-

Picture this: you slap down five figures for a "1945 Romanée-Conti," swirl with practiced ennui, and announce you can taste the liberation of Paris.

Except the bottle is a kitchen-sink remix of Two-Buck Chuck feat. Photoshop & Social Proof that says the guy who sold it to you is legit.

You didn't buy wine. You bought belief. And belief, once corked with doubt, turns to vinegar faster than you can say Rudy Kurniawan.

Who is Rudy Kuniawan?

For those of you not as much of a TrueCon fanboy like me,

he’s an Indonesian whiz-kid who started showing up at wine auctions with mysterious millions and an even more mysterious cellar. Between 2002 and 2012, he moved more “rare” Burgundy than the entire Côte d’Or ever bottled. His superpower: creating wine fakes so good that in blind tastings, experts sometimes preferred his.

In Vino Duplicitas is a must-read, but long story short, a billionaire named Bill Koch caught on to Rudy after he found some factual errors (i.e. impossible vintage years). I won’t spoil it, but eventually Rudy got popped.

That said, his story raises an interesting point about what makes rare wine rare. Like if his wine is just as good (or better), isn’t it effectively the same? Almost. But it’s missing a tiny piece. The most important piece. It’s no longer scarce.

Here's the thing: we never actually trusted the wine. We trusted the scarcity.

When there are only 600 bottles of '45 Romanée-Conti on Earth, owning one means something. When Rudy's printing them in his kitchen between episodes of Breaking Bad, that meaning evaporates. The liquid might taste identical. The story dies.

This is why trust and scarcity are joined at the hip. Pre-internet, information was scarce, so having it meant something. Your doctor knew things you couldn't Google. Your consultant had benchmarks you couldn't access. Your wine dealer had the inside track on bottles you couldn't find. Trust was simple: they had the scarce thing, you didn't, transaction complete.

.

Since the invention of the internet, quality Information was never actually scarce. It was just stuck.

Think about it: every medical journal ever written existed somewhere. Every business case study sat in some library. Every wine vintage had been documented by someone, somewhere. The problem wasn't existence. It was synthesis. You needed a Columbia MBA to access certain databases, a medical degree to parse the journals, decades in Burgundy to connect the dots.

And the gatekeepers didn't just hoard information. They hoarded the ability to make sense of it.

Enter GPT. Suddenly any keyboard warrior can synthesize 50 years of medical literature over lunch. A 19-year-old can access every Harvard Business Review article and have it explained like they're five.

GPT didn't kill expertise, it killed the paywall around it. Anyone who can figure out how to get themselves online can access all medical knowledge, every business framework, the complete history of Burgundy vintages, and whatever else is out there. Information went from wine to water: infinite, free, and flowing from every tap.

Old trust equation: “They know something I don’t”

New trust equation: “They'll narrow something I can't”

It's the difference between a search engine and a decision engine. One gives you 10,000 results. The other gives you permission to ignore 9,999.

The market isn't paying for your confidence. It's paying for your constraints.

This creates a new currency with three denominations:

Taste — Can you turn 10,000 options into one recommendation without flinching?

Context — Do you grasp THIS moment, not some template from a TED talk?

Ownership — When it goes sideways, is your name on the bottle?

Money used to hide in information gaps. Now it hides in decision fatigue. The new arbitrage: selling simplicity to the overwhelmed.

Whoever compresses a thousand "maybes" into one "let's fucking go" prints equity.

Same trade everywhere: leverage infinite information, sell singular constraint.

For a century, fortunes were built on information asymmetry. Today, they're being built on decision fatigue asymmetry. We've gone from information asymmetry to decision fatigue asymmetry.

Watch what's happening: The most valuable people in every industry aren't the ones with the most data. They're the ones willing to hit delete.

The investor who goes all in while others hedge. The creative director who picks one concept while committees deliberate. The doctor who says "this is what we're doing" while others drown in the tests.

They're not braver. They're not better informed. They just understood the assignment: In a world of infinite options, the product isn't the choice. It's the choosing. Or rather, the not-choosing of everything else.

They don't need a hero. They need a filter.

The Formula Nobody Wants to Admit:

Infinite Options × Zero Constraints = Paralysis

Sufficient Options × One Constraint = Progress

The math is unforgiving. Every dashboard you share, every alternative you propose, every "on the other hand" you offer is a form of cognitive debt. And you're sending the bill to your client.

You can stay in the business of creating options. Keep delivering comprehensive reports. Keep believing that more information is the answer. Keep adding to the noise that is overwhelming your customers.

Or you can start playing the new game. Realize the product isn't the analysis. It's the conclusion. The luxury isn't the list of choices. It's the empty space you create by eliminating them.