Disney must be wondering how it all went so wrong.

Disney’s Mulan movie is cursed.

I’m not that sympathetic. It had ‘cynical cash-grab’ written all over it from the get-go.

And I can see how it made sense in Disney boardrooms back in 2015.

The idea of pitching a marquee blockbuster to the lucrative Chinese market made perfect sense.

Sure, we all had concerns about China then. But the west was still in the habit of bending over backwards to please China, if the price was right. The last movie to criticise China was made all the way back in 1997. Hollywood had long-since apologised for making movies about Tibet.

And Disney knew about potential human rights breeches in Xinjiang, where the film was eventually made. But hey, show me somewhere where there aren’t human rights violations. And anyway, this is about economics, not morality.

But no one could have predicted just how quickly things between the West and the East would end up going South.

When Mulan launched a week ago, it was into an entirely different world, and into a throes of a new cold war. It didn’t matter that Covid had made it very difficult for people to go out and watch films anyway, though of course that was always going to make it challenging.

Mulan was being seen through a geo-political lens.

And in that way, it just didn’t matter how good or bad the film is (it sucks apparently), audiences the world over were primed to hate it.

Hollywood bent over backward to please the CCPs sensitivities, and worked hard to make the movie as “Chinese feeling” as possible – paying great attention to authenticity in costume, culture and history.

However, in the end, it was like French chefs coming here and telling us how to make vegemite sandwiches. The Chinese media was full of posts saying, “Hey America, leave our culture alone.”

… Before the CCP just went ahead and banned media outlets from talking about it anyway.

And for the American audience, there was no appetite for fawning and uncritical pieces about China.

It wasn’t that long ago that the film’s leading actor, Liu Yifei, was tweeting support for Hong Kong’s police during the pro-democracy demonstration, giving birth to the #boycottMulan hashtag.

Disney found itself trying to please both sides of the most epic culture war in a generation, and there was just no way that they could do it.

And so it bombed.

But think about this. How many businesses are in Disney’s shoes?

How many businesses ended 2019 with dreams of expanding further into China’s market, or dreams of leveraging Chinese supply chains to competitive advantage?

And how many of them are realising that they’re going to have to go back to the drawing board.

I just don’t think people get how much things have changed, and how quickly.

The world has pivoted, almost overnight.

We’re no longer talking about ‘integration’. In the US, in Australia, in Europe, (in India!) we’re talking about ‘decoupling’.

This is massive.

History will end up seeing Covid as a very clear line in the sand between two very different global economic orders.

I think you could wish it were different. I dig the Chinese people. They’re fun. They’re industrious. What’s not to love?

And if there was a vision there of us all coming together in a harmonious global family, then that’d be a beautiful thing.

But that’s not what geo-politics has planned for us.

History is still the contest of empires.

And we’ve just got to do the best we can.

JG

Stoicism, as an investment philosophy, is all about control.

I had to laugh at myself the other day.

I’ve got a subscription to the Australian Financial Review. Part of the deal is you get access to an app.

The app gives you notifications if the AFR thinks there’s something particularly newsworthy. Not every day, thankfully. Just when there’s something they think is important.

Anyway, over the past couple of weeks they’ve been sending out notifications with Victoria’s new case numbers and deaths.

Every day.

And I found myself hanging on these numbers.

If the new cases were going up, I felt bad. Oh now. More lockdowns.

And if the case numbers were going down, that made me happy. Great. Maybe we’ll bust out of this rat-hole reality sooner rather than later.

And since these notifications would light up on my phone in the early part of the day, I found that whatever mood they induced became a flavour of my day.

The mood would linger, with a half-life somewhere around dinner time.

And then I caught myself.

What on earth am I doing?

There was absolutely no actionable information in these notifications. Whether the case load was going up or going down, it made absolutely no difference to what I did with my day.

(In fact, now that lockdown has given us perpetual ground-hog day, there is very little that anything can do to influence the direction of my day.)

But there I was. Even though this information was practically of zero use to me, I was taking it on. I was waiting for it to come in. And then I hung the mood of my day on the outcome.

Totally flipping ridiculous.

I’ve been writing about Stoicism over recent weeks, and I am pretty sure that this is exactly what a Stoic WOULDN’T do.

Stoicism is all about focusing on what you can control – what lies within your sphere of influence. And it’s about disengaging yourself and your experience from everything that is outside of you control.

In fact, it goes deeper than that. While you shouldn’t be stressing about the things you can’t control, you should also be training yourself to love what fate offers up, since everything is an opportunity to grow and to fortify your virtues.

But yeah, stressing about some numbers over which you have no influence and which give you no useful information, is totally un-Stoic.

And so this gives us a Stoic investment philosophy.

In my investing career, I’ve always tried to focus on opportunities where I have influence. That’s why I love property. There’s always something you can do to improve the value or improve the return.

Share-markets on the other hand – well, there’s very little you can do.

And yet many people spend hours on their investing apps, watching the market see-saw about the place – even though there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.

This is nothing but a recipe for stress and unhappiness.

So I’ll leave you with that thought.

Stoic investors are focused on what they can control, and don’t stress about what they can’t. This is where they direct their money and their energy.

… despite what their apps are telling them.

JG.

The key to living is in the last place you’ll look.

I know this is probably going to be an edgy topic right now. But I want to talk about death from a Stoic perspective.

So full compassion for people facing the prospect of losing loved-ones right now, through Covid or through whatever rusty scythe Old Death is waving at us right now. Death is a brutal loss to have to come to terms with.

But, in a world of few guarantees, death is definitely one we’re going to have to deal with sooner or later.

And it’s tough when we’re talking about our loved ones, but it’s a particularly challenging exercise to get our minds around the reality of our own mortality.

We’re not geared for it. Our egos want to live forever. We all hold out on the hope that maybe we will be the one human in the history of the world who might live forever.

But we won’t be.

We will die.

This thought can be terrifying. And most of us choose to stick our heads in the sand and ignore it. Like, just pretend that death isn’t even a thing.

But that wasn’t the Stoic way. The Stoics wanted to stay awake to the reality of death – to carry that awareness in every moment.

As Marcus Aurelius said,

“You could leave this life right now… let that determine what you do and say and think.”

This is one of the reasons why they have a reputation for being a ‘grim’ philosophy.

So why did they do it?

I think what happens when you become conscious of death – when you meditate on it consciously, or you have a near-death experience like a car crash – is that you become very grateful for the life you have.

If I told you that you had just five minutes left on earth, I can guarantee you that they will probably be some of the sweetest minutes of your entire life. You would taste the full sweetness of the air, you would feel the warm sun or the cool wind on your skin, you would savour the rich world of emotion and memory that lives in your mind.

You would drink in everything life had to offer you, knowing that the call for last drinks had already gone out.

Nothing snaps you back into the moment like coming face to face with Death’s ugly head.

And so for the Stoics, meditating on death, trying to be consciously alive to our own mortality – that was nothing but a strategy for living fully – for living with gratitude and gusto.

The more you did it, the richer your life would become.

And what I would note here is that this is an idea that pops up all over the world. It pops up again and again.

That says something, doesn’t it?

Like, take this passage I’ve always loved from the Hagakure – A manual for the Samurai in Japan.

The Way of the Samurai is found in death.

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master.

And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. This is the substance of the way of the samurai.

It is a hard reality to face. Death is coming.

But if we can face that reality – really face that reality – then that is when we start truly living.

JG.

It’s groundhog day here in Melbourne. You don’t miss what you have until its gone.

You know what’s killing me right now?

All the certainty.

I’ve never had so much certainty in my life. Each day is totally precedented. I’m sailing around and around in chartered waters.

And it’s getting me down.

This is life in Melbourne in Stage 4 lockdown.

It’s groundhog day. Every day feels like it’s the same.

I used to look forward to the weekends. Now Saturday morning is the same as every other morning – shuffling around in my underpants wondering if it’s a respectable hour to be hitting the liqueur cabinet.

I can actually say I’ve made good use of lockdown. I’ve taken it as an opportunity to really focus and bang some great stuff out. I was actually surprised at how productive I could be when there were no distractions.

But now I’m realising that I actually really like distractions. I really miss interruptions. I miss having my day derailed and taken in an interesting new direction.

I miss the variety.

Partly this is a case of the grass is always greener. When I was being interrupted all the time, I wanted to be left alone. Now that I’m left alone, I’m craving interruption and some social interaction.

But it’s also about what the human needs to be happy. It needs both stability and variety.

They need to be in balance.

The human is not a machine. If you give it the same day over and over again, it will get bored and tear its eyes out.

But if you give it too much variety – if it never knows where it’s next meal is coming from – then it will probably collapse into anxiety.

A roller-coaster is only fun if you know you can get off.

And every person probably has a different idea of where the balance is – what the ideal variety to stability ratio is.

It’s like music in that sense.

I’ve heard it said that music is the perfect balance of repetition and novelty.

There are structures like rhythms and bass-lines that give music predictability. But if the music is too predictable, it gets boring. (EDM – looking at you.) You need some novelty, in the melody line for example, to keep it ‘fresh’.

Too much novelty though and it just starts to just feel like noise.

And so music is a sonic experience that appeals to the human need for both stability and variety.

So this is one of the unexpected lessons I’ll be taking from Covid experience.

My ideal life involves balance. There’s a sweet-spot where the certainty to variety ratio is just right.

That means getting disciplined on the certainty side – making sure that I don’t end up with too many distractions in my day.

But it also means making sure that I’m getting enough variety. That I’m sampling from a satisfying range of experience.

It’s my responsibility.

For now, my hands are tied. There isn’t all that much I can do.

But on the other side of Covid, for a while, my life is going to be a veritable variety store.

JG