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Donald and Kim – The Movie

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Did you see the spoof movie Trump showed Kim? Genius.

I don’t know if you caught this the other day – I’m not sure how much press it got here.

Basically, Trump played a video to Kim Jong Un during his negotiations with him.

This is it here:
https://www.facebook.com/WhiteHouse/videos/1710505219037204/

Basically, it’s a sort of mock movie trailer, casting the Donald and the Kim as the lead characters, on the verge of destiny, complete with husky-throated voice over and everything.

Yep. People were shocked. Shocked!

Who the hell plays people spoof movie trailers they made in a nuclear disarmament negotiation? Who does that?

Trump does that, and there is just so much to learn here.

I kind of don’t know where to start.

First up, the idea of playing a video during a negotiation is awesome – especially one that it naturally tense.

You see this sort of promo-video thing with big developments. It’s the kind of thing Trump would have played to investors when he was raising capital for a golf course or a hotel or something.

It’s selling the feeling – the felt experience of the offer – before you get into the nitty-gritty.

Key Lesson 1: Humans are fundamentally emotional creatures. A good vibe can save an ordinary set of numbers. A great set of numbers can’t save an ordinary vibe.

Of course, people freaked out that Trump was treating a nuclear disarmament negotiation like an investor road-show. You just don’t do that.

But one thing we know for sure about Trump is that he doesn’t listen to “you just don’t do that.” His natural instinct was to go to a negotiation technique that worked, and when his staff freaked out, he probably said, “why not?” And without a good reason, he just went ahead and did it.

Key Lesson 2: People will tell you ‘you just don’t do that’ a lot in life. Always question it.

Then the video itself is gold. It’s full of powerful visual imagery, and it’s tailored specifically for Kim. We know he loves movies and he loves basketball, so there’s rich references to those.

Key Lesson 3: Know who you’re working with. What are their pain-points? What turns them on?

The video then tosses out the old adversarial framing to replace it with a collaborative vision – the two leaders walking hand in hand into a glorious future. There’s no longer a winner and a loser anymore. It’s no longer Trump vs “little Rocket man”. There’s two winners or two losers. This is powerful.

Key Lesson 4: Build trust by selling win-win.

The video also seems squarely focused on Kim’s legacy. It’s about how he will be remembered – about the future he will deliver for his people. It’s great for the people of North Korea, but this is also Kim’s chance to be a hero.

Key Lesson 5: Sell the benefits, make them personal.

The more I think about this the more I love it.

So how would Trump have used this?

I imagine he would have sat down at the start of his meeting with Kim, and said, “We have the potential to do some great things today. Here, take a look at this little video we made – it’s just a bit of fun – but this is where we’re coming from.”

He wouldn’t have over-sold it. He would have kept it light. Kim would of seen it for the persuasive play that it was.

But that’s the thing about persuasion. It still works, even when you’re flagging all your moves in advance.

But it would have worked. It would have softened the tone of the meeting. It was a friendly gesture. I imagine it would have been a productive meeting.

And all the professors of Diplomacy are left scratching their heads wondering what the hell just happened.

Love it.

Property Planning Gone Mad

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A textbook case of politics driving house prices.

Ok, so I wanted to look at an amazing policy backflip in NSW planning this week, but first, I know a few of you are interested in the art of persuasion, so let’s start with this gem from Opposition Finance spokesman Jim Chalmers. He’s complaining about the way the CBA activated a bunch of kiddie accounts without telling them, in order to juice their sales stats.

“These are appalling revelations and unfortunately also the sort of behaviour Malcolm Turnbull wants to reward with a $17 billion tax handout.

Labor wants to see the victims compensated for the rorts and rip-offs which are being uncovered, the Liberals want to compensate the perpetrators. Banks shouldn’t be rewarded for fiddling with kids’ bank accounts, they should be punished for it.”

Yep, he really went there. “Perpetrators”. “Fiddling with Kids”. The subtle cues are not so subtle. Banks = child rapists.

You might have thought that subtly evoking people’s anger at paedophiles was a step too far over the line. You’re probably right. But welcome to politics in 2018.

But while it’s poor taste, it’s brutally effective persuasion. Banks = kiddy fiddlers. The government (and the tax cuts) are their enablers.

Ouch.

As I’ve said before, it’s going to take something special to get these tax cuts through in this environment.

Malcolm, Morrison, I’m looking at you.

(…but not holding my breath.)

But let’s leave Canberra now for the Capital of modest and sensible, Sydney.

You might remember a few weeks ago that the NSW state planning body gave itself power over certain local government decisions in Ryde.

(Effectively it turned certain higher-density modifications into ‘complying developments’, fast-tracking their approval.)

Called ‘The District Plans’ they were only released in March this year and they called for 7,600 new homes in Ryde over the next 5 years. They also championed the ‘missing middle’ approach to providing terrace houses and duplexes as a way to increase density that is compatible with detached houses.

The 7,600 extra homes sounds like a lot, but we’re still barely scratching the surface of what’s needed. Still, it was a recognition that Sydney is growing fast and the housing stock simply isn’t keeping up.

And this is a point that everyone accepts. Sydney needs more houses. The only problem is, no one knows where to put them.

And Ryde certainly wasn’t happy about being the sharp-tip of the spear in the agenda to density Sydney. Nor was Canterbury-Bankstown.

The Mayor of Ryde was complaining to the papers that there’d be developers and “bulldozers of every block”. The Canterbury-Bankstown Council discussed the proposed changes just over a month later under the agenda item: ‘THE MISSING MIDDLE – A TRAIN WRECK OF A POLICY TOTALLY MISSING THE POINT’.

(Hard to tell what they were really thinking there.)

The local governments rallied hard on their constituent’s behalf.

The state government, facing a tricky election, decided to do a backflip. Now the whole thing’s on hold.

It’s just so classic.

Sydney’s population is booming, thanks in large part to an immigration intake that’s set at the Federal level. The greenies don’t want the city sprawling outward into bush and farmland. Existing residents don’t want to see their leafy streets being built upward, and everyone wants to complain about affordability.

Can you see a way out of that one?

Nope, you can’t. Because there isn’t one.

Unless one of those policy levers is shifted, higher and higher prices are baked in.

It’s driven prices over the past twenty years. It will drive prices over the coming twenty.

And we’ll still be complaining about housing affordability in 2040.

Isn’t that hilarious?

NO B.S. FRIDAY: Time to Tap the Power of, “No!”

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Life is what you are willing to accept.

Life is not what you achieved. It’s not what you went out and got.

It’s what you were willing to accept.

(Can some one stick that quote over a picture of some dolphins climbing a mountain at sunset or some crap like that for me? I want to get into motivational posters.)

Life is what you are willing to accept.

This idea struck me when I was in the shower, and it stopped me in my tracks. (I have a treadmill shower, to stay fit.)

I focus a lot on achievement. On making things happen. And that really is important. It’s a key element in the make-up of your life.

But in the balance of things, it’s small fry. If you were to break your life down in to what you went out and got, and what came to you and you received, what would the break down be?

90% : 10%?

Or think about it this way. How many things are you working on achieving right now? Maybe the most productive people might have a list of 20 things, maybe 50 for the uber-driven.

But how many ‘things’ are there in life? It’s almost infinite. Who sits next to you on the tram? What is the weather is doing? Do they have any bananas today?

So maybe a ratio of 9:1 is optimistic. Maybe its more like infinity : 50.

Ok, it’s silly trying to put number on it. The only want to make the point that a lot of what we have in life is what comes to us.

In that sense then, there is an important and overlooked leverage point for creating the life you want. What you are willing to receive.

For example, if you are willing to sit next to stinky drunken hobos on the train, you’re life will contain that flavour.

However, if you are not willing to accept that, if you get up and change seats whenever that happens, your life will not have that flavour.

There is an important filter here.

And I would say that ‘what you are willing to accept’ is probably the key way to understand your life.

Are you willing to accept verbal abuse from in-laws? Are you willing to accept mundane job tasks? Are you willing to accept living in a hovel above a train line? Are you willing to accept driving a 30 year old Datsun with broken indicators?

This is the power of no.

If you say no to these things, then something has to change.

If you say to the universe, no, I’m not willing to accept a circle of friends always trying to bring me down, then something has to change. It has to.

Now of course this has the element of a gamble to it. If you say, no, I’m not willing to accept a boyfriend who is suffocatingly protective, then you do open the way for the universe to give you the reality of ‘no boyfriend’.

That is a possibility.

But if you can accept that, then you can clear the space for the universe to give you something different.

More often than not, in my experience, the universe tends to be embarrassingly generous. The probability of no boyfriend is much lower than the probability of better boyfriend.

(Gary please stop calling me. Todd and I are happy.)

Professional scrabble players know this. (Yes, they exist). They ‘chuck in’ a huge number of times – much more often than amateur players.

They know that you don’t have to be stuck with a hand of shitty vowels. That’s hard to work with. Much better to clear the decks, trust fate, and try again.

Ok, I’m slipping off point. The central thing here is that to create the life we want, we have to be strong. We have to be really strong in what we’re willing to accept, and really strong in saying no when we need to.

If you get clear on this – if you get really strong on your no, it will have a huge impact on your life.

Negative Gearing Reform – HUGE Possibility

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New Zealand leads the way

Bit of news from across the pond. Looks like New Zealand’s new Labour government is setting the stage to remove negative gearing, by ring-fencing losses on residential property so they can’t be offset against salary income.

An Issues Paper has been released by the Inland Revenue Department on the proposal to change the rules in what the Government says is “an effort to level the playing field between speculators and investors – and home buyers”.

IRD is proposing that the new rules will apply from the 2019-20 tax year and will mean that investors will no longer be able to offset losses on property investments against their other income. It’s not definite yet that the new rules will be applied in entirety from April 1 next year as the IRD says it would be possible to phase the rules in over a two or three year period (by gradually reducing the amount of losses that can be applied against other income). However, the IRD appears to favour applying the rules in entirety from next year.

Revenue Minister Stuart Nash, in “encouraging feedback” on the proposed changes, says the “persistent tax losses” that many property investors declare on their investments indicate that they rely on capital gains to make a profit..

The changes will “make the tax system fairer” Nash says…

“In conjunction with the recently announced extension to the bright-line test, ring-fencing losses from rental properties would make property speculation less attractive and level the playing field between property investors and home buyers. The time is right to test the detail of this proposal with investors and other stakeholders,” Nash says…

IRD is suggesting that the ring-fencing should apply on a “portfolio basis”, which means that investors would be able to offset losses from one rental property against rental income from other properties – calculating their overall profit or loss across their portfolio.

Also under the suggested changes, a person’s ring-fenced residential rental or other losses from one year could be offset against their residential rental income from future years (from any property) and their taxable income on the sale of any residential land.

I think this is all pretty interesting. For me, if New Zealand pulls the trigger first, you can pretty much lock it in that Australia will go at some point. The same way that Trump’s tax cuts breathed life into the prospect of tax cuts in Australia.

It’s working at the collective consciousness level.

And I actually don’t mind some of the proposed changes. The idea of a portfolio basis – where loses in one property can be offset against income from another – is a great idea. It’s about recognising that property investors are running a business, and treating all their activities that way.

But I didn’t know what the ‘bright line test’ was. I had to look it up:

The bright line test – which requires tax to be paid on any gains made from a residential property sale – was first imposed by the National-led Government in 2015.

The Labour-led Government has argued the measures don’t go far enough and that extending the test to five years will help deter property speculators and “may” have of a dampening effect on the housing market.

National opposed the changes, despite it being a bill that “in the normal course of events, we very much would have been supporting,”.

“But we cannot support this bill because of the egregious, and I think in fact duplicitous, way in which a stealth capital gains tax is being imposed on New Zealanders through this legislation.”

So the gain you make on any property you sell within 5 years is added to your personal income and taxed. And that’s new because NZ doesn’t have capital gains tax…

(Why aren’t their prices higher?)

But seriously, 5 years is a pretty long time in property investment. I don’t think you’re just going to deter ‘speculators’ and ‘property flippers’ with that. You’re deterring everyone.

It’s that old narrative again. That everyone investing in property is just flipping and speculating and getting something for nothing.

I guess unless you’ve actually owned an investment property, you don’t realise how much work is involved.

It’s not nothing. And there’s risks too. You could get a bad tenant. Or no tenant. As an investor, you’re wearing that risk.

So I’m a little tired of this narrative that all investors are speculators and gamblers. That we’ve got nothing to offer the world.

Give us a break.

But I just don’t know how we’re going to shift it.

JG

The Secret to Win/Win

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Putting win-win in its proper place for full power

“Why do you think he’s going to go for vendor finance?”

“Oh, well, you know. He gets to help me out. There’s a feel good factor. It’s win-win.”

This idea of win-win is deep in the collective consciousness now. I don’t know exactly who came up with it, but I’m pretty sure it was Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that made it famous.

But like a lot of things on the way into popular culture, the message has been diluted, distorted and bastardised.

Like my mate. ‘Win-Win’ is not a persuasive tool. “C’mon mate. Give me some money. It’s win-win.”

It’s not something you apply after the fact to justify a decision or bring someone around to it.

It’s a mindset. It’s a way of coming up with solutions. Not a method for selling them.

I see a lot of people get this wrong. Even if their intentions are more genuine that my mate’s.

They decide on what they want, and then look for a way ‘sell the benefits’. And in that moment, they’re not trying to deceive the other party. They’re genuinely looking for the things in the deal that are good for the counter-party.

But this isn’t where you apply win-win.

At its heart, win-win asks you to step into the shoes of the other. Before you’ve decided what you want, empty your agendas and look at the situation through the lens of the other person’s interests.

In that way it’s an act of empathy. It’s about being able to connect with and understand the drives and motivations of another.

It’s a very feely process.

But what happens if you can do that is that you open the space right up, and open the door to many possible solutions. You get to see where your interests and their interests intersect. You get to get creative.

That doesn’t happen if you’ve already decided what needs to happen and are just looking for a way to sell it.

This mindset approach to win-win also puts you in a position of strength. If you have taken the time to understand what’s driving another person, you’ll do much better in negotiations. You’ll be able to anticipate where directions will go, and sell the benefits of particular outcomes much more effectively.

So remember this, win-win is first and foremost an act of empathy.

The challenge is not losing sight of your own interests by focusing on the needs of another. This is another important life skill, but we’ll leave that for later.

Who would have thought? So much personal development on the road to becoming a titan of business.

Your apartment – now with a McHappy toy!

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What is McDonald’s up to?

What’s a company’s most valuable asset?

Take McDonald’s for example. What’s their most valuable asset?

It’s people, right? That’s the conventional wisdom.

Actually, not even close. People barely make the top ten. They’re down there somewhere with photocopying equipment and toner.

McDonald’s most valuable asset is real estate.

Think about it. How much real estate does McDonalds occupy? In prime locations across the country. It must be like hectares and hectares worth.

And all that land must be worth a small fortune.

I often think about it when I drive past these places. Like, how much business do they actually do?

It wouldn’t surprise me if the fast-food restaurants were just revenue-neutral place holders for a massive real estate empire.

McDonald’s is a real estate company with a fast-food arm.

I think the same thing about op-shops. It’s a patient but profitable business model. Buy shop-fronts in out of the way locations, wait for the areas to develop, sell the real estate on.

All the while sourcing your products by donation and your staff from volunteers.

Seriously, those guys must be killing it… over the long run.

I don’t know any of that for sure. It’s just what I see looking at those businesses through the real estate paradigm I live in.

But then there’s this news the other day. McDonalds is doing a joint venture with Stockland to develop an apartment complex in Western Sydney.

From Property Observer:

The biggest name in fast food, McDonald's, has moved into apartment development in western Sydney's Parramatta, teaming with developer Stockland.

The project is at its Parramatta restaurant site at 355-375 Church Street.

Some 350 apartments are proposed along with 1565 square metres of new retail space, a car park and the new restaurant.

The fast food group will retain ownership of the restaurant stratum lot, which is proposed to have two levels of seating, a PlayPlace, McCafe and a dual-lane drive thru.

McDonald's senior development director Josh Bannister noted this was the group's first mixed-use development.

They do not have any other plans at this stage, but the company has been looking at value-adding its property portfolio with residential components elsewhere in Sydney.

The proposed apartments will include one to three bedrooms, with views across the Parramatta Park, Parramatta River and towards the Blue Mountains.

Nice. Keep the restaurant, build a 350-apartment complex on top, roll around in jello-pits of money.

And “they don’t have any further plans at this stage…” Sure they don’t. Come on. You telling me this wasn’t the business model from the beginning?

Even if we take that at face value, you can bet this won’t be the last time they do something like this. They’re going to make a tonne of money out of this deal… for what? Effectively selling the air-space above their restaurant.

Space they weren’t using anyway!

If it’s one thing I know for sure in life it’s that patient money loves real estate. Economies change, industries grow and die, cities evolve, gentrify and decay.

But through it all, there’s real estate. Whatever is going on, on a long enough horizon, real estate makes money.

The only time it doesn’t is when civilisations themselves collapse.

But in that environment, nobody is making money.

Patient money loves real estate because that’s where the value is. Over the long run, nothing else comes close.

With those of use with shorter life-spans than McDonalds and St Vincent De Paul, we’ve got to roll with the cycles in the market.

But it’s the same dynamic that drives value for us. Land is worth more over time because they’ve stopped making any more of it.

(… apart from those garbage islands in the South China Sea).

You want to play like patient, inter-generational money?

It’s property all the way.

NO B.S. FRIDAY: Your post-AI tool kit must contain magic

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The robot revolution will make magicians of us all… or we'll be redundant.

In what ways are you better than a robot? In what ways are you worse?

I don't think anybody has any idea of the tech crunch that is coming down on society – not governments, not media, not ordinary citizens.

It's probably just a handful of geeks in Silicon Valley that are going to make out like bandits.

(And me. I'm going to get in on that action for sure.)

And for a while there, I was thinking that my job was safe. The coming revolution in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics is going to devastate the job market.

Like, Cretaceous-era level carnage.

But I thought, hey, I'm an entrepreneur. You can't teach robots how to do what I do. My job's got to be pretty safe, right?

But, I'm no rocket scientist. There's a body of experience I draw on day-to-day, but really it's pretty simple: sniff out an opportunity, crunch the numbers, pull together a team, make it happen.

If I'm honest, a good chunk of that process could be automated. A computer would do a much better job of crunching the numbers on the trillions of opportunities that must be out there.

Sure, there are some soft skills. A robot probably can't persuade an investor to tip in a couple of mill… but then, if a robot came to you and said I have a project that has an 84.4% chance of delivering a 14% return with a 2 percentage point standard deviation, you could probably take it at face value. You're probably not going to be thinking, why does this robot smell like ouzo? Is it going to piss all my money up against the wall?

(Common road block for me.)

But even soft skills vs hard skills probably isn't the right question. They're training robots to be nurses in Japan, and people seem to like them. They say the right things, they never complain, they make the appropriate understanding noises at the right time.

Turns out, some soft skills can be taught to robots.

So what is the right question?

For me, this is where it gets interesting.

Turns out, right now where we are in robotics and AI, is that some things are trivially easy, while some things are impossibly hard.

What's easy? Finding the square root of 45823903573034999213897534. For a computer that's a walk in the park. Or beating every chess champion on the planet at the same time. Yawn.

So what's hard?

Catching a ball.

Looking at a picture of an animal and saying whether it's a cat or a dog.

Understanding whether someone is joking from their facial expressions.

Turns out these things are pretty much impossible for computers right now.

As some one said (when I was reading about it a while back so sorry I don't have a reference), for things that require thinking, computers are light years ahead of us. For the things that humans can do without thinking, computers are light years behind.

This still blows my mind.

What can't computers do? The things humans can do without thinking.

The reason for that is that millions of years of evolution have gone into doing those things. Catching something or hitting a target. These are incredibly useful skills when it comes to catching food.

Being able to tell at a glance whether something is food, or an enemy, or an inanimate object. Again, incredibly useful.

Knowing when someone is about to stab you in the face, by reading their body language. Again, vital human skill.

And so we are highly optimised around certain tasks. Computers have a lot of catching up to do.

We almost never had to calculate the square root of 45823903573034999213897534 in the wild, and so we don't really have the hard or soft ware to do it.

To me I find this incredibly exciting. What it means is that the celebration of cerebral intellect is almost over.

Soon, no one is going to have bragging rights about pure intellect. No matter how brainy they'll be, they'll be nothing better than a half-wit compared to a computer.

And so what will have?

We'll come back into the things that make us special, and all of those things live in the body.

They're not in out thoughts, not even in our personality. None of that will be special anymore.

You will be special because you are an organic, self-sustaining, sensory orgy, part meat, part spirit, chokka block full of earthy goodness.

And it won't be our ability to solve problems that will make us special. It will be our ability to tap into deeper intelligences. The instincts and gut-knowings that live in the body, or the cosmic collective consciousness that gets dialled into the pineal gland or where ever it is.

Soon, we're going to stop putting any value at all on technical education. It will be a waste of time.

Rather, we will need to go back to where our specialness lives, and learn how to tap those powers.

And those powers are just so much more exciting. So much more wonderful and mind blowing.

I just can't wait for humanity to make that leap.

Bad News: Your money in the bank- gonski in 60 seconds.

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Another day, another banking attack on democracy.

Valentines Day will go down as a dark day in Australian history.

It was the day that the banks overturned one of the few protections that depositors had.

Ask anyone how safe their money in the bank is. I'd say 80% wouldn't have a clue. The banks are big. The money must be safe.

Another 20% are probably aware that Australia has a federally-funded deposit guarantee scheme.

So if a banks goes broke, and you had money in the bank, then the government will give you your money back, up to $250,000.

It's called the Financial Claims Scheme, or FCS.

(Not to be confused with the government's current public relations program, ‘ffs'.)

So all good, right? Your money's safe.

Well, turns out, it's not so safe. It turns out the FCS is underfunded, and not actually much of a guarantee at all.

In 2011, the international Financial Stability Board based in Basel, Switzerland, found that Australia's FCS contained about $20 billion for each bank in Australia.

Sounds like a lot right. Well, actually, no so much. Each of the four majors, who account for over 80% of all deposits, they each have something north of $400 billion in deposits.

So if one of the big four went under, the chances that there'd be enough in the kitty to cover it are pretty small.

Especially when you remember how concentrated the Australian banking sector is. It's hard to see a situation where a major goes under without taking some of the regional banks with them.

So not a lot to inspire confidence there.

But that's ok, the government could just go into debt or print money to make sure it hit its FCS obligations, right?

Well, maybe, maybe not.

And this is what happened on Valentines day.

The government sprung a sneaky move on the Senate, ramming legislation through while just 7 senators (of 76!) were in the room to vote on it.

(I guess the others were taking their chief of staffs out for a candle-lit dinner).

It was the APRA crisis resolution bill.

What's in the bill?

Well, a bunch of stuff, but the most alarming was the removal of the guarantee bit from the deposits guarantee scheme.

At this point I have to introduce you to Dr Wilson Sy. He was formerly the Head of Research at APRA, so knows what he's talking about.

As he says, “the evidence collected here strongly suggests that the Bill is designed to confiscate bank deposits to ‘bail in' insolvent banks to save the financial system.”

How?

“Or”.

There was key change to the APRA mandate. APRA is normally responsible for “protecting depositors AND ensuring the stability of the financial system.”

However, in the latest bill, APRA is allowed to make its decision in secret, if it is in “the interest of protecting depositors OR ensuring the stability of the financial system.”

See what they did there?

Now typically, protecting depositors is part and parcel of ensuring the stability of the financial system.

But in the middle of a crisis? When banks are going to the wall and the government is running out of money?

When it's facing the prospect of having to print billions and trash Australia's financial reputation?

It's not hard to imagine a scenario where protecting depositors is not the best way to ensure the stability of the financial system.

And since that decision will be made behind closed doors, it's also not hard to imagine a situation where government lackeys just decide to fleece donors and bail-out their banking mates, given the choice.

As Dr Sy points out, the new bill gives APRA and the government “discretion.”

But it's just not a guarantee if the body behind it has discretion.

It's like your insurer saying to you, yeah, your house and contents are totally insured… you know, unless something else comes up. Let's just see how it flows on the day.

And in the middle of a crisis, with a disaster to blame and their banking mates to protect, you can bet that the politicians will use their “discretion.”

And so that's what happened. On Valentine's Day, in the cold, heart of Canberra, the government quietly rushed through legislation designed to screw depositors over.

Thanks, mongrels.

I know the banking sector gives us things to be angry about on a daily basis, but if you're looking for a good outlet for that anger, the Citizen's Electoral Council is running a strong campaign on it. Check it out.

And time to rethink our definition of ‘defensive' assets.

NO B.S. FRIDAY: Love – the most unrealistic expectation of all

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Valentines day reminds me of how good we are at burdening ourselves with unrealistic expectations

I saw something cute on Facebook this week. It was someone talking about being a working mother.

She said, “Working mothers are expected to work like they don't have children, and mother like they don't have a job.”

Too true.

If it's one thing we've become very skilled at in the west, it's placing totally unrealistic expectations on ourselves

… and then beating ourselves up with a spiky stick when we don't live up to our own ridiculous ideals.

How much misery is this causing us right now? I'm not just talking about moody teenagers – at least they have the luxury of imagining that their future might be different.

I'm talking about everybody.

We should be cut like an Olympic athlete (no matter how old we are), as creative as cocaine-happy graphic designer, as up-to-date as a news anchor, as enlightened as a Himalayan man with no pants, as compassionate as a nun but as staunch as Donald Trump…

Ok, maybe I'm being a little specific here. Perhaps some of these are just me. But you get the point, and you probably have your own version of this drama playing out in your own head.

Unless we're careful, we tend to ask too much of ourselves, and then make ourselves miserable trying to keep up. It's a contemporary epidemic.

And love is the worst.

As I wander past the post Valentine's Day clutter in the dumpster outside my office – wilting roses and teddy bears and all that guff…

(seriously, ladies, I'm married. To the fellah who dropped off the golf clubs… thanks. They're very nicely weighted.)

… I'm reminded at just how much industry and endeavour is geared up into making us feel totally inadequate about our relationships.

And I feel like I'm seeing a shift.

We used to worry about whether our partner was ‘the one'. Taking our cue from 90s romantic comedies, we felt that our lover should knock us off our feet, and keep us there on the floor. If we tried to get up, they should knock us down again. And again.

Even at 5.30 in the morning, after you've both been up feeding the baby all through the night, she's got breast milk stains all down her singlet, he doesn't even know where his pants are… even in that moment, the sheer attractive power of your immutable soul bond should knock you on your arse.

Love is not being able to get up off the floor. Ever.

This is the fairy-tale and it's incredibly seductive.

It's starting to lose its grip on us though, slowly but surely.

At a conscious level (if not wholeheartedly) we can see that the fairy-tale is unrealistic BS. We get it.

That's nice.

However, I see it being replaced with fluffy personal development mantras. About being, self-sufficient, independent, complete on my own.

That we should love our partner like we love our I-phone. We deeply appreciate its sleek design functionality, and would be proper pissed if someone stole it, but ultimately, they're easily replaceable.

And you know, it is good to be independent. It's good if your own sense of self worth has nothing to do with whether there's someone on your arm or not.

However, a relationship should not be a theatre for the expression of independence.

That's not what relationships are about.

To me, relationships are a shared journey – towards shared and independent goals. To make it work, you need to think of yourself as a team.

And I mean that in a very sporting sense. You have to work as a team. You have to share your vision of what life is going to be about, and you have to work cooperatively, picking up slack and supporting each other wherever possible.

Great relationships work like well-oiled teams. Each person in the pair is independent and autonomous, but they understand their place and their role in the team, without saying.

It's not a theatre for expressing independence. There's no “I” in “Get with the program, dickhead.”

And what we don't realise is that both of these misguided notions of love – the co-dependent and the independent – both of these have been driven by the same merciless machine that makes us all miserable.

Our ancients never put so much stress on their relationships. Why?

There's probably a myriad of reasons, but I think on the whole, they were just generally more secure. They didn't need their relationship, or their relationship to the relationship, to make themselves feel ok about themselves.

And that's because advertising.

The marketing industry has totally inflamed our sensitivities to comparative worth. It's human to compare yourself to others. But only modern humans compare themselves to photo-shopped waifs on massive billboards…

… and to the centre half forward for North Melbourne, and to Richard Branson, and to the Dalia Lama….

And so we crave love because we want to know that we're ok. That we have a place within it all.

But love was never meant to carry this burden. Love was only ever meant to unite us in a hormone-driven dance of horny pants, and then transmute gently into a content shared-sense of companionship.

(That'll never be a pop song, but I think it's the reality of it.)

Asking anything more of love – and especially asking it to make you feel ok about yourself, is just asking too much.

You've got to find the right donkey for the right burdens.

How do we get back to the old ways of thinking about love? Do we want to?

How do we cultivate a greater sense of ‘team' in all our relationships?

How do we separate love from the need to feel ok about ourselves?

JG

Why the apartment crash is on hold

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Banks are running a closed shop

I've been warning my readers about the high-rise apartment sector for what… like 3 or 4 years now?

They're still standing… Is it time to admit that I'm wrong?

While I generally agree with the line that being wrong about the timing is the same as being wrong, I'm standing by what I said. In fact, if you followed my advice and steered clear of the high-rise sector in recent years, I expect a thank you card for Christmas.

And if things play out how they look like playing out, I expect you'll want to throw in a top-shelf bottle of whiskey to accompany that card.

So if things are as shaky as I've been saying, why haven't we seen more cracks starting to appear in the high-rise foundations? And apart from blacklisting a few suburbs here and there, why aren't banks back-pedaling harder on their exposure to the sector?

These are good questions. One of the old salty dogs of the Australian economic commentariat, Robert Gottliebsen had a crack at answering them the other day. I think the answers were interesting:

“Nowhere in Australia are there more danger signals than in inner city apartments. Most of the property commentaries look at average dwelling prices in particular cities, not at specific markets.

Broadly one and two bedroom apartments units sold on a “used” basis are down about 20 per cent in the three main markets – Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Melbourne has a very serious problem in this market because a large number of the apartments have explosive high fire-risk cladding that must be replaced, which will either send builders and other industry players to the wall or will be paid for by owners who are risking their own or their tenants' personal safety each day. As this becomes understood the value of these apartments will fall by a lot more than 20 per cent.

Ok, hang on a sec. “Explosive” high fire-risk cladding? I've written about the cladding issue before, but I'm not aware of anyone saying that the cladding had the potential to “explode”. Maybe it was senior moment… Anyway:

Right now there are series of developers and apartment owners that in years gone by would have seen the bank heavies move in and take control.

But the banks are just sitting there watching the crisis unfold. Why? Here are five possible reasons and I give my rating out of 10 for each of the reasons.

Firstly the banks have changed their spots and are going to be soft in the future. Possible accuracy rated out of 10 – nil.

Secondly, the banks are scared about the impact on the total market if they pull the plugs. Rating – nine.

Thirdly, in Melbourne, taking control of fire risk apartments either by appointing receivers to builder/developers or taking control of individual apartments is extremely dangerous for banks. Stay low: Rating – nine

Fourth, the banks are worried about the royal commission and don't want bad headlines at this time. Rating – eight.

Finally, when interest rates are low banks are less likely to be vicious because the cost of allowing money to be frozen while the borrower tries to solve the problems is low. Rating, seven. But this will change if interest rates rise.

At some point the banks will have to confess their problems in this area and my guess is that the combination of higher global interest rates and the royal commission will force those confessions.

Maybe. I suspect to the only way to get the truth out of the banks is to pry it from their cold, dead hands.

However, on the idea that the banks are colluding to prop up a sector and to prevent the entire industry taking a bath… well, we've seen it before and it certainly wouldn't surprise me if that was the case.

I think the banks probably did get a little blind-sided by the king tide in foreign capital – a tide that came in quickly, and is quickly on the way out.

They don't want to be left holding the baby on that one, but they're stuck with it.

A managed unwind is actually probably the best we could hope for.

I think the next 12 months are going to be make-or-break. Developers and early buyers will be looking to off-load stock on a new generation of buyers.

But the only generation of buyers that's going to fall for that – or be dazzled by free i-pads, and interest free furniture packages – is a generation that is probably not going to be particularly savvy.

(They're not going to be readers of my blog, that's for sure.)

That also means that they're probably not going to be in a super-strong financial position. They're more likely to struggle with mortgage payments if the economy stumbles.

That is, the market is trying to hand-ball the baby on to a new bunch of suckers, and those suckers are the most likely to go down, fall hard, and go down en masse.

That wouldn't be fabulous for the economy.

So spread the word. Is grandma thinking of tipping her nest-egg into an off-the-plan apartment in inner-city Brisbane?

Get her to think twice.