Knowledge Source

Your freedom to create wealth...

  • Home
  • Real Estate
  • Business
  • Success
  • No BS Friday
  • Video
    • Student Stories
    • Training Events
  • Contact
  • Experts
    • Jon Giaan
    • Dymphna Boholt
    • Mark Rolton
    • Sophie Howard
    • Kevin Doodney
    • Mark Baker
    • George Fokas
    • Spiro Kladis
    • Graeme Holm
    • Rachel Rofe
  • Live Events
  • Online Events
You are here: Home / Archives for Uncategorized

No BS: why we’re such a hot mess

April 15, 2021 by Jon Giaan Leave a Comment

No B.S Friday: most people make a big mistake when they set the trajectory of their lives.

In many ways, humans are a hot mess.

I don’t feel I really need to justify that. It’s pretty easy to find people just making a hot mess of themselves, of their countries or of the entire planet.

I don’t think it’s my case to make.

But one of the ways that I think humans are particularly hot and messy is that we have created a circular motivational system for ourselves.

So, ask most people what the point of life is, and I reckon 8 out of ten will tell you that the point of life is to be happy. To enjoy life.

That’s what we’re here to do.

The founding fathers of America enshrined it as a right – the pursuit of happiness.

We are pursuing happiness. We’re chasing it. Happiness is the goal and the target.

That’s a pretty mainstream and vanilla idea. Most people would agree with it.

Now, what is happiness? Well, it’s an emotion right? I think most people would say that. Happiness is something that you ‘feel’?

Again, nothing too controversial there.

Now, the real question here is, what are emotions?

Well, what I would say, and perhaps this is a little controversial, is that our emotions are our automatic guidance systems.

Every feeling we feel is.

If we are cold and we find something warm – like a bear-skin rug or something, that warmth is a motivational cue. It’s our bodies way of saying to us, “Hey, that warmth feels nice. Do more of that. Get closer to that.”

It automatically guides us out of the cold and into the warmth, which obviously improves the odds of survival.

That seems fairly obvious for things like physical pain, but I’d argue that all emotions are serving a similar role.

They’re there to guide us towards the things that are good for us, and away from the things that are bad for us. 

So we feel a loving bond to the people around us because we’re a herd species and we survive better in packs.

Laying out an abundant spread of food at Christmas makes us happy – happiness rewards us for creating abundance and enjoying food.

Watching your lover leaves you makes you sad because you now have fewer mating opportunities… and your complex needs for intimacy and understanding have also been dashed.

Over time we have developed some fairly complex needs – social status, actualisation etc. It’s not all just rooting and eating.

But what I would argue is that happiness is what tells us we’re on the right track in life. It’s the way of helping us remember situations that are good for us, and encouraging us to repeat them.

In that way, happiness is a guidance system.  

But have we gone and done?

We’ve made the guidance system itself the point.

When we pursue happiness, we pursue the signposts to the things that are good for us.

Happiness is not the thing.

And what is the thing?

Well, that’s what we have to figure out. We have to inquire into our souls, determine which drives are coming from our most elevated and inspired self, and shoot for those.

But if we’re just pursuing ‘happiness’ we’re missing the point.

Happiness guides us towards what we really want and what we are here to do.

But happiness itself is not the point.

We have set the guidance system itself as the destination. It’s like punching your GPS into your GPS.

No wonder we’re so confused.

No wonder we’re such a hot mess.

JG.

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorized Tagged With: nobsfriday

Can property grow any faster?

April 14, 2021 by Jon Giaan Leave a Comment

The property market is thundering along. Can we keep it up?

So I guess you caught the headlines last week about how the property market is going absolutely gangbusters right now.

Prices were up 2.8% in March – the biggest increase in 33 years!

And that was on the back of 2.1% in February, which was the biggest increase in 17 years!

And that means, unless my maths is mistaken, that that’s the biggest two-monthly increase in 50 years.

No, it doesn’t work like that. But we are setting records. Make no mistake about that.

But what really caught my eye was what was going on in Sydney. Sydney prices were up a colossal 3.7% in the month. That’s massive. It sticks out like doggies on the chart:

When you put it together into quarterly data (3 months at a time), prices are growing at 7.1%.

Again, that’s the fastest clip in 30 odd years.

And Sydney we can keep up the pace its set in the first three months of the year, we’re looking at price growth of over 25% p.a!

Ka-pow.

The boom has well and truly arrived folks. 20+% is a boom, make no mistake about it.

And can we keep it up? Can Sydney keep posting monster gains?

Well, all the leading indicators seem to suggest it can.

Like Auction clearance rates. They’ve been holding up above 80% for months now. When you line it up on the charts, it says the upturn is barely getting started. 

Same story with new lending. Mortgage growth is accelerating, but still running a fair way ahead of price growth.

It all suggests that even though we’re posting record monthly and quarterly gains, and even though we’re already growing at a clip north of 20% p.a, there’s still plenty of headroom left.

The boom has a lot further to run.

The train is leaving the station. Catch it if you can.

JG

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorized

Interest rates could still go lower

April 12, 2021 by Jon Giaan 1 Comment

We’ve never seen money this cheap. But it could get cheaper yet.

Interest rates have tumbled since Covid was unleashed on the world, and they could still go lower yet.

Right now, many lenders, especially the big lenders, have chalk-board rates below 2%.

That’s phenomenal. When I started investing mortgage rates were well into double digits. I could imagine getting a mortgage rate with a one in front of it.

And the thing is, mortgage rates could actually keep going lower.

If you look at what’s happened to borrowing costs, there was an immediate drop post-Covid, as the RBA slashed the official cash rate to 0.1%.

After that though, they kept drifting south, to their current incredible lows.

There’s a couple of reasons for this.

The first is the RBA’s Term Funding Facility (TFF) which gives banks access to money at the cash rate of 0.1%, so long as they lend it out to borrowers.

Since the TFF is a fixed rate facility, the banks have passed it on to borrowers at super-cheap fixed rates.

It’s why fixed rates are so much cheaper than variable rates right now, and why fixed rates, as a share of total loans, are at record levels.

Take a look at the boom in fixed rate lending in CBA’s mortgage book:

There’s also been a boom in 4-year fixed rate mortgages, as people lock in the cheap money for as long as possible.

The second factor driving this is more of a global story.

Money is cheap everywhere right now. Since banks tap a lot of their money from international money markets, they’ve got access to a tonne of cheap capital right now.

It’s not 0.1% cheap, but it’s still cheap.

And this, along with inter-bank competition, has seen mortgage rates collapse.

Predictably, when interest rates tank, mortgage lending goes through the roof, as people look to capitalise on super cheap rates.

And you can see that in all the measures of mortgage lending. They’re booming. CBA’s book has gone vertical:

But this is across the board:

And, just as predictably, when finance booms, so do prices.

The investment bank UBS lines the two up, and given where mortgage lending has gone, they reckon house prices are heading to 15% year on year in the very near future.

And after that, who knows where we’ll end up.

At lot of that will come down to where interest rates go from here.

And while the official cash rate has hit the floor and isn’t going any lower, as I’ve said, it’s not the only factor influencing mortgage rates.

The RBA has other tools at its disposal, and trends in global money markets are also a factor.

And the direction is still towards cheaper, more abundant money.

So the question is live.

Rates are cheap. Super cheap.

But there is every chance they could still go lower yet.

JG

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorized

No BS: how to beat the overwhelm

April 9, 2021 by Jon Giaan Leave a Comment

No B.S Friday: try this stress-buster on for size.

I was riding the edge of my overwhelm the other day.

No real reason. It’s funny how it works like that. I was busy. I had a lot on. A lot of deadlines coming to a crunch.

But that’s not unusual for me. I’m a high productivity individual. There’s always a lot going on. Life is always full.

But sometimes you’ve got a handle on the beast. Sometimes you don’t.

Last week, I didn’t.

My first strategy when I get like this is to stop, breathe, and make a list.

I just jot down all the things I’ve got to do. As much as I can think of, I just get it down on paper.

What I’ll often notice is that the list ends up being a lot shorter than I thought it was going to be.

When I’m mulling from one interconnected problem to the next, I can often go round in circles without noticing it.

It feels like I’ve got a hundred things. But all I’ve got is ten things. I’ve just counted them all ten times.

So stopping and doing a head-count can reduce a lot of anxiety, I’ve found.

Getting it down on paper also means getting it out of my head. Holding ideas in your head takes energy. It takes effort. When you outsource it to a to-do list or some sort of project management software, you free up mental resources, and that can feel relieving too.

But in this case, writing a list didn’t help.

I mean, it sorta did. But it still felt like I was riding the edge of overwhelm.

And I think that meant that it had become a bodily phenomenon at that stage. And I think what was really throwing me – why overwhelm is so curly for me – was the mismatch between my physical and mental states.

In my mental universe, I’m tackling massive problems, as sirens of emergency wail all around me, and people watch on, in desperation or judgement, wanting to know if I’ve succeeded or failed. Everything’s on the line.

It’s epic.

In my physical universe, I’m sitting in front of a delicate piece of computer hardware, mostly still for hours on end, just gently tapping at keys every now and then with my finger tips.

It’s hard to imagine a less heroic physical state.

But that’s where I was, and my mind and my body were in total disconnect.

And that can be ok. But living in that disconnect requires a compensatory energy at some point in the equation.

Normally, it involves managing your adrenaline and hosing down your body’s desire to fight or flight.

Some days I really do feel like ramming my fist through the monitor and then shoulder charging the office windows and commando rolling out onto the street.

Not because that would actually help me finish the email I’m writing, but because that would give me the release that comes when my physical and mental realities align.

So yeah, I think overwhelm comes from constantly telling your body that we’re in the middle of some sort of epic battle AND asking it to do nothing about it.

It’s why overwhelm often comes laced with a feeling of futility.

That’s what it feels like to me. And it’s why hitting the gym and just smashing myself often sorts it all out. It gives the body the release it needs.

Writing this, I’m wondering if this might be a particularly blokely approach to stress. That maybe it’s more of a masculine tendency to meet stress with brute force.

I don’t know.

But I still think that there’s something in this. That maybe the feeling of overwhelm is just your body saying “I can’t live this lie any more.”

I think you’ve got to listen to that.

But if it’s true, it means that managing overwhelm is not about dealing with anything on your to do list.

It’s about giving your body the release it needs.

Whatever that looks like

JG.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Why the RBA needs you to be rich

April 7, 2021 by Jon Giaan Leave a Comment

The RBA doesn’t want you to be rich. They need you to be rich.

I don’t know if you’ve picked up on it, but there’s a drive to make you richer.

Are you feeling it?

Gina Reinhart is. All the rich-listers are. Their wealth has jumped a staggering 24% in the past twelve months. Gina’s has double. Doubled! According to the AFR:

Despite a global pandemic dominating global economies the top 200 richest Australians increased their collective wealth by 24 per cent in 2020 to $424 billion.

Australia now has a record 104 billionaires, including seven people in the elite “ten-digit club” with a wealth exceeding $10 billion.

Mining magnate Gina Rinehart is once again Australia's richest person, having increased her wealth two-fold in just 12 months.

Ms Rinehart topped the Australian Financial Review Rich List for 2020 with a personal wealth of $28.89 billion, a figure up 109 per cent on last year.

Partly that’s a mining story and it’s related to the mining boom. But most rich-listers aren’t from the resources sector, and their wealth is booming too.

No, it’s a cheap money story.

Money is so cheap (I say cheap. It’s practically free!) But it’s so cheap these days that those with deep pockets are making a motza.

And while the 1% always make out like bandits in a crisis, there’s a push to make ordinary Australians wealthier too.

And it’s working.

In fact, household wealth hit fresh record highs at the end of 2021, and the quarterly increase in wealth was the biggest in 11 years!

Household wealth is now up a pumping 7 percent on a year ago – despite the worst recession in decades.

That’s not bad.

Even the young’uns are feeling wealthier. At least one study of Gen Z and Millennials found that four in five are wealthier now than they were pre-Covid:

Gen Z-focused money education platform Flux surveyed 807 of its followers on social media site Instagram in February, finding the crisis has had a positive effect on the personal finances of many young Australians, notwithstanding the broader economic downturn.

The vast majority of respondents (82 per cent) to the poll indicated that they were in a better financial position now than before the pandemic hit early last year.

Government stimulus, financial returns from investment markets and an ability to save income amid the state-imposed lockdowns were among the key reasons identified.

Ahh. Investing Gainz. I know that one.

So Australians, despite the Covid recession, are feeling a lot wealthier.

But none of this is an accident.

This is exactly what the RBA wants to happen.

It’s something called ‘The Wealth Effect’.

When Aussies feel wealthier, they go out and spend more, and that’s good for the economy.

It’s a virtuous circle. The wealthier we are, the more we spend and consume, and the wealthier we all become. That’s the wealth effect.

And the easiest way to help Aussies feel wealthier is for house prices to go up.

(Over half the gain in wealth in the last quarter of last year was due to rising house prices.)

So the RBA is very happy to see house prices rise. A couple of years ago, the RBA published research that found that a 1 per cent increase in the value of housing wealth will lead to a 0.16 per cent increase in the long-run level of consumption.

So that’s a pretty decent bang for your buck.

And this is also why house prices and share prices tend to move together.

When house prices rise, they spend more, which boosts revenue and profits, which in turn boosts share prices.

This is the wealth effect in action.

And so this is why the RBA is more than happy to run the economy very hot over the next few years.

And they’re happy to see house prices soar too, because they know a lot of that is going to feed back into the economy and boost growth.

The wealth effect is in full effect.

So I wouldn’t be on the other side of this bet – of this push to make Aussies richer. There’s a saying in America: “Don’t fight the Fed.”

My advice?

Don’t rumble with the RBA.

JG

Filed Under: Blog, Finance, Uncategorized

The simple reason prices are booming

April 5, 2021 by Jon Giaan Leave a Comment

REA Group is giving us an insight into property demand. And it’s simply scorching.

I’m sure you don’t need to be told this if you’re active in the market right now, but property demand is red-hot right now.

Like scorching.

That’s the read we’re getting from REA Group – the mob behind realestate.com.au.

They reckon they’re seeing huge volumes of buyers across their websites – at levels miles above what they were seeing pre-Covid.

This is what their demand index for buyers shows. Demand bounced back incredibly strongly out of Covid, and has been very elevated since.

I reckon what this shows is how much pent up demand was in the market – how many people were hoping for a bargain to be able to get into the market. That’s why search activity was so quick to launch.

It’s a similar story in the ‘for sale’ searches, with all states coming back in a big way.

Average views per listing have gone through the roof, which probable reflects how little stock is on the market right now.

And stock is down mostly because a spike in successful sales activity is chewing through the available housing stock. Sales are well up on previous years.

You get a sense of that from Corelogic’s sales data too, which is well above its 5-year average.

… And Corelogics stock-on-market measure, which shows that the available number of properties is way down on ‘normal’ years.

And that, in a nut shell, is why prices are booming.

Demand is through the roof, and supply is right now due to surging sales activity.

It’s a red hot market. Make no mistake about that.

JG

Filed Under: Blog, Property Investing, Uncategorized

No BS: Easter is a festival of heroism

April 1, 2021 by Jon Giaan 1 Comment

No B.S Friday: There are many lessons to take from the Easter stories. Today, I’m thinking about heroism.

I know most people know I failed school more than once. But did you also know I failed Sunday School seven times?

Yep. True story. You can fail Sunday School.

I had the same relationship with Sunday School that I had with weekday school. They wanted me to “just shut up and do your book work.” I wanted to overthrow oppressive authoritarian structures and play soccer.

We had to agree to disagree.

Still, as fraught as that relationship was, the things I learnt there found their way deep into my psyche.

And while colouring in a picture of the baby Jesus did seem like a colossal waste of time (time that could have been spent playing footy, which is a totally awesome use of time), there was something there.

Through it all, down through time, I felt there was some sort of transmission. And in many ways I’ve been wondering what that is exactly.

And I do find myself pondering the Bible and the stories of Jesus fairly often. There is a language here, and I think a code and a blueprint for fully realising our potential – for actualising our mission here on Earth, dare I say it.

And in all of that, it often feels like the Easter stories are the heart of it all. I think they are incredibly profound, and there’s so many ways to understand them – to learn from the example Jesus gave us.

Now, as I said, I failed Sunday School, so don’t’ be taking any theological advice from me without consulting an independent salvation planner.

And while I take a lot from the examples of Christ, even I’m not egotistical enough to compare myself with the suffering and mission of Christ.

My cross to bear is my rascally good looks and not knowing what to spend my money on next. For Jesus it was the entire sin catalogue of humanity and dying a slow an agonising death.

There’s no comparison.

But there are many, many lessons.

The one I’m reflecting on at the moment is how it feels like whenever we want to bring something beautiful in the world – whether that’s our creative vision, our generosity, our love, our walking in the light, whatever – there is a price that must be paid.

That’s the nature of this fallen world. Jesus, and all the beauty he brought, was met with the full suffering and sinful nature of humanity.

For us, will be tested and often disappointed. You might say you want to bring this or that through, but then the devil will say, “Yes, but look how hard it’s going to be. People might laugh at you. People might say nasty things about you on Facebook. People might stick burning crosses up on your front lawn.”

“Won’t it be easier to betray the better angels of your nature and just go to the movies or something instead?”

Following Jesus, as best as you are able, on the path he walked, is not easy. That’s the point.

The very beauty that Christ brought through only came through because he was willing to pay the price for it.

And if we can keep this sacrifice in mind – the one made by that hero of Calvary – then it steels us for the heroism our own life demands.

It spurs us on to the heroism needed to be true to ourselves and what we know to be beautiful and best.

And to do that, despite what the devil says, in the seductive voice of our own laziness.

So this Easter, remember that this is a festival of heroism.

And let it spur you on to fulfil your own heroic potential – in whatever shape you know it to be.

There. Now can I get my Sunday School diploma?

JG.

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorized Tagged With: nobsfriday

Musk’s Bitcoin future is not here… yet.

March 30, 2021 by Jon Giaan Leave a Comment

You can buy a Telsa with Bitcoin, but the reasons why you shouldn’t say a lot about the market.

Imagine being Elon Musk. You tweet that you bought a hat for your dog on Etsy, and Etsy’s share price jumps 8%.

There should be an ETF that just buys anything Musk mentions in a tweet. It’d be a killer.

Last week, Musk announced that you could now buy Telsa cars with Bitcoin. This followed revelations earlier in the year that Tesla had invested US$1.5bn in the crypto-currency.

So is this the “widespread adoption” we’ve been promised?

We’re not there quite yet. Telsa were making it clear that there were still risks involved with using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. From their T&Cs:

The price of Bitcoin can be volatile and subject to upward and downward movements. With respect to final payments: (i) if you transmit less than the Bitcoin Price, we will keep your payment and apply it to the amount due and you will be required to pay the outstanding balance; (ii) if you transmit more than the Bitcoin Price, you will not be entitled to reimbursement of the excess amount.

Am I reading that right? If the price of Bitcoin (relative to US dollars) moves against you, you have to pay more. If it moves in your favour, they just keep it?

(Musk really is a genius.)

But what about if you need a refund?

If you are entitled to a refund of your payment or to a buyback, we reserve the right to refund to you either the exact Bitcoin Price that you provided to us at the time of purchase or an amount of US Dollars that is equivalent to the US Dollar price of the product that you purchased, at our sole and absolute discretion, taking into consideration operational efficiency. The same applies to all fees and incidental costs to which you are entitled. THE PRICE OF BITCOIN CAN BE VOLATILE AND THE VALUE OF BITCOIN RELATIVE TO US DOLLARS MAY DECREASE OR INCREASE BETWEEN THE TIME THAT YOU MAKE YOUR PURCHASE AND THE TIME THAT WE PROVIDE A REFUND OR BUYBACK.

(That’s them putting that bit in All Caps. I guess they felt they needed to shout that bit.)

So they get to choose whether to pay you back in USD or in Bitcoin, depending on which one makes most financial sense to them?

Again, genius.

That leaves you carrying the risk of a large fall in the Bitcoin price, and large falls are relatively common still.

So, it doesn’t look like it makes all that much sense yet to purchase Telsa in Bitcoin just yet.

But that’s ok. Elon Musk is, once again, giving us a taste of what the future will look like, even if reality still lags behind.

But this also shows us that the whole crypto-space is still in the early stages of adoption.

As an investor, that’s exactly what you want to see.

If Bitcoin was fully baked in as an alternative currency, the window for making early gains would be gone.

There’s no money to be made coming late to the party.

But as far as global currencies go, Bitcoin is still far and away the youngest and freshest kid on the block.

So I think Bitcoin still has a big future ahead of it. And there’s still lots of money to be made if you know what you’re doing.

And I’m not one to be betting against Elon Musk.

JG

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorized

The Crypto Killer is Dead

March 29, 2021 by Jon Giaan Leave a Comment

Bitcoin has become too big to fail.

I’ve got to admit, when I first heard about Bitcoin and what the crypto mission was, I was sceptical.

I now think I was wrong.

Remember, Bitcoin (like most of the alt-coins in the crypto universe) is an alternative currency. That’s what it seeks to be. An alternative to the dollars and coins in your pocket.

(Lol. Who even uses hard currency these days? Who even has pockets? Am I right, ladies?)

So when I first heard about a bunch of tech-heads trying to disrupt the concept of money itself, I just laughed.

Governments derive a lot of power from the money they print. The money itself is backed up by the government’s monopoly on violence.

Disrupting money isn’t like Airbnb coming along and disrupting the accommodation business. This was different. It was an attack on governments themselves.

And so this is how I thought it would play out.

Governments, once Bitcoin got big enough, would see the threat for what it is, and squash it.

They would decide that they like have exclusive control over the money system, and just legislate it all away.

I now realise that this is naïve.

Or more to say, if the US government had rallied up the axis of evil … no wait. What were we? The coalition of the willing? That’s it. Anyway, if the US had rallied the troops and decided to kill it, I think they probably could have… if they had decided to do it six years ago.

Now, I think it’s probably too late.

The crypto world is just too big and too global now.

If you really wanted to kill crypto now, it would really be a global project. It would really need most nations on earth going hard in a coordinated and systematic way.

I have no idea what that might look like technically, and it might not even be possible without unplugging the internet, but it doesn’t matter. Coordinated and systematic action is not something world governments are famous for.

Imagine trying to get the US, China, Russia and Iran all on the same page with something like this. Forget about it.

And in that way, Bitcoin is out of the box.

All that governments can really do now is throw sand in the gears – make the on-ramps and off-ramps – the places where the crypto universes interfaces with legacy money – slow and glitchy.

But, that’s not a killer.

In fact, the crypto space has a mythology built around preserving the freedom of transactions from government attack.

So now, I reckon that if the US government announced that they were going to fight crypto – I don’t even know how – but even if they just announced that they were going to set up a committee to look at killing crypto – I think that would play so well to the crypto-mythology, that I actually think we’d see the price of Bitcoin spike!

6 years ago it would have knocked the wind right out of Bitcoin’s sails. Today, I reckon it would cause the price to launch.

Bitcoin is just too big and too global now.

Time to get used to that.

JG

Filed Under: Blog, Crypto, Uncategorized

No BS: how they weaponized freedom

March 26, 2021 by Jon Giaan Leave a Comment

No B.S Friday: The agility of liberal democracy has been tested, and I don’t think we passed.

It may be the case that our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness.

Freedom is what makes little countries like Australia great, but I also fear it is being weaponised against us.

We know that the Russians were running general disinformation campaigns during 2020.

The most basic interpretation of that is that they just really like Donald Trump, and thought Trump would deliver more for their interests.

But I don’t really buy that, and I don’t think the Russians have much interest in short-games played out over 4-year electoral cycles.

Like the Chinese, like all authoritarian regimes, they play a long game.

And I think the long game is the weaponization of freedom, and the weaponization of confusion.

Think about why America has had such a woeful response to the Covid crisis.

Again, if you want to pin this on the Donald, I think you’re missing the bigger picture. Sure, he made mistakes. Sure, some of his decisions and handling was daft. But America’s failure was deep.

Think about it. America, as one of the richest nations on Earth, should have had one of the best Covid responses. Most problems give way pretty quickly to the sustained pressure of lots of lots of cash.

But that didn’t happen. And arguably, Covid hit America harder than any other advanced nation. America accounts for just 4% of the global population. Yet it accounted for 20% of all Covid fatalities.

That’s a long way out of balance.

And why did it happen?

I reckon that a key reason was of the freedoms Americans enjoy – the freedom to express themselves however they want. The freedom to question authority. The freedom to openly challenge the government itself.

These are great freedoms. I hold them dear myself.

But in the case of Covid, when misinformation was rife, it became difficult to organise a unified collective response.

China didn’t have that problem. There was one response and everyone toed the line. And that wasn’t just at the point of a gun. The Chinese people genuinely trust their government – more than any other people on Earth.

Wow. 82%. Are you kidding me?

And personally, if the price of freedom is being a little slower to organise a collective response, I think that’s ok. It’s a price I’m willing to pay.

But I do think it has exposed a chink in the armour of liberal democracies. Countries like Russia and China must be thinking that America’s commitment to democracy makes it weak and slow in a crisis.

That’s a weakness that could be exploited. Set up social media information campaigns that inflame existing divisions (with no agenda but to foster division), and bam, you have weaponised freedom.

It’s that easy.

The key challenge that the West faces now – and I’m thinking about this as we continue to fumble the ball on the vaccine roll-out – the key challenge facing the West is how we build trust in our collective institutions?

How do we maintain our commitment to democracy, while building our capacity to respond to a crisis?

This is the point that the long road to freedom has come to. This is the challenge for our generation.

What do we do with this?

JG.

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorized Tagged With: nobsfriday

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 21
  • Next Page »

Newsletter

Join over 217,477 Wealth Seekers and Get No B.S. Timely and Valuable Education On The Latest Trends An Opportunities To Make Money Today.


Popular Stories

Power Challenge 3/8: Take the Reins

Your opportunity to win an I-pad – and make a full-power start to the year. … [Read More...]

Power Challenge 4/8: Radical Honesty (e.g My writing is crap)

Your opportunity to win an I-pad – and make a full-power start to the year. … [Read More...]

Connect with us online

  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact

Copyright © 2021 Knowledge Source