Send us Fan Mail

Deception detection, credibility assessment, and the real OODA loop. Former CIA case officer Kent Clizbe explains why reading the body fails and what he does instead.

Kent Clizbe served as a staff CIA case officer in the 1990s and as a contractor after 9/11. He is the author of Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment and Willing Accomplices. With Brian "Ponch" Rivera he explains why he stopped trusting deception detection. He says East German and Cuban sources passed the agency's body-measurement tests, and every one of them was a double agent.

His method is holistic contextual credibility assessment (HCCA). It depends on contextual competence, which is real knowledge of the subject's country, language, profession, and subculture. Clizbe walks through a weapons source who was working in a moped factory, his lunch with Wayne Simmons, and his years vetting hires in the dot-com boom. Ponch connects the method to John Boyd: culture and previous experience sit inside orientation, and orientation shapes what a person observes and how he acts.

Kent Clizbe: https://kentclizbe.com
Why They Lie on Substack: https://kentclizbe.substack.com

Stay connected with No Way Out
X: @NoWayOutcast | @PonchAGLX

Stay connected with No Way Out and AGLX

X: @NoWayOutcast | @PonchAGLX

AGLX: https://www.aglx.com/no-way-out/

Send us Fan Mail

Police training, the constraints-led approach, and the real OODA loop. Dr. Pete Blair of ALERRT explains why training has to look like the job an officer will do.

Dr. J. Pete Blair is Executive Director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center and Professor of Criminal Justice at Texas State University. With Ponch Rivera he asks why so much training consists of things that are not the thing. He walks through the firearms qualification, the four parts of the constraints-led approach, and why good training looks messy.

From there the conversation moves to John Boyd. Dr. Blair describes how policing learned the OODA loop as a sequence, and the two compare Boyd's full sketch with the perception-action loop of ecological dynamics. The second half covers John Vervaeke's 4P model, the four kinds of knowing, and why Dr. Blair starts training from the role the learner will occupy. His example is how you learned to ride a bike.

Tactical Science on Substack: https://tacticalscience.substack.com
ALERRT: https://alerrt.org

Stay connected with No Way Out and The Whirl Of ReOrientation
X: @NoWayOutcast | @PonchAGLX |

Stay connected with No Way Out and AGLX

X: @NoWayOutcast | @PonchAGLX

AGLX: https://www.aglx.com/no-way-out/

Send us Fan Mail

Neuroweapons, cognitive warfare, and the real OODA loop. Dr. James Giordano returns to No Way Out three years after his first appearance (Ep 35) to show how dispositions shape what we observe before we ever orient.

Dr. Giordano is Special Advisor to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War (CBRN) and Head of the Center for Strategic Deterrence and Weapons of Mass Destruction Studies of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. He retired from Georgetown University Medical Center after a 20-year career as Professor Emeritus of Neurology, Biochemistry and Ethics. With Brian "Ponch" Rivera he walks through the dOODAc loop, his extension of John Boyd's OODA loop with dispositions in front and consequences at the back, and the two test it against Boyd's own sketches.

From there the conversation moves into the cognitive domain as biological, psychological, and social at once, how each layer becomes a target, and why he describes directed energy neuroweapons as a clear and present threat. He closes on human-machine teaming, DoD Directive 3000.09, and a model his team calls SYNTHCOM that keeps decision authority with the human.

Dr. Giordano's connection dropped about 40 minutes in, and he finished the conversation audio-only from the National Defense University. His views are his own and do not represent the U.S. government, the Department of War, or the National Defense University.

Dr. Giordano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-james-giordano-8454476/

His latest commentary, on Havana syndrome: https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2026/9/25/commentary-havana-syndromes-new-term-gives-rise-to-new-approaches

Stay connected with No Way Out and AGLX
X: @NoWayOutcast | @PonchAGLX
AGLX: https://www.aglx.com/no-way-out/

Stay connected with No Way Out and AGLX

X: @NoWayOutcast | @PonchAGLX

AGLX: https://www.aglx.com/no-way-out/

Send us Fan Mail

Where does recovery fit in the plan, brief, execute, debrief cycle? CAPT (Sel.) Kevin Bernstein, MD, is building human performance optimization into naval aviation to answer it.

Bernstein is the Navy sports medicine physician building a human performance program for naval aviation at Commander, Naval Air Force Atlantic, after tours with Naval Special Warfare Group Two and Navy football. Fifteen commodores signed a requirements letter asking for the program. His picture is simple: an aviator coming off a demanding flight might conduct their debrief in compression boots, a massage chair, or a sauna, the same way a quarterback who ran the triple option ends up in the training room.

Trey Warren, PhD supplies the problem. After a hard landing, maintenance inspects the jet. Nobody inspects the crew. Retired Rear Admiral Mark Leavitt notes that an aviator's medical record at retirement runs about an inch thick, against three or four inches for everyone else. At Training Air Wing Six, the human performance team can keep an aviator flying and has no authority to down one.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera hears representative design in Bernstein's platform-specific training, lines up plan, brief, execute, debrief against the flow cycle, and argues naval aviation already owns the playbook. Clips from Guido Bernacchi on chair flying, Kegan Gill on G and helmet load, Mark "Slider" Keller, and Cynthia Fluck.

Also covered: alcohol as a readiness threat, sleep and crew rest, nutrition, spine preservation and Pilates, creatine, moving away from anti-inflammatories, and why psychedelic-assisted therapy deserves study.

KEVIN BERNSTEIN, MD
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbernsteinmd/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/navysportsdoc/

Stay connected with No Way Out and The Whirl Of ReOrientation

X: @NoWayOutcast · @PonchAGLX · @NoWayOutMoose

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

Send us Fan Mail

Oriane Cohen spent four years under deep cover. She never approached her targets. She studied what they needed, made herself useful, and waited for them to call her.

Cohen is a perception engineer and strategic intelligence advisor, founder of OC Strategic Advisory, and a former human intelligence operative and war correspondent. She came to the study of influence by running operations first and reading the literature afterward, and her verdict on the literature is blunt. The people writing about the grey zone have not been in it.

She argues that cognitive warfare was assembled rather than invented, stitched together out of psychology, cybernetics, neuroscience and propaganda, then given a name scientific enough to institutionalize. Once a topic has budgets, departments and careers attached to it, it has to be real.

Her original move goes further. Soviet reflexive control assumes a controller upstream of your decision. Cohen asks what happens when there is no controller and no intention, when thousands of actors with unrelated and sometimes hostile incentives converge on the same effect without coordinating. That, she argues, is the condition we now live in, and it is why conspiracy theories keep multiplying. They hand the brain a villain and a closure the real answer refuses to supply.

Asked why two people in the same place experience different realities, she lists what builds a frame of reference: language, experience, family, trauma, religion, genetics. That is orientation, and she reaches it without ever mentioning John Boyd.

Also: the four scales of the grey zone starting with the family, why she calls people like herself the bastards of the system, why she gives no client a technique before they can face their own mechanisms, and why the place you get your information is now the same place working to influence you.

Recorded without Cohen on camera, at her request.

Perception engineer and strategic intelligence advisor, OC Strategic Advisory

The Grey Zone: https://orianecohen.com

OC Strategic Advisory: https://www.ocstrategic.com

Substack: https://orianecohen.substack.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/orianec/

X: https://x.com/TheGreyZoneOC

Stay connected with No Way Out and The Whirl Of ReOrientation

X: @NoWayOutcast · @PonchAGLX · @NoWayOutMoose

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

Send us Fan Mail

Gareth Holebrook spent eighteen years trying to qualify for Kona. He got there in 2022 and collapsed seven kilometres from the finish. He does not tell it as a triumph. He tells it as a governance failure: effort continuing after awareness had already stopped.

A former Royal Navy weapons engineer who spent six years working with David Marquet on intent-based leadership and ran the agile practice at Visa, Gareth joins Brian "Ponch" Rivera to argue that capable people rarely fail from lack of capability. They fail because nothing governs the decision once it is underway.

They cover who owns a decision after it is made, the Santa Fe, crew resource management, the limits of checklists, Tim Noakes and the central governor, what a leader does in a complex domain when they genuinely do not know, and a Top Gun Maverick scene Ponch had watched and missed.

Late in the conversation Gareth explains why he thinks Boyd's loop is not a sequence of four things and is not about cycling faster. He got there from endurance sport and organisational decision governance, having never studied Boyd.

Books: Ishi: The Discipline of Determined Intent, Kaizen of the Day, and Kettei: The Discipline of Governed Intent.

Gareth Holebrook
Substack: https://ishidodi.substack.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garethholebrook/

No Way Out
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/no-way-out
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5fzIKBmVR7ARosQ3I52uN
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@nowayoutpodcast
The Whirl of ReOrientation: https://thewhirl.substack.com/
In the Loop newsletter: https://www.aglx.com/newsletter-signup-north-america
AGLX Consulting: https://www.aglx.com/
Book a Call: https://www.aglx.com/book-a-call-na/

John R. Boyd's Conceptual Spiral was originally titled No Way Out. In his own words:

“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”

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

Send us Fan Mail

Fifty years ago today, on 3 September 1976, John Boyd published Destruction and Creation. Almost nobody who talks about the OODA loop has read it.

Mark "Moose" McGrath and Brian "Ponch" Rivera the paper's fiftieth anniversary, with multiple versions on screen.

Mark argues the paper is the kernel that everything Boyd wrote for the next twenty years is built on. He walks the fusion at its center: the second law of thermodynamics, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and Gödel's incompleteness theorem, three ideas Boyd was told did not belong together. Then he puts each in plain language. You cannot know everything. You cannot use algebra to prove algebra. You have to be outside a system to judge it.

The conversation traces Chuck Spinney's lineage from energy maneuverability theory through Destruction and Creation to asymmetric fast transients, which is why speed was never the point. It covers Boyd's 1972 letters home, the years he spent arguing with thousands of books, the difference between the drafts and the published text on observer and observed, and the moment Navy TOPGUN pilots told Boyd he had left the human in the cockpit out of his equation.

Mark closes with five questions for anyone who still teaches the OODA loop as a circle with four arrows.

Mark Joined from Buenos Aires, where Mark is running a deliberate experiment in crashing and rebuilding his own orientation.

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