get emergent properties, decentralized control, all the things you brought up, all these things that CAS tell us about how systems potentially should work going forward.

53:30
Speaker 1
Very cool. Well, gosh, I feel like I could just talk to you forever, but I.

53:36
Speaker 2
Know somebody’s going to go, hey, you listen to category theory. You read some stuff. I got a book back here on it. I’m still learning about it. And I talked to Daniel Friedman about it. They had somebody on Active Inference Institute do a lot of math. I looked at I, it was like, oh, my gosh, there’s math involved.

53:58
Speaker 1
Well, okay. So do you have any final thoughts that you’d like to share with our audience?

54:06
Speaker 2
No, it’s exciting time right now. Right now is the time to get in and learn about what makes us humans, what makes us a human. It’s a great time to learn about active inference. Find something that works. If it’s Active Inference Institute, if it’s Gigging on Spatial Web on Tuesdays with you reading your posts, looking at the flow system, looking at John Boyd Zulu, joining the no Way Out podcast, find something that you can learn from that changes the way you view the world. You have to do this right now. There’s no way out. Right?

54:41
Speaker 1
Right. Let’s go through.

54:44
Speaker 2
Yeah.

54:46
Speaker 1
Well, thank you so much for being here. It’s such a pleasure to have you here. Brian Ponch Rivera. I hope you come back to our show very soon.

54:56
Speaker 2
I hope so too. This is a lot of know going back to when we started. I have no idea what’s going to come out of my mouth today. I’m glad we did it. I learned a lot too.

55:04
Speaker 1
Yeah, me too. Well, thank you so much, and thanks for joining us today, guys. We’ll see you next time.