Adam “Guz” Karaoguz has spent ten years building something he calls the A-Frame. It has three parts, attention, appreciation and action, and its goal is attunement. Attunement is Adam’s word for being in tune with the people and the situation around you.
Adam is a retired Navy SEAL. He wrote his Naval Postgraduate School thesis on how ground force commanders make decisions. He calls the A-Frame an extension of John Boyd’s OODA loop. Mark McGrath and I asked him to walk us through the framework, the work behind it, and the personal experience that shaped both.
The work behind it is years of synthesis. Adam draws on Iain McGilchrist on the divided brain, John Vervaeke on parasitic processing and relevance realization, and Gary Klein on recognition-primed decision making. Recognition-primed decision making is Klein’s account of how experts match a situation to patterns they already know and act on the first workable option. In Boyd’s real OODA loop, orientation sits at the center, and each of these thinkers adds to how we understand it.
Ibogaine and integration
The conversation moves into Adam’s ibogaine treatment at Ambio in Tijuana and the integration work afterward. He describes the moment he realized he was going for himself as well as for Slider. Mark “Slider” Keller is the former Navy flier who guides veterans through the same treatment. Ibogaine is a Schedule I substance in the United States, and this episode is not medical advice.
Story and the loop
Adam has also written a novel, The Infernal Tower. He learned the Story Grid framework through Steven Pressfield’s mastermind group. He argues that storytelling and the OODA loop are the same pattern at different scales. A story puts a character in a situation that breaks an old understanding and makes them build a new one. Boyd called that destruction and creation.
You can find Adam at the Renaissance Human Substack and on LinkedIn.
What story are you telling yourself about the situation in front of you?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.