Scanning Your Environment for Mismatches
This is the No Bell podcast where we talk about how to optimize your technology, life, and mind. We're joined by special operations veterans, entrepreneurs, investors, and others who have overcome difficulty to make it to the top of their craft by staying in the fight. Welcome to the Nobel podcast. I'm Sam Malaimo, and I'm joined by Mark McGrath. Mark, welcome.
Mark McGrath:Thanks for having me.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. Let's start let's start from the very beginning. Where did you grow up?
Mark McGrath:Army brat. I was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, where we allegedly keep the gold. My dad was a West Pointer. Both my parents were born in New York City and from childhood was moving around constantly. And then in eighth grade, I settled in Pittsburgh.
Mark McGrath:We settled in Pittsburgh with my mom and my parents divorced. So I went to high school in, in Pittsburgh. You know, I'd lived in Germany. My father did an unaccompanied tour in Korea, and my grandparents lived right here in Philly down at six o' Lombard. So I lived there for about a year and a half with them.
Mark McGrath:Lived in Germany for three years, back to Kentucky, and then my father had an assignment in Pittsburgh, and then that's where when my parents split. That's how I ended up going to eighth grade in high school in Pittsburgh. And then I went away to college and joined the marines, and that was that was it. But so I I kinda had an interesting eclectic upbringing.
Sam Alaimo:So bouncing around as a kid, did you I always ask this question, especially with the military guys, because I, did did you get in trouble a lot as a kid? And I usually ask. No?
Mark McGrath:My brother did. But no. I was the oldest of three. I felt like my brother, younger brother, got in more trouble. At least he got away with more things than than than I did.
Mark McGrath:But when your dad's an army officer and you rebel, You know? I rebelled by going to the marine corps, and, I think he was following Phish, the band, Phish as he was going through school, but I did not get into much trouble. It's not that I didn't do things that wouldn't warrant getting in trouble. I guess I had a good way of not getting caught.
Sam Alaimo:Oh, so so your brother was following Fisher on the country, the band. Yeah. And you rebelled to go in the marine corps.
Mark McGrath:That was my rebellion.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. What what what's with the rebellion against your dad was? Yeah.
Mark McGrath:The the rebellion started in for me in 1985 when my aunt, his older sister, married a navy pilot.
Sam Alaimo:Mhmm.
Mark McGrath:And I start I always love the ocean. And, you know, being around the army my whole life, you know, it's like, well, I'm gonna be in the army like my dad. And then but I really like the sea. And I saw this meet this guy that marries my aunt that, you know, flew planes that landed on ships. I'm like, well, that's kinda like the best of both worlds.
Mark McGrath:And then that next summer, Top Gun came out. Oh my god. And I was 10, and that was life altering. And then I kinda wound up just saying, no. I'm gonna be a navy a navy pilot.
Mark McGrath:And my father was like, yeah. Whatever. You know? That's I guess that's acceptable. You know?
Mark McGrath:In high school, I went to an all boys Catholic high school in Pittsburgh. Our disciplinarian was a marine, and I did get in trouble once. I got a fist fight, and I beat the crap out of a kid, and I got summoned. And I was waiting in the office, and there was marine paraphernalia around the office thinking this guy must have something to do with the marine corps. His name is mister Wheeler, and he's gone now.
Mark McGrath:But he came into the office. He grabbed me by my tie, started smacking me, threw me up against the wall, you know, say, you know, fighting with, you know, fighting. And he kept calling me McDermott, which is not my name, but he kept calling me McDermott. He says, do you wanna be a bum? And I said, you wanna be a bum, McDermott?
Mark McGrath:And I said, no, mister Wheeler. I wanna be a marine. And he and he let go. Like, he let his talons out of my neck and said, you can go back to class. So I ran around, told everybody, dude, if you're ever in trouble, like, tell mister Wheeler you wanna be a marine.
Mark McGrath:Like, two or three days later, my mother, I come into the house, and she's crying. And she said, there's a message on the machine from a staff sergeant, somebody from the marine recruiting office, and then you have to go see him. And why? Why are the marines calling the house?
Sam Alaimo:I'm like,
Mark McGrath:I don't know. Just ignore it until I went to school, and mister Wheeler asked me if I saw staff sergeant Roe, was his name. I said, well, no. And he says, if you don't bring me back a business card in his office, you can count on being in detention for the rest of your career here at, Central Catholic. So That's a hardcore school.
Sam Alaimo:That's like a story I'd expect from the fifties.
Mark McGrath:Oh, man. It was, all boys Catholic school in the early nineties was,
Sam Alaimo:Is it still that way?
Mark McGrath:I don't think so. No. And I and I think it's watered down. Like, when my father went to all boys Catholic high school in the sixties, you know, when I went through the nineties, you know, it just kinda probably is a diminishing return. But, yeah, it was pretty hard.
Mark McGrath:I mean, in my class, let's see, just in my graduating class, from high school, I I think we had five or six marines. I was the only officer, and then there was about five guys that either enlisted it, in the reserves or or active duty. In fact, my buddy, Mike. So I convinced my buddy, Mike, to get on the bus with me to go down the recruiting office. And it was not in a good it was not a good neighborhood.
Mark McGrath:So we got on together and right away impressed, blown away, and he asked me what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to be a navy pilot. He goes, you know, marines are naval, and they're naval aviators, and they land on carriers too. And why don't you sit down and watch this movie? And you can find it on YouTube.
Mark McGrath:It's called Warriors from the Sea.
Sam Alaimo:I gotta check it out.
Mark McGrath:Ten minutes, and it was literally geared towards me and Mike. So we're sitting there watching this video. I'm like, wow. So wait a minute. You're telling me you can be a naval aviator.
Mark McGrath:You go to sea and all this, but you can be part of this group that's doing all that? I'm like, totally, totally in. And Mike actually just retired a few years ago as a master sergeant. The the guy that went with me to the recruiting with this, the the video worked.
Sam Alaimo:So he signed up. He enlisted when he
Mark McGrath:He enlisted when he graduated, and then I had a Rossi scholarship. So I went to, I went to Marquette University on a naval ROTC scholarship with a marine option.
Sam Alaimo:You grew up in a military environment. Was Top Gun the moment where you're like, yes. I wanna do it?
Mark McGrath:No. I wanted to be in the military. Top Gun was the moment that I wanted to be Your whole life you wanted to be in the military. Yeah. From yeah.
Mark McGrath:For as long as I could remember.
Sam Alaimo:And then Top Gun was the moment it turned into water.
Mark McGrath:I got away from the army. Yeah. I found my way out. The sea in
Sam Alaimo:the air, I guess. Oh, interesting.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. And I always like to joke. I wanted to be an oceanographer, but Catholic high school beat that out of me. Yeah. But yeah.
Mark McGrath:No. No. I I wanted to be from day one, like my dad, to go into the, military. I remember taking an aptitude test as kids, and I always came back military officer, military officer, military officer. It wasn't even a a thing for me.
Mark McGrath:And I wanted to be a pilot until I went to college in naval RTC, and we had a marine officer instructor that taught us all about, like, how to really be a marine. It's where I first heard about John Boyers from him. And he got us so fanatic about being marines. Like, you didn't care if you were a pilot or not. And then when I found out that my eyes were no longer good for for flying to be a pilot, I'm like, my whole life.
Mark McGrath:Like, I'm gonna be a marine, so who cares? Like
Sam Alaimo:Your friend group went and enlisted, and you decided to go the officer path. You got a scholarship. But what what made you pursue the scholarship in the officer path?
Mark McGrath:Again, when your dad's a West Pointer, you know, I think they sit you down at some point and they say, okay. You can go to the service academies, you can do ROTC or the GI Bill.
Sam Alaimo:Right. If
Mark McGrath:you wanna go to college, I think those are the those are the three options. So I probably could have gone to West Point prep, but I didn't I just didn't wanna be in the army at all. Plus, my father was on the staff at the time there. Yeah. The thought of being, like You
Sam Alaimo:get that crutches.
Mark McGrath:Kid, you know, it wasn't really for me. And I just didn't wanna be in the army at all. Like, I I absolutely was hell bent on on on not being in the army. I I wanted to be in the naval services so bad, particularly the marines. Like, it was it was huge to me.
Mark McGrath:So I went the ROTC route. And I wanted to go to a Jesuit school too. I went to Marquette, which is, run by the Jesuits. And so they have a very unique way of of teaching and learning and thinking and challenging assumptions and so it was kinda like a radical, approach that I liked. And having gone to the the order that I had in high school was Christian brothers, and they were very much the disciplinarians.
Mark McGrath:And I always thought that the Marine Corps was a snap compared to graduating from Central Catholic with with Christian brothers. So I felt very prepared, but I remember them telling me, like, his name was brother Clement, he was our guidance counselor saying, now it's Jesuit school's for you. You need to go to a Jesuit school. You ask way too many questions. It's they're perfect for you.
Mark McGrath:And and he was right. I I loved it. It was a great time.
Sam Alaimo:So what did you do in the marine corps?
Mark McGrath:I was an artillery officer.
Sam Alaimo:Tell tell me about that. Like, what was the, how did when you when you first got in there, what was the training like? How did it kick off?
Mark McGrath:Yeah. So so all marine officers have to go to OCS, and then when you're commissioned, I graduated, I went all marine officers regardless of where you go, go to the basic school, which is six months. So regardless of what your specialty is gonna be, you're gonna be basically infantry officer first. And I say infantry officer, like, everybody's gonna be able to command a rifle platoon regardless of, you know, being a pilot, a lawyer, a logistician, artillery guy, it doesn't matter. Everybody goes to that training first because every marine's a rifleman.
Mark McGrath:So you had that common experience. And then when you graduate and you find out what your, you know, your specialty is gonna be for me was artillery. Like, the infantry guys stay there and they go through another ten weeks, I think it is, of officer course or artillery school six months. So I went to report to my unit out in the fleet, which is the first battalion, twelve marines, was in, third marines in Hawaii. And then you did, like, six weeks of on the job training, and then you get sent back to Fort Sill, Oklahoma for six months of artillery officer base, of course, and then from there, I went right to deployment in Okinawa.
Mark McGrath:So out to the out in the fleet. Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:Rock and roll. So was was it Taylor your your job the whole time you were in the Marine Corps?
Mark McGrath:For my fleet tour, yeah. And then I was, an officer recruiter before I got out. It's called an officer selection officer in Oso. I did that, and then I went to the went to the civilian world.
Sam Alaimo:So let's dig into to nine eleven because I I know you were deployed during nine eleven. Do you remember, like, the exact day, the exact moment, what you're Yeah.
Mark McGrath:We end we were about to deploy. So September 10, was a night like any other. Everybody everybody went to bed. My platoon sergeant was away, and one of my corporals was acting liaison chief. I was the liaison officer in charge of all the four observers and everything.
Mark McGrath:And we were doing a sand table exercise with our rifle battalion, which is third battalion, third Marines. And I said, look. If anything happens or you need anything, just call me and and I can help, you know, because you're gonna be kinda under undermanned or whatever. Most marines, they never did that, though. They they always knew what they needed to do.
Mark McGrath:Officers just would have to tell them what to do, and they would always get it done, which is one of the great things about being a marine. But, the phone kept ringing. You know, in Hawaii, you know, we were six hours off New York time. Like, the phone keeps ringing. And I'm like, what the what the hell?
Mark McGrath:Like, look, you know, look at the clock. It's like, well, it's too early for him to be calling unless he's, like, getting everybody up at, like, 3AM or what the what the fuck. So I finally get up because my then wife says, you know, get up and go answer the damn phone. Like, the cell phones are all going off. And this is, like, the first cell phones.
Mark McGrath:Like, we were just, like, the my first ever cell phone. I answer it, and it's my buddy, Matt, who's in my battery, and he goes I go, what the fuck? And he's like, dude, shut up and turn on the TV right now. The fucking World Trade Center has been attacked. Yeah.
Mark McGrath:I got chills thinking it. I turn on the TV. And I'm like, holy shit. My first thought was, like, do you know how many times I've been on the roof of that observation deck in Acadia with your families from New York City? But then, like, all of a sudden, you're like, this isn't a dream.
Mark McGrath:Like, this is this is real. It's about to go on. Like, everything that we've been training for, it's it's gonna be time to time to go. And it took us forever to get on base that day. Couldn't get on base.
Mark McGrath:We assembled at a house in Kailua, Hawaii, and we watched TV. And I remember calling in and saying, hey. We're stuck out here. I won't let anybody on. Eventually, we got back on, and I remember, our the battalion commander of the rifle battalion telling us, quietly get ready.
Mark McGrath:Quietly get ready. This is it. So, yeah, I think everybody wanted to get their hands in it. Yeah. Then we deployed the train, and we were hey.
Mark McGrath:Tahkalo Training area in Hawaii. It's high altitude. Well, guess what? The mountains of Afghanistan are high altitude.
Sam Alaimo:Pretty high altitude.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. And they ended up not sending third Marine Division at first. So first and second went, we were what's called the speed bump in case the Koreans tried anything, North Koreans tried anything.
Sam Alaimo:Oh, man. You're you're a
Mark McGrath:guard fix. Yeah. That was our mission. So often then we all had for guys that were my year group, we had b billettes that we had to go to. So some guys went to boot camp like Oregon the Drillfield.
Mark McGrath:A lot of guys went to recruiting. I I went to recruiting. And then on our b billettes, which you guys will call shore tours, the OIF started and was over pretty quick, and the monitors are like, yeah. You guys should get out and go make money because it this thing's over. Who knew?
Sam Alaimo:02/2004, they thought it was over.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. Who knew?
Sam Alaimo:I can't even get to see without knowing that what came after 02/2004.
Mark McGrath:Looking back, I I guess you could have thought that that would happen, you know, especially a lot of the books that they made us read. I would thought, well, the protracted gorilla war. That's like that one book they made us read, Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall, Firepower Unlimited War. I mean, we were always learning about these things. It was funny because at OBC, at artillery school, they weren't teaching us how to use supporting arms versus insurgents.
Mark McGrath:It was about how to use supporting arms versus, you know, columns of Soviet troops, and that was in '99.
Sam Alaimo:Totally unprepared for the guerrilla war. Totally unprepared.
Mark McGrath:I I say, like, as as marines, we kinda were because Somalia had happened and then, like, things like Kosovo. Yeah. And it was always kind of a a discussion and, you know, the like, the the best about being in the marines, one of them, is the professional reading program. I mean, a lot of the books that we were meant to read, like like I just mentioned, Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall, Mal's book on Guerrilla Warfare is on the list, Jacob Var. I was always into that.
Mark McGrath:Like, I always kinda like the, like, the guerrilla warfare stuff was really fast. It's still I read a lot about guerrilla warfare and take the concepts actually and teach it to companies. Yeah. I I find it fascinating. I always found it fascinating, like, how because it's a very marine thing too.
Mark McGrath:It's like, how can we do so much more with so much less, you know, and and and, like, be put in, like, the worst conditions and just be laughing about it and, like, ah, who cares? This is how it goes. So but, yeah, no. They they told us I'll never forget. It's like, you boys it's like, no.
Mark McGrath:We can do he was from the South. Ain't no we can do for y'all. It's like infantry officers, artillery officers, there's far too many of you. And guess what? You don't have a combat fit rep or an expeditionary medal.
Mark McGrath:Everybody behind you're gonna be lumping over you for years. They're gonna be leaping over you. You should get out and go make money. Go go take what you learned somewhere else. So we did.
Mark McGrath:I I can go out with my my best friends. Very few of them stayed in. Most of us most of us got out.
Sam Alaimo:Fuck. Okay. So let's let's wrap up the military. What was it it like, on the one hand, the best aspect of the military you got?
Mark McGrath:The marines. Being being a marine and being with marines and leading marines, there's there's no part of my identity that means more to me than being a marine.
Sam Alaimo:Do you still have marines in your life?
Mark McGrath:We just had a reunion last month in Michigan with our old battery, and we got together with our battery commander who retired as a colonel, and we all love each other like brothers. And, you know, of course, anywhere you go and you see that equal global anchor and, you know, you go up and talk to anybody and it blows people away. Like, wow. You can just go up and talk to somebody. I I won a bet one time, hundred bucks.
Mark McGrath:We were in Minnesota in a corporate event, and the ESPN baseball crew was was there. It was Rick Sutcliffe, Aaron Andrews, and and Dusty Baker, who's now back managing again. And this is one of those years that he'd been fired, and he's commentating. And I go, I bet you I can get Dusty Baker to buy me a beer. And they're like, no way.
Mark McGrath:You know, everybody's throwing their money down, like, watch. So I get up and I walk over, and I tap Dusty Baker on the shoulder. And all they see is me walk over, tap Dusty Baker on the shoulder, hip up, and give me a hug and, like, sit down and have a drink with me. He's a marine. The baseball manager.
Mark McGrath:That's they're like, how did you do that? How did you do that? Like, oh, Dusty's a marine. And we didn't talk about baseball once. We talked about the marine corps the entire time.
Mark McGrath:Great guy.
Sam Alaimo:The marines have a gift that they've managed to maintain that camaraderie. Like, not just while you're in, but after you're out as well. So it's more powerful when you get out.
Mark McGrath:You're mandated, I think. They inculcated you never stop never stop learning, never stop never stop, you know, earning that title. I mean, you're constantly, constantly, constantly living up to it, or, you know, being challenged to live up to it, and everybody's trying to do the best they can.
Sam Alaimo:What about the worst aspects of the Mozart?
Mark McGrath:The worst that well, I'm sure we could relate to lots of things. You know? Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:Should he show you the one that stands out that you can you you think you're actually able to fix now with your current philosophical endeavors?
Mark McGrath:I don't know. I mean, again, the bureaucracy is so strong in the defense department. Like, you'd think, oh, it'd be great to, like, be the guy that came up with a solution. I just eliminated hurry up and wait. Oh god.
Sam Alaimo:I can't even imagine.
Mark McGrath:I think the other thing I loved about the marines, you know, it was very hierarchical in garrison, like, very hierarchical. But in the field and, you know, it's very flat. Like, every you know, your officers are always with the with the troops. You know, it wasn't like the officers are way back there and the and the troops are over here.
Sam Alaimo:And hovering ahead in the helicopter. I love the philosophy. Everyone's a rifleman. I love it.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. And even now, like, when we get together these reunions, there's very few officers. There's very, very few of us. I mean, there's a lot more marines. So when we get together, it's still kind of that really tight bond.
Sam Alaimo:Even when I was a kid, I was debating on becoming a marine officer or an enlisted SEAL. Even now, the pull's there. Because even just the marketing aspect alone of the marines is so powerful. But then to hear everybody talk about it, like, their light their eyes light up talking about the marine corps. That's a powerful thing.
Mark McGrath:Oh, yeah. I mean and like we're saying at the beginning, I mean, I I think marines and seals, they have a lot more common than than than others. I mean, you know, we get the best emblems. Right? It's both we both have an eagle with an anchor, and then, you know, you get a little little bit of difference.
Mark McGrath:So with the Trident, so instead of a Trident, we put the globe up, but, no. It's all good.
Sam Alaimo:So you got out of military, bridged the gap between getting out and then having your company now so we could see how that flows.
Mark McGrath:So I initially got into medical sales with a start up that was actually owned and operated by some former marines, which, by the way, we're not allowed to say that term anymore, former marines. What do you say? Marines. So if you're alive, you're a marine, unless you got kicked out, then you're an expert.
Sam Alaimo:Fuck. I love it.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. No. No. It was, general Amos, our common a few common months ago, came out with an order, like, I don't ever wanna hear foreign marine. You're a marine till you die.
Mark McGrath:So and then even then, you know, you're either gonna be in hell with all your old buddies or up in heaven guarding the streets according to the song.
Sam Alaimo:I love the logic.
Mark McGrath:I got out. I did medical sales. I kinda went through a lot of what they call junior military officer recruiting, like, where, big corporations are looking for shift managers or whatever, and a lot of it seemed boring to me. And medical sales was kind of interesting. The medical part or the sales part?
Mark McGrath:Kind of the medical like, I guess, the sales part. Like, it was going out and interacting with with people.
Sam Alaimo:So that appealed to you immediately Yeah. Coming out of the military?
Mark McGrath:Yeah. Yeah. Well, having been a liaison officer for two years and then having been a recruiting officer. You're kind
Sam Alaimo:of selling anyway. Yeah.
Mark McGrath:You're kind of selling and you're kind of going back to, like, reading about guerrilla warfare and stuff. I mean, you are kind of like an embedded advisor and it's kind of the same thing is, you know, in a medical situation, like, you're trying to embed yourself with whatever you're selling. In my case, it was diagnostic pathology. Like, you're trying to become part of the team of the dermatology office or the gastroenterology office or whatever. And it was fun, but I got bored with it.
Mark McGrath:And then I went through another recruiter that specialized in they were just looking for, like, say, seals, green berets, rangers, marines, pilots. Like, they didn't want not gunfighters.
Sam Alaimo:Right?
Mark McGrath:I mean, like, they didn't want logisticians or supply officers or whatever. And they had a different recruiting approach, and he goes, you ever heard of, like, investment wholesaling? And I'm like, no. What's that? Like, well, you work on Wall Street, and you gotta get licensed, and you're basically gonna sell investment products to, financial institutions.
Mark McGrath:I'm like, yeah. Sign me up. That sounds really fun. You know, like, the the dynamics and chaos of Wall Street. And I found that to probably be the best application of of what is they taught me in the in the marine corps.
Mark McGrath:What year was this? This was '5.
Sam Alaimo:So this was a few years before one of the worst deceptions in American history? Yeah. Did that impact your career?
Mark McGrath:Oh, yeah. I mean, we're about to have the fifteenth reunion this year of the team that I was on through the financial crisis, and we're tighter than it's funny. It's the only place outside of the marine corps where I ever felt as tight with a group than I did with this group of guys that we this is the fifteenth consecutive year that we're gonna get together, next month, and it's going through that together. We had a very, interesting leader that wanted to make an external sales team that had zero financial experience. So two of us were veterans.
Mark McGrath:He was looking for, like, college athletes, like, drug reps. Like, I I hit a few of the wickets, and we set records. It was so much fun. But then to go through that immediately, not knowing what you know, not having come up in that industry. Like, I I wasn't scared or worried.
Mark McGrath:Like, you know, I used to use people freaking out, and you read about people jumping off skyscrapers and things like that. I don't like nobody's shooting at us. Like, there's you know, I got friends in Afghanistan that are getting shot at right now or living in a hole. Like, I get to put a suit on today and, you know, stay at a Ritz Carlton. Like, is this really that bad?
Mark McGrath:Like, you know, I I just had a good different way of of looking at it, And it was in that path of the just the chaos of markets that I started going back to the warfighting curriculum in the marine corps and pulling out Boyd, getting right back to to John Boyd and realizing that I had I had to go in deep, do, like, deep questions about what it was that the marines actually taught me because it was a lot more than I realized.
Sam Alaimo:So your first exposure to Boyd was the marine corps. Let's let's let's dive in.
Mark McGrath:Enable RTC. Yeah. We learned about it in the evolution of the art of warfare warfare class in Naval RTC in college.
Sam Alaimo:So lay it out for anybody who doesn't know what Boyd is and what OODA loop is and what VUCA is. How how do you elaborate on that?
Mark McGrath:Yeah. So John Boyd was a retired Air Force colonel and which is often what he's just reduced to. He was a fighter pilot, and he came up with this four step process called OODA loop that helps you make decisions in chaotic nonlinear environments, and that's about that's about it. That's kinda how we all kinda learned it initially. Right?
Mark McGrath:Like, you know, we're in a one v one situation, and your oodle loop is faster than mine, you win. And my oodle loop's faster than yours, you win. And it's a it's an oversimplification of something that's designed to empower you to thrive in any situation to achieve excellence either individually or as a team. So Boyd's kind of this radical that as a young lieutenant and junior captain, he writes the definitive air to air combat study that's still in use by NATO Air Forces today in his free time. He comes up with also called energy maneuverability theory, which is, the trade offs, the gain and loss of energy, the turn inside the other.
Mark McGrath:It's a it's a mathematical formula, and I'm a historian, and I always botch it in layman's terms. But it's basically how do we gain or lose energy faster than our opponents in certain situations. And it it forms, like, the design of a tens and f fifteens and f sixteens and all that stuff all came from f eighteens all came from Boyd. He retires from the air force, and he goes on this just sabbatical, like this permanently self induced exile, where when he comes out, he publishes this paper called Destruction and Creation. And Destruction and Creation is a combination of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
Mark McGrath:Like, we we you can never, with any certainty, or accuracy, calculate exactly where you are. We could do one or the other, but but you can't do both. Godel's incompleteness theorem is, like, you just you can't have complete information, and no system within itself can verify itself within itself. And then the last one was entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, that everything all natural processes, entropy increases. You know, disorder increases.
Sam Alaimo:Where did he seclude himself to do this kinda hermetic study?
Mark McGrath:Yeah. So well, great question. So when he retired, he lived in a small apartment. He was living on his retirement salary only. He turned down I mean, he could've worked for a defense contractor and probably made millions.
Mark McGrath:He was such a he was such a genius. He did it all in his apartment. He did it on libraries, the Pentagon.
Sam Alaimo:He was just obsessed.
Mark McGrath:Obsessed. Yeah. He he he believed that he was in pursuit of something. Even up to his deathbed, he believed that he was in pursuit of something that was gonna improve how we learn, you know, how we operate, how we thrive, and, the complexity of our of our universe. And it's a lot more than the, you know, the the little four step tactical process, but his work was so complete and it was so interdisciplinary.
Mark McGrath:I mean, he read thousands of books. I've been to the archive several times at Quantico, and I've seen his all his archives here in the marine corps. How I heard about him and how the marines heard about him was after the Vietnam War and the marines were doing a lot of soul searching, They start talking about maneuver warfare. And there was this, you know, strange, esoteric, retired air force colonel that goes around the Pentagon and gives this brief called patterns of conflict that's, like, six hours long that nobody wants to go to. And he's got these radical ideas of how you can, you know, through through insights and orientation and harmony and all these other ideas, like, you know, how you can thrive from the throes of combat.
Mark McGrath:And the marines actually take the risk. Like, yeah, sure. Have him come down to Quantico. Let's let's do it. And he gives them the brief, and that was it.
Mark McGrath:I mean, he was always more affiliated with the marines from that point on than the air force, and it led to a lot of great things in the marine corps. One of the big things would have been, the book warfighting, which was then called fully marine force manual one, is now called marine corps doctoral publication number one. But, you know, warfighting, which they teach at business schools and they read in boardrooms and things like that. And it's basically, how do we cognitively approach war fighting? How do we cognitively approach the chaos of capital markets, the chaos of sports, the chaos of the corporate world, whatever it is.
Sam Alaimo:It's radically different from what what I was what most people are taught about OODA loop.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. To me, OODA loop is
Sam Alaimo:like, alright. I'm on a sniper mission. I'm doing an inflow right now. It's 02:00 in the morning, night vision goggles. I'm looking at my environment and assessing what I would do, observe, orient, decide, act.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. And you're talking about what happens years before that Yeah. And what's gonna happen years after that, a full encompassing philosophy. What That's why you
Mark McGrath:that sniper to that position anyway. Yep. What are the things that he's been trained with that shape how he observes and makes sense of his world, how he comes up with ideas, how he learns, how he thrives and survives? It's it's so much bigger than just tactical scenarios. Now you could say, like, well, you know, they're gonna you could you could have it tactically, operationally, strategically, yeah, but but I think that Boyd and the dig the deeper I dig on this stuff, the more I realize, like, this this the the the empowerment that you get from really delving into these ideas, it's beyond anything that even I I understood when I was in the marine corps, and it's taken years and years and years of study and application in the, investment business to really to really see it.
Mark McGrath:But then, like, once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Absolutely cannot unsee it.
Sam Alaimo:So let's play it out real world. When you were in the investment business, how did you apply it?
Mark McGrath:So, well, kinda like the paint the picture I was painting, like, why did I see things so differently? Right? Like, I hadn't been conditioned to think the way a lot of people in that industry had been because they came up off the desk. They'd been in it for years. They've been through crises before.
Mark McGrath:Someone like me that's not too far removed out of the marines and is you know, I'm happy if I have, like, a carpeted floor with a poncho liner in, like, a bag to put my my head on. Right? That's, like, my idea of luxury. Going into that world was already, you know, kinda weird, and I just started looking at things differently. Like, my experience there was shaping how I see things.
Mark McGrath:So, like, my biases, my conditioning, and all that stuff. It it wasn't like a lot of the other people in that space. It was more like, well, this guy is a veteran. He was in the marines. He just sees things differently.
Mark McGrath:I would say to myself, nobody's shooting at us. I'm gonna be driving from, you know, this brokerage house to that brokerage house, and there's probably not gonna be any IDs. There's probably not gonna be any, like, checkpoints. There's probably not gonna be anybody taking a pot shot at me. I'm okay.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. And then you read these headlines, and you're like, why are people freaking out about these headlines? Like, this is, like, a great buying opportunity. Like, if you're doing all the right things, but that's orientation. Like, if my orientation is wired that way, I'd see things as an opportunity where somebody else would see it as a total, abject crisis.
Sam Alaimo:It's almost like the observe phase of the observe orient aside act isn't just observing literally what's around you. It's observing the full complex environment. Yeah. What are people thinking? What are the mass movements at play?
Sam Alaimo:What are the geopolitical events? What led to the recession? What's gonna get us out of the recession? So you were analyzing it strategically and then able to make the most of it.
Mark McGrath:And trying to synthesize too. This is the other thing with Boyd is that analysis is not enough. You have to have synthesis. So trying to break things down analytically and then put things together synthetically that other people can't see, something something novel.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. I would call it disintegration integration.
Mark McGrath:Sort of. Yeah. Because that's really what it's destruction creation. That was this paper. It's it's breaking things down, pulling it apart, putting it back together in a in a way it didn't exist before.
Mark McGrath:But I always start talking about orientation. So orientation is really where you gotta start. Orientation is you. That's what makes you you. It's your cognition.
Mark McGrath:You know, you see people say it's the brain. No. It's not the brain. It's the mind. The mind and the brain are are are two different things.
Mark McGrath:It's the mind. It's like, what do you think? What do you feel? Who are you? Where'd you go to school?
Mark McGrath:Where'd you grow up with? What kind of family did you come from? What what are your cultural traditions, your genetic heritage? You know? How do you handle new information?
Mark McGrath:What do you do with new information? What's your appetite for learning? Are you a reader or not? You know, all those things play into, like, I also call it, like, your cognitive software. It's like your internal operating system.
Mark McGrath:That's what shapes how you see and make sense in in your environment. Yep. The orientation. So, really, the starting point is that. The orientation is how I shape and and see things that make sense in my world.
Mark McGrath:So that sniper out there, his orientation is what shapes whatever it is he sees. Now he might see something that's a that's a threat, whereas a sheriff sniper wouldn't say, what are you talking about? Yeah. Just, whatever. Because they have they have a different cognitive understanding of of things or different experience or different knowledge or different learning or whatever.
Mark McGrath:That's the critical component is is orientation. The the phase is where people get like, people say, well, the phase of this thing goes that is if it were just a loop. It's not really a loop. And if you look at the OODA loop sketch, and that's how I always define it. Yeah.
Mark McGrath:I know you read my substack and you say I always put OODA loop in quotes sketch. That's what Boyd called it. And that's how he drew it. He never drew it in a circular a circular way. He would talk about it that way.
Mark McGrath:So in his early briefings, when he got out of the air force and he's talking about patterns of conflict, he was talking about oodle loops, how Alexander had a faster oodle loop than Darius in the battle of Gaugamela, you know, the Macedonians versus the Persians or whatever. And that's not wrong per se, but his own thinking evolved to say that there's something more than just going through something fast. I have to be oriented a certain way. I have to have certain beliefs. I have to have certain understanding because that's what actually empowered Alexander to see the opportunity.
Mark McGrath:Not that he was just not that he was just quick. Because you can have a really fast doodle loop, and if you're going in the wrong direction, it doesn't matter. You know? It's just like a a dog chasing its tail.
Sam Alaimo:You you like when you talk about these questions you're asking during that observe phase or the orientation phase, that's like injecting caffeine into my veins. Like, that's what it does to my body and my mind. And I imagine that that's that's part of the power is knowing what questions to ask and then endlessly asking those questions to make sure you have relevant up to date information on who you are, what you are, and where you are, and what environment you're operating in. Because that's like changing. That's like crack.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. So I I didn't understand the concept without thinking of it as a loop. So if you can try to concretize it, like, when you're in the investment firm or a company you're working on now, how do you not see it as a loop? Can you walk me through what it looks like in concrete application?
Mark McGrath:Ultimately, what you're doing is you're looking for mismatches. You're looking for patterns of things that don't add up. Something's off. Something's wrong. I got bad news.
Mark McGrath:Right? You know, most leaders in in business, they're constantly looking for good news. They just want good news. If you're doing OODA loop right, you're doing BOID right, OODA loop sketch right, you're scanning your environment for mismatches. Those mismatches are your opportunities.
Mark McGrath:What sport did you play? I didn't play sports. No? What sport do you like to watch? Tennis.
Mark McGrath:Tennis. Okay. You know someone's dominant lefty, right, or dominant righty or or whatever, and you can identify a weakness. That's a mismatch. Right?
Mark McGrath:Now you as the opponent, you're gonna play to that mismatch and seize that advantage. But and then or or do something novel yourself such that your opponent on the tennis court has no idea what's what's happening to me. Like, you ever see, like, a, like, a sports team, actually, Notre Dame on the other week when they lost to Northern Illinois. Right? They're all standing there like, what just happened?
Mark McGrath:They have they have no idea what just happened to them because whatever Northern Illinois was doing, Notre Dame had no answer for. They couldn't identify the mismatch. Northern Illinois kept presenting mismatches to Notre Dame that they didn't know how to handle. Now why could that have been? I don't know.
Mark McGrath:I would speculate and say, well, we're ranked number five. We're Notre Dame. We're better than them. You know? That's an unranked team or or whatever.
Mark McGrath:We didn't see them as a threat. We didn't see it as a legitimate threat. Whereas Northern Illinois found some gaps. They found those mismatches, and they capitalized on those, and the other the other team had no answer for that.
Sam Alaimo:So break it down for a knuckle dragger brain like mine. If if I'm the coach of Notre Dame, what should my mind have been doing in that moment?
Mark McGrath:Empowering people to make decisions at the lowest level, to look for things that are not apparent to somebody coaching, coordinating from the booth, or coaching from the coaching from the sideline. Give them the ability to make a different decision. If if if the play calls for the two hole and the four hole's open, the two hole's not, then go down the four hole. You know, give give people the flexibility and the agility to do certain things. As an example, that could that could be, one thing.
Mark McGrath:You ever read When Pride Still Matter, the biography of Vince Lombardi? Of so he went to Jesuit schools. He went to Fordham, and the Jesuits empower you to think and challenge things and question things. And if if something he would tell his players, like, if something works better, then do that. Even if the play if the play called for this and that's blocked and it's open and you're gonna score, then by all means, do the one that's open and you're gonna score.
Mark McGrath:Don't don't sit there and say, I'm afraid of coach or I'm afraid of, like, violating the rules or whatever. You know? You don't wanna do that because you wanna have empowered people to be able to make those kind of decisions.
Sam Alaimo:So by the time you're the coach on the court and you you notice this is this is fucked up, like, there's a mismatch Yeah. You should have identified that three years before. Possibly. Just like the marine corps did, everyone's a rifleman's that anyone could plug a gap immediately to win the fight. Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:So everyone else should be looking at their profession in the same way.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. Yeah. So, like, so just let's stay on football and and Lombardi. So Lombardi used to teach this thing about the sweep. He had this class or school for coaches, and John Madden went to it as a young coach.
Mark McGrath:And he's like, I can't do the John Madden impression, but he's like, you know, we're sitting there for eight hours just talking about the same play. And what he thought was crazy, like, when we go through the same play over and over again for eight hours, all of a sudden, these things emerge that we had never seen before. Opportunities start to emerge. We start to look at things differently even though we're doing the same heuristic. I mean, you you're no stranger to immediate action drills.
Mark McGrath:How many times have you gone through immediate action drills over and over and over again to the point where you're just like, I wanna throw up. I'm so freaking bored of doing these things. But then when the moment comes or the chaos comes or then you apply that, you don't have to think about it. You don't have to you don't have to stop and think about it. That's part of the orientation.
Mark McGrath:That orientation allows you to shape and see something immediately or act immediately that you can figure something out before your opponent does or before your enemy does.
Sam Alaimo:How do you think about the difference? That's a good example. So, like, immediate action drill. So if I am training for a high intensity kinetic conflict, and I've done a center appeal 10,000 times, leaving up to that moment, I'm just acting on instinct. I'll just do the center appeal.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. When the little ravine happens in Afghanistan, I'm getting fired out from the North. Yeah. But that's very different from the coach. It's very different from, like, let's say, an officer who's set back, who's making not just an instinctual decision for physical movement, but an actual tactical decision.
Sam Alaimo:There's almost two different oodle loops you have to abide by depending on what your position is.
Mark McGrath:Mhmm.
Sam Alaimo:Have you ever broken it down that way?
Mark McGrath:Yeah. You you need to have trust. Right? So you you I mean, are you so you're talking about, like, how how would a team do it with with leaders? Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:The the the guy who's carrying the ball It's a very different OODA loop from the coach. Correct.
Mark McGrath:So okay. So where their orientation intersects is that we're we're the same team. Like like, every orientation is unique, you know, your orientation and my orientation. But if we're on the same SEAL team, we're on the same, you know, marine artillery battery or the same football team, at some point, we intersect that we have. We're able to build mutual trust.
Mark McGrath:And from that mutual trust, we're able to develop intuition, and we share the same common goal. And everything that we do is geared towards achieving that goal, and that's we could go through EFAS. That's another Boyd thing. If I'm your coach, if I've done it right, you should be empowered to make the on the spot decision because you have full awareness of what the overall team goal is. And I shouldn't have to tell you to do something if you see an opportunity.
Mark McGrath:You see a mismatch. You identified a mismatch, and there's an opportunity. I shouldn't have to tell you to do it. You should be able to brief me afterwards what you did, but you shouldn't have to be told what to do. Because what that does is elongates the time scale.
Mark McGrath:Right? Like, if I have to go back and ask dad if I'm allowed to do something, and he's gotta ask grandpa and then, you know, and, like, that whole chain, by the time something happens, it's over. You know, this is, like, you know, back to the the corporate days. People are not empowered to do things. And by the time they ask all the right people, whatever they were asking about, it's already done.
Mark McGrath:Like, it's over. Like, it like, like, the the time is so far it's so far removed. And if a wily competitor had noticed that mismatch, they've already taken advantage of that. There's nothing you can do about it.
Sam Alaimo:So you're a team of former combatants and athletes. Were they were you guys empowered to operate that way?
Mark McGrath:Absolutely. Yeah. Decisions were that that's why we still get together so much. I mean, because we trusted each other with our literally with our lives, and you were empowered to the lowest man to do the right thing. Everybody knew what had to be done, and it's so much easier to brief me about what you did rather than to ask me if you're allowed to do what you know you need to do.
Mark McGrath:That just that just that that that expands the time scale. We don't we don't want that. Because ultimately, orientation, we're trying to constantly reorient. You know, my substance called the world of reorientation. Like, we're constantly trying to build and augment our orientation such that we can compress those time scales.
Mark McGrath:So I can observe something and I know exactly what's happening. I know right what to do without having to think about it. I can act, like, you know, if a fly lands on my face, I don't have to think about it. We can just we can just do these things. You know, like, one pilot's eject out of a fighter, ask them, hey.
Mark McGrath:Do you remember what you did when you sat there and then, you know, like, you squeeze your cheeks and squeeze your legs and then pull your head up and did you know, going through your your ditty? No. You just did it. Do you remember it? Nope.
Mark McGrath:Why don't you remember that? Because you had drilled and trained for that so many times that when the moment of truth came, it was instinctual, and you didn't have to do anything, except it. You just did it, and then So
Sam Alaimo:you're doing this now as a company. You this is your work. You're helping companies do this. I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of, like, let's say let's say the investment firm you were working for, they'd never heard of this before. You come in there and say, listen.
Sam Alaimo:I know these guys are playing with a significant amount of money, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions. I need you to trust them. I need you to let them make autonomous decisions on the ground, boots on the ground Yeah. Without your approval and just wait for them to brief you after the fact? How do you convince people to accept that kind of that kind of autonomous action without them having come from it, like, without even understanding it?
Mark McGrath:It's not it's not impossible, but it's it's very difficult to observe in, say, big public corporations. It's probably not not nearly as I think of, like, the bureaucracy, the the risk aversion, the the lack of the lack of trust. You know? They they're all command and control systems. Boyd talked about one of his briefs or or organic design for command and control, the difference between leadership and appreciation or appreciation and leadership versus command and control.
Mark McGrath:Command and control is a system where we don't trust anybody. So we have command and control and there's wickets and there's this and there's that and I have to hit and I have to be able to see everything in real time and everything's objective. Whereas appreciation and leadership is that I can understand the value or worth of people, ideas, and things. And with that leadership, I can inspire and influence others to achieve uncommon goals together enthusiastically. That's a totally different thing to command and control.
Mark McGrath:That's a trust system. Yeah. Boyd talked about military units about trust, about trusting each other. And, you know, you it's no stranger. You've been in these types of units where you trust each other literally with your with your life, even in training.
Mark McGrath:Because, like, you know, like, you trust the parachute's gonna open. You know, I trust that this round is gonna do what it says it's gonna do. Like like like, there's there's there's all this implicit trust. When you don't have that, you can't operate. And he he figured this out.
Mark McGrath:He one of the areas that he studied and you you've seen the, the sort of epistemology of Boyd, was the Germans after Napoleon. You know, around when Clausewitz came out. You know, Clausewitz was one of the military reformers after Napoleon. And they're like, we can't have this again. We gotta we gotta figure out, like, you know, what needs to change.
Mark McGrath:And a knack acronym that he used to use is EFAS. It was Einheit, Fingerspitzinger Fuhl, Auftraag, and, Schweppencht. And Einheit was mutual trust. That if we don't have mutual trust, there's literally nothing we can do as an organization.
Sam Alaimo:This is Bode at Klausowitz.
Mark McGrath:This is Boyd. Mhmm. Well, this is the Germans. This is Boyd piecing together what he learned from, Moltke and and and Clausewitz, the rest of them. The second one was Fingerspitzingerfield because we trust each other, because we know how to operate, and we know our immediate action drills and stuff like that, we can develop
Sam Alaimo:intuition so that now
Mark McGrath:we can communicate without even communicating. Right? We we develop a team intuition. Auf Trog or Auf Trog's Tactic was sometimes translated as mission command. But, really, what it is is empowerment.
Mark McGrath:It's that if you know the mission, you know what has to get done, you know the final result desired, you're empowered to do it. You don't have to be told by an officer, and you don't have to be given a book and, you know, this is the paint by number step by step by step by step. You don't have to you don't have to have that because you're empowered to do that. You don't have to ask because you know you're allowed to do that. That's the mission.
Mark McGrath:So just do it. Right? Everybody's empowered. And the last thing is a Schreppenckt was a focus and direction. What's the focus and direction point?
Mark McGrath:You know? What are we trying to achieve either, you know, tactically, operationally, strategically? It doesn't matter. And once we all understand that and we harmonize around that, there was another Boid word was harmonize, not synchronize.
Sam Alaimo:I dig
Mark McGrath:it. Synchronize is for watches, harmonize is for people. Once we harmonize around those goals and objectives, now we're truly empowered to thrive.
Sam Alaimo:You talk about mismatch. Doesn't it pair with isolation? Yeah. How does that how does that match up go?
Mark McGrath:So so great great point. So in his brief, the strategic game of question mark and question mark, which he reveals what the question marks are in the brief, they're actually it's interaction over isolation. It's the strategic game of interaction and isolation. You interact with your environment. You interact with your teammates.
Mark McGrath:You interact with your subordinates. You interact with your superiors. You interact with your customers, your clients, whatever. You interact with the people you're defending, the people that you're protecting. You isolate your opponents.
Mark McGrath:You isolate your enemy. You're constantly trying to isolate your enemy to reduce his optionality, to limit his action such that you yours can remain free and independent. The reason that you interact is for the goal of free and independent action so that you individually or you as a team, you as an organization can enjoy freedom of action and independent action within your discipline or discipline or domain. If you're isolated and I'm no longer interacting, or I could self isolate. I could say, ah, we know everything.
Mark McGrath:I've done this a million times. Oh, we've always done it this way. I can isolate myself that way. My my functionality through the Loup Scratch is gonna degrade because my orientation and perception is gonna be misaligned with reality. And it's gonna misaligned with reality.
Mark McGrath:And it's gonna if I'm in a competitive situation, it's constantly gonna go like that. Me, that, you know, crashing and noodle loop you've heard the term crashed OODA loop. Right?
Sam Alaimo:I know. Yeah. Yeah.
Mark McGrath:So that was one of the the terms people use a lot. Well, it crashed his OODA loop. What what I meant is that I can no longer function independently and freely. Notre Dame's OODA loop crashed. They lost Northern Illinois.
Mark McGrath:You've isolated your thinking. You've cut yourself off from the rest of the world. This is how it's always been. We know how it's gonna be. We don't have to interact.
Mark McGrath:We don't have to get feedback. Because that's the other thing with the OODA loop, you know, you're constantly getting feedback. You know, you're constantly getting feedback, making new observations, and learning. Now you heard me say the example cognitive software. I mean, it's just like your iOS in your phone.
Mark McGrath:If you don't update it, you don't refine it, revise it, it just becomes obsolete. It it it becomes dysfunctional. The human computer is no different. The human the human cognitive software is no different. You constantly have to keep feeding it because the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity of the universe is never going away.
Mark McGrath:And I gotta I wanna I wanna surf that rather than be, consumed by it. So in order to surf that, I constantly have to keep breaking my models and revising my models and my understanding of how that VUCA, you know, volatility and uncertainty complexity, how that actually flows. So I can create a state of flow.
Sam Alaimo:Is there a certain cycle of the mismatch isolation duality? Like, is it constantly asking for mismatches to then isolate? Is that how that that function should work inside the mind? It
Mark McGrath:can. Yeah. I might wanna interact with a a mismatch. It might not be an isolation thing. It might be an interaction.
Mark McGrath:There's an opportunity for us to to interact. If I notice that, say, like, a mismatch, I know that certain customers in a certain area aren't being aren't being serviced or they're not they're not getting this or not getting that's a mismatch. And that calls for me to interact with them. And then I can isolate my competitors that are not doing the interaction and isolate. I'm just telling you how I speak Spanish, and I was going into The Bronx in certain neighborhoods where you had to speak Spanish or you'd be in a lot of trouble.
Mark McGrath:Well, in medical sales, you know, a guy is six three, just wearing a suit with short hair because I was still in the reserves. I looked like a cop. And people would just, like, part it was like Moses parting the Red Sea. Like, people would just move away from me. And walking in these offices, and they'd say, like, we don't speak English.
Mark McGrath:You know? And I started speaking to them in Spanish, and I saw the mismatch. People were afraid to go into these doctors' offices because where they were located. I wasn't. So rather than I isolated the mismatch, now I started interacting.
Mark McGrath:And I boxed out all my competitors. There was it was a pathology lab. They were sending, great, their biopsies to our pathology lab because I would interact. Where where and then, like, any competitor wouldn't go in there anyway because they chose to isolate away from that. They chose not to interact with that mismatch.
Mark McGrath:Because I I'll never forget this. I remember looking at these reports. I'm like, look at all this opportunity. Like, what is this? Oh, nobody goes in there, man.
Mark McGrath:No. No. Don't go in there.
Sam Alaimo:I see why you call your platform the whirl of reorientation because this is a a never ending process.
Mark McGrath:Never ending process. Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:And it's constant awareness. It it it keeps like, the word that hits my head is crack. Like, it's gotta be addicting once you habituate this kind of process. You're constantly on and constantly aware, and I bet then it it feels uncomfortable being isolated. It's uncomfortable thinking you have it figured out at that point.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. Totally. Because you know you know right then, I gotta break my model. Something's off. Yeah.
Mark McGrath:I gotta break and revise, break and revise, break and revise. Most people don't wanna do that.
Sam Alaimo:Well, it's uncomfortable at first, and then it's always uncomfortable to do the inverse once it's habituated. Yeah. Once you're comfortable, like, literally just opening your brain and understanding the world around you, it has to hurt doing the opposite.
Mark McGrath:Comfort is, exactly, doing the opposite. Thinking contrarily, going against a crowd is not a comfortable place to be. Once you feel comfort, that's the biggest red flag to you. Like, I gotta break the model and redo something because if I'm comfortable, that's only gonna lead to complacency. It's it's the same thing it's the same thing in business.
Mark McGrath:You know, Blockbuster was number one in everything, every category in home entertainment. Right? Blockbuster was number one until all of a sudden they weren't. And it was just just like just like that. You know?
Mark McGrath:They're they're no longer irrelevant. But imagine going in there because, like like, they could have bought Netflix. Imagine going in there and presenting to them, and you're thinking, I got all these stock options. I got a house on Long Island. Like, what what what do I what do I need to take this risk for?
Mark McGrath:I'm comfy. I don't need to do that. Like, Kodak's another great story. Like, you read about, can't think of the author's name, but it's a billion dollar lessons was the book. And they go in there.
Mark McGrath:They they discovered digital photography. Like, this is gonna be the end of us if we don't if we don't do something about it. And they're like, we've been in the film business forever. We know what we're doing. You know?
Mark McGrath:Know? Look at the mansion I live in. I'm I'm not I'm not taking any risk. I'm not gonna lose that. You do have to have some level of, you know, being able to take risks.
Mark McGrath:I I always think I always like to tell the story of Apple. Like, I think that Steve Jobs, when when they threw him out the first time, it's because he was that guy that's all smashing the model. We gotta keep going. We gotta keep making this better. And they're like, no, man.
Mark McGrath:We've got money now. Like, we we we can slow down.
Sam Alaimo:We don't have That's right.
Mark McGrath:That's why and they got rid of him. And then they brought him back because they realized that, like, to be competitive, you have to have that approach where you're constantly reinventing yourself. You're constantly reorienting. The the world of reorientation actually comes from the same paragraph of a briefing called the Conceptual Spiral that the name of our podcast comes from. There's no way out.
Mark McGrath:And what Boyd was saying is that there's no way out of the world of reorientation because, you know, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and none of that stuff's going away. So there's no way out of that. And if you don't reorient, if you're not in that world of reorientation, you're gonna get you're gonna you're gonna get defeated. You're gonna become obsolete. You're gonna become irrelevant.
Mark McGrath:It and you can you can you can overlay that. You can watch any sport. You can look at any business thing. You can start to overlay that. And like I'm saying, it's like, once you see it, you can unsee it.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. And it's it's really easy to not easy. It's simpler. It's more simple to predict when something's gonna derail or something's gonna be successful because you start to look for those traits. That's what I was trying to teach people in asset management.
Mark McGrath:I'm like, once you get this, everything is just gonna woah. I had never I never knew that was right there before. I never I never knew that was a good all this stuff comes self evident. A lot of people take like, when you talk about Boyd, a lot of people will feel intimidated or threatened that you're going in there to tell them that they don't know how to do x. So, like, if I'm working with a, say, a football coach, which I have, I'm not telling him, I know more about football than you, and this is how you should coach football.
Mark McGrath:I'm not saying that. I'm showing you that if you take your current model of what you think you know about football and you start challenging that and testing that and smashing that every week, week in and week in week in week out, looking for mismatches within your environment and empowering your people to make decisions within that framework, you're only gonna get better as a football coach. You're only gonna get better as a football team. One of the best books on this is Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh. Yeah.
Mark McGrath:He was the famous San Francisco forty niners coach and coach at Stanford. And knowing zero about Jon Boyd, he wrote one of the best books ever about, like, Jon Boyd type thinking. Because, like, I think successful people, it's inherent to them. They're they're inherently doing this. Our argument is that when and I think this was Boyd's too.
Mark McGrath:When you become aware of what's actually making you successful, now you can double, triple, quadruple that. That's where the results become geometric.
Sam Alaimo:There's a point I wanna hit because it you did a post the other day that it really struck my brain. You were talking about how Boyd is not commonly accepted. Yeah. No matter how much he read, no matter how much he studied, no matter how much education, no matter how sound the theory, he was never gonna be truly accepted because he had a military background. Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:He had a knuckle dragger, boots on the ground, pilot Just
Mark McGrath:a fighter pilot.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. He was a fighter pilot, but in Korea and Vietnam, if I understand. He was actually a combat fighter pilot.
Mark McGrath:He he he flew combat missions in Korea, but never fired a shot in anger and was never, to my knowledge, was never shot at. And he was not a lead, so he was a cover man in their formation. He he was not a fighter ace that developed a tactical model in Vietnam.
Sam Alaimo:But he was a combat fighter ready in order to incur that risk in the combat.
Mark McGrath:Oh, absolutely. In his Vietnam time, he commanded what was, dubbed as spook base. It was in Thailand, and it was where they were running the, like, the sensors and the, like, the black ops out of in Thailand, but he he didn't have a he never commanded a fighter squad.
Sam Alaimo:Well, I guess the point is that that's held against him
Mark McGrath:Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:When that is in fact the primary asset. That's what that's what backed up all of his education and made it worthwhile and made it applicable to asset management, to sports Yeah. Entrepreneurship, to finance. Yeah. And it's ironic that that those, like, the quote, unquote experts in theory would discredit him for what makes his theory actually applicable in the real world.
Mark McGrath:Right.
Sam Alaimo:It stunned me that that's actually a thing.
Mark McGrath:So so what he did was is it related to his Korea experience that came after his his real corpus of work started, you know, in theory, the late sixties when he came out with an engineer energy maneuverability theory. And if you read the Boyd bio, it was when he commanded the base in Thailand that he was writing to his wife, like, I'm on to something. Like, I can see it clear as day. There's this thing I can see. It's gonna make humans better off than they are.
Mark McGrath:Like, you know, he he was thinking these things. He went back and he revisited his time as a fighter pilot in Korea in the mid seventies. So he had started this work. He went back and revisited the air situation in Korea because it was a 12 to one. Like, it was it was us 12 to one over the over the MiGs.
Mark McGrath:And he went back and he explored that as part of what was called the lightweight fighter program, which the results of that were the f 16 and the f 18. The myth of Boyd is that, oh, yeah. He was a fighter pilot in Korea, and he came up with this tactical model in a dogfight, you know, whoever has a faster oodle loop. And that's mostly what it's reduced to.
Sam Alaimo:As if that would be irrelevant.
Mark McGrath:As if it would be irrelevant. And then I think the other things come, well, he wasn't an academic, and he wasn't a PhD.
Sam Alaimo:As if that would be helpful.
Mark McGrath:As if that yeah. Exactly. And that was really when so when he came up with destruction and creation, that's usually my litmus test. When someone that they say they know a lot about Boyd or Udo, I say, what do you think of destruction and creation and how it applies? Like, what's destruction and creation?
Mark McGrath:The paper that Boyd writes, the only paper he ever published. Just one paper. It's 11 pages, one paper. There's, like, 50 sources on it. Did you read it?
Mark McGrath:No. I did. I'm not aware of that. Then you can't talk about Boyd.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah.
Mark McGrath:Because Ooda, everything comes from that paper. That's what he riffed off of his entire career was destruction and creation. It's not very big. I can have a copy of it. Just a course.
Mark McGrath:It's not in your book. Yeah. It just so happens I have a copy of it in one of my Boyd books. But one of the one of the things that got him on this was, like, how in the hell did me as a fighter pilot with five children, one of them has special needs, and all the other stuff that I have to do as an air force officer, how in my free time did I come up with, you know, the aerial attack study or energy maneuverability theory? Because he did all that autodidactically in his free time.
Mark McGrath:So think about that. You're a young officer, and autodidactically, in spite of all the things that you have to do, you know, for your your billet in the air force, your five kids, one of those special needs, somehow you managed to write in your free time the definitive air to air combat study that all NATO air forces use and the design theory that is applied to all modern aircraft. That was really his thing. It's like, how the hell did I come up with this and not all these aeronautical engineers that we have, not all these astrophysicists from, you know, Caltech or MIT or whatever. How is it that I came up with this stuff?
Mark McGrath:And that was really his driving kinda impetus. Like, what is it that empowered me to do that? And that's how he came up with destruction and creation, and that's what he riffed off for the next he wrote that that he published that in '76, and then he died '97. So for the next twenty one years, he was basically riffing off that.
Sam Alaimo:It's incredible. Let's move on to sort of a lightning round to wrap this thing up. Sure. So random like, radical pivot here. Give me a sixty second pitch on on psychedelics.
Sam Alaimo:Any direction you wanna take.
Mark McGrath:So our interest in psychedelics and if you go to our podcast, no way out, we've had a lot of guests lately talking about psychedelics. We've had Jesse Gould. We've had Norman Oller now twice on our show, wrote the book called Tripped, which is crazy. Maria Volkova, and we we have some others in in that we haven't published yet. But we're a veteran owned service disabled small business.
Sam Alaimo:And The podcast or your company at home?
Mark McGrath:Company. The yeah. The so the four of us all have What's your company called? Sorry. A g l x, Alpha Golf Leamax.
Mark McGrath:Right? Aglxaglx.com. So we all have service connected issues, but we're you know, so we're a service disabled, better known small business. And the thing that drives all of us crazy, and I and I know that you share this, is how many vets are committing suicide.
Sam Alaimo:It's espionage.
Mark McGrath:It's it's out it's outrageous. And there are novel therapies that aren't even really novel. These things have been around for thousands of years, like psilocybin and like ibogaine and like MDMA and ketamine, and all these other LSD and other things that can improve mental mental health. We had Norman Oller on the show, and he's talking about how LSD was actually created for mental health. And it's like a onetime use.
Mark McGrath:It's designed to be like a onetime use product, where you use it once and, like, you never have to you never have to use it again. He talks about that on the show, but I I think that that's a really big thing to us is, like, what are some ways that we could help veterans get treatment? So we we we certainly use our platform as a dialogue to get people to to think and talk about these things. And turns out, I mean, you know, there's a lot more people talking about them than you would think, which is good. And then, you know, hopefully, within the even within the military, it seems that the the the conversation of psychedelics is a lot less taboo.
Mark McGrath:But they have a stigma. Right? They have a stigma that, you know, that's what the hippies did in the
Sam Alaimo:old days
Mark McGrath:or that's what people that burned their draft cards
Sam Alaimo:That's going away real quick. That that stigma is going away real quick.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. And I think that any veteran that, you know, we all have compassion for other veterans and we see what people have gone through, you you know, we've all seen it to some level. Something could help them do it. And something that's been around for thousands of years, and they only maybe need to use it once or whatever. Like, why wouldn't we why wouldn't we explore those
Sam Alaimo:Yeah.
Mark McGrath:Things rather than, and I won't go into the details. I know someone jumped off the Bay Bridge in Rhode Island. And when they autopsied him, you know, he had all the, quote, unquote, drugs to help him with, you know, depression and whatever, like, all those psychoactive and psycho psychotropic pharmaceuticals. And you wonder, like, what if he had gone on a trip? You know, if he would that have helped him?
Mark McGrath:Would that have cleared out, you know, the the the things in his head that were, you know, distracting him and and and and keeping him disconnected from reality? And it's really it's it's boy's dude a little sketch. Like, you're trying to get orientations realigned to reality, and I think that psychedelics actually help with that.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. Second one is where'd Moose come from?
Mark McGrath:So in eighth grade, my best friend, Joe Wozniak, started calling me Moose, and it stuck. And, you know, with the name McGrath, like Mark McGrath, that's, like, an illiterate of Moose McGrath wasn't that big of a deal. And then in the marine corps, everybody just it didn't really pick up in college, oddly enough. Like, nobody really called me Moose in college, but in the marine corps, like, day one, like,
Sam Alaimo:how does that Moose. I need to find out. Like, what is their you don't look like a
Mark McGrath:Six three? Like, I don't know. A lot a lot of officers aren't Paul. I, you know, I I was usually not not Paul was the tallest guy, but I was the tallest officer in my battery, so I don't know. They tried to do Sugar Ray.
Mark McGrath:That would people would try because the I'm
Sam Alaimo:so much better.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. Well, the leaders leader of Sugar Ray is Mark McGrath. Right? So Mark McGrath, Mark McGrath. And that would last about a day because somebody would say, sugar oh, you mean moose over there?
Sam Alaimo:It's too flattering as well. The nickname has to not be flattering.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. It's no fun. Yeah. Yeah. You don't wanna be, yeah, you don't wanna be a celebrity.
Mark McGrath:You have a celebrity nickname. Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:How do you prime yourself for the day? One, two, three things you have. Is there a ritual in the morning?
Mark McGrath:04:15 wake up. Jesus. I don't know why I can't stop it either. Like, it's just, like, you can't not not do it. How
Sam Alaimo:long do you go to bed?
Mark McGrath:Ten.
Sam Alaimo:That's impressive. That's impressive. Yeah. So 04:15 wake up. Is that when you hit the pool?
Mark McGrath:Pool opens at five.
Sam Alaimo:What are you doing between then?
Mark McGrath:Reading. I try to read. So daily stoic. I do the daily stoic. I like that with with Ryan Holiday.
Mark McGrath:Very good book. And it's easy because you flip through the thing. I also like to read in the mornings. I read and I listen to two types of books. One is Steven Pressfield's nonfiction books.
Mark McGrath:So the war of art, turning pro, the authentic swing, you can read them in two hours. And when you listen to them at two times speed, you can get it all in an hour. And sometimes go into the pool or whatever just to have that on another one I love is Endurance, like, about the Shackleton expedition by, Alfred Lansing.
Sam Alaimo:Still haven't read that. I gotta buy it.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. You don't complain about cold after you read that you read that book and, you know, spoiler alert, you know, it's a historical thing, but everybody survived. And you just can't imagine that people survived that thing. But and then when you get to the pool, it doesn't matter how many times you go in, you know, it's like surf torture. Right?
Sam Alaimo:Yeah.
Mark McGrath:You know it's gonna be cold. Yeah. You know it's gonna suck for, like, I don't know, a time, and then it's not gonna suck anymore.
Sam Alaimo:Especially when it's cold in Manhattan, and you're going into the gym and it's cold and the water's cold, and the last thing you wanna do is jump in.
Mark McGrath:No. So my daughter's a swimmer in college. She's a division one swimmer. And she was asked by a 11 year old, is it hard to get into the pool? Like, you know, do you all she goes, I've been swimming since I was, you know, half your age, and every time I get into the pool, you gotta tell you gotta go through that.
Mark McGrath:I know it's gonna be cold. I know it's gonna suck, and you just you just do it.
Sam Alaimo:What's your swim routine like? What's your workout? Swim? Just endurance. Just
Mark McGrath:go Just
Sam Alaimo:get it.
Mark McGrath:Just get it done. When I'm primed, I could generally do about 3,200 meters in an hour.
Sam Alaimo:How many days a week can you do this? Five. Five days a week. You just swim for an hour.
Mark McGrath:Ideal. Yeah. Do you lift at all? Yeah. I like to do barbells.
Mark McGrath:I like to do, the starting strength program if you're familiar with Sets of five. Right? Start well, starting strength is like like squat, deadlift, standing overhead Bench. Bench, and a power cleans. And I find that that's a my son did that as well.
Mark McGrath:Both both of my boys did that. And one of my boys is a senior in high school, and he's a he's a d one swim prospect as well. I like the I like the simplicity of starting strength. There's actually an article on starting strength on their web page about about the oodle loop, and it's one of those things I wish I would have known when I was younger. Like, I wish I would have known about starting strength while I was in high school or even in the even in the marines.
Mark McGrath:I think a lot of the the PT that we did, you know, you're you're physically paying for it now. Yep. And I think with some refinement, like like a barbell program that promotes, like, more, like, salatophagy, anything like that, I think would have been beneficial. The other thing too, like, you know, who knew back in, like, '98, no one talking about, like, nutrition. Yep.
Mark McGrath:Nobody was talking about none none none of that stuff.
Sam Alaimo:And really the war on terror that, like, there became a a cult of fitness. That's when, like, functional fitness and CrossFit, that's when these things started to blow up.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. Yeah. We were fit. It was just different. It was just, like
Sam Alaimo:Running in different and like yeah.
Mark McGrath:Quit quit bitching. You know? Just go out and run and
Sam Alaimo:yeah.
Mark McGrath:But, you know, you surely run somebody. That's that's all BS. Like, who told you that? You know?
Sam Alaimo:What about after the swim? Anything else after that? Or is that the morning?
Mark McGrath:You gotta have the protein. You gotta you gotta replenish. I I do like to fast, though. So sometimes, like, I'll I'll swim, and I'll I'll let let it keep burning until, like, noon.
Sam Alaimo:Nice.
Mark McGrath:So and just have, you know, like, I'd be drinking, you know, like, the the black coffee Yeah. Which is also something I I learned late in life. I wish I would have known more about fasting back in well, we had, like, de facto fasting. Right? And, you know, we've been on ops, and, like, they don't, you know, you don't eat.
Mark McGrath:Like, you just you don't eat, so you just tell yourself, well, I don't need food.
Sam Alaimo:It's the ancient things. Fasting, the psychedelics, the oder loop.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. Right?
Sam Alaimo:It's all the old ways. What about books, Diva? A couple books that have changed your life.
Mark McGrath:The Art of Contrary Thinking by Humphrey B. Neil. It was recommended to me by a cabbie in February when I was home visiting before deployment. And a guy asked me, like, what do you wanna do when you gather marines? I said, oh, I wanna go to law school, but I was a history major.
Mark McGrath:I don't wanna work in a museum or be a teacher. And, says, ah, you should go work on Wall Street. Wall Street's run by liberal arts people. I'm like, BS. He's like, no, man.
Mark McGrath:You gotta get the book The Art of Contrary Thinking. So I got this book, and that's actually the second version. The first one I had was so tattered and and and and marked up. It was actually the first ever thing I bought on Amazon. It's a famous old Wall Street tome, and it basically says that when you think like everyone else, you're likely to be wrong.
Mark McGrath:And when everybody thinks alike, everyone's likely to be wrong, and you have to train your mind to think against the crowd and think against the herd. And for, you know, marines and seals, it's like you're gonna read this and be like, yeah. That's the life I chose. And, like, now I understand it better about avoiding crowdthink. Yeah.
Mark McGrath:I mentioned Endurance by Alfred Lansing. I love that book. Oh, and then, you know, Science, Strategy, and War, you know, the the Boyd book I was showing you. I mean, I take it with me literally everywhere. How do you pronounce
Sam Alaimo:the author's name again?
Mark McGrath:Ozinga. Yeah. Franz Ozinga. Franz Ozinga. Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:Science, strategy, and war.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. He's a retired air force officer, from the Dutch air force. Yeah. I I mean, it's great. I mean, this is like if I was gonna say, get the Boyd textbook Yeah.
Mark McGrath:And we're it's this, and we're gonna riff off of this. I've had it since the first publishing.
Sam Alaimo:It looks like it's been right about 79 times.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. Thousands. And it's just it literally, like I said, goes with me and everywhere. So Certain to Win by Chet Richards is another great one. And Chet was a collaborator of Boyd, and he's been a guest on our show.
Mark McGrath:His book, Certain Win, is like how to apply Boyd specifically to business. It's got more of a maneuver warfare type flavor to it, whereas, say, that book is more of the comprehensive, like, thriving and complexity, and that's that's the one that I would recommend. You can't come in and teach a class on OODA and then leave and, like, everybody knows it. You know? His minimum that he would request was six hours.
Sam Alaimo:Oh, geez.
Mark McGrath:I I need six hours. We need to talk about these things. People say we got fifteen minutes. I'm like, I'm gonna distill an you know, a six to thirty six hour brief in fifteen minutes, and I'll do my best. And, hopefully, you give people enough of a taste.
Mark McGrath:And if they don't get it, then their competitors might. And if their competitors do, the people that wouldn't give it the the time of day, they're they're in a lot of trouble.
Sam Alaimo:I love it.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. And that and it's ultimately we say it all the time. And you and you see me write this on the on the on the substack. Do this before your competitors do. If your competitors are learning these things and you're not, you're gonna get hosed.
Mark McGrath:It's it's imminent. You you can you can look at it as an overlay and slap it on and say, they are going to lose at some point because they're unable to reorient. They're unable to constantly change their environment. They're too comfortable. They're vulnerable.
Mark McGrath:They're vulnerable to threats. And once what we try to do is try to build an in internal component in an organization so that they can see these things themselves. They don't need to rely on us as a crutch. You know? We can kinda come in like an embedded liaison and then leave.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. We don't wanna be like a big box consulting that you just keep, you know, constantly buying, you know, boilerplates and templates from. But, yeah, that's what you ultimately, you know, you you teach people. And they have to do the work. You know?
Mark McGrath:Like, if they don't do the work, you know, and their competitors are, it's it's gonna be an ugly situation for them at some point.
Sam Alaimo:How about movies?
Mark McGrath:The movie Lebowski. Number one. Yeah. And I walked in here to the lobby, and I saw the mirror that I have the exact mirror in my office. You know, are you a Lebowski achiever?
Mark McGrath:Of course, Fullmetal jacket.
Sam Alaimo:Oh, yeah.
Mark McGrath:That was what I was saying after the Big Lebowski. And then, like, number three is harder to pin down. I mean, of course, Top Gun was very was very influential on me.
Sam Alaimo:Classic.
Mark McGrath:You know, my father raised me on John Wayne movies, the Milk and the Stars. Seen one.
Sam Alaimo:I have to Oh, really? Yeah.
Mark McGrath:Yeah. Sanzu Iwo Jima, Green Berets, all those and even, like, the westerns. You know, I watch a lot of movies with my boys. So about one boy's 19. I was 18.
Mark McGrath:So, you know, Big Lebowski Animal House, those those sorts of things.
Sam Alaimo:Alright. We'll wrap it up there. How can people follow you and your work in your company?
Mark McGrath:Yeah. So to go our website is, aglx.com, alpha golf Lima x-ray Com. The Substack is the world of reorientation, but I just changed the domain. So if you type in the Whirl.Substack.com, w h I r l, you can it goes right to it. And then our podcast is No Way Out, and you can access the podcast either from hlx.com or The Whirl and, The Whirl Brewery orientation.
Mark McGrath:And it's also available through Spotify, iTunes, and we're on YouTube as well.
Sam Alaimo:Alright. Anything I missed, Sam, you wanna add?
Mark McGrath:No. We'll have to have you on the show sometime to talk about the things that you're up to. Appreciate it, brother. Thank you. Yeah.
Mark McGrath:Thanks for having me, Sam.
Sam Alaimo:That's it for this episode. If you wanna check out more from the podcast, head to 0eyes.com/nobelle, where you can see show notes, read more about our guests, and suggest guests or topics of your own. Until next time, stay in the fight. Don't ring the bell.