No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Unplugged: Information Abundance and Digital Detox with Michael Guimarin
Transform your relationship with information and reclaim your focus in today’s digital age! Join us for a thought-provoking conversation with Michael Gummerin, an expert who has spent the last four years coaching individuals on how to manage their information diets. Michael introduces his groundbreaking low information one-day detox, showcasing how a shift from mere observation to true orientation can fundamentally enhance our decision-making processes. Discover the structured steps that can help you reduce the influence of synthetic forces and reorient your sensemaking in an information-saturated world.
As we navigate the constant influx of information, we delve into the nuances of optimizing workflow and decision-making. From the generational differences in handling information to practical strategies like creating space and connecting with your environment at the start of the day, this episode is packed with actionable insights. We also explore the impact of physical settings on productivity, offering tips like avoiding device usage in the bedroom and leveraging body positioning to enhance work efficiency. Learn how to filter through the noise and focus on what truly matters to make significant progress daily.
Finally, we tackle the complexities of modern information dynamics and the importance of decentralized networks. From historical narratives to the evolution of communication, our discussion spans various topics, including the role of tribal signifiers, the impact of global supply chains, and the shift in traditional consulting due to accessible information. Michael shares personal anecdotes and practical examples, encouraging listeners to take decisive steps towards information liberation. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to empower themselves in the digital age and break free from information overload.
Michael Guimarin On LinkedIn
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Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
Acta Non Verba – with Marcus Aurelius Anderson
Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
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All right, michael Gummerin, welcome to the no Way Out podcast. Thanks for joining Ponch and I today. We think that this conversation is going to be really timely, specifically around a lot of the work that you've done that's helped me and changed my life and empowered me to change my own life, and that's a low information one day detox. Why don't you start there and tell us about that?
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, guys. I appreciate coming on. Um, just, I think for the last four years I have been in one way, shape or another, coaching people, um, leading courses, et cetera, on how to manage their information diet so everything that they eat, if you will, as it relates to information. And what was exciting, mark, about what you know you went through with the one day detox is that there has been, as a result of this work, a sort of structured process to take people through in order to help them, you know, to put it in sort of more Boydian terminology to reorient their sensemaking so they can make more effective decisions to drive the outcomes that they're looking for in their lives.
Mark McGrath:Well, I did it in, I think I got it last November and I did it right in time for Christmas. I did it in, I think I got it last November and I did it right in time for Christmas. And I don't think the things that I used to click on daily I really haven't looked at since December and I feel a lot more. I have a lot more clarity, I feel like I actually have a better understanding of things that are going on, because I'm not necessarily allowing myself to be, you know, reoriented by synthetic external forces. Right, and I'm thinking that was the intent when you designed the program.
Michael Guimarin:Yes, exactly yeah, the if you want to get sort of in the nitty gritty of it, the way that we grew up at least everyone who's probably listening on this podcast, let's say everyone over 40 is we grew up in an information scarce environment, and so all of the structures that we've built, both in our own sensemaking apparatus but also in society, are related to managing the first O in OODA observation. And when you shift to an environment where information is abundant so you're no longer dealing with information scarcity, then all of the mechanics and what I say, that the zone of proximal action, or the war, if you will shifts from observation to orientation, and so the course is designed and sort of. And the problem is is that if you're focused on observation, you grow up on observation and everything is framed in that way. You sort of get orientation as a byproduct of all that, and so you're never intentional about designing it. And in much the same way that an author like David Foster Wallace will write a story like this is water, you know. And the one fish turns to the other and says what's water?
Michael Guimarin:People don't think very often about their orientation in an active way. They think about their observation. They're like hey, michael, you're having great outcomes. What news are you reading? What are your sources? How are you thinking about this from a model's perspective? And that's an observation mentality. An orientation mentality is more like it doesn't matter what my sources are or how credible they are, but how aligned are they to me. And so the course is designed. The larger course, but this is the one day detox is a smaller subset of it. It's designed to incept a new kind of orientation for you. So if I go and I tell people like, hey, you're all screwed up, you got to learn an orientation, they immediately react wrongly because they're like, no, I'm fine, my life's been great. But through doing the exercises and it's a very practical thing and we can talk about why we do practical knowledge as opposed to just reading it I can move people off of observation as their zone of action to orientation.
Mark McGrath:Walk us, walk us through the epistemology of the one day info detox. You know, what was it that got you thinking about it? What's your background that helped you craft and shape it and get it out to the, to the public?
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, so so in 2020, I was in one of these internet dark nets, have been on them my whole life. But one of these internet darknets I've been on them my whole life but one of them and people were saying, hey, there's this thing, that's going on, there's some kind of virus coming out. What's the story there? And so I put out a position paper on the coronavirus and I said, on this day, this will happen. On this day, the schools will close. On this day, the stock market will crash and for a period of about six weeks, in that position paper, the calls were 100% correct and, as a result of doing that, at the end of February 2020, there were a number of people in our immediate area, mostly hedge funders, who took that information, sold and then bought back in at the bottom three weeks later. So they made quite a lot of money like just an obscene amount. And so then they came back to me and they said, okay, how can we actually formalize and teach this process?
Michael Guimarin:And then that kicked me off on this uh, running courses and doing one-on-one coaching and and and basically I have sort of framed it as there's a diet, um, and the diet is composed of sort of like three components. There's a detox. So you, when you think about the way that you're, uh like, if you're fat and you start eating healthy food because the body is a dynamic system it will start to repair all of the things that are messed up. Unfortunately, the brain is not a dynamic system in the same way. So if you stop consuming bad information and you stop with your bad orientation and you get a good orientation and a good information, the brain does not rewire itself, um and and so you actually have to actively go in and start changing things.
Michael Guimarin:And so the detox is the first part of that process, where we're going to start allowing people to pull away and give them the correct sort of like motivating statement, and we can talk about that in a minute, if you want. Then the next phase is the diet itself. So, like, what are the best practices that we're going to employ for all these different topics? And then, finally, I call it discovery, which is what are the advanced topics in sensemaking that I'm going to make use of to become better at making decisions faster, and that's basically the epistemology. But the detox is you have to stop doing the bad stuff and then you have to start removing all of those bad processes on an active basis.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Hey Michael, a question here. Yes, go back to the why and I'll kind of anchor you in a direction. I understand that most people get about 11 minutes of work done in a day actual work done in a day. Yeah, that we get dumber when we get distracted. It takes we lose about 10 IQ points and sometimes it takes 23 minutes to get back onto a task after you've been interrupted. In that context, can you walk us through more of the why behind this info diet, if you will.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, so I think you're talking about flow. Is that correct, like your flow state?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, it's a disruptor. Everything that you're bringing up disrupts you from actually getting work done. So if I'm constantly looking at zero hedge all day long or looking at X, I'm losing my ability to focus default.
Michael Guimarin:So all the kids, so everyone under 20 doesn't actually have this problem at all, which is very funny, but everyone over, let's say, 40 for sure has it. And then there's this sort of weird inner group of people that are in the transition. If you grow up in an information scarce environment, as we all have, then you're going to what we would call over-rotate on new information, because you have an inbuilt fear of missing out. And so, if you frame this in terms of your grandmother or your great-great-grandmother, every single person that came into their town was like a big deal, and you would want to listen to everything that they would have to say and evaluate it against everything that you knew, because otherwise you might miss something, and you know whether that's gossip or whatever. And so the number of people that somebody would likely meet in their life was probably like 100, more than sort of the 150 that they would be exposed to. Today we meet 100 new people, you know, in an hour of surfing Twitter, and so in order to become effective at our work, we're actually need to deploy strategies, like you said, for make creating space, and so you think of this from like a systems perspective operationally, if your system is too optimized and you don't have Slack, then if you make one like if there's one brittle area that breaks, it creates a cascade and then everything freezes In our lives. We want to figure out a way of being so that we can create space with what we're doing, in order to add that slack back in, so that we can make really excellent decisions and sort of.
Michael Guimarin:The insight here is in the past, I had to evaluate every single opportunity because I didn't get very many and so I had to, like, really go hardcore on, like is this person telling me the truth? All this kind of thing. Today, I actually have to spend most of my time rejecting opportunities and understanding that the opportunity that's actually going to make a difference, it's already there and so I just need to have the space to see it in. Whatever my environment is, as opposed to, like, I'm actively looking for it Is that. Does that help, or Absolutely no.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:no, it's about it's kind of like being present, right. I can't just spend all my time shuffling through information. I actually have to reflect on it and figure out what is important to me.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So you know, there's some things that we've learned and I'm not sure if I'm not, and I'm guilty of doing this still and that is I take my devices into my bedroom, right, we watch, and I might. I don't do as much anymore, but the first thing you'll do when that's available is you start checking X when you wake up, and that's a bad thing, right. I know that the first thing you want to do is, when you get up is go outside, connect to the external environment and be present. It's simple things like that. Are you coaching that in your program as well, or is it a little bit different?
Michael Guimarin:Oh yeah, absolutely. So I want to give you the breakfast fractal, but first I want to answer your question. So the there are a set of. So we are embodied, human beings are embodied. There's the brain, which is sort of like the mind, and then there's a physical body. We have to respond to both, and so, when it comes to consuming information or daily practice, you need to be considerate of your body. So, for example, you need to be considerate of your body. So, for example, where you sit or how you, where you are physically in the environment, when you do different tasks, needs to be different. So, for example, I'll take calls when I'm walking. I'll do all my interviews right here at this desk that I'm sitting at. There's a chair behind me that I'll do. Some reading on the bed is really only used for two things, sleeping being one of them. I don't want to be consuming on my back TikTok reels, because it'll take out, it'll just go for hours. And so there's there's.
Michael Guimarin:You want to actually physically put your body in different locations and then just make one task for that location. So then, when you physically move your body to that location, because you have a history of already doing it there, you are set to do that, and then another. There's an interesting one which I think both of you guys are veterans Is that accurate? Okay? So there's an interesting one around body position, which veterans always really love, which is, if you have something that you need to do but you don't want to spend a lot of time on like meetings, you make everybody stand. Meetings go a lot faster if you're standing right or, depending on the difficulty, you can put your body into difficult or more relaxed positions, depending on the kind of work that you're doing, and you'll get a different result.
Michael Guimarin:And we all are aware that there are certain people that when we meet them in person, they make us feel different ways depending on the person, and there is an entire sort of sense-making modality around coming to understand that, and so the things that you can do are infinite, right, like starting off, like I'm going to wake up and I'm going to look at the sun, cause that's how we grew up, or whatever, not, you know, use light, that's a great. You know, like first intervention, but there's sort of like an an infinite number of these interventions, um, that you can work on. But physicality is, you know, and understanding that we're embodied and then, therefore, our physicality and our locality in space and time super important.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:That also includes when you go to bed, how frequently you're going to bed on time, what you put in your body before you go to bed, what you put in your body during the day, how much caffeine you have and how much alcohol you consume. Again, is this all part of your thought process?
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, so you want to discover your own baseline for different, uh, sense-making modalities. So I always tell people that most of us are pretty sick in the sense that we have low level inflammation from the food that we eat or the pesticides that are in the food, and so a lot of people will go. When we do the longer course, which takes about six to 12 weeks, a lot of people will change. When we do the longer course, which takes about six to 12 weeks, a lot of people will change up their diet and I'll just give them a very like baseline restoring diet. Some people have a lot of damage. They need to do something like gaps, um, which can take up to two years, and that, basically, will heal you from almost any problem GAPS, gut and psychology syndrome. It's, it's all. It's a whole, a whole. I don't know if you guys have come across this before, but it's an entire protocol that's been written by women and nothing wrong with that, but it's not like here's a sheet. This is what you should do. You have to like read multiple books of narrative in order to understand, but basically it's retraining your gut and microbiome and your body to get like a better baseline. And so when we think about how are we going to make better decisions. We need to be considerate of the fact that we are human. So one of the early ones would be like doing a halt. So I teach a decentering exercise. So basically I use like a random bell on my phone and that's what I tell everyone to use, and then when it goes off, you decenter from yourself and you think about yourself in a third person and so like for me I would say, is Michael feeling hungry, angry, lonely or tired? Stop what I'm doing. And I need to go fix that particular thing before I go back to what I'm doing. And there's a whole reason for that. And a lot of guys will tell me when they speak with their spouse that they start doing it with them and they're like, okay, is she hungry, angry, lonely or tired? And then they fix that problem and then whatever issue they're receiving goes away, because we're more likely to get emotionally triggered or activate those bad patterns that we've passively reinforced through years of dopamine loop consumption when we are hungry, angry, lonely or tired. And of course, this is like an infinitely deep fractal. And so there's a number of things you can do after that and on and on and on, and we can write books about all this Because, again on, and we can write books about all this, because, again, this is new For all of human history.
Michael Guimarin:Up until about let's call it 2007, we were living in an information scarce environment. Now that we're living in an information abundant environment, literally the field is open. That's why so many people are making money with this kind of stuff, because all these generational arbitrages exist. You can exploit them. They're going to exist for the next 50 to 100 years.
Michael Guimarin:So it's not like you're going to learn about this and then it's going to go away, because everyone competes it away. That's not how it works. So it's just like a very exciting time for this entire field to emerge and how lucky we are to be able to apply Boyd. I didn't talk about this, but I belong to the Boyd Institute, which is a think tank in DC where we try to try to use Boydian, you know, information and ways of being in frameworks to understand the intersection of politics and technology. And, yeah, it's like so exciting that we're here at the beginning of this and then you know, our descendants will all be much better at this than we are. So they'll laugh at sort of like what I'm talking about now.
Mark McGrath:In the info diet you talk about emotional triggers and how to recognize them and how to deescalate them. So what effect can emotions have on on the decision process in your assessment.
Michael Guimarin:Oh yeah, absolutely. So the this gets really into the sort of the psychology of thinking and the way the brain works. Um, I'm going to step back and say most people confuse cause and effect. Uh, so just keep that in your mind. It's usually the opposite of whatever you think it is, but the brain is always processing information from the environment. It's actually projecting its own mental model of the world onto the environment and then looking at what's being reflected back. And then there's a bunch of cognitive biases, like confirmation bias, that are all designed to find the deltas.
Michael Guimarin:So you can think of this like you're looking in the forest and then you see movement and your brain automatically finds the movement because it's a delta between the static image and the next frame, if you will. The same is actually happening all the time, and so we're always projecting our internal state onto the world and looking at what's coming back, and there's tons of. We can tell stories or however you want in order to get this idea across. But as a result of doing that, then our mental state at the time that we're projecting is going to affect the kind of information that we're seeing. And so if and in psychology they'll talk about like stage one versus stage two processing, which is this idea that we're always engaged in stage one, which is this sort of intuitive, emotional response to information, and that we have to be deliberate about activating stage two, which is this deliberative, logical, analytical reasoning and we can get into that.
Michael Guimarin:But sort of, if you start from the assumption that, however you are, you're going to project that onto the world and then see what gets reflected back, well, now you're going to like that's a complete mind shift change for most people. Most people think like no, I'm just going to like view the world and then, based on what I see, that's what I'm going to respond to. And it's like, actually it's the opposite. It's like how you are is how you project onto the world and that's what you see back.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:That's it Seeing is believing or believing is seeing. Right, yeah, exactly.
Michael Guimarin:And, granted, we're like way off here, but, yeah, this topic space is really deep. So if you're listening at home and you're like Michael's, jumping all over to all these different concepts, I wouldn't worry about it too much. I would just try to focus on the simple things that you can do. So I'm going to just take 30 seconds here to say what is the simplest thing you can do is, when you come across information in your environment, the first and only question you need to ask is if I find out, if this thing that I'm looking at is true, what is the action I'm already doing that I'm going to change? If I find out the thing that I'm looking at is true, what is the action I'm already taking that I'm going to change? And so let's break that down. First of all. We're not saying saying if this is true, I'm going to start doing something else, because that's not how it works. You're already taking actions towards all your goals in the environment, whatever they are, and if you get new information and that new information is going to cause you to stop doing something, then it's worth evaluating whether or not it's true. And if it's not going to help you stop, it's not going to help you stop something you're currently doing or create a reprioritization, then you absolutely should not evaluate whether or not it's true, because you'll be stuck in this loop of always evaluating new information.
Michael Guimarin:Case in point I live in California. It's a dumpster fire politically. Everybody knows that I don't pay attention to state level racism in Wisconsin. Why? Because no understanding of this person's going to win or that person's going to win, or this is the key issue or that's the key issue. None of that. If I find out what's true or not true or whatever, is going to change any action about how I'm acting in California. And I apply that same logic to every single thing that I come across, because so much of our environment is about stealing your attention for a little bit so they can send you an ad or whatever. And so if you just say like, okay, I don't actually care what this is because it's not going to change any action I'm already taking, you now have freed up so many mental cycles and, granted, it's very hard to do that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:That's a great example. We talk about the free energy principle and active inference here quite a bit, where the idea is that there's information out there that our brain doesn't need access to. It has access to it. It just doesn't care because it doesn't matter. When it keeps us alive, it's whatever. But your example of what's going on in Wisconsin doesn't really affect it. Doesn't matter when it keeps us alive, it's whatever. But your example of what's going on in Wisconsin doesn't really affect me right now with what I'm doing in the political races there in California. So thank you for that. No, this is fascinating. There's so many connections to John Boyd's observant side.
Mark McGrath:It's the opposite of what McCloughan talks about the global village and the global village is not a good thing Like where the systems and the environment are such that we all have to have an opinion on everything going around the world. That's like what you're talking about is, like you don't need to want to care what's going on Well, so there's two really interesting things about McLuhan, and we can talk about Huxley and Orwell, which is all.
Michael Guimarin:Three of them failed to predict user-generated content. So there's no user-generated content in Brave New World or 1984. And it turns out that when you allow people to create their own information and publish it into the town square, you create an infinitely deep, impossible to survey fractal that is so large that the idea of a singular consensus in McLuhan's sense, the global village is not even possible, and so it's very difficult to use that model as a rationale to reason about the world, because there's no way to say, like you know, in the 1950s or 60s everybody watched the same three news channels and so what you would talk about at the water cooler the next day, you had a very high likelihood that people would know what you're talking about. Today, because of this infinite fractal and our ability to access any information at all, in the world there's no consensus, there's no shared reality at all, and people can sort of build their own realities and exist in them completely.
Michael Guimarin:Your next door neighbor could be a complete whack job from your perspective, and vice versa, and so all of the strategies that you want to employ, therefore, are going to fundamentally be different, and so what I like about the if it's not going to change in action, you're already taking heuristic is that it really grounds you in your own personal goals and helps you to stay focused on those things that are going to drive your life Like, if we're being honest, all of us have an infinite number of things we could do, but two or three things we know we should do every single day, and if we just focus on those two or three things, we'll make so much progress. Um, and so that's that's really what that statement is designed for.
Mark McGrath:And then in the, in the diet, you talk about reading resonance.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah.
Mark McGrath:How would you explain that to the layman?
Michael Guimarin:Um, that, that that's that's more about um sometimes. So to the technical explanation of that is that there are these really deep information fractals, so like, for example, let's look at the astronomy, so you have, like the the uh solar system goes around the center of the galaxy. Okay, it looks a certain shape. And then all the planets in the solar system goes around the center of the galaxy Okay, it looks a certain shape. And then all the planets in the solar system go around the sun. That looks like a similar shape. And then you go down to like earth itself and it doesn't have that shape at all. And but then you keep going smaller and you're like well, does the body have that shape? Does the cell have that shape? Not really. And then eventually you get down to the atom and it kind of looks the exact same as the solar system. And so this is a concept of. There's this like fractal. That's this pattern that's repeating. And in an astronomical sense it's very difficult to get resonance because we don't perceive that level of scale all the time. But when you're talking to somebody in person you can feel like you're vibing with them and that's sort of like a recognition that you have alignment with them in a bunch of different ways and the body has a lot of sensory organs about it that help you to identify things that come into resonance. And in the information environment you can think of, and in the information environment you can think of, there's sort of been historically.
Michael Guimarin:We all operate sort of in this institutional consensus mindset and then we use like sort of market driven functions like voting or price discovery to come to an answer. Right, so there's a consensus answer to be like. I have an institution, we're going to run a process, we're going to investigate what the you know interest rate should be. Then we're going to get 11 guys on a panel. They're going to vote up or down, should we raise or lower interest rates? Then we're going to decide okay, we have an interest rate and we're going to distribute that interest rate to everyone who's affiliated with the institution. So that's a consensus, centralized process.
Michael Guimarin:The problem with that process is incompatible with the internet, where things move a lot faster and independent actors have the ability to make their own decisions. And so what has responded? So you have institutional consensus, and then the internet has created these decentralized networks and the way that they function is based off of residents, and so people take actions in a decentralized network, independent of what anybody else does, initially, and then they'll start like coming into residence with other people, because that's an action that helps them to achieve a goal and sort of. It's like the exact opposite way of sense-making and making decisions as institutional consensus, and you can see like all of the things are opposite.
Michael Guimarin:So like, for example, you can't leave the IRS unless you give up your US citizenship, and so we would say that entry is very easy for that institution, but exit is impossible, whereas in a decentralized network you're free to leave one group and move to another. No problem, right, it's very easy. But it's actually very difficult to generate legitimacy with one new group unless you meet some set of criteria around authenticity with the goals and incentives of that group in order for you to be taken seriously. And so a practical example would be you get these influencers, they get like millions fans or whatever, and then they sell out, they start talking about things that are not related to why their audience joined them in the first place, and the audience dissolves instantly, right? And so all this money and effort and time they've spent building their influence, like you would in a consensus environment goes away because people are free to leave them and join somebody else.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Only if there were a few examples in the world over the last couple of years that can validate that. I don't know of any. I'm kidding.
Michael Guimarin:What was that?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I'm kidding about the validation of what you just shared with us there. There's been a couple of instances over the last couple of years where organizations have done exactly that and alienated many of their own clients right their own customers. So it does happen.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, yeah, I mean like everything from a really good one is the government. So we didn't really have great data on how the government makes decisions in the real world. They told us how they make decisions, but there was no experiment to prove this. So, for example, when the US decided to lock down, the government decided on, like March 13th 2020, the network, the decentralized networks, had already locked themselves down. So what had happened was everybody independently decided like, hey, this virus thing is probably dangerous, and so all the credit card bill like everybody going out, everybody doing everything for four days it went to zero, and then the government decided to lock down.
Michael Guimarin:And so it was not the case that the government decided to lock down and then we shut down the economy. It was more the case that all these people independently shut down the economy and then the government institutionalized it by saying saying we're going to lock down, and then the government doesn't have a way to reverse a decision once they've made it kind of like they add a regulation and then it never goes away started to business, transact and everything within a few days after the lockdown, because they realized that this was a non-starter and that society could function normally, and so, like all of the problems that we had were a result of a decentralized process being centralized by the government and then no process to unwind that, and you can actually make a good argument that this pattern is accelerating and it's happening more and more and more in every context.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:That's a great example I was talking to somebody not too long ago about I was on a live brief with Yanir Bar-Yam. We were talking about complex adaptive systems and safety and in that brief to the government I learned rapidly how dangerous COVID, this virus, was going to be. Immediately I picked the phone, called my dad, had him quit his job and then, as I started to pay more attention to what's going on, I realized, hey, I may have made a mistake, but by then it was too late, where the government had already mandated several things or went with the lockdowns. So I agree, I'd never heard that perspective before, but you're right, that moment in time I learned about something. I got ahead of the government and made that decision to go ahead and let my parents know how dangerous I thought it would be, and later found out I was wrong.
Michael Guimarin:Right, and then you admitted that you were wrong. But who in the government admitted that they were wrong? Nobody, nobody. And that's the problem, and that's actually why all of the hedge funds in February 2020. And starting then, they all decided that the government was actually downstream, and so they all created their own open source intelligence networks. They had already done this to a certain extent, but basically the feedback that I got from guys running like a billion dollars was if the CDC is lying to me, there's no government data. That's correct. Everything is made up.
Michael Guimarin:We're going to just figure out everything on our own. So that's why a lot of times when there's a CPI print or they, you know they fix the jobs there's no change in the markets because they already know the government is full of it and all the data is cooked, so they don't even look at it anymore.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:It's hilarious Not only that you can see when the data are leaked, and you can see it the day before that's leaked, and they know the direction of the move or the market moves, and then you know these funds are making tons of money off it. They're leading it by a day and a half and it's illegal, right, but we could see it in the data, or the market said it's been leaked, so it's working both ways actually.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, talk more about the value of an info diet for, say, a hedge fund or some kind of even a leadership team to have at their company. What could be the value of? And disclosure I've gone through disclosure, you know. I've gone through your, as you know, I've gone through your. Yeah, there's a great plug today's episode.
Michael Guimarin:I can't quite see it, but yeah.
Mark McGrath:But then also I went through your more rigorous and more intense course which, as you said, you know and you were correct, of course, the uh, the one day, uh, the info diet, one day detox is really just a small percentage of what we actually uh can learn and I guess what I found the value of it's. It's like you're training, you're helping improve sense-making, you're helping improve the world of reorientation. You know the ability for someone to admit that they're wrong or admit that they don't know, and they continue to discover and explore and things like that. And, um, you know what's the, you know what's the upside you getting? Maybe just use hedge funds or traders as an example.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, so anytime. Um, so we can actually back this out and make it more general. Um, the reason why traders and hedge funds and all these people make a lot of money is because they're fundamentally dealing with uncertainty, and there's a difference between risk and uncertainty. And risk is the distribution of outcomes is probabilistic, like if I throw a die, whereas uncertainty, the distribution of outcomes is undefined, is undefined and profit is derived when you take some portion of the uncertainty and you make it subject to risk. So you create some framework or some technology that allows you to make probabilistic, which was previously undefined, and that work of converting uncertainty into risk is work that historically, men have done right.
Michael Guimarin:We go out and we hunt the lion or the woolly mammoth with a small group of four to seven guys, and they either are successful or they're not successful, as opposed to a risk strategy, which is a set of women go out and they pick a berry, bush, there's no need to develop any tactics around managing uncertainty in the latter example, and so what happens is that there's sort of like two areas of decision-making that emerge dealing with uncertainty and dealing with risk. So we're focused on dealing with uncertainty when we're a hedge fund guy and making decisions under uncertainty is as much an art as it is a science, and so the key aspects of understanding the info diet and going through the work are related to how clean is your OODA loop, if you will, and how fast can you run it, and then can we train you to instinctively identify opportunities based on your orientation, so that you make the right decision as a consequence of your information environment, not because you had a good decision-making process. So we're going to introduce all these concepts around risk and uncertainty we're going to talk about okay, you need to be a Zen monk, if you will. When you're trading in the market or you're looking for opportunities, you need to understand that the opportunity that's going to be your next 10 X is always in front of you, because the world is full of opportunities, and so your goal is that we want to cut out as much information as possible that's low value, and then only see high value information, and so that so you can only be successful. It's kind of like if you're a guy and you go to a gold gym, or like a 24 hour fitness, and you start asking people randomly at the gym what you should invest in, you're not going to be as successful as if you go to one of these hundred thousand dollar a year country clubs and you start asking people what you should invest in, and the difference in this case is that you can actually create your own $100,000 country club equivalent by fixing your orientation so that only good information comes into your environment. And so now it doesn't matter which decision you make, they're all good decisions by virtue of your process. And then it it doesn't matter which decision you make, they're all good decisions by virtue of your process. And then it also doesn't matter if you're emotionally upset or whatever, because again, you only have good information to make decisions against.
Michael Guimarin:And that that's a life transformation that takes a little while. Like you, I think, mark. You talked about doing this last year and we're 10 months later and you're like. You come back to me and you're like, you're like man, this has changed everything, but I can't speak to anything specific. That's kind of what happens when you make an identity shift and you do this and that now, um, and the reason why this works is because we're all have expertise in a particular area, and this is like a general thinking methodology, because obviously uda applies to more than just fighter, jet fighting, and so you can just apply it in any field. But you get the most impact for fields that traditionally, like I said, small man teams are operating in under uncertainty. So hedge funds and trading is kind of the ideal there.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Michael, I'm curious can this lead to groupthink? And the reason I'm asking this is if I sit around and identify the information that's important to me and the reason I'm asking this is, you know, if I sit around and identify the information that's important to me, I might end up in an echo chamber, right? So I'm just kind of curious on how you coach folks through that.
Michael Guimarin:I don't know that groupthink is a thing in our information environment. So I'll give you an example. There's this very weird paradox where the more valuable a piece of information is, the freer it is, where the more valuable a piece of information is, the freer it is. That's to say, when Michael Jackson died, everyone in the entire world knew about it in 10 minutes. And you have this very strange thing where, if you remove as much detail as possible, as much precision, and try to focus just on accuracy I always use the example of Bitcoin. So I learned about Bitcoin in 2010. I was involved in the project. I got kind of like I was bored of it at the end of 2010, because there's some technical reasons why I felt like it would never work and to date, none of those have been overcome. But if I just sampled what everyone in my environment was talking about financially in 2010, in 2011, like I literally just said what everyone in my environment was talking about financially in 2010, in 2011. I literally just said what's one word that describes what people are talking about? It's Bitcoin, it's Bitcoin, it's Bitcoin, it's Bitcoin, it's Bitcoin. So all I needed to do was just invest in that.
Michael Guimarin:So the most important information pierces whatever information environment you have set up, as long as you personally are open to new information. So you've internalized this frame that there's no such thing as correct anything. Everything is wrong. Our goal is to be less wrong over time. That's a David Deutsch thing. If you've internalized this as a man, that anything that you observe is wrong, any law that exists about the universe or observation, it's all wrong. And so your goal is just to figure out how can I be less wrong. So if you internalize that curiosity, you can't have a filter bubble.
Michael Guimarin:The other thing is in an information scarce environment, there was a rationale for reading different perspective newspapers. So, for example, there are a hundred facts to any story. This is just a made up example, and a newspaper will create a narrative by taking 30 of those facts and putting them together, because if you put all a hundred together it's too nuanced and the audience doesn't really care. And so you take a 30 fact slice. And what happens with different newspapers in the olden days is they would take different 30 fact slices and you could read different newspapers from different perspectives. To recreate 50 of the core facts or 60, right, you had to go there to get all 100, but by reading different information sources you could get you know 60 of the original 100 facts. And so if you're really invested in needing to do that, so you read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and, let's say, the Economist, then you could really understand what was going on in that event, because you saw the same event from different realities and because of the economics of newspapers and things like the Pulitzer Prize, which again are observation tactics in the battlefield, you could be pretty sure that those 60 facts were more or less part of the original set of 100. Once we shifted to internet news, there aren't 100 facts anymore, there are 1,000. 900 of them are wrong and people are collecting incorrect facts and putting them together with correct facts and you have no ability to discern what the hundred actual facts of the thing are, let alone the 30 that are actually the most salient for you to do that. And so if you start reading news from different perspectives so it used to be like you would read a liberal newspaper and a conservative newspaper and because of the economics of information, you could get real facts from both that's not the case anymore, because we don't have objective-based news, we have perspective-based news, and then people lie and you can't tell. So the best way to go psychotic is actually to read different newspapers from different perspectives, because the uh and this actually gets even crazier, like to the.
Michael Guimarin:This gets to the core of what one of our problems is as a society. When nixon and kennedy debated in 1960, they basically agreed on the a of where we are and the b of where we wanted to go for the government. Right, and they talk about that in their debate. We both agree that america is a great place and we want to make it better. Okay, great. The thing that they disagreed on was the best way to go from A to B, and that's the form of our debate. That is like, let's say, pre-1980s, and that's what we think of when we think of debate.
Michael Guimarin:The problem in an information abundance society is that the value of the war, if you will, in the information space, is not in saying that guy has a bad way to go from A to B, my way is better. It's actually redefining what A is, and so all of our arguments in all of society are all functions of A versus A prime. They're all about definitions. There's no discussion at all about the best way to go from A to B. We're all just arguing about what is A and, institutionally, like at the top of our society, the US government cannot agree on what a woman is. Now that's funny because the three of us can agree, as can every single person that's listening to this podcast, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about died from COVID versus died with COVID. We're talking about infant mortality in the US being the instant the baby is born and Europe being after one minute after it was born, and that explains all of the difference that we're talking about, literally GDP per capita.
Michael Guimarin:I talked to somebody who used to collect these data in the World Bank for Africa. It's made up for a lot of those African countries. They literally just make it up and then they publish it in the CIA fact book or whatever. Ok, like all of these definitions that we base all of our understanding and analysis on. They're made up. We base all of our understanding and analysis on they're made up and it's just whatever is the easiest for whichever tribe or group is using them to get their point across, and so you actually really don't want to consume information that's not from people who aren't aligned with you and therefore resonant and therefore part of your tribe, because you'll go psychotic, because you'll try to apply an A to B criteria to different A's and you'll go nuts because the assumptions, the key frameworks, all those things that are underlying the other side's argument, you don't share them and that's broken consensus. We can't, we were never going to go back to a place in the world unless we uninvent the internet where we have agreement on what a woman is.
Mark McGrath:So, like here, you know, I live in Manhattan and I I love to get the New York post. I think it's, it's entertaining, uh, it's got great sports or whatever. But yesterday when I went to the drugstore they didn't have, uh, the New York post, they were all out. So I got a daily news Opposite ends of the spectrum, right, like it's. Like you, as you're saying, you know, like when you read something, and not necessarily that you agree, but you can clearly see, like the market difference of how things are portrayed and how things are framed, if you will, you know.
Michael Guimarin:Right, and the end state of this is that people will see the exact same event in real life and they'll interpret it completely differently.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, even in the sports sections, when you look at the sports section when you look at the sports sections of the Daily News versus the New York Post, it's you don't even understand it's always so.
Michael Guimarin:There's that whole gel man amnesia thing, and that's always interesting. It's always interesting to me in sports, where I was literally at the game and then I read an article about it and it's like were you not watching what was happening? And the argument is never like the score, right, the argument was why was the score? And so some people will say, oh, there was a flag in the third quarter and that was where the momentum shifted in the game. And then other people will say, no, it was because this player got injured in the fourth quarter. And it's just. That's just reality. And that's what I mean when I said earlier. There's a hundred facts and then the newspapers take 30 of them to craft a narrative that makes sense. And how good are they at doing that? They get a Pulitzer prize. But now we have a thousand facts and nobody can evaluate that, and so we're we're kind of hosed, and that's why we go towards this sort of decentralized, resonant thinking um around making decisions and yeah.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, there's power in that.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, well, and the other, and it's, it's. I find it very liberating as like a lone wolf kind of guy not really a lone wolf, but like as a guy who has his own opinions that I just you know, you can just make them on your own and I agree like 90% with everybody around me and we don't really care about that 10% difference, and then we just keep going on with our lives methodology the people that get canceled the hardest are the ones that are closest to you. Um, you know you're much kinder to your enemy than you are to your friend. That's slightly different. I don't know if you guys have noticed that about people who are?
Mark McGrath:what about echo? What about echo chambers?
Michael Guimarin:Uh well, so again the. The question that we're always asking ourselves is um, am I getting better? Like, am I getting the results? That I're always asking ourselves is am I getting better? Like, am I getting the results that I want to get? So if you're in an echo chamber and you're getting the results that you want to get, you should stay in the echo chamber. If you're in an echo chamber and your results are starting to diverge from what you want to get, then you need to move out of the echo chamber.
Michael Guimarin:The problem with saying echo chambers are bad is that 80% of our reality is socially mediated. And what do I mean by that is, when we say there's an objective truth, what we mean is it's independently, objectively verifiable. This is like E equals MC square is objective, but the value of the dollar versus the Canadian dollar, versus the Euro that's a social construct, and so there is value to standing in a group that has a particular perspective on those three currencies. And about 80% of our reality is that socially mediated things. You want to find your group and therefore signal to other people like hey, I'm in this group, so they find you. Other people like hey, I'm in this group, so they find you, you know you.
Michael Guimarin:You basically like conglomerate, uh, and to create those echo chambers, because it's the only way to exist, cause there's no way to like, I'm not going to read in a book, uh, what reality is anymore, because there's no consensus on what reality is, and so reality, therefore, is just what me and all my friends decide that it is. And if, if we're not losing compared to nature, like if we just start, you know, saying like, oh, we can live by eating, only, you know, bamboo, then we're going to die. So that would be a divergence with nature.
Michael Guimarin:But if we say like, yeah, you have to eat like regeneratively farmed beef and you know 90% from that, it doesn't matter the rest of 10% and get your sunlight and get your water and exercise. That's an echo chamber and it's freaking great Like my life's never been better. I've been sleeping. I don't want to hear about what some fat doctor at the FDA says that I should be doing. I want to do what all the bros are doing when I go lifting. That's an echo chamber right, there's a belonging.
Mark McGrath:It's almost like you're describing, if you've ever read tribe by uh, sebastian junger, like he talks about how people would be kidnapped on the frontier by by native tribes and then take it into that tribe and then they would try to get them quote unquote back to civilization and they'd want to stay with the yeah well, so there's there's two things that are going on there.
Michael Guimarin:Number one is we all do like cults as a thing. We're all part of a cult, whether we're like it or not, and so we want to join a group of other people, a tribe. And then the other thing about that book which is like not a great thing from this conversation um is the idea of war brides. So you don't really want to look at the um stories from the women who are captured who then can. There's like a whole physiological basis for that. So that's not a. You don't want to. That that's not what we're talking about. So like, yeah, like if you steal women from one tribe and put them in another, they will have a their reaction to the trauma, to processing. It is to basically adopt 100, the new tribe, and they're never gonna reset. Like if you get stolen again, it won't, it does. It's like a one-time thing. It's a, it's a survival mechanism, it's adaptive. So like, that's not a good example, but I understand generally what you're talking about.
Mark McGrath:People want to belong to yeah they want to belong, you want to feel like they're, feel like they're part of something or um, I don't know, I mean, I was a grateful dead fan, you know. So I always kind of like, uh, when I see somebody out there and they've got a shirt on or a hat, you know, and I hold up my phone and you know I've got my, you know there's a, you know, like like being a marine or being a naval aviator, I mean there are, there are tribes oh, yeah, well, and there's jargon for them as well, and you guys see them as well in the, in the real world.
Michael Guimarin:If you see somebody with purple hair, you know it's kind of like in nature, bright colors, stay away. Um, on Twitter, you know, some people will put a flag of a particular persuasion that usually says stay away, or they will or will not have pronouns or whatever. Right, these are all tribal signifier. You're wearing a New York hat right now, so that's also a tribal signifier. Um, men in particular, we like our uh, very ordered tribal signifier, so you can go into any group of guys and they'll have like a uniform if you will, even if they're not in the military. Um, so yeah, there's like a appearance of power is a great book about that, by the way.
Mark McGrath:I forget who they were playing last weekend, but auburn, uh, you know all the frat kids. They wear their coat and tie with their uh, orange and blue ties and and they got, uh, they got beat, but the, the funny meme, what you know. So you see all the, as you say, you know they're in their uniforms, but they showed this. There's one famous picture from it already where this kid's like, just just like his hands and his and his, uh, his head in his hands, and it says the look that you make when you realize that your pledge master is going to take this loss out on you.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, yeah, exactly. And because we were in the fraternity system, we know what that means, right, how many people that never were. They have no context for that. And because we don't share a consensus reality with them, they're like what? So anyway? And because we don't share a consensus reality with them, they're like what so?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:anyway, and, michael, curious as to how you found yourself in this type of role. What's your background? A little bit, and then I want to ask you some questions about current state of affairs. So yeah, some background.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, so, like using the sort of Vox Day framing, I'm an inheritor class gamma male historian, so I was born into a wealthy family. I went to all the private schools, I had what you would call a classical education for a world that no longer exists, and so I learned this sort of historian perspective of we're always going to observe reality and then describe it. And then I started to understand, through my own journey of being very confused about the world but yet curious about it, that there's all these mental models that we can pick up to help explain everything. And so I picked up you'll notice I've just used a bunch of mental models in this conversation and I just picked them up over and over and over again. And I got really excited about this information, diet, stuff, because, um, I think first of all, I think it's really interesting it's a transition that's going to take at least, uh, 40 years. Um, if you read the Bible, uh, the Israelites were lost in the wilderness for 40 years. For a journey that takes five days. You can go walk from Egypt, cairo to Jerusalem in five days, but yet the Israelites were lost for 40 years. That's a metaphor, and so I know that this is going to be the rest of my life. So it's kind of like fun for me to talk about, but this isn't my work or how I get paid or anything like that. I have a bunch of projects. I was in Silicon Valley, had a bunch of tech startups, had some exits was able to invest into. I'm sort of like halfway between being an operator in startups and being a full time investor. So that's sort of what I do now and I just I love learning about all these things and then writing the history and then seeing you know these, these big waves of society I talked to.
Michael Guimarin:I'm sure you guys are familiar with John Robb. John Robb and I are good friends on the internet. You know we haven't met in real life. Oh, actually we did meet. We actually did meet at that dinner where I met you guys. I think and that's a great example of like John is a boomer, so he sees all of the. He'll describe everything that I'm saying in almost the same terms, but he'll say we need to reestablish consensus. That I'm saying in almost the same terms, but he'll say we need to reestablish consensus and I, as a millennial, will tell you consensus is impossible to redo because of the internet, and then you'll get somebody like Daniel Schmachtenberger, who's a Gen X, which I think might be closer to you guys, and Gen X is very confused. So there's a lot of Because you grew up in an analog world but now exist in a digital world. Genx is the most hosed of all the mental people that I speak with.
Mark McGrath:Best music, though we get the best music.
Michael Guimarin:You guys had great culture right. The 80s was amazing. You can see the evolution over the generations. That's a little bit about my background. Hopefully that's helpful.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:No, thank you for that. Then then a current condition you, you, you brought up, uh, California. Yeah, I don't know if you use it, use it. I think you use dumpster, dumpster, fire in politics. But just uh, just give us your perspective of what's going on globally, if you don't mind, and that's kind of a broad uh yeah, so so I'll.
Michael Guimarin:I'll answer this in the most hardcore way possible, which is everything changed for humanity after 1858. And why is it? What's what's important about 1858? That was when the Lincoln Douglas debate happened, and the debate itself is not important, right? What's important is that was the first time that we had light speed communication because of the telegraph lines and the railroads, where you could have a debate in Illinois and then there could be an editorial comment about it in New York. That debate became really the first major media event. That was like a global phenomena, or I should say civilization-wide phenomena, and prior to 1858, the speed of information distribution was quite slow.
Michael Guimarin:So when you look at the US Constitution, the framers they're like okay, people got to vote. It takes days to get on your horse or wagon and go to wherever you need to go to vote. And because we live in an agrarian society, it makes sense from a power distribution perspective that the only people that will vote will be landowning men, because if you're on a farm, you can't afford to have every adult leave for three days to go vote. So you basically elect someone among yourselves as a representative. Aha, it's a fractal. And then they go and they vote on something and they elect a representative, and then they vote on and on, and so you can create a structure for it.
Michael Guimarin:The Constitution and all of the governments never saw this idea of light speed communication, and it completely changes everything. And it's why, after 1858 that we get the theory of evolution, the Catholic church has a crisis. All of a sudden there's all these religions that appear like Mormonism and all these things that are new, because they're all reconciling with this fact that everyone can now talk with everybody else. And it's no accident that one of the oldest religions, which is sort of the God from man as opposed from man from God, which we sort of collectively call Marxism today, but it's sort of like the original anti-God religion, also emerges. And so, at the same time, the elite, starting post 1858, definitely by, you know, let's call it the turn of the 20th century they had internalized this idea of this extreme existential nihilism where nothing matters, we don't really do anything. You get Nietzsche and all the German philosophers saying things like God is dead, and so you have this complete breakdown and sort of like what the function of the elite is supposed to be.
Michael Guimarin:And then, by World War One, with all the all the wealthy men's families dying in the trenches by getting their heads blown off. This entire concept of noblesse oblige comes out. And then there was a resurgence where people wanted to go back to this idea in the 50s. That's why you get Under God and the Pledge of Allegiance and you get TH White writing the Once and Future King, which is about the Arthurian legend, and you continue to have this de-evolution in all of our institutions and all of our structures. The entire world is one civilization. People have a really hard time with that. They're like no, there's different countries. No, it's not really true. You can buy Coca-Cola in any country in the world in 15 minutes. So the question is, what is happening? Well, what's happening is that there's an existential nihilism that pervades the elite, which are supposed to caretake over the entire society, and instead they're just sort of like going on the path of reckless destruction.
Michael Guimarin:Um, and the system is sort of escalating into a point where it will reset and, um, there's been a bunch of like minor things that have happened, uh, since then, but structurally, like, if you look at, um, some of the technologies and the history of technologies coming out. So the printing press comes out in 1430. You don't get Martin Luther until 1519. Then you get the reformation. It takes 300 years to um to reconcile. So the treaty of Westphalia doesn't come until the 1740s Um, so you have like hundreds of years where the system is trying to figure out what to do. So, like, right, the Westphalian nation state was what emerged and there was kind of some stability for let's call it 110 years, and then you've got light speed communication. So we're going through another transition like that. Like it, um, it will. It will last the rest of our lives. There's not really anything we can do to stop it, unless you want to uninvent the internet, uh, which is not a thing. And um, yeah, I don't really know what the future state will look like.
Michael Guimarin:So, previous to the Westphalian structure, the first estate had all the power right the church and the King, and then, with the nation state, there was a 300 year war where the second estate, which is all the aristocrats and the nobles, fought with the King, and then they got the power, and then the best version of a second estate government is the US. Now we have a situation that's very analogous. I just wanted to talk about that for a second. The fourth estate is the press that was used by the second estate to overthrow the first. Now we have the internet, which is what Mark Zuckerberg this is Mark Zuckerberg's theory, which is hilarious that he actually is saying this because he knows exactly what's going on. The third estate which is hilarious that he actually is saying this because he knows exactly what's going on the third estate, which is the commoners, is using the fifth estate, which is the internet, to overthrow the second.
Michael Guimarin:And so you're watching in real time is like the people are basically going to overthrow all of the governments, but like the governments get us. You know, we say the enemy gets a vote, and so they're going to. They basically get a choice right they can become totalitarian, like China, and or they can become like fully decentralized, like a Venetian city state kind of situation. You can read Thoreau reinventing organizations if you want a conceptual, philosophical framework on this. So this would be like you know red mafias versus teal decentralized organizations in his sort of pedagogy, know red mafias versus teal decentralized organizations in his sort of pedagogy. But what you're watching is sort of a de-evolution as all of the institutions break into all these warring mafias and then some of them become so broken that they form these emergent decentralized structures and you're going to watch this huge war that happens between the two of them.
Michael Guimarin:I said that I think a billion people will die. I don't really know. I'm kind of optimistic that we'll make it through. A lot of people aren't? They think the world ends, that this is the great filter, that we can't get past this. But I think humanity would have failed, you know, a thousand generations ago if that were true. But I do think you know we're going to make it through, but we're, we're watching it right, Like you could say, the internet.
Michael Guimarin:Doug Engelbart, mother of all demos, 1967, you know you could say that was analogous to the printing press, um, that kind of kicked off the idea of networked computing, um, and then you don't get the reformation until 1519, which is what? 90 years later. So you add 90 years to 1967 and you're well into the 2050s, um, so if you think that, like, humans move analogously, you have sort of this, we're waiting. You know, like. So, if you ever watched John Rob and I talk, we're just sitting there like, yep, israel lost, um, they.
Michael Guimarin:And like, post October 7th, we did a thing about how Israel had lost and they actually lost back in 2021, but they didn't notice it. And then post October 7th, now there's like a perception that like, oh yeah, they totally lost. And it's like very weird to watch these wars play out when you already know sort of the net effect. And what I mean by that is if you look at the sources of Israeli support in the United States traditionally it was a democratic party that anyone under 45 in the democratic party does not support Israel. They're like super not supportive of Israel. Um, and so even Chuck Schumer gave a speech like post October 7th about how this had happened and there was no more support. Um, and you can. And then there and this, these things are all very structural and you can sort of watch them devolve and happen.
Michael Guimarin:Um, so yeah, that's, that's what's happening is that we're going through this massive transition. It's probably going to last our lives Is the medium, the message.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, of course you know that you know, as well as I do we sure do Even tracking any of Neil Howe's work on the fourth turning. At all Is there.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, so I come across that work all the time. I think it's great, like, so Chinese calendar is only 60 years long. It's like 12 years that repeats five times and then it repeats again. Um, if you look at the entire history of Western civilization, like I, I have a degree in classics and that's what I mean by inherited class gamma male who's a historian? Um, so so I like studied the ancient Romans and the Greeks. Um, um, so so I like studied the ancient Romans and the Greeks.
Michael Guimarin:Um, all of our stories are written by men and for men and they basically, like, you need to understand the fundamental stories of your society because they only happen once every 60 to 80 years. So, like you and you, and when you're in it, you don't really, you don't really understand. You're like, no, it's like cause, your parents tell you something but it's not actually true. So you need to have the story there so that you know. You know how to uh, how to evaluate, like a Julius Caesar that's emerging, or like a Donald Trump type figure.
Michael Guimarin:Um, you need to understand, like, what it is that they're doing and what the historical context for it, and basically it's that, uh, for whatever reason, we have to go through the entire civilizational cycle at some level every 60, 80 years. And then there's there's broader patterns that we fit into right. So you could say, like there's the hunter gathering and we can have a whole conversation about the kind of currency that you use, how trust is established, the, the way that we deal with violence of the individual versus the state. Then you have sort of the agricultural revolution, then you have the industrial revolution. We're now in the information uh society, so we're sort of in like the fourth uh incarnation of these, this big group. So the, the change that we're in right now is much bigger than, um, you know, the no-transcript.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Sorry, I'm missing it right now because you're asking me to like talk about all of history.
Michael Guimarin:It's an infinitely depth fractal. So, like all the people are the same, all the so like the. The other really weird thing that I think that conservative right is partially going through I don't know if you guys are seeing this yet, but this recognition after watching October, january 6th is now being called the insurgency of 2021. If you look at the history books that the state of California tries to pawn off on my kids, which are homeschooled, so we know that that was not an insurgency, because we know that if it was a real insurgency, you could get any of the gazillion GWAT guys and they would have been successful. Like we are an insurrection, sorry, you know that it would have been successful if it was a real insurrection, and yet the history book says that it was an insurrection. And so you're like wait, is all of history just like made up?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:and then the answer yes, there's no, it's not real like.
Michael Guimarin:And then the next evolution of that, all of history is made up and people like get really frustrated about this because they're like, no, like this really happened. And you're like, okay, whatever you know, I always think about um. You know, was the whiskey rebellion exactly Rebellion, exactly as it was described, right? Or was Vlad the Impaler really a bad guy? Or did he like put one guy on a spike and then some, you know, pissy gamma historian 60 years later was like I don't like this guy because he did good PR. Yeah, like exactly. Like NPR gets to talk about him. And then we only have that historical document. And so now we think that Vlad was this terrible guy but we don't really know anything.
Michael Guimarin:Sort of the next level that you get to after history is completely false and made up um is that history is actually always happening and it's only in the present. And so all the characters from our mythology, whether it's Achilles or Frodo or whatever, they're always here and with us. And we see them in Elon Musk, we see them in you know that Alexander Soros guy. So we see all the heroes and villains of antiquity and all of our stories and then we see them like in our church, right, and then we're all playing out this play over and over and over again, and so you can just sort of say like, oh yeah, this is where we're at. Like right now we're in the interwar period, you know, between 1920 and 1940. And so we're trying to figure out. You know what's going on.
Michael Guimarin:A lot of people will say world war three has already started. It started, you know, years ago. And that when historians look back, I mean israel is bombing lebanon and our news is kind of like not interested, like this is one sovereign country is bombing the shit out of another sovereign. Where's the response? The way that we did with the russians in ukraine. You know what I mean. And so like we're going to go back and look at this event and be like, oh yeah, that was totally world war three. Right.
Michael Guimarin:And the thing that worries me and I brought this up numerous times in the Boyd Institute is we look at Pearl Harbor as kind of the, as the signaling entrance event for the United States in our mythology about World War Two. And we can have a lot of discussion about World War Two if you want, but I'm just going to stay away from it, other than to say Pearl Harbor was the entry event. Pearl Harbor was the entry event. Maybe China's rapid annexation of Taiwan is not an entry event, but it's Hiroshima, it's the end.
Michael Guimarin:You can think of World War III as an ongoing multi-theater war and we've been fighting it on economics and politics and everything, and the kinetic strike that is the annexation of taiwan. If they're going to do it like in a bolt from the blue type attack, it's not going to be an overlord attack, sorry pentagon planners. Um, if they're going to do that like that could be the end of the war as opposed to the beginning, and I think this is like the interesting. This is why I like studying history or the story that we have about it, because then we can draw these parallels and we can ask ourselves, like okay, well, if it was the end of the war, what would that look like? Well, it's like well, they would need to have compromised our politicians at every single level. Great Are they? Have they done that?
Mark McGrath:Oh yeah, great it's like they would need to have compromised our critical supply chains.
Michael Guimarin:So let's look at food, you know. Let's look at munitions, you know, let's look at munitions. You know, the Baltimore situation highlighted that there's two ports where all of our mid-tier weapons system supply chain goes out of. It's Baltimore and San Diego. If you stop Baltimore now all of a sudden, like you can fire all your missiles, the ones you have in stock, but if you want to restock them, they got to come from Baltimore. That's where all the contractors are that have all the, you know, the little part that goes in the javelin or whatever.
Michael Guimarin:So when we think like this is how I'm thinking about it, in terms of like, okay, like, let's look at all the different theaters and how we match up so that we can, we can be there. And also you have to appreciate the Chinese. Uh, because they've been fighting a war for 20 years and the U? S doesn't know that it's in a war. We don't want to admit that it's a war. Or there are structural reasons why we don't think we can win. And you know, like, what's going on in the Biden administration. That's always interesting to speculate about, because you, you want to believe that somewhere there's somebody who's competent, that's in charge, but you don't really know. And then you look at history and it's always like really random.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:The stories that we hear and then this guy did this thing and you're like, okay, is that what's going on here? But everything you just described, not a lot of Americans know they don't believe it to be true. Right, january 6th was an insurrection. Covid was a terrible thing. That happened. Everything you just brought up, I believe many people look at and go, that's, you guys are making stuff up right now. Everything you just said in the last 10 minutes, michael, is BS, right, so that's, I mean they can they have the opportunity to turn out. You know, tune out this, this, this podcast, and go that that information is. It doesn't resonate with me, right? It's not what I believe. That information doesn't resonate with me, right, it's not what I believe and that's based on their orientation.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, so you know, having these conversations we might just attract more people that kind of look like us and talk like us. Yeah, but it's not going to. In my opinion, and I'm going to ask you this question, it's not going to influence anybody whose orientation is such that they get their information from. You know, pick one of the majors Fox or CNN or anything like that right? Thoughts on that, yeah.
Michael Guimarin:so there's a couple of things. Number one is I think Cortez conquered the Incas with 200 guys, so that's number one.
Michael Guimarin:Number two is I have four children. How many children do you have? So if you, exactly, if you think about this on a generational timescale, like, just help your kids so that they can be oriented, or help your church group or whatever it is, because I agree with you, there's a lot of zombies, and I'm going to use this word very particularly they're entrained Go look it up they're entrained by media to believe whatever they want them to believe and there's no amount of deep programming that you can do to pull them out of it and you literally they're just part of the environment. That's how I think about it. So there's a couple of things. Number one is everyone believes that there's some including myself, because I just said, is there anyone in the Biden administration who's awake? Everyone believes there's some higher order group at the end, like there's some. You know it's not a tier one special operations unit, it's a tier zero unit, right, they're the real guys, you know. Like we call them the unit or whatever, right, they're always going on about like there's some group that's going to come in and save us at the last minute.
Michael Guimarin:And American history is kind of funny about this because it always is kind of like America's really slow to. It's like what is it about the military? Do everything wrong in the most incompetent way possible, and then at the end, some random guy just no, this is what we're doing. And then we went. May God continue to bless the United States. But so I always believe, like is there a people above us? And then you speak to people like Joshua Steinman, who is in the Trump white house, and he has a saying which is it's just us, so we could just do whatever. And what I've found is that you can just do whatever you want because there's no, there's no, there's no structure anymore, it's all, it's all gone. Like the COVID really showed a lot of people that this is all corrupt and there's no, it's not real. Like what these people are saying is not real and they're kind of comical. It's the same way everywhere, right? And so any kind of guy who just wants to go out and do stuff like this is the age of heroes.
Michael Guimarin:I think right now in the civilizational cycle, you can just do whatever you want. You're like I want to open a factory and elon musk is like I'm gonna go do this. I'm gonna go build like a starship factory in texas. You know, regulation be damned, we're just gonna just do it. And he's like whatever. I got rockets and now he's you know what I mean? Like it's. It's so. It's weird, because we grew up thinking, oh, we have to, like, get permission or the institutions are legitimate. Now we know they're not legitimate and we know we don't need permission, so we just go and just do whatever.
Michael Guimarin:And you just sort of deal with it as it comes so.
Mark McGrath:I feel it's what it's what Boyd Boyd was also about decentralized networks, that that's how you know, that's how you get speed. I mean when things are pushed down to the lowest level and, as you say, I mean we tell clients all the time. You know, the more people you have to ask, the longer it takes, the faster the opportunity goes away.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, and because the Internet has had a really profound effect on the economics of information. So I'll just say this really quick and sorry. Punch Mark has gone through this before. There's sort of like four types of information propositional, procedural, perspectival and participatory. So propositional information is like the sky is blue, it's like facts and other things like data. Procedural information would be like a recipe, like first you do this, then you do this, then you do that. Perspectival information is I'm watching somebody else put the Legos together so that I can put the Legos together and then.
Michael Guimarin:Participatory information is harder to define, but it's the information that you get from doing the thing yourself. The Internet makes the first three free and the way that value works is anything that's abundant is not scarce and therefore it's not valuable. Because only things that are scarce are valuable is not scarce and therefore it's not valuable because only things that are scarce are valuable. So proposition, procedural and perspectival information, which is the entirety of business school, law school, medical school it's not worth anything. The only thing that's worth something is participatory information. So it's actually doing the thing and we know this. When we go talk to the bro at the gym, you don't ask the fat guy how to get healthy. You ask the guy who looks jacked that you want to look like. So you're asking the guy that has participatory information and because the internet has given us this ability, that only participatory information is valuable Now the other ones are just table stakes.
Michael Guimarin:It means that we can just go out and get that information anywhere that we want and then just do whatever, because there's no, the institutions are not real, they're not, they don't. I mean, I'm sorry, but I you cannot make the hhs person rachel levine. It's not real, it's not. You can't do it like. Nobody believes it. So you just. You can just do whatever you're're like. Okay, whatever, we're just going to do this. You don't have to break the law, but you can just do whatever you want. Defy convention, because the people who are pushing convention are clowns. Frankly.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Hey, this is just a note for me in this episode. I want to take a look at taking what you just gave with the four Ps and I think it's four Ps and mapping that across a worldly map. And I think, mark, there's something we can do with that, with PR and every and everybody else, but that'll we kind of give away what we can do with this. Everybody's going off with it and do it. But I just want to throw that note in there that is, michael just triggered that that we can actually map that out in a way that can be useful for.
Michael Guimarin:I love worldly maps.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:By the way, he's a cool guy guy yeah, yeah, yeah, so you know what I'm talking about. I would take what you just said and put it across there. And then you, you just created this new capability to understand the I guess, uh information landscape. Can I explain for the audience?
Michael Guimarin:like a really simple way for this yeah, yeah, do it, please do it. So Nike is a company that makes shoes if we distill what they do and so they have 20,000 people that are involved in their business to get shoes into their 400 stores. And the reason why they had all those people is because they were before the internet. And so you have to have a guy that goes to the factory in Asia and knows how to set up the machines and all this kind of thing, and you have to pay for all that expertise, and so it takes 20,000 people to get shoes in your 400 stores. And so that would be say, like is the Jordan shoe? And then A-Rod, who is a baseball star, I believe, and forgive me, he also released a shoe with a team of like 10 people and it functionally like the same number of shoes. And that is because all of that information the perspectival, propositional and procedural information is available for free on the internet. And so he just like, hey, I'm going to go release a shoe. And people are like, wait, what? Like you're going to try and compete head to head with Nike by just doing this? And he's like, yeah, and he was successful at releasing his shoe for that entire like release cycle and now a bunch of other people have copied it and it's the collapsing of that.
Michael Guimarin:It's it's you deciding. You know, I don't want to hire a plumber to fix my pipes. I'm going to go on YouTube and look at some video of some guy with the exact same thing. You're like you know YouTubing the exact model number of whatever part you have, how to install. And then there's some guy with a 30 second video with 400 views that you watch and then you can just do it. That is completely game changing. Yeah, like it's just you can't even. And so if you're listening to this and you're like man, these guys are really esoteric. I don't really believe a lot of these things that they're saying about the cycle of history or what's going on with the U? S and China. Just understand that you're extremely early in all of these things, because most people think if you go to school and learn a bunch of facts, that that's valuable. It's not. You can go on my phone and get it instantly, and my phone incrementally cost me two cents to get that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I've learned more doing this podcast with Mark over the last year and a half than I'd say the last. You know the previous 10 years leading up to that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:It's just because the quality of guests, the conversations, this is the way to do it. This is the way you get your information. You learn. That's number one. The main reason why we do this. Number two is to get some information across to other folks that are interested in this. So I believe the dynamics of our landscape with regard to consulting is changing rapidly, where the better we can give people access to practical experiences that they can improve their day-to-day work. We can do that here through the podcast and through the world of reorientation through Substack, better than we can do going in and spending 40 hours a week with a client. So I do believe that's changing.
Michael Guimarin:Let me plug your own service for you and I'm not economically affiliated with these guys. So when participatory information is the only one that's valuable, or the one that's most valuable, there is an extreme amount of pressure that's put on execution speed, and this is why, in the world, you've observed that things are happening faster, because it doesn't matter what you know, it's what you can do in a given time. So you want to try and get your OO loop inside your competitor or whatever, and so the value of consulting and get your OO loop inside your competitor or whatever and so the value of consulting is not McKinsey is going to come in and tell me there's 15 models, it's don't do these 14 models because you're here, and then, once you completed this, do this next thing. So the value of consulting is no longer telling you what to do, it's telling you what not to do, based on your specific context, in a timeframe that's faster than all your competitors. So you will so like, and that is a function of participatory information that you've gotten as a result of being consultant.
Michael Guimarin:So you can listen to all these podcasts, but it takes a lifetime of participatory information to distill down all the concepts that we're talking about the reason why you hire a new consultant, and we can talk about, sort of like, an old consultant versus a new consultant, or we can talk about PR Mark I know we talked about that the other day.
Michael Guimarin:The reason why you hire them is not because they're going to tell you here's the 15 strategies you need to employ. You can Google right now what are the 15 strategies in your business that you need to deploy. The reason why you hire them is because they have the understanding and the experience, having implemented before in what not to do. So it's not which of the 15 strategies you're going to do, it's the order that you do them in, based on your specific context, and you don't have the time to evaluate all of the different information sources that are out there that would tell you which one you should do in your specific instance. You hire somebody else to get that time back and execute faster, and that's that is a like that entire market having shifted as a direct result of the economics of information going to zero for distribution and therefore participatory information becoming hyper valuable compared to everything else. And yet McKinsey still has 23 year olds making PowerPoint decks. It's just like it's.
Michael Guimarin:It's all, it's all very it's all very hilarious to me.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, Legacy systems are hard to. They don't always disappear so quickly.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah Well, what happens is they become over optimized, hyper optimized and therefore super brittle, and so then there's an exogenous so outside of the system shock that causes them to freeze or shatter and then they get replaced. And the problem is we don't know when that shock happens. So, in the US's case, if we want to talk militarily, we don't know when we get a near-peer or sub-peer conflict that our entire supply chain freezes up and we're just no longer able to wage war. Um, but, like you know, you can look at the way all the procurement and everything done pentagon and all this and you can be like, okay, like we're, we're dangerously I over optimized for this way of war fighting that hasn't existed in 80 years. Um, and you know, like we couldn't even get the material into theater like we could in world war ii, we were putting out 10 000 ships a year. We can't, we made four ships a year.
Mark McGrath:Now, like I don't think people really understand I think john rob had something on uh global supply chains just in the last 24 hours or so regarding exploding pagers, I think. Think it was.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, that's a very interesting story.
Michael Guimarin:Israel, basically interdicted a Taiwanese supplier of pagers and either put so Zero Hedge which is not a good source and I'm not going to say why, but you should be very skeptical of them says they're using PETN, which is an explosive that gets activated by high heat, but Israel is used to using RDX, which is an explosive that gets activated by high heat, but Israel is like used to using RDX, which is like a remote explosive. They did it in the nineties and so it makes sense they would do it here, and so they basically put RD I'm going to say RDX they put RDX and all the pagers in the supply chain and then made sure that whoever was buying them was just the Hezbollah guy yeah, Hezbollah and then they would distribute them to all their people, and sort of my comment was don't single source your bespoke telecommunications device.
Mark McGrath:This was a tweet from yesterday. It was one thing that Israel sabotaged of electronic devices did. It showed us that global supply chains are dangerous.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, I think a lot of people who are not in that area. So I've been in the supply chain area, specifically around maritime, for a couple of years now, so we all knew that and all of the people that we spoke to understood how brittle they were. But a lot of people who are these sort of like 15 minute internet experts weren't aware and now they're kind of freaking out. Um, yeah. So we'll see. Well, Michael, you guys want to talk?
Mark McGrath:to talk about well, we want to make sure we send everybody to uh, you know, I've, I'm a, I'm a subscriber to the uh the info, uh the info. Diet, one day detox. And then, of course, I've done the uh the extra coursework with you. But theinfodietcom is where you go to get your resources.
Michael Guimarin:Yeah, you can just follow me on Twitter. On Twitter I have links to it. It's just at Michael Gimrin on Twitter.
Mark McGrath:But I have to say that I found and there's a quick reference guide in a small book that requires some skin in the game. You have to do the work. It's like we talk lines all the work. It's like we talk lines all the time. It's all great, but if you're not going to do the work, it doesn't matter. And if you do the work, I will tell you the liberation that I have felt since going through this and doing this. It's just phenomenal, Absolutely phenomenal. It's a great way to break a lot of those information snacking addictions that you get. So we definitely recommend it. We'll make sure that we link to it.
Michael Guimarin:Thanks, Mark. Yeah, I really appreciate you saying that and bringing me on. Like I said, it's a side project. I have a lot of fun. If anybody listening has any questions, you can always ping me online. 99% of people never take the action, so if you're the 1% that does like, welcome. The rest of us are really excited to see you because there's so many projects we have going that we can work on.
