John Boyd: A YouTube Personality in an Analog Age with Ian Brown

Everyone knows John Boyd as "the OODA loop guy," but he was much more than that. In this episode, I sit down with Ian Brown, a Boyd historian who spent nearly a decade inside the archives poring over decades of briefings, transcripts, and slides to separate the man from the meme.

We dig into why Boyd refused to publish a formal book, why he wouldn't let anyone walk away with his slides without sitting through the briefing, and why his 1976 essay, Destruction and Creation, and not the OODA loop, is the framework behind his thoughts and presentations.

Drawing on Ian's two books, A New Conception of War and the newly released Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals, he makes the case that Boyd was never really finished thinking and that reducing him to four boxes and an arrow loses almost everything that made him worth listening to in the first place.