We forecast before we act. When the world disagrees, we get surprised. Michael Polzin says that is how living systems survive, and he is building it in code.
Michael calls himself a regenerative architect. He is the founding operator of Universal Natural Intelligence. He has spent decades listening to people and years turning John Boyd’s orientation problem into software. His claim is that active inference, the math underneath orientation, is now buildable as a working intelligence that uses no machine learning.
Michael’s frame is calibration. We survive by calibrating our signals against reality and against each other. He separates true from honest, and he teaches calibration with tape measures and chopsticks. He shows how language loads our priors, the expectations we carry before we look, with the difference between azul and blue. Michael also tells the story of one team whose single process lasted twelve years and half a million devices, because the team built it to recalibrate as the world changed.
Agents with no goal
Then Michael describes agents built on active inference in a Minecraft world, given accurate signals and no goal or reward. When he accidentally broke their tools, they adapted. Michael traces bad behavior to systems more than to people. Turn the mathematical dials for dopamine, adrenaline, and trust in internal versus external signals, and their behavior starts to look like anxiety, depression, dissociation, even intoxication. A large language model chases token probability. Michael’s agents seek balance.
Inside the loop
I tie it to orientation, which sits at the center of Boyd’s real OODA loop. Getting inside an opponent’s OODA loop runs through genetics, culture and language more than through speed. We also talk about the introspective edge of the best traders, and the show’s founding line, which says to attack the system and spare the person. Michael also argues that small surprises can heal. He closes with EducateWright, a nonprofit for anti-violence education and active inference training, and SolutionWright, the venture building the work in the open.
Which signal in your work have you stopped calibrating?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.