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Reading people works far less often than the experts claim. Former professional poker player Zach Elwood explains when a behavioral read helps and why it usually doesn't.

Zach Elwood wrote Reading Poker Tells, Verbal Poker Tells and Exploiting Poker Tells, and hosts People Who Read People. With Brian "Ponch" Rivera he explains why even good readers act on a tell only a couple of times in an eight-hour session, why reads that help at a poker table fail in an interrogation room, and what Tim Levine's research in Duped shows about nonverbal lie detection. He uses Gary Klein's approach to turn gut reads into named factors.

Ponch ties it to John Boyd. Orientation shapes what a person perceives, and a decision meets an environment nobody controls. Elwood's lesson from poker matches it: you can't be results oriented.

Zach Elwood: https://behavior-podcast.com
Poker tells: https://readingpokertells.com

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Deception detection, credibility assessment, and the real OODA loop. Former CIA case officer Kent Clizbe explains why reading the body fails and what he does instead.

Kent Clizbe served as a staff CIA case officer in the 1990s and as a contractor after 9/11. He is the author of Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment and Willing Accomplices. With Brian "Ponch" Rivera he explains why he stopped trusting deception detection. He says East German and Cuban sources passed the agency's body-measurement tests, and every one of them was a double agent.

His method is holistic contextual credibility assessment (HCCA). It depends on contextual competence, which is real knowledge of the subject's country, language, profession, and subculture. Clizbe walks through a weapons source who was working in a moped factory, his lunch with Wayne Simmons, and his years vetting hires in the dot-com boom. Ponch connects the method to John Boyd: culture and previous experience sit inside orientation, and orientation shapes what a person observes and how he acts.

Kent Clizbe: https://kentclizbe.com
Why They Lie on Substack: https://kentclizbe.substack.com

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Police training, the constraints-led approach, and the real OODA loop. Dr. Pete Blair of ALERRT explains why training has to look like the job an officer will do.

Dr. J. Pete Blair is Executive Director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center and Professor of Criminal Justice at Texas State University. With Ponch Rivera he asks why so much training consists of things that are not the thing. He walks through the firearms qualification, the four parts of the constraints-led approach, and why good training looks messy.

From there the conversation moves to John Boyd. Dr. Blair describes how policing learned the OODA loop as a sequence, and the two compare Boyd's full sketch with the perception-action loop of ecological dynamics. The second half covers John Vervaeke's 4P model, the four kinds of knowing, and why Dr. Blair starts training from the role the learner will occupy. His example is how you learned to ride a bike.

Tactical Science on Substack: https://tacticalscience.substack.com
ALERRT: https://alerrt.org

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Neuroweapons, cognitive warfare, and the real OODA loop. Dr. James Giordano returns to No Way Out three years after his first appearance (Ep 35) to show how dispositions shape what we observe before we ever orient.

Dr. Giordano is Special Advisor to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War (CBRN) and Head of the Center for Strategic Deterrence and Weapons of Mass Destruction Studies of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. He retired from Georgetown University Medical Center after a 20-year career as Professor Emeritus of Neurology, Biochemistry and Ethics. With Brian "Ponch" Rivera he walks through the dOODAc loop, his extension of John Boyd's OODA loop with dispositions in front and consequences at the back, and the two test it against Boyd's own sketches.

From there the conversation moves into the cognitive domain as biological, psychological, and social at once, how each layer becomes a target, and why he describes directed energy neuroweapons as a clear and present threat. He closes on human-machine teaming, DoD Directive 3000.09, and a model his team calls SYNTHCOM that keeps decision authority with the human.

Dr. Giordano's connection dropped about 40 minutes in, and he finished the conversation audio-only from the National Defense University. His views are his own and do not represent the U.S. government, the Department of War, or the National Defense University.

Dr. Giordano on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-james-giordano-8454476/

His latest commentary, on Havana syndrome: https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2026/9/25/commentary-havana-syndromes-new-term-gives-rise-to-new-approaches

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Where does recovery fit in the plan, brief, execute, debrief cycle? CAPT (Sel.) Kevin Bernstein, MD, is building human performance optimization into naval aviation to answer it.

Bernstein is the Navy sports medicine physician building a human performance program for naval aviation at Commander, Naval Air Force Atlantic, after tours with Naval Special Warfare Group Two and Navy football. Fifteen commodores signed a requirements letter asking for the program. His picture is simple: an aviator coming off a demanding flight might conduct their debrief in compression boots, a massage chair, or a sauna, the same way a quarterback who ran the triple option ends up in the training room.

Trey Warren, PhD supplies the problem. After a hard landing, maintenance inspects the jet. Nobody inspects the crew. Retired Rear Admiral Mark Leavitt notes that an aviator's medical record at retirement runs about an inch thick, against three or four inches for everyone else. At Training Air Wing Six, the human performance team can keep an aviator flying and has no authority to down one.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera hears representative design in Bernstein's platform-specific training, lines up plan, brief, execute, debrief against the flow cycle, and argues naval aviation already owns the playbook. Clips from Guido Bernacchi on chair flying, Kegan Gill on G and helmet load, Mark "Slider" Keller, and Cynthia Fluck.

Also covered: alcohol as a readiness threat, sleep and crew rest, nutrition, spine preservation and Pilates, creatine, moving away from anti-inflammatories, and why psychedelic-assisted therapy deserves study.
KEVIN BERNSTEIN, MD
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbernsteinmd/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/navysportsdoc/
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