SSP 054: Steve Clemens - Going Back to Simplicity

Hello. Welcome back to the Stage Shifters podcast. My name is Jordan Kanlish, and in today's episode, I've got my good friend Steve on the line from Canada. For those who've been listening to this podcast for a while, they'll know that Steve was someone who I connected with while I was living in Toronto and I had a weekend away up north with my girlfriend. We booked in an Airbnb off grid in a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere, and Steve and I really hit it off from that moment. And he's made two appearances on the State Shifters podcast in the past. And if you haven't listened to those episodes, I would highly suggest going back and listening to them. They'll be in the show notes. Steve's story is truly inspiring and it's the reason why I've brought him on to have the conversation we're about to have today is because he's someone who has a level of understanding around what is going on in this current time with a lot of uncertainty, a lot of shifts happening globally. Now. Steve was someone who may be aware of a lot of the dependencies we have on a system that is very fragile. When we say system, like the economic system that's currently ruling our lives is actually propped up on a lot of fragility. And these conversations were something Steve and I were having, you know, two years ago when we first met and we spoke about how the, you know, system was only one event away or one large, you know, black swan event away from complete collapse. And at the time of this recording, we are sort of in the midst of somewhat of a collapse or somewhat of a readjustment. And I wanted to bring Steve back on to share some insights and perspectives around what he's been seeing, what he's been noticing, you know, what's been happening globally. And I feel it's valuable to take in this kind of perspective as we start to think further on down the line, as we start to develop some foresight around how are things gonna unfold after all of this, because we know things aren't going back to normal anytime soon. So I want to bring Steve on highly suggest checking out the two other podcasts we did. And I hope you enjoy this episode. If you got value from the episode, be sure to reach out to me. Would love to hear from you. Check me out on Instagram. Tate Shifters. Guys, without further ado, enjoy.

Welcome to the State Shifters podcast, a show dedicated to helping you discover your true potential through connecting the mind, body and soul.

Steve, welcome back to the stage. Shifters podcast, my friend. What a. An absolute pleasure to have you back on here, buddy. It's the third installment. How are you?

I'm doing fantastic.

Oh, mate, look at this beautiful sunny day you've got here in Canada. Shit looks beautiful out there. How are things in sunny old Toronto or Grimsby?

It's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, it's a paradise right now, so. But everywhere in the world, there's paradise. Wherever you're at, you enjoy the space you got.

Well, mate, I wanted to bring you back onto the show because, you know, for those who have been a longtime listeners of the State Shifters podcast, you know, you were one of the bigger interviews that I had because some of the thoughts and perspectives you were sharing to people were truly one of a kind. Because when we met, you really opened my eyes to a lot of things that I previously hadn't considered. You allowed me to think in new ways. And since then, we've had a second interview where I came up and we had a chat in Grimsby in the snow, and now here we are, I'm back in Australia. You're still in Canada. And I know that now is the time where people will take a lot of value out of hearing your perspective again. Because if they haven't listened to the first two conversations we've had, I highly suggest going back and listening to them. Because all the things that you were talking about back then, it's funny how now everything is starting to fall into place exactly as you called it, exactly as you said it. And this is where we have an opportunity to really start to dive a little bit deeper around what's actually going on right now and maybe share some deeper truths that perhaps people are overlooking amidst all the distractions and noise and turmoil that's going on around the world right now. But first of all, maybe at the time of this recording, it's June 7th here in Australia, also in Canada, and we're in the midst of the coronavirus. We're in the midst of a lot of things shifting globally at a big level, especially in America. Mate, what has been your take on what's going down right now from your lens, on your side of the world? You have a little bit of distance from the noise. So do I, because I'm back in Perth. But what has been your take on the way things have unfolded, given the fact that you sort of predicted this? The last conversation we had recorded, you literally said this was. This was coming. Obviously, couldn't have predicted how it was going to come through the pandemic, but how have you been Digesting a lot of this. What's been going through your mind as the things progressed to where we're at at the time of this recording.

The first thing is obviously the observation. I feel pretty insulated from, from a lot of stuff. So it gives me an opportunity to just kind of observe, to see what's happening. And from what's being said in the media to how people are reacting, the streets. I mean, just the simple fact that watching people now operate in society wearing masks, where normally you would only see that in, in Asia or in the airports, now it's, it's everywhere. And it's, it's, it's old people, it's, it's young people, it's everybody. And the lining up, the distancing and the way that people are using terms like the new norm, like this is. This is going to be the meme of 2020, the new norm. So these are the things, oh, I'm, I'm trying to digest and, and even, you know, close friends and family to watch how they are reacting to this with, I mean, severe social isolation, to having people pick up groceries when the groceries come in. Like, everything is quarantined, sanitized. Like, it's something I never thought that I would see in my lifetime. So it's that times a thousand, probably more than a thousand. There's so many different aspects to this of the, I would say the repercussions of, I mean, again, shutting down basically the entire globe simultaneously. Again, that's unprecedented. And the amount of times that you can say the word unprecedented is going to be unprecedented. So the economy, that's going to be the one that's going to take the hit. That's going to be the thing that's going to affect us all. And it's kind of like we're doing it to ourselves. We don't realize that we can't operate like this. Restaurants need to be full. That's their business model. If they don't churn tables, they don't make profit. If they don't make profit, they go bankrupt. All the employees are now unemployed. Look at the unemployment numbers, too. Those are pretty scary. We've had, I think, six consecutive weeks of 1 to 2 million Americans losing their job every single week. And then you had also a couple of spike weeks where you were 5 million. Like, those are scary statistics. That's 40. Over 40 million Americans lost their jobs. That didn't happen during the Great Depression. It did. It took three years. This took less than a month and a half. So again, Those are the systemic fallout of the coronavirus. And again you talk about a Black swan event. Again, you couldn't see this one coming. But this is the kind of event that has a drastic effect on the economy and then again the people as well.

We were chatting just briefly before we hop on the recording here around some things that Elon Musk has now been tweeting. He's back active on Twitter, which is always fascinating to see what he has to say. But he just recently made a tweet about how Amazon should start to break up this monopoly that Amazon's now created. And the kind of reasoning behind that tweet was something that you alluded to in regards to some information in a book that was released about coronavirus that had some factual information. And we were chatting about a lot of the theory based information that's coming out around how to, you know, wearing masks, social distancing, things like that. And I think people are starting to notice now that is a bit of, there's a bit of skullduggery going on around what's, what's fact and what's not with the virus. And I know we've had a few conversations about this and I'm sure people have come across things online surely by now, unless you've been living under a rock around some truths about the virus, a lot of that is now trying to be censored online. I wonder what have been some things that. I know you picked up on this real early on because we were having this conversation back in March.

There's a lot of things that are highly suspect, I'll tell you that right now, right off the bat. I mean again, they're just basically reporting every death, the coronavirus death. I mean, autopsies show that there's a coronavirus. And again, if you understand virology, a lot of people actually have coronavirus in them. It's a natural, it's a natural virus that is actually in us. So for somebody to die of a heart attack, but test for coronavirus, how to post autopsy, then they list the death as a coronavirus death to the point where somebody who will get hit by a truck, if they have coronavirus in them, they'll say they died of coronavirus. And again, that's something that could be looked up, but that's to the extent of what they're doing. People have to understand the virology behind it. And the way that they're reporting this is they're, they're really skewing the statistics. So again, when you have Somebody who tries to release statistical data in a very, very easy read format and tries to put it on Amazon and then Amazon doesn't allow the sale of it. And the whole time all the media is saying, wear your mask. Social distancing. Stay home, stay home, stay home. Like, what is that gonna do again for our antibodies? Like I was taught by my mom to eat dirt. She didn't care if I ate dirt because it works up our antibodies. We wash your hands too much, if you become too clean, you start to lose immunity to certain pathogens out there. What's going to happen to people's immunity while they're being socially distanced? Scrubbing the crap out of their hands using triple sand laced hand sanitizer. And then they get back out in, so everything opens back up and now they go back out into public with a depressed immune system. What do you think is going to happen then?

Second wave is coming, man. And this second wave could be worse than the first one based on what you, I feel you're alluding to there.

But again, it's simple immunity. Like when you are, when you are isolated and not exposed to again, like simple things in small quantities works up our antibodies. That's how our immune system works. And what we're doing right now is we're drastically affecting the ability of our body to respond and it's going to get inundated. And this is again where you're super cleansing. They've been talking about a superbug for decades waiting for this superbug. Whether it's the MRSA that's going to come out of the hospitals or whatever it is, but it's going to be some superbug that's been able to mutate itself and we're not going to have any antibodies to fight this off. That's bad news.

Mmm. Big time. And really at a time where, you know, the, this, this, the lockdown has caused so much, yeah, so much hardship for businesses, for just the economy in general. But as you see so many people unemployed, you really start to question how there's going to be a bounce back, how people are going to recover their livelihood. But now there's also a question of like, how are we going to recover health wise when we're so now defenseless from immune system standpoint.

Well, you have people, you have people right now that don't even think about the recovery. It's what's happening to the people in the state of lockdown. I mean, if there's a psychologist that was talking the other day that how people are in lockdown right now they're going through basically depressionary thing. Like the same way somebody who experiences a death and they have to go through the five stages of grievance, grieving. Yeah, yeah, doing right now. That's how psychologically damaging this is to people being. Totally, totally. I mean a lot of people have a lot of friendships at work like there. You have to admit their lives kind of depend on their daily routines and their routine is hanging around a certain amount of people at work having that certain amount of water cooler chat, going out shopping. I mean again, like their lives are disrupted, their kids are home all the time. I mean even husbands and wives are together. People who aren't used to being around each other and then also trying to operate. If someone is working from home and you got kids in the background going crazy. Like these are things that people, it's hard for them to adjust to. There's so many different things that are impacting us and it's all going on simultaneously.

Yeah, I mean it's concerning but at the same time there are a ton of opportunities are going to come out of this and we don't have these conversations to obviously scare people. I value these conversations because it's awareness. The more awareness we have around what's actually going on, the impacts in different areas on an individual and a collective level. It gives us the ability to make better choices. Right, so. So that's why I love having chats with you mates, because the awareness you've got around all the different factors that you're processing and you're seeing lots of different industries being affected and your level of foresight around what this could be indicating in terms of the way we're shifting and evolving moving forward? For people who are listening, what do you think are some important things that people should be becoming aware of right now in terms of what's actually happening, but then also some indicators around where we're shifting or moving into and what may be some big things that are about to change quickly that are going to impact a lot of people.

I think what people should be focusing on most right now is if again you're, you're at home with your family. What I've seen is it's nice to see how there's a lot more people that are actually out together. I've seen a lot of people out bike rides with their kids and walking their dog with the kids and stuff like that. That's nice to see the impact and how this is going to go. I don't think it's going to be business as usual. I don't think that there's going to be that V shaped recovery that they're talking about because again, I think that this is going to be not business as usual because you can't open things up. You have to keep in mind, like all of the food suppliers that would be supplying, like the airlines, the hotel industries, the resorts, cruise ships, these food manufacturers would be sending or food producers, whether it's, it's dairy for cheese or produce, whatever it is, meat, the amount of demand has gone down. These farmers have had to call massive herds, massive, massive herds. Because you can't milk a cow and not have anywhere to send the milk. It's not like you can send it to the grocery store because these manufacturing facilities manufacture the food in massive packages, not stuff that somebody would even buy at Costco. They're massive. So if you think again, like all of these industries that are not going to be opening up and again, believe me, when the first cruise ship says, yeah, we're open for business, I don't think people are going to be rushing to get on board. That's just what I'm thinking. Again, it's, we've been so scared. We've been sitting in a fearful state. Even on the beaches they have cordoned off areas where again, I got a little post this morning where they showed a whole bunch of sheep in these little six foot by six foot pens and then they showed a picture of the beach and it looked identical. Like.

I'm curious to know since things have unraveled over the last few months, how has the course of your regular day or routine shifted and what have you been focusing on right now? I know a lot of your investments are still in line now with the trends in which way things are going, but I know you take care of that side of things. What else is going on? What's a day in your life look like right now?

Gardening. Absolutely. Sustainability. And again, that's the funny thing is. Well, I don't want to say funny, but the thing that I want to point out is like my day hasn't really changed. That's how I've always spent my day is gardening, farming and just trying to become sustainable in a time like this, it seems like it's paying off in spades big time. Yeah, well, again it's, it's not just the sustainability part, but there is pleasure too. I mean, again, gardening has always been a hobby of mine. So this to me is, is not a hardship. So that's where I'm Fortunate that I've always enjoyed gardening, but if anybody hasn't gardened before, again, get a. Get a little pot and put a tomato plant in it and start with that. Because there's nothing like having a fresh tomato on a veggie burger.

Yeah. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna dive into this a little bit more because, like, sustainability 101 now for people, like, it's. It's now like we're chatting. I remember a few weeks back and we're talking about some of these videos on YouTube where blokes would have like a few thousand views on their, you know, sustainability, how to grow, you know, how to grow crops or their own food. Now have like millions of views over the space of a few weeks. Yeah.

Of X amount of subscribers. It's crazy.

Crazy. And where should people be focusing their attention right now when it comes to, say, sustainability or growing their own crops, growing their own fruit and veg?

If you look at history, whether it's. Whether it was the Great Depression or whether it was post war when they made victory gardens, if it wasn't for stuff like that, there would have been massive starvation. But what everybody did is they started to become independent producers. They didn't rely on something being farmed 3,000km away. Take four days, sit in a grocery store for another two days, charge you an arm and a leg for it when you can grow it in your backyard or in a container garden. But again, that kind of logistics supply chain, again, as you can see, it's not going to last. Like, as soon as, especially you get into economic problems and the dollar starts to erode or hyperinflation, that's when the logistics system doesn't work.

Steve, I would like to dive into that some more and drill a little bit deeper on that, because that's something that is at the forefront of a lot of people's minds when it comes to hyperinflation and the value of the dollar. Because now across the globe, you have Australian government, Canadian government, American government printing money and giving handouts to people who have been affected by the coronavirus. Australia was $3,000 a month. Our program is called Jobkeeper. People getting paid $3,000 a month. I know Canada, it's around $2,000 a month. Like, this is a lot of money that's getting handed out to people, mate. And people are thinking, right, how we're gonna have to pay this back, or what's. What's going on?

That's taxpayers money. That's not a. That's not a handout we're paying for.

There you go. Yeah, right.

We're paying. So again the 00% interest rate policies and then obviously if people don't think we're going to negative, then again you're silly. This is the US and the globe has so much debt that if they don't have these interest rates to carry that debt, their budget deficit, their payments on the debt right now are in the trillions. So just to service the debt on the $25 trillion in the US is over a trillion dollars. That's not sustainable. And now they're printing more money and again bailing out who? Not, not residential mortgage this time it's commercial mortgage and the banks of course. So whatever crisis we had back in 2008 where the mortgage backed securities, this basket of toxic mortgage sloppy shit that they sold unsuspecting investors, they bundled them up. They bundled them up with literally toxic shit. And mom and pops were putting this shit in their retirement portfolios. And then it pops credit crisis. All the banks freeze up. Overnight lending done. And again the way that they're injecting money into the system, before they even started talking about another QE, they didn't even want to call it QE4. They're calling it not QE4. They were pumping so much money into the overnight market that again they, they got so close to redline. Here comes the government. They'll buy everything that's gonna come in and buy the world. They're buying everything right now. Money markets, they're buying bond. They even opened up a sovereign window. They're not just giving money to America now. No, they're giving money to the world. Line up at the window, come and get some money.

So that's where another indicator people use the sometimes a stock market as an indicator of economic performance. And during this time where we see the stock market still go up. Yeah.

So that's a what. Yeah. Doing Corporations can borrow money at 0% and then go and purchase their own stock.

So these corporations can go in and repurchase their own stock, therefore propping up the stock price. Given the illusion that the stock market is doing okay. But in reality there is so much debt behind the scenes that they need to prop this stuff up because it comes crumbling down.

What's one of the largest companies in the world that you know of right now? Just think Amazon.

Amazon.

Okay, I'm glad you, I'm glad you said that. So last week Amazon just issued $10 billion of bonds at almost 0%.0, 4.04% $10 billion of bonds issued. They just borrowed 10 billions of dollars for nothing.

So for people who don't know what bonds are, bonds are debt, company debt.

Yeah, when you can issue stock or bond stock, you have part ownership in the company. Bonds, you're just basically issuing money and, and paying a little bit of interest on it, but there's zero, zero ownership in it. So you can buy an Amazon bond, you have zero ownership in the company, but they're going to give you 0.04% a lot of money.

What meaning do you take from that? What does that indicate to you?

I don't know. Again, Tesla did the same thing too. Well, they issued more stock. Actually it wasn't a bond, but they got a lot of money. Tesla's building stuff. Like he's, he's building stuff. But what Jeff Bezos is doing with that amount of money already, having that amount of money, maybe sitting on cash, I don't know, maybe it's going into an environment again. But I'm just saying is point being, corporations are getting money for super cheap right now.

Right.

That's what, that's what again is giving the perception of especially the fangs. The fangs are killing it right now. You think that all other like hurts. Hertz rentals going out of business are already declared bankruptcy. Airlines, restaurants, like the restaurant chains are filing for chapter 11 left, right and center, like shutting down, like the IHOPs and all the restaurants are shutting down. Tons of real estate is going to be available to square footage of commercial real estate. You have to think about the securities that are backed by that.

Yeah, you mentioned Hertz. And the automotive space is going to be going through a big shake up. Aerospace obviously collapsing as well. No real end in sight in terms of when we can travel next.

Well, for an example, just the car industry right now. They've manufactured so many cars and there's so few people purchasing cars right now that they have nowhere to put cars. They're literally putting cars in, in stadiums, in parking lots to the point where they're now filling up cargo ships and they are now parking these large cargo ships offshore with cars in them. Cars that are being delivered from China or Japan. They're not letting them dock because there's nowhere to put the cars. I think the Hertz rental agency has like 500,000 cars their fleet and they have to liquidate all these vehicles. Could you imagine 500,000 cars flooding the market immediately while already nobody buying vehicles?

Got to be an indicator of a shift in the whole industry of automotive like Oil using oil, again, we know that's a finite resource, so maybe this is a part of that shift.

The auto industry and putting gas in your car is a big driver for fossil fuels. But even right now, the way that the price of fossil fuels have dropped because of the, again, geopolitical issues, you got Russia and Saudi Arabia started that little spat where they went to opec. They were supposed to cut production, but instead of cutting production, Russia decided to increase production. They wanted to basically ride out and try to bankrupt Saudi Arabia by trying to lower the price of oil, knowing that it takes them more money to pump a barrel of oil. So Saudi Arabia decided to ante up and they said, that's fine, we're actually going to increase production too, because they think that they could then outweigh or outride Russia. That brought the price down to negative. It was the May contract went into a negative. There was actually, they, they couldn't again. They, they were paying people literally to take oil.

Yeah, legit.

The first time oil went negative, you look at the contracts, they went to zero, bounced back up quickly. But again, first time in history because of an economic thing. These future contracts that they put on oil literally forced the price of oil into negative. So we'll have something like the United States shale industry, they dumped a lot of money into that. The US was very low on the list of being one of the oil producers of the world. But they started coming up with this cool thing in the early 2000s called fracking. They fracked this shit out of the ground and it would release this gas in the shale and they could turn it into fuel. That's the new shale industry that they got going on. They injected a lot of money, a lot of loans to get these, these fracking rigs. They purchased a lot of property to do this on. And then the price of oil goes to basically Nothing. They need $40 a barrel to break even. So how many, how many fracking companies right now are going belly up? How many people does that industry support? Towns are built around those kinds of things. So again, the impact just keeps going and going and going.

Do you see like, do you see opportunities coming out of this? Like, I know you're a pessimistic person, but you also take a wide angle view on what's going on. And for people who are maybe like just thinking week to week, they're taking things week to week, they're just watching the regular news that they see on tv. And like we chatted to earlier before getting on this call was like, there was so much going on behind the scenes that we actually, we don't even know about because the news we get is like this constant change of like just, just there's something different every week now. Distraction. Yeah. So like, any suggestions of what people should be looking out for? Maybe getting news from alter, getting lots of piece, different pieces of information and starting to maybe form a wider angle view of what's actually going on to maybe make better decisions for themselves and their families going forward.

Yeah, again, it's something where you want to get your facts checked. I mean again, there's, there's lots of things that you can do. But I would say try to listen to two podcasts, but again, unless there's going to be somebody doing fact checks on the things that I say, how are people even going to trust what I say? I could be factually inaccurate right now. And again, that would be misinformation in itself. Not saying that it is, but this is something where you really have to take it upon yourself to really just find some trustful sources out there. I mean, I find mine because I was going into cryptocurrencies, the alternative. Like again, if you were talking about things that you can do to start preparing yourself, I wouldn't be trusting the financial system much. Like, I mean again, pay off debt. If you can understand hyperinflation, understand how that works. Do not buy anything right now because things like cars and houses, they're going to drop in value. You can wait and get a wicked deal. If you do have some kind of asset that you're depending on the value, like a house right now, that's again your financial move. But to sit on an asset that has the potential to depreciate very quickly, that's where you have to sort of like reason out. Should I be calling a financial advisor? Should I be thinking about restructuring my asset allocation and whatever assets I have? Again, that's all up to like a personal decision. But right now I believe a prudent person would understand that when they're printing that much money and there's that much debt, it never goes well. Especially when you have too many dollars chasing too few products. You have to think like there's not many things being made right now because everybody's sitting at home not consuming much, but there's still a shit ton of money being printed. The definition of hyperinflation is too many dollars chasing too few products. It's pretty simple. Look at Zimbabwe, look at, look at the Weimar Republic, look at Venezuela. There's really good examples out there where again it's simple observation. You don't go and get this from a news source. I mean again simple observation. Those were under still almost prestige sort of environment too. And again you think about from 2000 to 2020 they actually say that this was one of the most prosperous years. They were actually saying that this was like the way that the market has gone up. There was a good 10 year bull run, long as bull run. But they were still injecting a crap ton of money into the system. It was injection, injection, injection, injection. And just before coronavirus they were saying everything was all well and good, whereas it wasn't because that was still all injected money. So what do you think's going to happen when things aren't good?

Do you think there's an adoption of a new system that's about to be born or is. Do you think they would ever allow the current system to melt down?

Yeah, they're already working on the resale. They're already working on it as a digital dollar right now that they've released in three. Three very large cities. So they're doing the pilot project where they have a digital backed one. But it's not decentralized. Believe me. It's a digital dollar. There is there again this is. They want to get rid of physical cash. They want to. With cash is black market. With black market there's lost tax revenue and government doesn't like lost tax revenue.

Sure.

Oats catless. And again coronavirus. It's a fantastic way to usher in a cashless society because money dirty. So again what a great way to freak the shit out of people in the background. They have a digi dollar that they're unrolling whereas the US does too. They got the new comptroller for the Fed is the guy from Coinbase, I forget his name. And he's been working on a prospect for a cashless or digital dollar I think since 2017. They have some papers. He wrote some papers on it. And now he's the right hand man for the Fed. The new comptroller.

Yeah.

So they're rolling out their own digital dollar as well. You don't. The states is not going to be left behind. They're not going to let China unroll their digital dollar first because that will give them an advantage, obviously first mover advantage. And the States does not want that. So believe you me, there is a digital dollar that they're working on right now.

Jeez. Which would speed up a lot of transactions. Like you said. Removes the. The black market Element of taxes being missed.

That's correct.

But at the same time gives up a lot of our privacy. Gives up a lot of our.

Libra. Facebook tried to propose with their Libra token stable coin, but again, it was something that it's not decentralized. And they have the ability to flip the switch. That's exactly what these, these digi dollars are. If the Chinese government wants to flip the switch and shut you off, they can do that. And they monitor everything. They can see every transaction. Every transaction you make.

When you say decentralized. For people who don't know, decentralized is the system like the model of blockchain where bitcoin is built off, where there's no intermediary. It's the blocks prove the validity of the transactions. Where a centralized model. Yeah.

There is no, there's no central agency. That has to be a third party escrow to the transaction. It goes from me to you. Nobody has to verify or validate that. It's done through the mathematics of the code. That's it.

Yeah.

It's trustless. I don't need to trust you. It's all worked out in the cryptographic and there's nobody stealing a fee in between. Technically.

Yeah. So would it be fair to say that maybe governments don't want bitcoin taking off because then all of a sudden you've got a cash version of digital currency, which is what they're trying to remove by creating this digital currency. I'm moving cash. But there still is a cash digital version, which is bitcoin, right?

Yeah. Again, I think that the genie's out of the bottle with the bitcoin. I think that the government's. I don't think that they thought much of it at the beginning and. Or this is a really good pilot project because again, let people work out the code and create something and then hijack it. You're good at that. And again, remember, everything is built on trust. You could have something as eloquent bitcoin, where basically that's the system we should be on, but we're not. We're on the dollar because everybody's faith and trust is in the dollar right now. But when the faith of something is shaken, they're going to go to something else. And again, when Venezuela broke down, the premium that they put on bitcoin to try to acquire bitcoin was crazy because that's what everybody went to first is they tried to liquidate everything, just purchase bitcoin. So obviously they thought that bitcoin was the asset that would hold their value, their purchasing power. That's what they decided. Same things have happened in China as well. So we'll see again like it's the awareness is getting up there. You have a lot of financial institutions that are now involved in Bitcoin ETFs. That's now been worked out. So you, so you have. Bitcoin is now open up to a lot of retail investors where it wasn't before the last bull run in bitcoin. It was very hard to try to acquire bitcoin through exchanges, so on and so forth. It was very difficult to navigate, very, very easy. Now the gates purchase bitcoin. I mean they have bitcoin ATM machines everywhere now. So gold, gold again precious metals is always something that historically has been sought after. Again to try to go to a market with a barbed gold, gold coin, it's not fractional. So that is very hard to transact in commerce. But to hold wealth, if you want to just store some money that you have, again a couple gold coins does well. But again the self reliance and the sustainability is always the best because you still can't eat gold, you can't eat cryptocurrency, but you can eat a tomato.

So for people right now who perhaps still in lockdown from as of yesterday in Australia, our lockdowns lifted, we could venture back out, we're sort of back into some sort of normality. But for people who are still in lockdown, maybe out in North America or anywhere else in the world and they've got some time on their hands, man, people got time like some, some something that we always complain we don't have enough of. Now all of a sudden we've got all this freaking time and I fucking hear people saying they're bored. People tell me they're bored at home. I don't to do, I don't know what to do. I'm losing my mind up here. Well bro, this is an amazing time to learn things such as the things you've just discussed, sustainability and how to you know, be self sufficient. Like where should, where should people start researching? Where should people start digging in, sinking their teeth into if they've got time up their sleeve.

Well again I think that first of all give it time because we have been in a routine for pretty much our entire lives. Whether it's from starting, going to school, working a job. We have always been, our day has always been basically monopolized. We've never actually had the amount of free time next to a week vacation here and there. So it is going to take time to adjust to just adjusting to having more time. Time. When I freed myself from my job and became self employed and had a lot of time, I actually had to go through a psychological adjustment because I wasn't punching a clock. I thought that I wasn't self worth went down because it was just the routine of me physically punching a clock made me feel productive. So people right now, they have to adjust to a whole different error 9 of still waking up in the morning and doing something where they have purpose, be productive. And again, remember that thing we talked about a while ago, that Kellogg experiment where they gave any people or they gave people too much time off work and it backfired because the people didn't come back to work because they found this thing called a hobby. That's what you need, right? You need something where you have that joie de vivre where you lose time. You get into the zone of doing something where you forget to eat. You know, you think 15 minutes went by but actually three hours went by. That's what people need to do right now. That's what we've missed.

Yep, yep, yep. That's a great point. It's, it's the curiosities. It's like getting clear on like, okay, yeah, if you're working from home and you've got some extra time because you're not commuting, what are some curiosities or some hobbies you can start to start to learn more about and explore? Because now again, dude, there's some companies now that are saying, hey, they're realizing like for example out here, I was chatting to a mate the other day who works for Deloitte and he was saying the Deloitte Melbourne office just finished building this brand new 31 story building and opened it up the other day, cut the ribbon on it and fucking empty. Because everyone's working from home, they can't come into the office and they've looked at the figures of their profits over, you know, the performance over the last couple of months and they've made the same amount of money people working from home as they did in the office. So they've just spent millions of dollars building a new office only to realize, hey, wait a second, people are just as productive at home, if not more productive.

Just the point.

What's the point? Yeah, what's the point of having a.

City who works in the FedEx office as well? Manager of the FedEx office, they have a lot of employees and, and they're all realizing we could have been Doing this from home all this time, it's going to be the new norm. It's going to be a new paradigm. And like I said, if you think that people are going to be rushing back. I don't think they are. I think that there's going to be a slow move back in by some. But again, I think that people are going to become quite accustomed to this new norm. Even the people that are getting these checks right now, they have the option to go back to work. They get pissed off. They don't want to because they're making almost as much with the check. So to get the inconvenience, I mean, you don't have to drive your car when you're, when you're working from home. You can just take your. I mean, get your insurance lowered. That's a big thing that they're talking about. People are driving 0km. Your insurance company will give you a rebate check.

I got one, surely. Oh, again, companies like that are just losing so much money. Right. Like, I don't know. I don't know how they're sustaining. Yeah.

People buy clothes because they are around people at work and they have to feel like they have to, you know, dress for success or, you know, think about the money that people are saving on haircuts alone. My goodness.

I know, I know. But like, you're right in the fact that it does take an adjustment for some people to work from home because it's that routine that shifts that people are so used to being. Associating a certain environment with the feeling of being productive that it then becomes this new challenge to how do you create a productive environment where your bed is, you know, not too far away from where you're working? And it's that routine of like, leaving the house and the commute or being in an office where other people are working. It's. I can imagine it's starting to create a lot of stress inside of people. And I know it is because I'm having conversations with people. You've been autonomous now for a number of years. I've been working for myself now for the past seven, eight months. There was a big adjustment period. I remember, like you said, that the whole clock in, clock out type thing, you know, initially my mind was still in that zone of like, thinking, fuck, nine to five, I need to be doing something, otherwise I'm not productive.

I had to. I had to leave the house. And of course, this was back when, before there was like, really Internet. But I had to go leave the house to go to Just go for a walk to go get a newspaper. So the newspaper was me getting out of the house and me starting the day. If not, I wouldn't put clothes on, stay in my pajamas. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

So it was that me leaving the house was then the trigger of the routine for the day to start. So I come back, read the business section, and then I'd start making my phone calls and doing what I need to do. But yeah, it's. It's again, like there's going to be a new norm. Waiting in line at the store the other day, and it just so happened that the way that the angulation of the building, I realized that if I came probably about half an hour to an hour earlier, I would have been standing in direct sun. And I think to myself, I'm like, think about the elderly people that have to wait in these lines. And the lineup is like, around the building it's direct sun. And I mean, it hasn't gotten hot here yet. But I mean, when we get a heat wave, we get a heat wave, what are gonna happen? All these poor people waiting in these super long lines. Or then again, if we get a second wave come, you know, late fall, winter time, how are these lines gonna work in the winter? That's cold. Canada gets cold. So look forward to seeing how that all pans out.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, we've got some interesting times ahead. There's no doubt about that. And I guess for people who are really confused as to, like, what's going on and confused as to how to navigate these times, I guess it's going back to simplicity, right? Going back to taking care of yourself first. Because you can't, you can't take care of yourself. How can you take care of your family? How can you take care of your community? So step one, take care of yourself. And step two, I would, I feel, is get educated. Like, get educated. That's one thing. You, you made me very aware of the fact of how dependent I was on the system. And the system is, is something that, you know, we can't rely on for too much longer. Like, it's, as we can see, it's starting to crumble, starting to fall apart from a community.

Again, get to know your neighbors well, learn how to work with your neighbors. Start to form that community in. Because again, if it's people working together, it's people understanding that opting out is the biggest thing. We have the right to opt out. My dad always told me, you vote with your dollar. Careful, you vote For Amazon, you got to love it during this period right now, a lot of people are buying things on Amazon. But think about all the mom and pop shops that are suffering right now. That's the new bricks and mortar storefronts that are closing down and you're going to see a lot of them boarded up. So, again, going to be a new norm.

Yeah, 100%. 100%. Right. And let's hope it's not too monopolistic where we've got, you know, a select few of people ruling the world or dominating, controlling a large portion of the wealth through big companies like Amazon and Jeff Bezos and people of that nature. And I think now is the time where we kind of really have to stand up and take some accountability and responsibility for, you know, sort of like what you did, you know, vote with your dollar, you know, time to it. Time to take matters into our own hands instead of.

Yeah, watch. Watch how. And this is where, again, in crisis like this, it's not money evaporating. It just transfers different balance sheets to different people. And that's where I'm saying is during crisis, there's a few people that make a lot of money, a lot of people lose a lot of money. But it's that transfer of wealth that these crisis periods, that's what they're about. And this is where you do not want to transfer any more of our wealth to the fat cats, to the 1%. Protect your wealth. That's the game. This is the game they've been playing since. Since the time of the kings. And this is where we have to educate ourselves, become financially educated enough to just protect your nut. Protect your rice bowl. It's all you got to do.

Yeah, Protection nut. That's a. That's a great one, mate. Steve O. I'm gonna. I'm gonna wrap things up there, mate, and I feel we could chat for hours here, but let's keep it. We'll keep it real digestible for people and as things progress, you know, and I'll get you back on here again soon, but really for now, I just wanted to, you know, acknowledge you for practicing what you preach, brother. Because, you know, the reason I bring you on here and the reason I value your opinion and perspective so much is because you didn't just read this shit in a book. You know, you're actually out there putting it to use. You know, you taught yourself how to grow your own fruits and vegetables, taught yourself how to build a house. You went out and did all these things, and you've done it. So I value that and I respect that a lot in people who don't just talk about things, they actually do them, get feedback from their environment and then get wisdom from what they've learned. So thank you, mate, for all that you do and for people who want to connect with you and say people have great questions about self sustainability or eco farming or anything like that. Where can they reach out to you? I know you're pretty existent online. Maybe they can just reach out to me. Maybe just hit me up.

Reach out to you and you can.

Yeah, I'll direct them.

Yeah, yeah, I'll get in touch with you and if you have anybody interested, then I'll totally.

I'll be vetting them.

It's.

They got to fill out an application process to get to you, mate. But Steve, I. Thanks for having a conversation with me, man. It's always a pleasure to have you on here.

All right, man, talk to you soon.

Thanks. Thanks, brother. Hey, there we have it, guys. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. And yeah, look, if you made it this far, cool. Here's my voice again in your ear and I'm going to make one more request for you is go ahead and subscribe and leave a comment on the podcast page because I'm really putting a lot of focus and attention on getting this podcast out to more people because I know what I'm putting in here can serve and bring value to people and it would mean a lot if you got value from this to leave some feedback and subscribe. So you stay up to date with what's coming up and as always, follow me on Instagram and love hearing from you. It's eight shifters until the next episode. Guys, thank you so much and I appreciate you.