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What if everything you thought you knew about human behavior was backward? Imagine discovering that we don't actually control our behavior at all—instead, our behavior is merely the observable side effect of our brains controlling what we perceive.

Professor Warren Mansell, a clinical psychologist and expert in Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), takes us on a mind-expanding journey through this revolutionary framework developed by physicist William Powers. Drawing from control systems engineering, Powers recognized that living organisms operate fundamentally differently than most psychological theories suggest—we're not stimulus-response machines or prediction engines, but sophisticated control systems organizing our behavior to make our perceptions match our desired states.

The implications are profound. Psychological conflicts arise when different control systems within us fight over the same variable—like wanting to both remember and forget a traumatic memory. Consciousness itself emerges as a spotlight moving through our hierarchical control systems, helping resolve these conflicts through reorganization. This explains why activities that temporarily downregulate our habitual control patterns—from deep conversations to meditation to psychedelics—can lead to transformative insights.

For leaders and organizations, PCT offers a powerful lens for understanding human dynamics. By recognizing that people are controlling for different variables and experiencing different conflicts, we can create environments that help people explore what truly matters to them while aligning with collective goals.

Whether you're fascinated by psychology, leadership, conflict resolution, or simply understanding yourself better, this conversation will transform how you view human behavior and interaction. Ready to see the world through the lens of control?

Warren Mansell on Linkedin

X: @warrenmansell

NWO Intro with Boyd

March 25, 2025

Flow Learning Lab

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What if the key to unlocking human consciousness lies not in neurotypical experiences, but in the unique ways non-speaking autistic individuals perceive and interact with reality? In this captivating episode of No Way Out, host Brian "Ponch" Rivera welcomes cognitive neuroscientist, researcher, and spiritual seeker Julia Mossbridge, PhD, and special co-host Sarah Kernion, a mother of two non-speaking autistic children, for a profound exploration of awareness, precognition, and expanded human potential.

Dr. Mossbridge shares insights from her pioneering research on precognition, demonstrating how scientific studies reveal that human physiology can anticipate future random events before they occur. She introduces the "informational substrate"—a foundational layer of reality rooted in information rather than matter—that may underpin phenomena like telepathy and non-local consciousness. Drawing on the intelligence community's Stargate program on remote viewing, she explains how these abilities tap into a universal information field, challenging conventional notions of time and space.

Sarah Kernion offers heartfelt insights from raising her non-speaking autistic son and daughter, who exhibit remarkable abilities to process multiple streams of information simultaneously—such as absorbing podcasts, TV shows, and reading materials all at once—despite motor challenges, like difficulty opening a door. She recounts instances where her children demonstrated knowledge acquired through unexplained means, including apparent telepathic connections. These observations align with Dr. Mossbridge's findings, and Kernion emphasizes how unconditional love and maternal intuition nurture their growth.

Julia Mossbridge, PhD

Stimson Center

Sarah Kernion

Helios Rising

The Telepathy Tapes

NWO Intro with Boyd

Flow Learning Lab

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In this episode of No Way Out , Captain Dan "Yank" Pederson, the "Godfather" of TOPGUN, shares the origin story of the Navy Fighter Weapons School, established in 1969 during the Vietnam War to address a 2:1 kill ratio that exposed deficiencies in aerial combat.

Pederson recounts how he selected eight experienced pilots and RIOs who, with limited resources, created a PhD-level curriculum in just 60 days by emphasizing the human element over technology. This focus challenged John Boyd’s Energy-Maneuverability (E-M) theory, prioritizing pilot skill, heart, and adaptability, leading to a remarkable 24:1 kill ratio by the war’s end.

Key innovations included vertical fighting tactics and a culture of psychological safety in debriefs, fostering a brotherhood that drove excellence. Pederson’s insights extend beyond aviation, offering lessons for organizations on building high-performing teams through mentorship, experiential learning, and human-centric leadership. As AI and automation reshape industries, he warns against over-relying on technology, advocating for human capability as the decisive factor. The episode connects TOPGUN’s principles to modern challenges, including AI’s role in human-agent teaming and the OODA loop’s relevance in cognitive warfare, urging organizations to prioritize people over systems.

Dan Pederson Wiki
TOPGUN: An American Story

NWO Intro with Boyd

March 25, 2025

Flow Learning Lab

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What if we've been thinking about AI all wrong? What if endless scaling isn't the answer, but instead we need systems that understand context, embody knowledge, and grasp causal relationships like living organisms do?

In this mind-expanding conversation with Mahault Albarracin, PhD, VERSES AI Director of Research Strategy – recorded on the 49th anniversary of John Boyd's seminal paper "Destruction and Creation" – we journey through the fascinating landscape where neuroscience meets artificial intelligence. Mahault shares how her background in social sciences led her to active inference, a framework that models intelligence after natural cognitive systems rather than linear engineering approaches, echoing Boyd's emphasis on breaking down outdated mental models to create adaptive new ones.

The parallels between Karl Friston's active inference and Boyd's OODA loop emerge vividly, as both frameworks highlight prediction, orientation in complex environments, and harmonizing changing tactical actions with evolving strategic intentions. We explore why current AI systems struggle with tasks humans find intuitive – they lack embodiment within spatial-temporal reality and fail to grasp how context shifts meaning, much like the limitations Boyd critiqued in rigid, backwards-planning strategies.

Perhaps most provocatively, we challenge the dominant AI doom narratives, tracing them to biases rooted in defense funding, colonial hierarchies, and adversarial worldviews. Could our fears of malevolent artificial intelligence simply reflect our own projections? What if, instead of building systems expecting friction, we created AI capable of empathy, resonance, and connection? As Mahault suggests, "The condition for AI alignment is to give it the ability to love us, to have empathy, to see us as kin rather than just objectives."

The conversation ranges from the technical details of the spatial web (creating interoperable standards for meaningful, privacy-respecting data connectivity) to philosophical questions about consciousness, harmony in multi-agent systems, and

NWO Intro with Boyd

March 25, 2025

Flow Learning Lab

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The technological paradigm we've grown accustomed to—with centralized AI models hallucinating answers and requiring massive energy consumption—is about to undergo a profound transformation. This fascinating conversation explores how active inference AI, inspired by the principles of biological intelligence, offers a fundamentally different approach that could reshape our technological landscape.

Dr. David Bray articulates the critical distinction between current AI systems that merely pattern-match based on past data versus the emerging active inference models that continuously predict, observe, and update their (Orientation) understanding of the world. These systems don't just regurgitate information; they develop mental models that allow them to navigate novelty and uncertainty just as our brains do. Meanwhile, Denise Holt explains how the newly ratified spatial web protocol creates the infrastructure for these distributed intelligence systems to operate across networks with shared context and meaning.

What makes this shift particularly compelling is its potential to restore human agency in technological systems. Rather than the surveillance capitalism model that has dominated recent decades, active inference AI within the spatial web framework enables pre-compute permissions and constraints, allowing individuals to specify what they want to happen (or not happen) with their digital identity. This represents a fundamental realignment of power dynamics in our technological future.

The implications extend beyond individual experience to organizational performance, national security, and global commerce. From detecting weak signals that might indicate emerging threats to managing complex adaptive systems like supply chains, this approach enables decentralized intelligence that can process information closer to where it's needed—at the edge.

Ready to explore this new frontier of AI? Connect with Denise Holt at Learning Lab Central to join a community focused on active inference and the s

NWO Intro with Boyd

March 25, 2025

Flow Learning Lab

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Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation

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What happens when our increasingly interconnected systems face unexpected challenges? Dr. David Woods, pioneer of resilience engineering, explores how organizations can build the adaptive capacity needed to survive in an age of growing complexity.

Drawing from decades studying high-risk industries, Woods frames our current technological moment with historical perspective. The "second AI gold rush" unfolds with familiar patterns – promising seamless automation while overlooking the inevitable new complexities and vulnerabilities that emerge. Through compelling examples from Boeing's 737 MAX disasters to financial system collapses, he demonstrates how brittle systems eventually break when organizations prioritize short-term productivity over long-term resilience.

Woods introduces core principles of adaptive organizations – graceful extensibility, the capacity to reconfigure and reprioritize under pressure, and the critical ability to anticipate approaching saturation points before collapse occurs. He challenges the linear thinking that dominates most organizations, explaining why reframing – updating our mental models to match changing reality – proves so difficult yet essential for survival.

Whether you're navigating organizational challenges, interested in the future of human-AI collaboration, or seeking to understand resilience in an uncertain world, this episode provides essential frameworks for thinking differently about complexity, surprise, and adaptation when failure isn't an option.

David Woods on LinkedIn

Dept. of Integrated Systems Engineering, David Woods, PhD

NWO Intro with Boyd

March 25, 2025

Flow Learning Lab

Find us on X. @NoWayOutcast
Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation

Want to develop your organization’s capacity for free and independent action (Organic Success)? Learn more and follow us at:
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The gap between how work is imagined and how work actually happens sits at the heart of our most persistent safety challenges. In this illuminating conversation with Professor Todd Conklin, we explore how Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) has evolved from its origins in high-consequence industries to become a powerful framework for understanding and improving safety across sectors.

Conklin traces HOP's development as a response to the limitations of behavioral-based safety approaches, explaining why scared people don't take scary jobs and how high-risk environments require systems thinking rather than worker-focused interventions. The discussion reveals a fundamental shift: redefining safety not as the absence of harm but as a capacity organizations actively build.

Perhaps most striking is the transformation in how we view workers' roles. "The worker is not the problem," Conklin emphasizes. "The worker is the problem solver." This perspective upends traditional safety management by recognizing that expertise exists at every level of an organization, and that workers constantly adapt to hold together imperfect systems.

Pre-Accident Investigation Podcast

Todd Conklin on LinkedIn

NWO Intro with Boyd

March 25, 2025

Flow Learning Lab

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Want to develop your organization’s capacity for free and independent action (Organic Success)? Learn more and follow us at:
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Step into the fascinating world where neuroscience meets safety in this mind-expanding conversation with Professor David Slater. Beyond conventional safety thinking, we explore how our brains actually construct reality and what this means for creating truly resilient organizations.

The discussion begins with an unexpected parallel between Formula 1 pit crews and workplace safety. Professor Slater reveals how these highly choreographed teams regularly "cut corners" to achieve sub-two-second pit stops—highlighting the universal truth that humans adapt systems to meet demands, regardless of formal procedures. This adaptation, far from being problematic, forms the core of what makes systems work in reality versus theory.

What makes this episode particularly valuable is Slater's masterful connection between thermodynamics, entropy, and organizational safety. He guides us through a compelling framework where safety isn't simply the absence of accidents but the maintenance of quasi-equilibrium states in complex systems. The human brain serves as the ultimate control system in this equation, constantly working to predict and respond to environmental changes.

Perhaps most provocatively, Slater challenges the very notion of "human error," calling it "too facile" and "a get-out-of-jail card" organizations use to avoid addressing systemic issues. Instead, he offers a more nuanced understanding of how perception shapes decision-making, explaining why two people can experience the same situation completely differently. This insight alone transforms how we might approach incident investigations and safety culture development.

The conversation extends into practical territory, examining how organizations can foster the conditions for adaptation, psychological safety, and high performance. Rather than relying on checklists alone, Slater advocates for systems thinking that accommodates human variability while ensuring everyone understands how their role contributes to the larger whole.

Ready to challenge your assumptions about safety, perception, and human performance? This episode will leave you with practical insights and a deeper appreciation for how neurosci

NWO Intro with Boyd

March 25, 2025

Flow Learning Lab

Find us on X. @NoWayOutcast
Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation

Want to develop your organization’s capacity for free and independent action (Organic Success)? Learn more and follow us at:
https://www.aglx.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@AGLXConsulting
https://www.linkedin.com/company/aglx-consulting-llc/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/briandrivera
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markjmcgrath1
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Stay in the Loop. Don't have time to listen to the podcast? Want to make some snowmobiles? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to receive deeper insights on current and past episodes.
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The No Bell Podcast Episode 24
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