Some strategies win on one landscape. Jordan Hall went looking for the strategy that stays most adaptable across all of them. Then he mapped John Boyd’s real loop onto artificial intelligence, the one force reshaping every domain at once.
Jordan is a co-founder of DivX and Neurohacker Collective and a founding voice of Game B. He spent several months deep in mathematics, physics and AI before we talked. He came out with a claim he calls the transcendent OODA loop, the strategy that stays optimal and most adaptable across every possible landscape. In his account it works as an attractor in strategy space, a point that strategies are drawn toward. Whatever sits closest to that peak wins.
Jordan’s examples come from military history. The phalanx gives way to the Legion. Maneuver warfare beats mass. He says the AI that occupies that position will outcompete the AI that does not.
Grounding
Jordan calls large language models powerful and ungrounded. He sees Karl Friston’s active inference as isomorphic with Boyd’s loop, which means the two share the same structure. Active inference describes a living system that predicts its world and acts to keep those predictions true. I connect that to orientation, which sits at the center of Boyd’s real OODA loop. I also bring in crew resource management and the naturalistic decision making we have mapped on this show for years.
Generalists and squads
Then we turn to the future of work. Jordan argues the coherent generalist now beats the specialist. He sees big organizations giving way to small, fluid squads, the way the pension gave way to the squad. He also argues that the skill that matters most with AI is the ability to call out its confident nonsense. On the far side of the disillusionment, he says, nothing an AI can do was ever the essence of being human.
What part of your work would you keep if an AI could do the rest?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.