Welcome to the Free Cities podcast.
My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 137 of the Free Cities podcast.
Yes, welcome to this.
Three Rules for Life, part two.
This is part two of my interview with Ben Gunn.
If you've been wondering why the episode is called Three Rules for Life,
well, the next two hours should answer that question for you.
bearing in mind it's a bit tongue-in-cheek as we say here in the uk yes jordan peterson can be
deeply annoying as well as deeply insightful anyway if you've come straight to this episode
from the web i would advise you to go back and listen to part one first that's number 136
for complete context. And if you haven't already, then episode 97 of this podcast
is a long form introduction to Ben himself and his general philosophy on life. If you're listening
to this as a new subscriber to the podcast on Fountain, well, many thanks indeed. I hope you
enjoy your early access to the next two hours of Alpha from the man like Ben Gunn. I did,
that's for sure if you're not a subscriber please think about supporting us it's only six dollars a
month for early access to long interviews like this one plus bonus episodes shout outs and
comments in the show intros and and this is the most important one a beautiful subscriber badge
on fountain anyway here's a quick synopsis of what you've got coming in the next two hours of
my conversation with Ben. I pointed my AI agent at it and he she had a listen. And guess what?
They created eight bullet points for life, as Jordan Peterson would say. Here they are.
Bitcoin's dual nature, store of value versus medium of exchange, economic structures and
incentives, political and class dynamics, the state, violence and property, political demographics
and economic decline, societal breakdown and reset, leadership, morality and the meaning of life,
and finally vision for the future. This is most certainly a banger of an episode. As I said
in the prelude to part one, I think this is one of my favourite episodes of all time. Or as the
AI put it, quite succinctly in fact, in quotes, this is a rally cry for how individuals can
navigate chaos by taking responsibility for their actions, embracing vulnerability and
aligning their values with meaningful action in both the physical and digital realms. Not bad.
Plus, I will never think about baby boomers the same way again. God bless them. Anyway,
Before we get into it, a quick public announcement. I'm off to Latvia for a week in August to record new interviews.
We'll definitely be visiting Baltic Honey Badger, if you know what that is.
Lots of great speakers there who I'm hoping will come onto the pod to talk.
But I'm also looking for other interesting folk, freedom lovers, you know the type, people who would like to have a long form conversation for this pod.
so please don't be afraid even to suggest yourself if you've got something interesting to say
otherwise please mention anyone you think i would like to talk to i'll be in riga in the middle of
august around the baltic honey badger conference dates drop me a dm on noster with suggestions or
in the old school way podcast at free-cities.org is my email address okay final word to our most
excellent show sponsor Veritas Village. They're building an off-grid village for freedom lovers
in Panama. All energy self-sufficient luxury homes in the process of being built right now.
And you can go and see them, check them out, buy an off-plan property there close to the beaches
and amenities, but in a slightly elevated location. So it's a perfect climate for growing your own
food every house comes with complete renewable energy independence whilst maintaining a modern
luxury lifestyle get in touch with them go and see the project look at houses that are currently
being built if you'd like to know more about their ethos and projects www.ecovillages.life
forward slash free cities for more info please mention us and there's also a link on that
interview that I did with Patrick, their founder, at last year's Free Cities Conference to give you
a good sense of who they are. Right, on to the episode. If you're not still in your rocking chair
from part one, you better grab it again. Set it down on the veranda this time of your ranch,
preferably, and now with dog curled up at your feet, please just sit back, relax, and enjoy part
two of my conversation with Ben Gunn.
So, as I was saying earlier, the theory always was that Bitcoin will be adopted as savings
and then it will become a medium of exchange.
No, I've always pushed back on that.
But that does seem to be happening.
No, I don't think it is.
I think it's just too,
you're feeling two parts of the elephant.
Because you can go right back to the white paper
and say, no, no, no, look at the title.
It's peer-to-peer cash.
Right, so then you've got an argument going
on a Bitcoin conference on a picnic bench, haven't you?
One guy's store of value with a MicroStrategy hat on
and one's got a hoodie on
and was leaning towards Bcash,
but went the way of the fork.
And he's saying, no, this is lightning
and it's got to be usable and it's got to be cash.
but it's a debt two people arguing about the two sides of what makes money money you it's an arch
i think money the word money looks in my mind like a bridge and the two points the moe the medium of
exchange and the store of value are like two pillars that come up and support the arch and if
you knock one away you don't have the other and the reason is this if you have a medium of exchange
it has to have value otherwise there's no point in exchange in it and if you have a store of value
it has to be exchangeable otherwise its value is only to people who want it so it has to be
maximally valuable and maximally exchangeable to be the best form of money to argue one aspect of
it against the other is to split the subject money has to be micro divisible to make it easy to
exchange and it has to have value in order to be money it has to have everybody has to have money
in common that you're prepared to swap for something that isn't money so that they're just
two sides of one issue argued against itself what i mean then is if you look at the world currently
i think personally many more people are using bitcoin as a store of value than of as a medium
exchange not that that's a bad thing i think it's an inevitable thing because um the more people that
use it as a store of value the more people will then eventually be peer-to-peer exchanging it
yep and um that's what i see in the world and that's what that's what i mean it's even a meme
amongst bitcoiners now you know save bitcoin spend your spend your tether or whatever you know
i get lost in these semantics mate because we're just arguing about the different aspects of money
is it money when you spend it yeah no but i mean in the real world if you turn on nbc
there's you know they talk about saving they don't talk about spending bitcoin they talk about
saving bitcoin they took the sailors on there their so-and-so's on there like and i think
if you took a survey of people who own bitcoin you know i would say 80 of them store their value
in it 20 of it well they store it because it's money i mean if let's take an extreme example if
we split them as issues as a point of rhetoric and we said right let's give examples of where
bitcoin's used as a store of value let's pick an easy one let's pick either the dollar strategic
reserve or sailor stash we'll pick sailor stash to invest in it as a store of value is to underline
your conviction that it can be exchanged in the future as a medium why would you store nuts in
the ground if you didn't think you could either eat them or swap them so when you stack you can't
eat a bitcoin you can't eat bitcoin and you can't live in sats i can't live but by storing something
how can you store something and say i'm storing it because it's good for storage
what are you storing what is it got value yeah it's got it's got a value okay so it can be
exchanged subjectively by negotiation yeah so the more bitcoin you stack and you say i'm saving
say saving is a means word it's an it's it's a it's a means to an end you're not saving to save
you're saving to spend i know but i think the majority currently of people who save bitcoin
will probably turn it into a fiat currency when they spend it yes that's what i mean yeah you
know that's yeah that's what i mean about we got we are that the theory that bitcoin will be used
as savings first and then as a medium of exchange more in the seems to be based and that's what i'm
basing it on you know well look what's happened like you apply where the progress is of it
bitcoin i mean to where we are in the economy and it's interesting to see which aspects of
bitcoin's value apply to which areas of the economy i'd argue medium of exchange if viewed
as a separate subject i don't i think it's one half of a word called money but the medium exchange
elements of it have moved to the lower scale of transaction and the higher uses of bitcoin in
terms of volume are used to store value so we've got a barbell we've got a low end of the economy
that supports farmers markets and podcast subscriptions and grants and donations and
t-shirts and all of these things that you can buy with a lightning wallet so it's totally
dominant in medium of exchange at the level of an event you can't buy a car with it that middle
ground that barbell is gone and then the next time you see bitcoin active on the economy
is at state and blue chip level and they are buying it to hold it so it's kind of weird
the medium of exchange guys that are against store of value get huge value from these holders
and vice versa because the holders who are holding it like gold coins get the comfort of knowing that
it's active and being used but what both are avoiding is the middle economy objects of high
value that would hit limits on things like tax regulation things of scale things of substance
cars to houses to businesses middle economy have to identify yourself have to be legitimate
bitcoin is a desert is a desert in those areas there's no way you can lose five figures of k
non-KYC Bitcoin. You can lose a few hundred dollars to a signer, to a signing device,
or you can lose $20 to a t-shirt. Can you spend 20 grand of it round trip without breaking the law?
Harder. There are a few use cases, but my point is that it's strange straight away to argue one
end of a subject against the other because money has to be exchangeable and it has to have intrinsic
value or a value that people will exchange it for otherwise why are you exchanging it it's worthless
you can't use it to counterbalance something that you want like timber or a car or a house
so if it's got no value you can't exchange it because the other guy doesn't want it
and if you can't exchange it it hasn't got value it's limited in its value by its how it's limited
to be exchanged so it's two sides of an argument but when you apply it to where bitcoin's adopted
I'll grant you that at the lower end
medium exchange is being proven out
how quick, how easy it is to make purchases
theoretically or at a small scale
but the reason it's kept small
is because you go into personal tax
bans, you go into capital gains
and outside of that de minimis
oh right, I bought some money on
I bought some bitcoin on coinbase and I spent it
in a coffee when I was on holiday in El Salvador
no one's going to come with the guns for you
or if they do you would be an
example and it would be bad overall for them
but that middle ground is the tax base and that's going to change it and how does it change
it's harder one ground man if you're small and you're hard to see you're small so you can't get
hit but you can't hit you can't hit back that's the that's the dichotomy you've got you either hide
and become like a a parallel society that well it has to be small because it's not as strong as the
main society physically or you have to be so big that you can bend the rules of it at the state
level changes in law at the blue chip level changes in governance and you've got to be big on that
side and it just interesting to me that on both edges the economy the fiat extremes in the billionaire and one hop from the central bank bitcoin has been acknowledged and is integrating and the only other place when you go down the ticket price and the activities in
an economy that you see it active and crackling is on wallet of satoshis at conferences or an
equivalent level of scale so do you think this is how it pans out then because what's stopping it
obviously, I think.
Well, no.
One of the things that's stopping it
is the capital gains.
Exactly.
He's just classing it as,
instead of classing it as money,
but by the way,
classing it as an asset.
That is also the area of the barbell
that it doesn't have capital gains, right?
In one use case, it's too small.
Fucking t-shirt, capital gains on a t-shirt.
We're not enforcing that.
It's going to cost more money
to phone them and chase them
than it would be to get 20 cents of capital gains.
So they can't enforce it on the lower band.
and all the tax breaks are for billionaires and corporations.
So there's no tax, there's no capital gains tax
up at that higher end and that's why it's been adopted.
Hold on a second, explain that.
Why aren't there, why is there no cap gains at a very high level?
They just, they have a degree of influence
over the ability to fight their own tax audits
that a blue collar family wouldn't have.
so michael say i don't need to go back to him but it's just a standard example of a big holder
and he's done it in a public way and done it in a way that's ostensibly not illegal
and is compliant he has a general counsel he has strategic resources he can game out and get advice
on and spend time and resource to walk that line in a way that it would be hard for somebody who's
living on a margin in a smaller business so it's a fight let's say that a family business wouldn't
have to accept bitcoin and to say well we don't pay tax on that but for someone at that level
they can get tax breaks they can do tax harvesting they get good lawyers in they they basically limit
the cost of carrying bitcoin to the level that people that do it in an informal way get which
is close to zero or zero and the benefit of the bitcoin is the capital appreciation of it
and the way Michael Saylor's been able to do it in the particular is to issue debt against it
instead of disposing of it. Both ways realize again, one is a way that you use the existing
recent increasing value to create more paper, to give you more cash, to buy more Bitcoin,
and you're putting on an accumulating bet. It's a bit bold, but I just point out that
it's no surprise to me that the two places in the economy that have the least violence
applied which is where it's too small to bother and where it's where you could get hit back by
someone with an equivalent amount of resource are the two places that bitcoin's made more progress
and the bit in the middle is the bit that's bullied out of its tax pushed around has a very limited
life doesn't really have a lot to live for which is that middle class that just does something
steadily and pays its taxes pays its bank interest and just keeps going it's boxer in animal farm
that level of society.
It's like, I'll work hard.
I'll go along with it.
It'll come good in the end.
I just keep going.
And then you have a heart attack and die.
And that's the bit that there is no Bitcoin in use
because to buy materials-
It's being saved there, I reckon.
It's what?
It's being saved.
Yeah, I think what you might get are very common,
I don't doubt it,
are like profitable businesses perhaps
or profitable sole traders,
people with high incomes
that just after their tax,
after their costs,
have 20 grand, have 50 grand
and buy Bitcoin with it.
but they're either going to move to somewhere it's not taxed or they're going to hold it for
a long time till there is no tax interestingly what you started noticing now is companies forming
who are offering the ability to loan to borrow against your bitcoin yeah which is obviously a
symptom of holders from probably you know i don't know 2015 holders who now are like
shit i want i want to i don't want to spend this but i want to do what sailor's doing and now i
think jack mallard's has just started a company that does that hasn't he you know and i i don't
know what do you think about that is that a bad long-term thing yeah yeah both terrible because
because of the fiat aspect of it because you're taking a long volatility idea which is owning
bitcoin outright with money that you've made and no you have no claims on your you have no credit
against you and you've got an excess that's what you buy bitcoin with i think when you start
stacking paper against it to get more you give up control over that and in leveraged bitcoin
positions that is your cutoff that's where your collateral and the value of your position
turn upside down and it's a great idea until that number on the bitcoin ticker
liquidates everything that you did with paper and you have a bigger loss so you don't you don't
really that's just the law of nature if you borrow as well as owning bitcoin you're you're
a function of just borrowing too soon though if you own like you know i don't know five bitcoins
now it's probably not the time to borrow on it but in 10 years time you could probably borrow
50 grand a year and or 100 grand a year possibly even and it wouldn't be a problem it's it's
what you mean is it's proportionally it's not one or the other like if you've got loaned bitcoin tm
it's inherently dangerous now like you could you could borrow ten dollars in every million dollars
of your bitcoin and be fairly confident unless bitcoin goes to close to zero you won't be
liquidated so there is element like it's like everything there's there's always in bitcoin
particularly in bitcoin a truth that people pick one side or the other and argue it and and debt
is another one of them it's it's bad to do a lot of and it's and it's arguably not optimal to do
none of and people can't work out that you just have a middle of something in something that
happened a few weeks ago was i was at the bitcoin conference nigel farage announced that if he got
into power with reform they would change the cap gains rules on bitcoin what i found astonishing
about that was they just said they were going to lower it they didn't say there shouldn't be cap
gains on bitcoin because bitcoin's money there should be no cap gains right do you did it you
did what 90 of people don't and it's to capture the buried lead in a statement these are clever
liar public lying in public is a skill and that is a great example of how you can change nothing
about what you're able to do after you're elected by saying something that could be clapped at that
is the art of politics.
He's not said
anything and all he's
done is underline
the fundamental principle
that Bitcoin should be taxed.
They're not set. What people
think they're saying is they're going to get a reprieve on their
taxes. But what they're being told is
that as long as they accept that it should
be taxed, we'll argue
and equivocate about what level it should be at.
And we can do that after we're elected.
I went even deeper, mate.
I saw that as a
as a as a announcement that the state should exist like someone should be able to tax you
there is stuff like i mean we're into politics now but like i haven't got a bitcoin solution for
national defense i've got a solution for local like paid volunteer fire services and things
that a minicus could get onto but we in between these episodes and things we watch hypersonic
missiles slam into tel aviv and they're coming in from a perspective where you kind of see what
it's like to get the maximum a state can produce pointed at you and i haven't got a i haven't got
something that removes a fiat structure from an from an economy or society is that then keeps that
type of thing is that your model of governance then everything is a free market other than the
protection of property rights i suppose you'd call that would you i i i don't know i don't think i've
i know there's a lot of people at this end of the politics that wouldn't like to be overly defined
but what i would say is that i i'm not an anarchist in the sense i think that there will be no
centralized state and it's not because i believe it should or shouldn't it kind of doesn't matter
does it it's what is likely to be enforced with the laws of violence and it's it's a bit of a
odd term but what i mean by the laws of violence is we're physical by nature there's not going to
be an abstract system that turns us completely abstract there'll always be a potential where
there's someone who's slightly smarter than someone else and that person who's not as smart
is stronger and they have a negotiation to make with you they say i can't build what you've built
because i haven't got the effort or the brains but i've got enough effort and brains to kick it over
and we'll make that okay by you giving me 10% of it.
And then you get to keep it.
It's a type of extreme capitalism.
And it gets ugly because you pay that Dane geld and they go away,
but you can't trust that they'll come back and try it again.
And that's what governments do.
They take an inch, they get given an inch and they take miles and miles
and do things in your name that you would be disgusted to have done with a vote.
But after you voted and they have the right to do it,
most people just go along, right?
Yeah, but even, you don't even need to vote on it,
let's face it.
You don't vote on the mafia, do you?
You don't vote on it.
They vote, by the way.
You know, I open the books, like make a,
like get a capo and get a soldier
and make them into a capo as a whole ceremony.
Doesn't that look a lot like when senators get sworn in me?
Put your hand on the magic book, do the ceremony,
promise that you'll never, ever do anything naughty.
Now you're not a human anymore.
you are a power allocator it's the same mafia and governments are very similar organizations
they rely on public um apathy and they're not ostensibly what they say they are they do things
with stated objectives and have underlying objectives they fall back to rules of violence
and they do it by singling out individuals to enforce a population i think it's also a function
The difference between a mafia in the state is how far the abstraction of violence has gone, I think.
You know, and like in the state, it's quite abstract.
They hardly ever come and knock on your door.
You just fill a form in with a piece of paper and send them money.
But the mafia might turn up on your door more frequently and demand some money.
It's a spot check.
Like if you've got 200 rifles to inspect to make sure they're clean
and you haven't got the time to inspect 200, you inspect a sample.
And the way you enforce violence is you enforce it on a sample.
You can't afford to batter the crap out of everybody
the way you deep down want to if you're a bully.
But you do have time to single out just that right one
who's just about beatable but big enough
to scare the shit out of everybody else.
And that's what happens.
Have you ever had any thoughts of what an evolutionary step beyond that system is?
Like you can go science fiction here or whatever.
Well, again, it's taking something that's true, which normally means it can be turned to one thing or another, which is physical capability.
It's like, where do you put your energy?
Do you put it into building something or do you put it into threatening someone else to take it down?
And these are complicated subjects.
subjects it's hard to know when's the right time to fight and when it isn't but it's to just i just
think there's this thing we've got ahead of ourselves and bitcoin is completely non-violent
because it does not exist in the physical space we do and i think this thing where it and they can
influence each other uh you can reach into that other realm and affect it but you can't be that
Bitcoin, we don't get and inherit the properties of Bitcoin by owning it.
And I think there's a big percentage of people that don't get that.
They think, right, my money's safe, so I'm safe.
And it's like, no, you're the weakest part of that.
And I think progress is just made when you take account of that.
That it's never going to, we're never going to have a Bitcoin standard
in that theoretical, completely non-violent.
in an environment that just base reward beating beating stuff around and having an ability to
destroy it it sounds cynical but it's not it's not cynical it's to say why would an abstract
concept apply itself in a jungle where we live it wouldn't the skill is to negotiate that part of it
to what you can make work that's fucking hard one of the theories though is that
the power of the abstract power can stop the violence as well it does do that as well you know
like i it is a good example i can't remember who said it but antlers on a on a oh yeah you know they
they they they're they're a very strong well antlers are better because you can actually
hurt someone with antlers yeah but as a stag you never really want to get to that point if you can
help it and they have so in the end it's like the biggest antlers yeah and then they become a
an abstract symbol of yeah let's not fight because i've got bigger antlers than you yeah so there is
a theory about that that the physical world can lack violence due to some abstractions now that's
where bitcoin's effective so like i'll give you i'll give you a wartime example that i was taught
a long time ago and i was being taught about the falklands war and there was a bombing run that the
RAF did from the UK using a pyramid of refueling that they've actually published the diagram
of it was like the refueler being refueled by the refueler.
What all flying at the same time?
No, in like a kind of coordination.
So they synchronized so that one bird was in the air to fill up a jet Then it peeled away Another one came further along And basically what it did it produced this unsustainable like you couldn do 10 of these attack on an Argentine well on a British runway that was occupied by an Argentinian fighter fleet
And it went, it was a massive operation.
Ridiculous.
And it strafed the runway with bombs.
and one of maybe 10 in a run of bombs one crated near the runway so it didn't actually do any
particular it's all right like not particular damage to the base but it was enough this is
the crucial part it was enough strategically to convince the the argentine uh command to withdraw
its fighter fleet because it was deemed at risk from distance and so without any violence
where the maximum would have been to actually keep going on those bombing runs that were
unsustainable very expensive and not possible to do 10 of and it would it chilled the issue at the
start and i think where bitcoin unlocks denied areas of the economy it has a second order effect
in dissuading people from even trying to fiddle with this that or the other part of a system
people who if we leave the door open on systems where anybody can stand on a pipe and ruin millions
of people's lives with a switch.
They will do it more often.
If you have a parallel system
or a fallback position that is ever closer,
they won't try in the first place.
You will not enforce things in a fiat law
if you're also aware that there's a NOSTA grievance procedure
that people can just go to for free
and have a better than average chance of being treated fairly.
And it will actually improve the existing system.
going back to Farage
he got unbanked
and then he went onto the Bitcoin
thing and that's how he got in
it's from what's not working
and the reason he is now still banked
is because
it pushed him into circles and have conversation
with Bitcoiners
wasn't it Coates and Co as well
they probably re-banked him because it was a terrible PR
the CEO got sacked
so these things
that people can do to punch others
remember at the bottom of all this is bullying and if you live by the sword you die by it and
yeah you can go out and you can do some naughty stuff and no one's going to stop you while you're
doing it but you don't own the consequences of breaking cover and and doing something nasty to
someone where 60 million other people see it and say i wouldn't want to be treated like that so why
should he be treated like that it draws the public attention to the wrong areas of what the state does
and how it does it.
And so that was a loss
because what did they get?
They got the benefit of removing him
from the system for two weeks
until the news media turned it into
a sacking of the CEO, gone,
and he's back in the banks
because it's political persecution.
That was a good round for Bitcoin.
It bounced him back to the ropes
where he had to talk to all the freedom maximalists
and say how terrible things are.
And then it drew him back in
because it wasn't able to enforce its move.
What do you think about all this cosying up to Bitcoiners by people in power now, politicians?
Do you think they'd turn away as easily as they turned towards?
I think politics, politicians as you see them, are better not viewed as people.
I know that sounds like dehumanising.
What I mean is, let me put it another way.
I know that's, but they're not.
And the reason is, first of all, you don't get their personal opinions ever.
So what we get is an onstage performance of something.
That performance, let's say it's not an opera,
let's call it a news reporter interview with Nigel
or with whoever, Keir Starmer.
If you said that's not a person with his own opinions,
he will stick to those opinions when pressed.
And let's call him somebody who is paid and gets power
from hitting the largest area of an audience.
that's the game so when we say oh what does he think of this what it doesn't that's not it
what what these politics politicians do is they cast out ideas to an audience and when the audience
resonates with it they get power so when to answer your question about bitcoin and how they're cozying
up to it i think when a politician's suite of comments goes from anti-bitcoin to neutral on
Bitcoin. It does nothing to me to tell me what that person thinks about Bitcoin. What it tells
me is the people that they are pitching to are being judged to be more receptive to Bitcoin.
So when you see politicians adopting it or opening the door to it or talking about it,
they're doing it in sympathy to their base. Their base is that more interested in it. Their base
have rejected the idea it's a scam and their base now think that it's somewhere between the standard
to do commerce on and not a scam anymore.
And if they don't adapt to that opinion,
they become unpopular.
Do you think that politicians are different now?
Do you think in the past they believed in something
and then they hoped everyone followed?
Or do you think they've always pandered to the...
Politicians now have more power.
So the state is a bigger percentage of our GDP.
So it's a factor that's more important in politics now
than it used to be.
If you own the last 5% of our national defense and a few basics, you can enforce your ethics better.
But what politicians now, modern politicians, have to do is be everything to everybody.
Everything to everybody.
Because that's the maximum jackpot.
That is almost, if you get a UK prime minister, you've got 60% to 80% of the wealth being created in that society at your fingertips for the time that you run.
and you've done it by promising people more than you can deliver
and it kind of works.
So they just copy...
Until there's a revolution.
Until people get too pissed off is basically what happens.
Well, where are we now?
We've got in the UK and actually most of the Western world,
we've got an economic and a political majority in the baby boomers.
All of a very tight grouping of preference and opinion
and will vote in their interest and will spend in their interests.
And they've been the dominant force in society for the last 30, 40 years.
So now they're retiring and getting sick
and the generation underneath them is much smaller.
So it doesn't have the productive capacity to live a quality life
and have the excess over to pay for the baby boomers,
healthcare, welfare, wars, and other expensive luxury opinions. And the difference has been
stretched in debt. So where the young and the under generations haven't made or won't or can't
make the wealth it takes for baby boomers to live like they've lived in their prime all the way
through to their death has been ballooned in debt. So we've not even got a stable demographic.
we've got the majority of people in the uk retiring the next sort of 10 20 years
and they expect services that need money and it's just not going to be there there's just this
bedraggled 18 to 35 year old minority who can't affect things at the voting booth because there's
not enough of them or in economics because they've got no money and they're being expected
to pick up the future tab for this other generation
and the first time is going to be when they retire
is they're not the economic majority anymore
but they're still the political majority.
From what it looks like to me,
and I use England as an example because that's where we are,
but I'm sure it's happening everywhere,
is slowly but surely the state is looting everyone.
Yeah, it's a farm.
It's run out of money and slowly but surely it's just taking money
because it doesn't produce anything.
Yes.
That's what's happening, right?
There's loads of horrible analogies for something like this,
and they're all quite incendiary, but they're not untrue.
It's like cancer.
It's like a tumor that represents 60% of the kilogram weight of a body,
and it absorbs nutrition and oxygen,
and it splits cells and it repeats itself in a way that doesn't cap,
and it serves no organic purpose to the whole.
It is just a big biological cost to the body.
Eventually the body dies or the cancer dies.
And there is something in this state and the size of it where it has no limitations.
The bigger it gets, inclines to be bigger again, like a bully.
You know, the bigger the bully gets off what it steals, the bigger it gets.
Therefore, it can steal more.
and the state's just been on this incredible run
under the sort of apathy and lack of understanding
of the people that support it
and bang pots outside at eight o'clock at night,
which is actually one of the scariest things
as an adult I've ever seen.
It actually terrified me.
Or heard, really, why?
It wasn't exactly the scariest people doing it.
It was terrifying to me.
Why, go on.
because it was it's such a basic movement isn't it clonking pots i mean the reason why it was
being done was also really strange when you think about to support the nhs i know it was so hollow
though it was like this is what i mean right so like what just just if you were really like i'm
i'm not that smart so at atiq level right you go along the street like what's that noise why is
everyone stood outside the front door banging their cooking pots together right and it's not
a joke like it's funny now but at the time i don't live i just thought that this shit can go anywhere
because you've got you've got grown adults i know and it's the cacophony of banging cookware
right and what for to it's set against this belief in an ultimate right to your health
and your safety.
And it's terrified me.
I went and bought welding gas.
When all that shit was kicking off,
I just thought, right,
we are in Munich, man.
Like these people will go
and do anything at this point.
They're so primed
to do what they're told.
It's like a beehive
that goes into like an emergency
survival routine
where it just goes ape.
And that's what we'll have promised,
i think it's just these mass madnesses do you think that so you think that on economic grounds
at some point in the future everyone you know the everyone's gonna or not everyone majority
are going to end up like that yeah they're going to be blinching people no one's no one's gonna uh
as this plane's crashing right and we know that there's bits in our lives that are just not
sustainable and it's just like a relationship with an alcoholic relative like you know and they know
they are not beating the odds at the bottle of that bottle and this is a society that is addicted
to the same degree an extreme alcoholic is addicted to alcohol where they're so so far
from where they should be that to turn back is actually almost as dangerous as to keep going
and that's exactly where we are it's it's such a fine line between becoming sober and risking your
life and the tremors and all the shit you do when you come out of alcohol that is that is an uglier
path for people politically than it is to just keep drinking that's what's scary and it's not
it's only scary because they're the majority it's we have not demographics in economics is destiny
like so there's lots of bullshit that's spread around in economic forums but if you just wanted
to boil it down to something quick it's demographics and your competitive advantage
that's it and capital flows and if you if you plot those things they are the they are the root
things you'd measure before you form an economic opinion of anywhere and when you look at the west
the demographic is top heavy it trends towards older sicker people that is not good there's no
economics and there's no societal argument to be had under an umbrella of here's a majority of
people who are going to become net consumers in the economy having been the net producers in that
economy and nothing underneath to replace them it's literally retiring without a pension is that
their fault yes no but i mean is it their fault do they it's a collective it's not your nan's fault
but i mean but i mean do they have the option to be any different that's what i mean it's hard
it's collective responsibility so it's it's the amount of mess divided by the people involved in
it with a lot of fudge and oh well i know a guy and he was a baby boomer and he's always been an
anarchist and he's always fought against the state i know i know i'm not looking to single people out
that's that's not it at all it's if we're making generalizations and we're looking at trends that
involve more than one people we speak in the general and the general thing in the west are old
sick low conviction citizens who are living at the expense of minorities on an increasing basis
and it's not linear they're about to stop working all the 50 to 60 year olds who are at the peak and
at maximum hourly rates and get the skills.
And it's all built, that economy's all built around them for them.
And just now they're going to start retiring, trimming in,
looking to sell houses.
Who to?
We don't know.
And we're on the turn.
But they'll still be able to vote.
They're a bit older than that, wouldn't they?
I'm 54.
What, you think it's in a 55-year-old's, you know?
Retiring, yeah.
Really?
Absolutely.
Wow.
What are they going to do?
how much
have they got a load of savings no you vote if you don have savings you vote and there still going to be a pervasive majority in that That the break right This is what going to change
What's going to change and what's going to stay the same in our lifetime?
The biggest generation in history has always been a net consumer
and has always been subsidized by their own productivity.
It's about to not be productive.
Explain that.
So are you talking about my generation?
It depends what you're generating.
You might exfoliate and moisturize.
Well, no, I think about my mum and dad as being boomers.
Okay, so silent generation.
So they're in their 80s now.
All right, so baby boomers are...
What is a baby?
Am I a baby boomer?
54.
What does it mean?
Probably at the end of that, actually.
The baby boom was after the Second World War.
So all the surviving...
Yeah, that's my mum.
Well, no, no, they were already alive.
It's not really to capture, like,
give me your driving licence date of birth,
I'll tell you if you're part of this ugly set.
It's to look at things in trends.
and economics is allocating capital and we had this very large generation after the war
this very large generation and a rash of productivity it's affected everything it's
affected the forests i work on the things that are planted were fast quick now um and lots changed
in the baby boom generation from the world they were born into the world i'm living in
the laws have eroded personal freedoms have gone down uh quality of life life expectancy
fertility
down
they're going down
really
I thought we were living at the peak of our
existence
I mean we probably are, it's probably a small little dip
as the man
falling down
having jumped out of a skyscraper says
so far so good
but what I mean is
what I mean is
that
fertility rates are crushed
quality lifestyle and life expectancy the boomers are the first generation to give
a world to their children and grandchildren where they don't live as long as they so they were the
high time preference for they were the first of the high time preference people yeah because of
the war yeah they had to rebuild fast there'll be examples in history where like we've got
roman empire rise and fall we've got demonetization examples of that got john law
in terms of how the money fell apart and the people that lived in that and benefited from it
are kind of similar to the baby boomers but it is a unique situation in that we do have quite an
efficient democracy like it's not a good system but it's recorded quite well and the problem with
it being so efficient is that it really does fall to who the baby boomers are and what they want
and if you're of a certain age similar to most people and you've got similar preferences and
similar tv shows they act like a lobby and that would be fine if they were proportionate to the
rest of society but this generation not from being right wrong or someone's fault is just about 51
of how things happen so when we have a novel flu go around the world as a society we react
like the median person in that society and the median person in society over covid in a western
democracy was a slightly overweight slightly middle-aged to getting older closer to retirement
than the start of their career a lot less to play for banging a thing a lot more to lose
and just generally scared right young people aren't scared of flu no but they got jabbed
and the way they got jabbed wasn't because it was in their interest but it was because we had a vote
and the median voter the median preference in society the ones that kick people out of
supermarkets and made jobs impossible to do without this stuff was about the age that you
start worrying about flu hitting you harder than the fucking flu no you're absolutely right so
if you let if you take a median voter which is the most commonly occurring type of voter not the
average because we don't go on averages on democracy we go on majorities so a median is a
better um measure of central tendency if we're trying to do quick estimates it's to say the
average voter as a median is a got enough money to be scared of losing it got a family that's big
enough to care about what happens but not so much that you take total responsibility for it
we talk about boomers loads of stuff scared of losing it and they know and act like they're in
a majority because they are and that's what happens in society it's the mass it's the mob
that enforce those things that are popular are the things that come through and unfortunately
for everybody who's not in that majority you're the minority and they don't need you to enforce
what they do but they do need you to pay for it and they do need you to realize the losses of it
so if a healthy guy decides not to take a jab
they're ostracized and if they do decide to take it sorry mate i know that heart condition is uh
completely debilitating and avoidable,
but it's all right because we've got free health.
Just join the queue.
It's take a ticket, five hours.
And it's not our fault because legal reasons.
Well, also the reason that a lot of people took the jab
was to save grandma as well.
I mean, that was literally,
that's where they focused it, like you say.
It's an odd justification though
because you've just saved the last 10 years
of a woman's life for a loved one's life
and you've done it by risking the death or crippling of someone with 70 years old.
More than that, there's much better ways of doing that.
Don't go out.
No, grandma, don't go out.
That's what I told my mom.
I said, look, are you really scared of COVID?
And if you are, you can literally press a button on your computer
and food arrives at your door.
You can, you know, you can do it.
The whole world is set up for you not to want to go out.
You don't have to expose yourself.
But it's your preference.
Yes.
But if you've got a minority preference, it's crushed. If you've got a majority preference, it's enforced. That's democracy. And it doesn't just work at the voting booth. It works in the societal zeitgeist. We went through, in an extreme, an enforced world that was optimized around about a 65-year-old who's got a pension.
that was the perfect for them stay at home and your restaurants are subsidized but you stay at
home because your work you're big enough in your hierarchy to make living out of your box in your
house viable and probably get more money and you don't like commutes anymore because you're not
that you know what you know it was it completely clipped much more fitted suit around the average
voter and it wasn't voted on but it was enforced societally because most people in the village
sort of liked being locked in.
It was like a day off at school when the pipes burst.
And they're like, yeah, well, I've still got my mortgage
and I'll still pay it off because this company let me remote in.
Well, and then a load of free money came through the door as well.
Yeah, but guess who died? The working man.
You can't go out, why?
I fix pipes, I put electrical stuff in.
No, that's not a key worker.
Oh, great, okay.
Am I only a key worker at the end of the tax year then?
Yeah.
Yeah, because you pay for all the key workers.
well if i pay for all the key workers aren't either key worker well yeah but that won't be
borne out in truth for five years so the argument today is you stay at home and if not get the
policing and if you moan about it on social media we'll we'll spike that and then all the things that
were argued about and enforced during that period of crisis have turned out to be true the origin of
the virus the lack of effectiveness of masks the total insanity of lockdowns the total insanity of
vaccinations that didn't have tests and have no legal basis and were issued under emergency use
that that that was insanity and it only suited one section of society
that looks niche until you check the demographic table and then you go ah fuck mate this is
half the voting base and it's at least half of the economy because that's where all everyone
owns their assets stocks bonds and houses are all with people who've kind of hit the prime five
ten years ago and and like gliding out and are about to retire but the problem is they've not
all put money aside for themselves that they think got half a million pound to a million pound house
everyone's going to sell their houses at the same time to fund their retirement and it's all done
one there and there's no one to buy them it's interesting that's just happened to someone in
my neighborhood so they decided to sell because the cost of living was higher than they planned for
and then they go to the market they don't get the price they want they go down 20 no they didn't sell
this is the thing i think this is another i think this is another um another quality of those kind
people is if their house was worth a million and now it's only worth 600 they won't sell
they'll go no because all they've ever known is oh it'll be you know it's it's worth a million
though it's worth a million there's two examples of other asset holders that suffer the same problem
one is the old-fashioned lords like the old like lord of berkshire or whatever cash poor there's a
great mini series from 20 years ago called i think it's called like meet the fucking burtons or
something it's something like that like the fucking someone no the fucking full fulbright
something like that yeah my friends they run a party at their mansion right every year and it
goes huge yeah it's something like that and they're like every second way is a fuck they're
incredibly interesting people but their life consisted of rinsing a 10 million pound estate
for pennies to pay for the roof and pay for the electric right yeah so that's one example
is this asset rich cash poor what where else can we see examples of that without having to argue
it theoretically one is like lords old landowners that are subject to tax and the other one's farmers
same thing right just had their capital gains cranked two days after that farmer takes himself
out and shoots himself so these are the two areas this is happening because of the looting
of people where does the violence yield the most farmers are a minority at the voting booth
they're not loved they're not respected and they they have assets that can be liquidated
readily so they of course are subject to inheritance tax there's loads of places you
can just move the goalposts landlords are a good one so someone in the property boom
buys five houses, remortgages and buys 10, then the law changes. Now you're not allowed to claim
your bank interest back against your landlord loans. That changes the business model. And now
everybody who is running into rent is now running out to liquidate. As the tenant laws get stricter,
where the tenant has stronger property rights than the landlord, and the landlord's costs and
their business model was changed at the DNA level. And it creates huge liquidations. So you get these
big breeds in in assets and the big breeds out changing on the rules and the boomers aren't going
to be any different from that they've not got enough money collectively to pay for the next
20 years of their life and their error term is to put it on their subsequent generations
it's not a matter of will there's two three boomers and their needs for every productive
taxpayer in society as things are there's not enough people to throw into a collectivist economy
to pay for what's already assumed to be had in this generation so it's a hell of a place to
open up a business no but what do you think is going to happen then like the the only the only
obvious result is a default isn't it no and and well you you like a like i hate to say it but a
reset a great reset of some description yeah but what form does that take is it an inflationary
yes or a bitcoin standard no there's two there's two bitcoin and gold or inflation right it's an
unsustainable situation right it cannot exist in the same place in space and time forever this
where we're in it will go somewhere right it's like a cake baking you can't unbake it and you
can't leave it in there forever it's it's temporary right is that your own anecdote i suppose it is
day up
but it's like that right
but what I mean is
we can't
it's not a physical
reaction
it's a chemical reaction
it's something
that is
it started
and it's got
it's got
and its end
is not there yet
and we can't keep
things the same
and
in money
it's inflation
or deflation
they're your options
and both
tracks
peel away
from what you thought
you were going to get
which was always a lie
because it's paper
and it will go
inflation
and it will go
and all the way back to zero, where the tokens aren't just worth anything.
Or it'll go deflation, where the tokens are scarce,
because you're starting to pay debt with the open amounts of cash that kept the economy liquid.
And there's not enough cash to cover the debt pile.
I don't mean not enough cash like, oh, we can't make ends meet.
I mean, there isn't enough dollars total in the system to pay the debt off.
Not even by a third.
By the time you've got into the first third of your debt pay down, there is not a single brass cent in the economy to buy milk.
They're the two ways out.
That's where it gets to.
What does that look like for somebody earning 40 grand a year?
Terrifying.
Because it's like breathing without feeling like you're running out of breath.
What would you advise them to do?
like how did
say you're working
you know
I think the
the median wage
in the UK
is about 35
or 40,000 a year
right
say you're living
in a house
you've got a
thousand pound
a month mortgage
your kid
two kids
you know
what do you do
to future proof
yourself
get philosophy
like just read
read the Bible
or something
I don't know
what to get
I don't know
read the Bible
I don't know
mate
it's not a good
position to be in
there must be something i mean you would probably say i mean well you might not even say that but
sell your house yeah put it into bitcoin i'm not i don't i wouldn't give advice to someone like that
i wouldn't give that advice it's probably the right thing for them to do but it's
giving the advice it's as an observer effect it achieves usually the opposite this is a triage
situation there's there's casualties that won't be reached and it's ugly it's it's ugly stuff it's
It's intimidating.
And you're down to this.
It sounds gross, but you're down to hope and you're down to courage
and trying to do the right thing and trying to really work hard
on what the right thing is.
But, I mean, if you look at other countries that have been through
inflationary times recently, like Argentina, you know,
they're coming out the other side, aren't they?
yeah but only after they realized the full whirlwind of ignoring it but but they did live
through it they lived through it well some people live through it mate i mean there is a survival
ship a survivorship bias and all this stuff like there's a lot of people buried in the ground that
aren't going to vote next year that definitely suffered for the decisions of the state and
continue to and it doesn't have to be a big bang and it doesn't have to be a big revolution
we can just rot we could just sit and rot this this the way things went over covid felt
like an open nursing home it felt like the nursing home model turned inside out and became the public
that's what it felt like it felt like being in an open air nursing home with rules that didn't
exist before and conditions for things that don't exist outside i don't see any reason why if there's
a majority of people that will have that done that can enforce it but what was different about
covid and will be different in the next crisis is that the people who are politically ubiquitous
the people that can win votes are not also the people that produce the value and tax the system
they're not they're now claimants net they're not also the biggest taxpayer but they're going to
want stuff and the main taxpayer is not going to want it they're not going to want to fund pensions
that weren't on the books.
They're not going to want to fund interest on debt
for things that have been eaten and consumed
by another generation.
But do they even get a say in that though?
Well, this is what's interesting
because now something has to break.
The productive economy has an incentive of one thing
and the democratic system has an incentive to the other.
And that will be a bigger fight
than when both groups were the same
because you can enforce in economics
what you agree in politics while you're both but as a generation that has to retire and wants to
retire they're losing the veto power of the economy they're asking you to do it and you have
an option you either go with it or you don't or you square the circle and you do a bit of it
in china the young people there just don't work they've got a phrase for it lie flat
so like unemployment in china youth unemployment super high all the baby boomers still very
productive still think everything's fine the youngest then well i'm just not going out the
door i'm not working that hard for this little so i'm just going to stay flat that's kind of
happening here yeah since covid people are not going back to work you know or or just not doing
low-paid jobs because yeah what's the point if you're taking if 60 of your burger flipping time
is given back to people you never meet,
not the same age as,
and don't agree with on most things.
You're a slave.
She's licking my toe, by the way.
He, he's licking your toe.
He must have a nice taste.
What the hell is on there?
Sorry, go on.
Must be something tasty on there.
He's just getting a bit fed up.
I know, lie down, lie down.
Come on, this is interesting.
But I know it's all quite cynical
and it can be considered divisive
because you're comparing one generation to another,
but that's economics.
look you can't have a system that runs on majority vote and then not make generalizations about the
nature of those voters as categories and preferences it's it's how it's been the boomers
have had their political wishes granted and they were terrible ideas they were abandonment of
principles abandonment of solid money abandonment of freedom and a sense of fair play and now they
want everyone to pay for them when they become the least productive i don't think of anyone
i've heard anyone frame it like that frame it as i know that it's framed in general as that
but not that it was a generation it happened in one generation kind of thing all it is i mean are
we talking since 71 is this another what the fuck happened in 1971 look we can pull up some accurate
census data of these countries and you'll see that like the majority the median person in the
UK is about 55, 55, 60.
I didn't even know that.
Why don't I see more people everywhere like me then?
Maybe I'm looking at the wrong places.
You probably do.
How old are you?
I'm coming up for 40.
Really?
Yeah.
How old do you think I was?
I don't know.
I don't know how old anyone is.
I don't really assign.
I've never felt much different since my late 30s.
If I'm meeting a 60-year-old British bloke, right,
and they're a bitcoiner and all the rest of it,
I don't think, boomer.
Good.
You know what I mean?
it's collective responsibility.
If you do things in a movement
that achieved a group aim,
you're not individually responsible, man.
But you are responsible to the degree
divided by the number of people that went along
or went for this preference
or cared conveniently less about something
in terms of medical freedom
when it was in their interest not to care
or they secretly liked the idea
that everyone's getting a lick of the same paint.
so what do you think they should have done at that moment should they have thought to themselves
been a bit more humble i've had a good run let's do this for the youngsters would that have been
the correct response as an individual you've got to take the animosity out of it i i i don't have
value judgments against individual boomers what i'm we're trying to look into the future and make
plans and we're looking at a future that's volatile and diagnosing it is about taking the
data and characterizing it and seeing what in that information picture can we use to make decisions
and the age split on demographics particularly now is quite stark and it can be used to explain
how we got to where we have got to in the lifetime of these people and therefore it can be used to
make fairly good estimates about what's going to happen from this point forward that's all
it's not therefore the boomers we all need to go out and give them a bad time no we do not need to
do and do that but we can plan around the tides and we can plan around the sun and we can plan
around a generation that is heavy in its age brackets and its preferences which is big it's
big the the split between that age bracket economically and the rest is stark it's not
linear and the amount of those people which is the nominal root of democracy is the number of
hands that go up in favor or against something is also a majority of this age bracket so they
at a minimum they draw my attention and they can be used you can overweight them in their
preferences to expect what you could see from the public while they are so big but they're not
around forever and they're changing constantly when they were young it was free sex free drugs
smoking weed at the festivals 70s harder drugs uh normalization of divorce start of it
repudiation of religion this was the atheist start right 80s secure the bag get the job
straighten out, marry the wife, marry the girlfriend, get the mortgage, securitize everything.
That was Thatcher era, pushing on to Tony Blair era, the luxury socialists. I secured my bag when
Thatcher was in. Most of the mortgage is paid off. Now I'm going to be generous with everybody else.
And now it's, now we've all secured the bag and we're not scared. We've had, we've been rich.
we've had free sex free drugs we broke all those rules then we secured the bag with small government
now we're going to give it all up to the globalists because where our habitat is secure we can give
the rest away and the kids can get babysat while we go on holiday you know it's this kind of stuff
and now now where are we with this gang 2000s total loss of right and wrong as a result of
all the other principles that kind of got eroded and undermined right and now it's like what the
fuck his gold back money doesn't even what was that that was must have been in between my weed
days and my heroin days to the booms right and now it's like i will just let it run you know let
it run we're going to be the informal grandparent generation we're going to be the skateboard over
the back we gave it we blew it we gave everything away after we ate what we could and now we're all
sick so we gotta look after us because we put the massive one is we put in so we take out say hang
John, in your lifetimes, collectively, boomers,
you went from surpluses and manufacturing economy, right,
to massive national debt that's double or triple the size of our defence budget,
our ability to fight for our place in the world.
Three times that budget, three times that amount to pay soldiers and buy guns,
two to three times of it is the interest-only element
of the debt that's been run up since the 60s.
right and you see an arc of a human being you see the end of the war freedom everything well
the war's won everything's fine now we can relax we need materials we need quick stuff we need
plastics we need gadgets the economy's open again we don't have to make bullets we can make toys
we can make gizmos convenience items consumer goods now we get to computers that's making things
easier making things more efficient and the states grew alongside this apathy it's always
grown alongside it and it's we're at the end of this arc 50 60 70 80 they're not around and
they're not going to vote that way and they're different from when they started like i said
it's a good movie that'll show you like the way the arc of a boomer would be forrest gump
believe it or not when you see the the the points of his life that he goes along
Vietnam War and the anti-war
these boomers they're not anti-war anymore
they're Ukraine flagged in the front garden
and banging pots
so they've changed
they're very collective aren't they as well
you would be collective if you're part of
if you are part of a set of preferences
where you're the majority
everything you think is true
because you can just enforce it with money
but also I think part one of the reasons people are
collective is because they're not competitive
I think that's a
That's a very natural response to being not very competitive.
Natural is the right word because where in nature are things not competitive,
it's when there's more resources than there are animals and it's open.
There's an unlimited amount of space to move into.
And we're at the end of that with these boomers.
They made an economy for themselves, served themselves quickly,
put it on a tab, some of it, and the rest,
we're going to have to bear the full cost of their lives
to the degree they've not saved for themselves,
plus the debt of what they've consumed along the way all right describe the person who will
see out this next say 25 year period successfully i don't think it's in the control of anybody
no but who's positioned well for example i was trying to trying to find out if you had any advice
so you haven't so who's positioned who's positioned well describe the person who's
positioned well for the next
part of history?
You can use yourself if you want.
I'd avoid that.
I mean, are you positioned well, do you think? We'll find out,
won't we? That's how I feel about
it, is that everybody's got to make their own
preparations as best they can.
And I know that sounds like
quite a foreboding thing to say,
but it's just to take a fact that we've lived
my... I've come up for 40s, you know,
things have been quite stable.
even when they've been unstable they've been unstable in predictable ways and i don't think
we can enjoy that in this next section it's to acknowledge what we don't know and to acknowledge
that the volatility we've saved ourselves and the stress and hardships we've saved ourselves
are being stored up for something and it will come back and it will come back unfairly and it
will come back unevenly and it's better to just not try and think that you can make a plan that
indemnifies you completely against your environment but to accept some of it as the
cut and thrust of a normal human life to make conflicts and to get into scrapes and try and
survive most stuff you try and do if it's too easy to the point you don't think you're risking much
on it it's not fulfilling and if you push too hard and you're reckless and you're probably you
know not not really taking into account how dangerous things are going to get and it's just
just bed in and sort of say this,
there are situations when we keep continually compounding and doing stupid
shit where the choices we have after that are all worse than the choices we had
10 years ago or 20 years ago. And I think we're there.
My, my, I wouldn't give advice at the moment.
I just wouldn't, but I wouldn't say I'm completely despondent.
I think there's always a best thing to do,
but you've got to kind of leave that one out of six on the dice to things just
not going your way,
getting caught up in something or being particularly affected by something as an individual more than your share And that totally okay and actually by the way that how most of the world lives we just been a kind of protected
from it for a while so it's just to kind of brace a little bit for sort of anything
and volatility is volatile like if you can guess that something's going to be volatile
you can prepare for it better than having a definition of what will happen in its exactness
If you know it's just going to be generally uncertain, you can make decisions that expose you positively to general uncertainty.
Just be more sensible, be a bit more self-sufficient.
I think that it starts with everybody about coming back to having an identity.
I think whether you've got 40 grand a year or a million pound a year, everybody has a sense of emptiness if they haven't got an authentic identity.
and I think that no matter what position you are in life,
you need to go back to what you are and define it
and decide in advance what you're prepared to do
to be loyal to that
and what you're prepared to do to change
or that you won't defend.
And that's a mindset that's free to get.
It has to be authentic
and it can carry you a very long way.
It sounds like shit advice,
but that is actually a really doable thing
and it's always improving.
And then at least when you make mistakes
or the world's unfair,
at least you're doing it along an authentic arc
where your actions are what you feel
and you're doing it at a scale that's risky and hard.
You've already won, no matter what happens.
Isn't that what Jordan Peterson would call
the meaning in your life?
Same thing.
Yeah, I think he's captured a good section
of what I'm talking about,
is that people drift when you adapt collectively
to a thing that you're not really sure about, it's just where everyone else is going, you've robbed
yourself of your identity. And a quick way is just to get back to what are you scared of? What do you
care about? We've done it. What scares the shit out of you individually is normally a good indicator
of what you need to work on next. And if it's a general sense of unease, work on a general sense
of preparedness. If it's a specific thing that you're not gripping, focus on it. And in the
focusing of it you either realize it's not that big of a deal because you've looked into it and
it's not a big deal or it is and you've got to adapt to it and that can fit into any walk of life
from whatever station in politics or ever you disagree or agree with anything of what i've said
do it from an identity where you were born who did you grow up with what are your experiences
what are you weak on what do you think you're competitive on that's a good start because then
no matter what happens out there you don't need to pre-plan it and you don't need to be a future
teller you can always respond to it authentically and that's a personal thing and that's why the
advice doesn't carry very well because it's just me doing what i think is best i wouldn't go as far
as to say what someone else genuinely what someone else should do but they're my notes it's a that's
the demographic picture that's the sort of situation we're in and here's the tech coming to help and
here's what i'm going to try and do negotiate in my life and it might go terribly yeah but like
i think it was jordan beaterson that said that the meaning carries you through any situation it
doesn't matter yeah because if that's if you're doing something for a reason yeah the result is
actually not as important as the meaning because uh if it doesn't work you're still going to carry
on doing it but if you don't have the meaning you're probably going to feel victimized by it
you're probably going to give it up you're probably gonna right the sweet spot on anything you're
doing is where it matches your values and you're not quite sure you're going to achieve it
and and the reason that your values are important to define are because halfway through that effort
you're going to have a crisis where you think it's going to fail and if you only got motivation and
you've only got the momentum of the decision like i started to all finish it's not enough to screw
the nut and what happens is when all the motivations evaporated and you you're knackered and there's
not another coffee in the pot and there's not another voice of encouragement and there's not
another bit of money that you find under the sofa and everything's down to zero the one thing that
drives through the target is remembering why you started and if your reason for starting isn't root
level identity like i to not do this is a betrayal of who i am as a person you won't finish it so as
long as what you're doing is authentic and genuinely you and it's within your perceived
abilities to achieve but not guaranteed it doesn't matter where you're starting from that's the that's
the arc you get satisfaction even if you fuck up at least it's honest and you normally get even on
a failure you still get a load of stuff that's real in the feedback because you put your real
opinions out there and tested them and that that's the way to go about this and then get just get
unlucky along the way people get unlucky every fucking day the only people that survive it are
the ones that come on with us on podcasts there's a load of dead people that tried this and they
haven't got the counter argument to make there's a survivorship bias in this but it is also just
the way to keep going well if you i think if you if you think about it you don't have any other
it's the best option anyway it is the best time anyway well it's the best option because you could
you could fail or you could not and if you that that's beside the point what's left when you do
succeed or you do fail yeah what's left because that's the thing that you'll have to contend with
yeah you've failed it's failing up right so like you set off and you've got an overly ambitious
you're a 22 year old you've got an overly ambitious dream right and you find when you apply your will
to it that you find yourself wanting and you end up not being the person that started off
and you develop as a character but if you get small and carry easy targets and go with the flow
you've not lived you've just gone along and if you're extreme and you never took account of your
limitations and you never were able to negotiate your limitations to an achievement and win you
haven't lived to the top potentially in your life so it's to strike that middle to have stuff that's
not reckless but it's not cowardly and it's it's that's a humble thing but it's also ambitious
because you've got to say to yourself i'm not sure there's got to be some element of this where
someone or something can kick the whole board over while i'm trying and that's the fucking
in the price if you don't if you're not up for that if you're not up for being uh treated unfairly
by life or by other people, don't bother.
Don't bother.
You've got to, that's got to be part of your decision
is to just say, and I can fail and I could try.
I could have the best odds of doing something
by how hard to try and I can still be unlucky
and fail at it.
It's probably a good judged target to try and hit.
The likelihood of failure is priced into all successes.
Yeah, you've got to, because otherwise if you fail
and a reason that's not your fault, you'll get bitter
and you'll go, there's no point.
like I did everything right there and I still got my chips taken off me what I mean is what I mean
is the likelihood of failure is priced into all the great successes yeah I mean like without it
without it there's no great success it's visceral you'll never ever forget a moment when you see
someone risking and being vulnerable for an achievement it's in your bones the one I have
I haven't even got it hung up yet but it's it's a set it's one of the strongest memories I've got
is a guy called Rowley Free
and he's riding a, I think a 1952 Vincent Black Shadow.
Okay.
And he's trying to break the land speed record
after the war on the flats.
And he's up, he's got,
he's riding in a traditional pose in leather
and he's not hitting the top speed
that the bike can achieve.
So he strips down to his underwear
and he surfboards himself.
He lays flat, his stomach's on the seat
and he breaks the fucking land speed record in swimsuit
because he's more efficient, right?
Now, if he comes off, there'll be bits of him everywhere.
But as an image, as an inspirational image,
in black and white, a man saying,
look how fucked up I'm exposing myself to get what I want.
It was the only root food for that guy.
He wasn't going to do four more runs on leathers
and keep himself safe.
he wanted the fucking win
enough
to risk his life to that point
and we all get it
because it's a best selling portrait
in black and white
that guy putting it all out
and it's ballsy
and it's inspirational
it's not reckless
because he was alive after it
and he got the fucking record didn't he
so that's the level
I'm not saying everyone needs to go and ride
motorbikes around naked
but for that guy at that time he was willing to push it and a tire could have gone and we'd have
never heard of him but that's kind of like you're never going to be a better person in your own head
than when you're doing something like that and it's hard because if you push too far you'll get
wrecked and if you don't push far enough you'll live in regret and that you know that's anything
to individuals listening,
whatever that feels like to you on your arc,
do it.
Because that's the best advice I could give
because it fits everybody at any level.
If you're scared of spiders,
there's something in there courageous for you.
And if you've got something really big,
like a big vision that you can't get out of your head
and you feel like you've got the resources
and the judgment and the wisdom,
putting it all on the side is cowardice.
Isn't that as well?
that is jordan peterson keeps coming up i don't know why um dwelling dwelling at the boundary of
of order and chaos that he's over the target but he's verbose isn't he i i i lose it with him
well yeah nowadays it's a bit grinding but when he when he was doing the kind of um
the religious series on youtube and stuff like that like i remember that i remember hearing him
say about the the sort of the boundary between order and chaos and and living there yeah and
really a theory of viscerally understanding it and and i've i've looped back around to that in a
number of really long form conversations i've had with people as well that you end up back at that
point where it's like yeah you need to dwell at the border of order and chaos and they were literally
words that he said yeah you know and i've come i don't know why i'd never heard them before but
they were you know there was a couple of these they're the they're the strongest words in our
language but it's also antithesis of what the booba generation would would say same with the
other one that always stuck with me from jordan peterson which we spoke about earlier was is is
that you know don't look for happiness in your life look for meaning that's right you know because
happiness is not applicable in many situations yeah that's right but meaning will carry you
through happiness sadness joy yeah and he he he he was the first person i ever heard say both of
those things ordering chaos and meaning some of the best stuff in my life is at the time most
miserable or like the most ridiculous because as long as you're on your line that i am who i am
and i believe that and i'm where i'm meant to be and i believe that i'm sorry just like that fly on
Sorry, that made everyone jump.
That was like, go on.
It was like, you got the fly over the period chopsticks there.
Yeah, I got him.
He's dead on the table.
He's had a great day.
But yeah, it's not about extra levels of comfort
or extra levels of security.
I think that's a mistake you see in Bitcoiners
more often than average, is this belief
that you just need to get to a bunker
or you just need to get to the other side of the moon
or push your gold chips into a magic square that no one can take.
And some of this is bringing it all back a little bit.
Like we've got better at putting property to one side and keeping it safe.
That's all to the good.
It limits the incentive to steal from us.
But you're never going to be in an area of absolute safety.
And when you get there, it's the shittest place you've ever been in your whole life.
It's quiet.
It's cold.
No one cares about you.
You haven't got a reason to get up in the morning because no one needs you
because you're just a node that runs off the air.
It's not a place in life.
it's like the side of the pool you know it's nice to know it's there but it's not a place to hang
out if you've gone to go swimming you got to get into the mix of it um it's balance that's what i
try and say is like i'm not saying generally people should be more courageous or reckless
um i'm just saying you've got you've got to find the middle of something that you can do
and do it all that jordan peterson stuff as well i would say and you might agree that the doing of
it at the practical application of the ideas is the value, not the theoretical white paper
way of thinking that then you abandon whenever you've got a real problem in your life, right?
I think this is the proof of work stuff coming through. If you work on your identity and you
confront yourself with hard questions, you will get the benefit of it just like you would hash
away for a block and eventually get the benefit of that. It's pro rata. If you don't think about
yourself and you don't think about your accountability and you don't think about how
you're seen because you don't think you need to be you're look you're living you're aiming for a
small life with very limited possibilities but when you win in these middle grounds and you get
somewhere you didn't expect the opportunities multiply and it is nothing to do with the
environment you're in you can be in a what it can be in a deteriorating environment becoming
increasingly capable as an individual to confront and engage with problems that you see and the more
time you work on it the better your judgment and wisdom and ability to get across a problem is
and it in the work that people avoid it about going from diagnosis to prognosis and not crying at the situation like the first 90 of the interview was but to say that the pitch There no point saying it right or wrong There no one to point at
That's the situation you're born in.
Some people are born in a plague.
Some people are born in Gaza.
Some people are born with illnesses and disabilities
and no fucking hope whatsoever of having a good quality of life.
So life's fucking tough, all right?
And we're not due a painless freedom by principle life.
it's it's get back in the ring get back into the real world and do to your level of scale at your
risk what you think is best and that's hard that involves being vulnerable risking loss risking
injury but it's a more satisfying route through any situation than trying to make it easier and
hope for it hope for a more fair situation as it's dealt out the pack i think that's um
you went earlier when you were talking about the aspects of bitcoin in the digital realm and
what what the the equivalent in the physical realm i think proof of work is at the core of that
yeah it is it's the it's the teaching from the it's the teaching from the digital realm
which manifests in the real world and is connected ironically it's the it is the connection between
the two it is connected and it's connected in a literal way it's connected through the electricity
supply exactly right so we already have a uh but i mean philosophically it's something you can learn
from bitcoin yeah you can that you when you apply it in your real life you realize it's everywhere
everything's a proof of work and or not right you can see through things that have substance to
people who don't understand the definition of bitcoin technically or economically can't see
through scams can't see where they're being taken from because they don't know what they've lost
it's like a lobotomy so this idea of working on yourself and asking questions of yourself and
constantly putting yourself in to stress testing situations can only be to the good as long as
they don't break you and as long as you're not so reckless that you lose your thread you stay in the
mix learn more about yourself that is exactly the hashing function of a human is to constantly go
back to the mine and constantly keep putting units of effort in and keeping a track of the results
and it it's it's not as smooth a return profile as mining you get some wins you get some losses
but as long as you're directionally going in the right place and you're changing your errors
and you're changing the way you respond to stuff in for better outcomes and more capability and more
power more reach more contacts more friends more understanding then you're you're actually
discounting all the problems you see in the world because you're better equipped to meet them
you see so you've got you can't just store bitcoin and pray every night for a better world
where we can realize millions of dollars of abstract wealth into a real economy and just
hope someone else does the tidying up it's it's the mess it is and it's it's it's critical
and it feels like it's all about to kick off and it might but you just got to make your peace with
that it is a i think i think they say i think i'll put it from a personal perspective i think as well
in this this is the age of the proof of work this is the age we're going into it's the age where
work matters
really against
all else.
Do you feel like the light's gone back on in a dark
room where
everything that Bitcoin touches or measures
measures it honestly
and
everybody's been used to sort of making
up what things are worth.
Yeah.
We're discovering what is
the value in work. We're discovering what the
work is valued at as well.
It's also pricing it properly because a 22-year-old should be working on the fitness and maintaining that.
And it's not clear normally in a fiat economy that you're giving something away until after you've lost it.
Whereas in Bitcoin, everybody knows the feeling about not buying Bitcoin soon enough because it's just a matter of checking the chart against what you could have bought in 2011 that you now can't.
Sorry, I didn't wear the camera.
I took my top off and just blocked you.
yeah so you know there's an accountability art coming into the world on bitcoin while it's at
peak drunkenness in terms of how it makes its decisions and it's way above me to decide how
that actually goes down but there's a frame you can take through it that is fulfilling enough to
enjoy agnostic to what actually happens and is actually in any case the right thing to do and
it's not about running away and hiding like fallout like the vaulties and it's not about
running headlong into it and being confrontational to it and throwing out things that keep life stable
uh and it's just about trying to divide the middle that's brilliant mate this is this is the
three rules for life we're in an an arc of accountability the meaning is the frame yeah
and um proof of work is and and it's back on the menu yes yeah because it because now the light's
gone back on the scoreboards back on the pitch yeah and everybody's been breaking the rules
and that's not being reflected or it's been pushed into another cost base is now like no no
like when you work for this you get it paid back three rules for life it's quite good actually
dude it's like ben like what was jordan peterson's was 12 rules for life in it we've that's three
three rules for life but that's not bad because anybody like whether you're a new listener or you
what listening in with a critical approach right like you know free cities sounds a bit whatever
you know i'll give it a try it's just to say there's people in the middle of this that aren't
extremely different minded to you and aren't as extreme or off the map as you think and it's
relative like we are at the extremes of us of state power here and free cities will stand out
relatively as a gap in point of view between that and i think the most important thing to understand
in all this is is at least to start with the idea of top down versus bottom up or centralized versus
decentralised because free cities are are what they are due to decentralisation same as many
other things well if you can have a well yeah but what i mean is in in the theory if you have a top
down procedure it tends to like i say it tends to become a tumour yeah and and i think probably
free cities will become tumours in the end but the point is if you have a number of competing
ones in a decentralised fashion yeah then it doesn't matter what happens you just need the
the decentralized and we're like you say we're at peak centralization arguably i don't know whether
it probably could get worse well it's high watermark like the line could keep going up like
i don't think today is the day where uh the state starts to recede it's not today it might not be
for years but i know it can't stay where it's staying sustainably because it doesn't have the
food on the farm to eat at its rate for decades something's got to give there's either got to be
a lot less people who claim or there's got to be a lot more people to claim from and you don't have
to be a genius to see that the biggest generation's been feeding itself on a bit of a bar tab and the
party behind might morally be the ones expected to take it up but in the numbers they're expected
to do the work of 10 of the people who've had their fun and at the savings and added to the debt
it's not to point fingers and blame them it's to just take acknowledgement of the fact the economy
isn't linearly divided by age we've got extremes and we've got high concentrations of preferences
that add up to quite a lot of power and we're just in i'm just in behind that um with far fewer
rights and a lot less upside with something still correct to do and it's not unfair like i'm not
saying we're the victims it's not unfair because life's unfair to everybody all the time every day
in the news you can click on something where someone has just had something they are not
deserving of bad that's fucking life right so i'm not bitter about it but it doesn't mean i'm not
going to play my hand in appreciation of what i know or what i believe about the way things are
going to turn around in my life it's just been about taking the things that you rely on most
and just seeing if you can change them and take more responsibility for them.
And the things that you can't take responsibility for
because they're the limit of your skill or the limit of your resource,
you've got to accept.
That's kind of on someone else.
It's kind of up there.
You've got to accept it.
You might be able to influence it.
But most people that try and control things that they have to accept
don't control things that they can.
they abdicate things like health and the way they think in their own heads as just things that
happen to them and it isn't you can control how you react to something you can control how you
how you respond what you choose to say or not say you've got control that is freedom in fact that is
but freedom is a again it's a neutral good it's the freedom to do harm free will is the freedom
to do harm the freedom to do good but i mean your freedom is the way you respond to your agency
no but i mean like you know the most classic example of that is victor you know man's search
for meaning victor frankel you know what living in a concentration camp the most unfree place you
can live but yet yet choosing every single thing choosing the way you respond to all these things
the response is more important than the event the event just sets the stage for how you want
other people to react to what's happening to you good or bad is that you've got a choice you've
always got a limit of range of agency to set how you respond to it and that's where you don't need
a political movement to be free you can just start by being honest with yourself and affecting the
things that you have to control have to influence and have to accept and a lot of the stuff we talk
about is in that big fucking big old area called accept and i see a lot of people trying to accept
control things that they should be accepting and accepting things that they're capable of controlling
that's a meme going around at the moment isn't there you can just you know you can just code
you can just yeah you could just manifest no but you can just be free it's a good one because you
can't you can choose it in the moment uh you can choose freedom in any moment it's not easy in every
well any choice you're given is an is an element of freedom like anything you decide to do under
your own power is you're exercising your agency but the the bit people i don't think are working
on is like you can only be as free as you're authentic to yourself you can't spin up a fake
person who can't do things that you say you can and lie and get by and live a good life in your
own head you can't do that so everybody has the freedom to be honest about who they are and what
they're good at and what they're bad at and have a plan for themselves that's freedom already and
yeah like that's a that's a good point is even if this goes into the gulag closed state system
those systems are riddled with people who still live authentic interesting lives and did the right
thing inside of the limitations of their lives and they're already doing it i mean we're all
living inside limitations you know we sometimes can't point at the stuff we've got as the freedom
end of a political spectrum but we do have an awful lot of individual agency we're limited and
those limits have gone up in in ways that are public but no one's controlling what i feel about
stuff they can influence it but ultimately the better i am at controlling my emotions and
judging things and making decisions the less effective that is even if they get better at it
or even if you track it back far enough the your ability to accept accept which is which is a really
like foundational principle in reality is the first thing you should do with reality is accept
the reality as it is before you make any movement before you make any intention or before you worry
about dying of something particularly accept that you're dying definitely we're all dying right
we're all in the slow process of death it's like well no you know iran iran and israel bombing the
tar out of each other.
And I was like,
that could roll up three different scenarios where I'm sort of in the UK
kind of affected.
My diesel might go up in price.
Yeah.
But you're going to die anyway.
You're going to die.
And also everyone's going to forget you.
If you don't,
if you sit there and hide or you,
you are going to be forgot.
It's like you've died already.
Even if you're one of the most memorable people on the planet,
you're just going to be a name anyway.
No one,
no one really cares about you.
They reckon you die twice.
You die when you die.
And then you die the last time someone says your name.
or you yeah i think i heard it differently you die the day the first time you die is when you
realize you're gonna die you know what i mean and then the other one is when you what when you
understand what that is like the dead goldfish or the dead bird on the road and you're like whoa
yes he didn't get up in the morning to sit there on the road all smushed up and then you see it if
you've got a long enough miserable enough life you see that happen with people you see bad bad
things happen to people who didn't deserve it.
And you say, fucking hell, even if I do do the right thing,
and I do do everything to my best effort,
I can still get a bolt from the sky and sweep my deck.
Someone made an AI, you know,
the new Google AI that does video.
Someone made one of those the other day,
which was interviewing old people on their deathbeds Yeah what are your regrets And so you said what was your regret and the guy said i regretted not buying the s 500 at whatever or not but it was all so ridiculous
that it made you realize that it doesn't none of this shit matters all the things you worry about
now won't matter in the future so why do they matter now the the answers people give on the
deathbeds are actually very similar it's like like and it's around and actually talking about
caution and privacy versus being too visible and being attacked and all of that most people's
regret on their deathbed if they've got chance to answer the question is that they didn't live
a full enough life they said no out of caution to things that they wish that have said yes
and think how many times you say no really in your life there's quite a lot i know in this
compounding very very small nose compound over time equally like when you think about the effect
you know what they call the butterfly effect sometimes you know a very small no can lead to
something in the future that never happens which is phenomenally killing futures versions of
yourself by saying no and you're creating future versions of yourself by saying yes
and it life is a process of doing both and that and that getting good at it is to saying yes to
the things that are good for you and everyone around you and saying no to the things that are
bad for you and bad for everyone or saying yes to the meaningful things because they might not
necessarily on face value appear good for you which is why you go back to judging your mission
as being achievable or not maybe because then when you say yes to it you're not saying yes
with the certainty you can do it like a jigsaw puzzle or a shit toy that you have to put together
like hobbies and easy simple self-fulfilling things it's to put a peg out and say i don't
know if i'm going to hit that target i'm going to end now mate but i've got one more question
what's your mission route missions just to live as to the maximum potential that i'm capable of
that's the that's that's a good life to to live to the maximum capability of what i can do with
my judgment and and do that in directions that are good for me good for my life and are good for
people around me by being someone who's responsible and capable and people getting the benefit of that
passively and me getting the accolade of it actively in going into volatile times which
we might be right or wrong about it might just be like this and boring forever but it doesn't change
that i'd still need to reach a potential and you can't abdicate challenges and get there and you
can't take on challenges that are beyond you and get there and it is a constant wild process of
testing that in a chaos outside and coming back with the results and risking the scratches and
risking death blows to come back and learn more get better and go back out again and again and
again until something gets me that's what i want to do so cheers mate nice one thanks for that and
thanks for inviting me up here again.
You're all revved up again.
I'm all revved up and ready to go.
I was already revved up when I got here,
mate.
You were,
mate.
You were.
I was,
I'm revved at the moment because,
um,
even simple things like I drove here over the mountains and it's a sunny week
this week and people were waving to me and I saw the headmaster of drive past
me and we waved and,
and I just thought,
yeah,
right now I'm,
I'm a complete anarchist.
I'm just driving down the road
doing whatever the fuck I want
making all my own decisions, no one's telling me what to do
and the sun's shining and life is good
and I love my kids
What do you mean? You haven't got Radio 4
on listening to the Middle East
or worrying about it from three degrees away
No, I was looking for... Jeremy Vine's
my pet peeve
If I want to incite violence, I just
listen to Jeremy Vine
You've got to understand that they're up there and popular
for the same reason the politicians are
It's because a fucking lot of people love the music that that guy makes.
And it's, yeah, it's part of the picture.
It doesn't, it shouldn't, if you're mentally healthy,
change your outlook day to day.
Good day out there, shit day out there.
Hey, sun comes up, sun comes down.
You've got time.
You've no matter, way worse than what we've got now,
you can do stuff that you can be proud of.
And you can do stuff that you can be ashamed of.
And it's all still to play for.
and whether the world's good bad what we think arrogantly we can guess is the very least of it
people that are good in bad situations aren't that because they've practiced necessarily it's
because they've served a purpose to get resilient to that and to get in the fight get in and fight
and risk losing that's the most important part not how you assess the situation before you go into it
that's sort of negotiating yourself out of it.
It's coming, whatever's coming.
And it could be a quiet world and a busy life,
or it could be a quiet life in a busy world.
Anyway, we keep going around.
I think it'd be a busy world and a busy life.
And for the record, I don't feel like a boomer,
even if I am.
I don't think I am, but...
Like I said, it's not something...
I can't wait to be a granddad, put it that way.
and I'm going to be a hands-on granddad.
You know what I mean?
I think that's one of the symptoms I find of...
Your dog's just frolicking in the grass over there.
It's not really.
One of the symptoms that is the most grating a little bit
is when they're like hands-off grandparents.
Because when you look at the traditional role of people,
when they're young, they did this,
when they're middle, they did this,
and grandparenting was always an important role,
which multi-generational families did.
It's a super important role.
Yeah, but I don't understand what keeps you going
if you're not a grandparent, if I'm honest.
Because having had kids, I now realise that having kids
is the most important thing you can do in your life, right?
It trumps everything.
And that's after doing some really important things
that I thought were really important in my life.
so what am I going to do when I'm older garden no I'm going to be a grandparent so I'm going to
help out in simple ways I'm going to offer as much wisdom as I can I know that's these days
grandparents often have less wisdom than younger people because it's all tech based now well it's
it's that generation they never had if they had a life with fewer challenges on average than most
generations they are the least best resource for advice what I mean is like you know I I don't know
whether you know that but i used to go to mongolia every year and visit a family and go on a nomadic
migration with them and stuff right anyway but when i i came to know their culture very very well
and the old people were revered but it was because they knew so much about herding and staying alive
and i think what's what's happened now in the current world we live in is the grandparents
Parents don't necessarily know a bunch of shit because the kids learn it at a very young age.
And it's a lot of the time now the grandparents are asking the kids, can you fix my thing?
Can you do this?
Can you do that?
Experience isn't a function of time, right?
Like you can't just live in any situation and make any decision and call yourself experienced.
Experience is success at the coalface where it wasn't always sure.
and young people can have a lot more wisdom
than old people who haven't got the mileage.
They're of a certain age.
And then we say, oh, well, at 70,
you must have been to war once
and you must have run a business once.
And it's like, no, no.
The whole generation had this room in the middle
to have coasted through and live a life
that was kind of artificially at the expense
of other people who've either died
or lived a lower life because of the confiscation.
And their experiences aren't to be copied
because their experiences aren't ones
that we're going to have.
They've had a different life.
They've done it on resources I'll never see, ever.
So you take them with a grain of salt
and you stick to the people that are half failing,
half winning at everything they set their mind to
because they're judging the challenges properly
and you'll get the advice you need off them,
not the advice you want off grandmum,
which is, oh, don't worry, it's all right.
Oh, you haven't put on weight, you look lovely.
And that's not what you want to hear.
A comfort generation will give you comforting advice.
They won't make your life better.
Well, anyway, here's to a better life.
Harder life, harder.
Well, is it, do I want a harder life?
I'm a meaning guy.
That's hard, so be it.
But the most meaningful thing I have in my life is my children.
And they are easy peasy to be around.
You know, it's the joy.
only just work at it right like if you had kids you had a distant relationship with by now it's
that's fractured and and low trust and that's hard they become a liability to you to your
feelings whenever you think about your kid and you never put any effort into your kid you're
gonna feel bad but if you if you put your effort into your kids and you've loved them and you've
done your best you made mistakes and you that's someone that when you see them your heart lights
up because they're a subject of your proof of work you're you're taking the bit of yourself that's
going to die and taking that bit that you want to keep carrying on and teaching your kids and the
grandkids about you so that that part of you keeps going on because that's the part you want to keep
and see in your grandkids you won't teach them about all the shit that you're ashamed of
well i mean they do see that as well that's the beauty of you know kids is you do realize oh my
god that was bad parenting yeah you know and um as they're getting older we talk about those things
more it doesn't make sense to talk about them when they're too young because you can confuse them
you that's your perspective if you've tried hard and you're honest right but if you've if you
haven't tried hard you don't even know what bad parenting is because you're still doing it
like bad parents have done horrible stuff and won't apologize because they think they're right
about it that's hell that is hell you're doing the wrong thing and you think it's the right thing
that's the abyss so you're in a position already where it's it's a good source of uh joy isn't it
to know that you've put something in it's well it i'll go back to the meaning of it is a there's no
better example of the pursuit of meaning over happiness than your children yeah because when i
when i just said being around them is so easy it is but if i look back there's such heartache and
trouble that you suffer on account of them yeah but actually you don't you you ride it out because
it's so meaningful you just literally ride it it's like a kind of tax deductible pain like you're
going through it still stings whatever it is whatever hardship but if it's under a mission
that you're loyal to yeah it's just the price you pay for getting what you want right yeah you're
right, it's the price you pay for meaning.
It's the price of meaning.
Yeah, like doing a hard thing you're not into
is maybe the worst situation in between your ears.
Like as an experience to go through,
you're doing something that is difficult
and you're not into it.
That is one of the hardest paths to walk.
So the opposite is to do something
that you really care about
to the point that you'd drown to get it,
blow yourself up to get it,
rip bits off yourself to get it,
give kidneys, go to any trouble, anything, all in.
And there's only one category, kids and a wife.
I'm not being funny, but kids could make,
not that I've done it, but I'm almost,
I could make the drudgery of a terrible job be meaningful.
Oh, you can do more than that for your kids.
Have you heard of this supernatural strength phenomenon?
Like, like, like.
Lifting cars and stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it's not urban myth.
it's verified like women lift cars off their kids you know this eddie hall the weight the
deadlift weightlifter the deadlift champion he lifted a 500 kilo bar off the floor right
was that the one who did it for his dead wife no no no no his wife's still alive but it's linked
to that because what he said he was being interviewed after it and uh this by the way
he lifted up a 500 kilo bar and then he had a his nose exploded under the pressure and a big
blot of blood while he stood there staring everyone out blood just pops out of his face
because the pressure your blood pressure is at 200 and you're dying and he lifted it and then
after he lifted it and put it down he's in hospital like uh like basically being treated as a stroke
victim like unconscious coma i think comatose or or induced coma it fucked him up but he lifted up
500 kilos and then after he's back to full health i think full or i don't think he'll be doing the
bar again but he's healthy again he's talking and he's fit and the interviewer was saying like how
you know how do you lift a 500 like a typical interviewer question and he had a very specific
question uh answer he said well have you heard about these women that lift up cars and that
yeah that's real and he said when i was doing the world record attempt i couldn't get past 494
something in practice but when i was over the bar i wasn't breaking a world record i was lifting it
off my daughter.
That takes a lot of visualization though.
Well,
you can get there and he got there and you bypass any limit,
any physical limit.
But what I mean,
the point of it is that you can only access that when your identity is root
believed and only you're responsible for that.
He couldn't have pretended theoretically a kid he hasn't had yet and rescue them because you wouldn't pick it up past 250 kilos if it is your kid or whatever other thing that is absolutely what you'd die to do.
No matter what that is, as long as you believe it, you will unlock your potential.
He did it by lifting a heavy weight.
That's a different level of effort than setting up a business or saying something that's difficult to someone who needs to hear it.
They're different levels of effort.
But these identity concepts are what you're loyal to.
And that's what pushes you through these barriers.
It's not motivation and it's not good luck.
And it's not a bit of extra money or an extra bit of encouragement.
It's what you fucking think enough to take to the absolute.
And that's why it's so important to define properly.
Because you either got it and it's in your pocket when you need it and you perform or you haven't got it.
And that check bounces when it comes to the test.
So it's that important.
Right, we've got to go, mate.
We can't keep this thing going.
That was a three.
Look at that.
That was, well, that's three hours.
plus i switched the thing off when i saw that thing flashing and that was 25 minutes so that's
three hours 25 minutes i might have to split this into two i don't know how you do it no i've never
done a two but this might be the perfect chance to do one ben thanks mate thank you mate it always a pleasure look here comes well you know he a clever dog so he seen the conversation and the noises yeah
he's realizing it like a phone call yeah it's coming now look now look
bored off his pants but yeah great to see you again and yeah I don't even need
to say good luck it doesn't mean anything I hope it carries on it will
carry on god bless type thing isn't it it's like fairly well i'd say i'm gonna bring i'm some point
in the summer holidays i'm gonna bring my kids up here so they're gonna swim in your lake get them
up mate because um there we that we vowed last time we were up here that that they're gonna do
that and well we've done like did well another podcast maybe but there's there's been stuff on
the site where i've been away that's been upgraded it's more comfortable to stay it will be something
we can offer out but not for now they'll want to camp mate that's what they do a bit of camping a
Better cooking on the fire.
Yes.
Right.
Great.
Thank you, mate.
All right, mate.
See you next time.
Bye.