Financial Fallout! 21 Futures Podcast S2 E6 - Jillian Godsil

Yeah,

yeah. So I, I became an accidental activist, and I was on— I just made documentaries about me. Crazy. I was in all the papers online. I was in the Huffington Post and New York Times, and I was on Russian, uh, TV and Belgian TV. Crazy stuff. Um, and anyway, it's part of all that I realized that we had inherited in Ireland UK law that as a bankrupt, you weren't allowed to run for public office. That's how Geoffrey Archer had to resign from his seat when he was moved into bankruptcy, so from the Conservative Party. Anyway, I went, this is ridiculous, I said. So I brought the Irish government to the High Court and the Supreme Court, and I said that my constitutional rights have been infringed. I changed the law, and then I ran in the 2014 European parliamentary elections as an independent against the banks. And I had no money. I didn't even have a car. I had to borrow a car from a friend. And, um, at the end of the day, I got 11,500 votes. for which I was delighted. Not enough to get elected, but enough to make a difference. And it also— that process that I went through, which I wouldn't really recommend to anybody, but it was an interesting time in hindsight. It taught me a lot about money. It taught me a lot about what is money. And I began to question things. So when I eventually ran into blockchain and Bitcoin properly in 2016, 2017, I went, aha, this is how I change the world. And so when you ask me, who am I as a writer, as a person, I jumped into this space And I was, because I was so keen to help make a difference this way, I ended up traveling the world and chairing conferences and speaking and stuff and writing for publications. So that's kind of what got me into crypto and blockchain. It was because people say you join for the philosophy, the technology, or the money. And I definitely joined for the philosophy.

Yes, absolutely. And one of the things that's so nice about this project that we're both a part of now Uh, is we do remember the sort of cypherpunk ideology of decentralization, privacy first, individual freedom and liberty. And it is very interesting when you, you know, I know quite a bit about precious metals, gold and silver, and you sort of think, is Bitcoin eating gold's lunch? Uh, is it going to eat gold's lunch? Are young people going to be buying ounces of gold or are they going to be stacking sats? Uh, which is really, really interesting. The latter. Right. Yeah, of course. Of course. I mean, of course you can do both. You can diversify. But yeah, that's amazing. What an amazing story as well. I mean, I doubt many people could say that's exactly how they kind of fell into crypto.

I mean— Do you know what I like? I said I came in for the philosophy. That's definitely why I came in because I thought there has to be a better way because I never had a library ticket. The next minute I'm busted and I've been bankrupt and all this kind of crazy stuff that was happening. This is weird. How can this be happening? Well, then I love the tech because the tech is really interesting. I'm fintech a long time, but it took me ages to get my head around the tech. That was just good. How does this work? How, you know, it just took a long while for me to make that jump. And then the last thing is the money. And it's not, I'm not a trader and I didn't buy lots of Bitcoin. I didn't do that. But I do know that in this industry, because you mentioned the cyberpunk sort of philosophy, is that I used to hate the greed is good and the dog eat dog and the zero-sum game that I was surrounded by in the '80s and '90s and stuff like that. Hated it, didn't like it, never liked it before I knew anything about Bitcoin and blockchain and crypto. And I love the idea that everybody can win. So, you know, that I can be successful, but your children can be successful, my children can be successful. It's— I don't want to penalize somebody just to make my— to make a living for myself. And I also know in my advanced years, I don't need several cars, several houses. You know, I need to live in one house and drive one car and do ordinary— I mean, I'm not a— Yeah. It's, it's, yeah, but it's nice to know that I can do well, that which I couldn't have done if I'd stayed in that old industry with that old mindset.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's amazing, isn't it? I mean, I don't know about you, but when I was growing up, I was always told being a writer was a road to sort of misery and financial ruin.

And, uh,

well,

it's taken me a long time to start making money as a writer, that's for sure. Because people say, oh, you can write and we'll expose you, we'll give you promotion. I'm going, you don't say that to your plumber. Oh, come and fix my toilet and I'll tell all my neighbors what a good plumber you are. No, you don't. You expect hard cash. So it's a very difficult industry to be in to actually, to achieve your worth, have people recognize your worth and pay you for your time.

Sure, sure. Yeah. I do think that opportunity is out there and it's growing though, right? There's a lot of fear in the markets as always, but if we choose to be hopeful and look Look for those opportunities. It's possible to find them, you know, and I was at a crypto event in London last night and they were, they were talking about remembering the CoinScrum days with Paul Gordon and wanting to bring that back. And there was a young lad pouring pints behind the bar and I sort of said, so what do you want to do? And he said, well, I want to be a journalist. And I said, good. Here's how you do it. Here's how you get started. Talk to the people in this room as you pour them your pints, you know. But you're right. Like we can all benefit, we can all win. And I suspect aspect, like myself, you're often asked by people who don't know much about crypto or the movement, and they say, can you explain it to me like I'm 5, you know, or how my gran could get a crypto wallet? And what's amazing is you can, you can, anyone can earn Bitcoin for free right now today, just, just rolling faucets, right? And things like that. And people have no idea about any of these things. But what I am most sort of grateful for is that intersection between, okay, I've got a skill around writing. Yes. But also it's a hobby and a vocation. It's something I love to do and would do for free. But the fact that you can create a career around that, you can be fully remote, work from home, no commute, meet really amazing people. It's a very good time, I think. And it's going to be an exciting year and an exciting future for people in the space and people who are new, just coming to the space now. And one of the things we're so keen to do with 21 Futures is kind of onboard people a little bit through, instead of tech necessarily, a bit more what you were talking about, some of the ideology, some of the stories that we can tell. And, you know, we've just got 21 incredible stories. So let's talk a little bit about what inspired you to write such an excellent and also very funny story. Your story is deeply funny. It was a real pleasure to read. And there was like, oh, how do I describe it? There's like an element of kind of naughtiness to it that was— would you agree? Is that fair to say?

I agree. No, I agree. And we were laughing earlier before you pressed the record button how I wrote erotica to try and save my house from the banks back in 2014. A trilogy, no less.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, I mean, and I also said I'm not going to be writing any more erotica, thank you. But I like being a little bit naughty in my writing, you know, and being suggestive. I mean, I did full-on graphic erotic— it's porn, actually, word porn, sorry. Yeah. Shocking stuff. But, um, I, I like to be more— it's kind of fun. It's— yeah. And it was funny, after I wrote the trilogy, I was invited a lot because I did under a pseudonym originally. And then sure, I said, oh, for goodness' sake, we're all grown-ups here. And so I was asked around when the first Fifty Shades film came out, I was asked to write articles in the main pillar press here in Ireland. And I did, you know, it was all about sex positivity and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, it was just, yeah, it's kind of fun.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, writing's a creative thing. Telling stories is a creative thing. It should be fun, right? Nobody should be looking at that empty page and feeling, feeling terror and feeling frightened. But it is interesting how different people react in different ways to the same thing. You know, you tell them write a story of 3,000 words and some people that's their Everest. And for me, I'm thinking, well, I could do that twice a day, every day. Um, and that's okay.

I'm very impressed.

Well, no, it's just, I think from, from a long time working in it, right? You learn a process that gives you an output and a productivity, but then to have the opportunity to write something fun and get people laughing, because, because your story You know, to talk about it without too many spoilers, there's kind of this ticking clock element. There's, you know, a clever sort of narrative device, a bit like the boiler in The Shining. We know the boiler is going to blow up. It's the ticking clock. Um, yours is, you know, these people have been abandoned on Mars, right? And no help is coming. And what do they do? They dance. And it's beautiful. Um, and you've kind of really nicely juxtaposed the horror of the situation. Yeah. with the humor of the situation. And it was just fantastic to, for us to sort of read it, dissect it, talk about it. And we thought this is absolutely, you know, a game-changing submission. So can you tell us—

You're very kind. Let me say thank you very much. Sorry.

Oh, you're welcome.

Well, you're so getting me now. You can have whatever you want. I'm a writer. Once I get a compliment, I'm anybody's.

So could you tell us, um, was that a story you'd been thinking about for a while or was it fresh to respond to the prompt, or what inspired it, do you think?

It's the prompt. And actually, funnily enough, more recently I've joined a writing group in my local town here where I live in Ireland, and we do prompts every time we meet. It's a very good practice to do because otherwise, I mean, I write extensively. I write thousands of words for my work, which I really enjoy doing. And I tend to write more feature style than, I'm not doing like news per se. I like to write fully rounded pieces. But the prompt— and I have, there was, I had, I have a couple of stories floating around in my head, and I've got a possible full novel that I'm thinking about taking parts of. But just also say write 3,000 words, that's quite nice. You just write and then you stop, and you know you have to get there before that. That's quite a good practice. It's like when you, when you do it in it with our group, you have like 15 minutes and you're there furiously writing because you know you have to do it in 15 minutes, whatever the piece that you do is. In the same way, having that limit and having the theme— it was a very broad theme.

Yeah,

I just thought I hadn't written— I'd written once before, I'd written a historic dystopian, or it could be a future, like, like the, like the— what do you call it— The Road.

Oh yeah, Cormac McCarthy.

Yeah, something along those lines before. So I was like, future or past, hard to know, but sort of felt like the past. Whereas this one here, I think it was just that I liked some of the ideas of her choosing her career, you know, and then just the little rebel thing. I just thought, oh, oh, you know, and the way she turned her foot, I thought, oh, she's a dancer. That's how she knew she was a dancer. I have no idea if she was a dancer before or ever after, really. She just liked to shake her booty, maybe.

You wait until you see the artwork that's been done for your story, because I suspect you haven't seen it yet. No. But you'll be able to. We've had some really amazing artwork created for each of the stories, and yours is breathtaking. It's exciting. Yeah, yeah, it's very, very cool. Um, so you mentioned a bit about dystopia there. So is dystopia an interest of yours, uh, or is it just one of many interests?

It's, do you know what, the thing that I need to write next, and I just haven't quite got the time sorted in my head, but if that story is part of it, and I want to put in like that, I want to put in COVID. COVID is totally dystopian. I mean, my God, look back on it now. It's weird. And we've lived through it, like living through World War 2 or 3 upcoming, who knows. But so I want to do something along those lines and take people out of their comfort zone. Yeah. So what would you do? It's like they say, I was talking to somebody recently about, I think it was some test. I don't know whether it was a fake one or not, but they put people in uniforms and people not in uniforms and encouraged them to be aggressive to the people who weren't in the uniforms. And I don't know, it went as long that someone almost got killed at the end because they upped the ante each time. And it's like when you're out of your normal What do you do? You know, that interests me. So it doesn't have to be necessarily dystopian, but you put somebody in a different country and maybe they haven't got access to the parts, the supports that normally guide them, the rail guards that normally guide them. So I quite like that idea about what would you do if you didn't have to do what you were meant to do?

Right, right. So in writer school, I think we'd have called that sort of the uncanny valley. You know, you've got to go into the other and get a bit uncomfortable, right? And dystopia, you know, myself and Phil, the other editor, we've been talking about that in the time we've been working on this, we've gone from talking about the future dystopia to the dystopia of today. It's actually arrived as we've been doing this.

Well, only yesterday, you probably were following that the Irish Taoiseach, the Prime Minister, was in the Oval Office for the annual St. Patrick's Day presentation of the shamrocks. Now it was a week early, but notwithstanding, the whole country was like, we'd our breath, we'd held our breath because we thought, will he do to Ireland what he did to Ukraine and Zelensky? Now we emerged relatively unscathed, but that— everyone's talking about how would the Taoiseach get out unscathed, how would Ireland get out unscathed. Now there'd be loads of things coming down, but just for that one day, that's weird. How would you ever think that would be part of our normal dialogue?

Yeah, I mean, I didn't have any of this stuff on my bingo card, right? Uh, but I think one of the hugest things that in a way is, is positive for the Bitcoin movement, even though it's horribly negative for the world. Do you know the Canadian trucker protests when they froze the bank accounts? Um, and then they realized actually we can use Bitcoin. Uh, and that was a bit of a, a sort of orange pill moment for a lot of people. But I see, you know, some of us have been looking at this from a much much longer period of time. And even if you read the Bitcoin white paper, right, it was all about getting away from the sort of banking trap that had been created. And unfortunately, even whilst we move our own ideology of what's acceptable away from centralized control, there's then this massive sort of globalist elitist overarching push from, well, actually, you don't have any right to privacy at all because you signed the terms and conditions, right? Because you bought your iPhone and you didn't read the thing and you signed it. And you just think, wow, we've traded actual freedom and liberty for perceived safety and perceived convenience. So it's not a fair trade because the convenience and safety is only perceived. In a lot of cases, right? You know, facial recognition cameras, are they to keep you safe or are they to— well, how do you prove it? You know, and I just think some of these, some of the stories in the collection are very dark. They're very dark indeed. And we did think, you know, can we get little bits of hope into some of these stories? And what I like about yours so much is kind of like a yes, but answer to that question. Like, Yes, there's a bit of hope in that we can have a laugh before we die.

I was going to say, I think mine didn't end on a very good note.

Well, exactly, exactly. But, but the attitude that the characters had and the way they embraced—

She's not a moony mini, that's for sure.

Right, right. And there's real, um, there's real power in that. There's real strength in that. I find it, I find it very moving, actually. Uh, I'm very lucky to have been involved in this and read some of these wonderful stories. Um, because I remember thinking every one of these writers needs to write a novel. You know, you're all ready if you haven't done it. I know you have, but some of them—

Oh no, I have to write my proper novel, not my erotica.

Oh, erotica's proper, isn't it? It must be these days. It must be. Um, well, look, you know, if you ever want to talk about novels, we can talk about that. I've done a bunch, but, um, we're not here to talk about me. Let's talk a little bit about, um, the fact that we've got this, this sort of quite wide group of writers. We've got some really established novelists like DJ Bodden, who's a tremendous writer. And then we have people who have just for the first time had a short story published. And then I suspect, uh, you know, those of us who work professionally as writers are somewhere in the middle, right? We're probably going, well, I'd really like to finish my country music album or do another novel. Um, would you have any advice for writers? And that could be general or it could be specific. You know, it could be specifically about writing in the crypto space or it could just be about how you get started.

Well, I do know that in my professional day job, writing for in crypto is great because people pay you.

Yes.

That, you know, and I was tired of being a freelancer. Oh, we'll pay you for promotion. Tired of that. Although I love writing. It's my joy. And I do write for the Irish Times and the Indo here as well in Ireland. But I remember going to the freelance forum where the chap who runs it, he's totally anti-crypto. I'm not allowed to speak about crypto. Hilarious. I'm trying to say to all the young kids that are there, if you want to get paid for your work, whether it's copywriting, website writing, press release writing, there's money in this space and there's appetite. So please consider this. And it's also, it's your brain is on steroids the whole time because of the change and understand stuff. Yeah. And just the ideas. Beautiful. And then the other piece of advice that I'm actually finally taking myself is that I've joined a local writing group, and I hadn't done for a while. I was in a bit of flux through different things. And the writing group is great, very mixed bunch of people, very mixed styles, very mixed standards. But we do prompts every week, and that forces you to write. And they also say write with a pen and paper, not such on your laptop, because that's something in the brain that sort of kickstarts. And that has led me— Oh, I was laughing, I was showing you earlier, I wrote a poem in there and then I published it. So this is with my writers group. It's called Cold, a poem by Gillian Gottsaller and many poets. And I got AI to translate my poem into various different styles from Gerard Manley Hopkins to James Joyce. And the results are fascinating. That was a bit of fun. But the advice going back, definitely try to find some place where you get paid because it's a pain in the bottom to write and not get paid. It's wrong. Yeah. And secondly, If you're doing pretty creative writing, join a group because I have found that very helpful for me this year.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. You know, you don't necessarily have to go and get an expensive university education and get into loads of debt. You can just find people that did that and then steal their knowledge through groups, which is— no, I'm joking, I'm joking. But yes, you're absolutely right in surrounding yourself with sort of like-minded individuals. but who do have different styles. You know, style in writing, I think, is a lot like style in music. Style is just how you make mistakes, right? And how you, how you torture and break convention. Uh, it's one of my favorite things about being a writer is seeing how people break stuff. Uh, it's, it's really fun. So yeah, I'm, I'm completely on board, um, with what you're saying. And I'd love to ask as well, because, you know, some writers are a little nervous about AI. Some of us are a bit more embracing of it. Do you have any thoughts on AI for writing? Is it a useful tool?

I think in terms of creative, although that was a creative exercise I did, that was really interesting, my poem, and then it duplicated— no, did it change it? It created these other versions which were like, whoa, you know, that's a thing that I've done. But I think with creative, it's not necessarily going to be helpful because It's all that original, what makes a human being a human being. For work, I find it very handy for minutes, for reports. It's just as fast, you know, and I can preparation, I can say read, like, you know how lawyers do, read this white paper, you know, now tell me what are the most important points. And actually, funnily enough, I had an interview earlier today and I got some questions based on white papers. And when I did the interview, I didn't use any of them. Right. They weren't pertinent. So you have to use your own knowledge because I said, the guy started talking about, these are not, even though they read really, really well, I thought, oh, this is kind of cool. And then I threw them away. I used the first one after that. I changed it totally because it didn't. And so you have to be very intelligent, I suppose, with the use of AI. I think AI is not, I know everybody might write a script and they go, ooh, ooh, get it away from me. I'm going, well, if you work with words, it can be very helpful. It's like saying you use a horse and cart or use a car, you know?

Of course.

It's kind of like that kind of analogy. But I do think you have to use your brains with it and what you're using, not just because, you know, apart from the hallucinations, like this, these articles, these, these points that raise, I mean, not really kind of like vague. And it's kind of like I thought at the time they were great points, but they're actually, they were useless. Like I say, I threw it away. And then also I think you have to be aware of, um, your voice, who you are, what you're doing. Yeah. And that's why I changed. I looked at that, I thought, no, That's not me. And I grilled the poor man instead. And I said, tell me more about this. I want to know about that. And what are you doing there? And why is that not happening? And it'll be a much more interesting article than that one, you know?

Of course. Of course. Yeah. I mean, it's, I used to work a lot in data and there is a saying in data, garbage in, garbage out, you know? And it's the same with AI, right? You've got to know how to prompt it. You've got to know how to use it. But yeah, we love an analogy. Mathematicians had an abacus and then a calculator, right? It's just an upgrade, isn't it?

And I wouldn't have written my story from AI, that's for sure. There's no way. Even that, I could have given it a gazillion prompts and it still wouldn't have come up with that quirkiness and the humor, as you said so kindly. And just that little, you know, there's no way. Even the way we had, I had sex in there, for God's sake. I must be obsessed with sex.

Into species sex as well, I believe, right?

Yeah. And it wasn't very tastefully done, I have to say that. It sounded very nice, actually.

Yeah, I mean, the alien character was my favorite, actually.

I liked him too.

Yeah, I'd love to— you should do a whole set of stories or novel in that universe. You could do a prequel, I think, maybe. I

could.

Fantastic. What was I— I had a really pertinent point I was going to make about AI that's now gone. Oh yeah, right. So AI lacks a soul, right?

It lacks— It may gain one in time. I don't know. Right now it doesn't have one.

I don't see how it ever could. Um, and I'd be, I'd be dreadfully frightened if it, if it sort of did. Um, you know, when, when we used to judge short story competitions and you could, you could spot an AI written one a mile off, right? And, and funnily enough, there are now AIs that seek out and destroy other AIs and, and identify AI stuff and flag it up. And you think, wow, you know, we've created monsters to destroy monsters, but it's always going to need a human pilot because it's not intelligent in the way we think it is. It's, it's learned to recognize more patterns. That's all it is, right? It's more and more patterns are being put into it that it's recognizing and then starting to predict, but it's not this kind of Skynet Terminator evil stuff yet. Who knows? Who knows?

Well, I mean, I do find it helps me in my work. Because I'm able to get reports, get highlights, things that would take me a while, just to take me physically a while. I can still do it. It's not that it's smarter than me, but it's just the speed. I'm going, okay, summarize that meeting, please, and do me minutes. And I might agree with the minutes, but it's enough for me to go, okay, that's good. No, that's missed the point there. And I find that very helpful, having a very smart assistant.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's free. Awesome.

Well, I actually pay for mine because I use it a lot.

Oh, okay. Which one have you got?

Oh, just a ChatGPT one.

Oh, the GPT. Yeah.

I was running out of prompts, so I thought, oh, I need to.

I just did a fun exercise for the Consensus Network blog, actually, the 21 Futures blog. And we asked different AIs to have a little go at writing a sci-fi dystopian story. And they were pretty mostly bad. One was quite interesting and the AI actually remembered its own previous story and then continued it a different time.

Oh, that's unusual. Most AI doesn't have memories.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. So the Google one, Gemini, remembered its own story and continued it. And I was like, that is really interesting. But yes, look, Gillian, I could talk to you about this all day and I love speaking to you, but What I want to know, what is next for you? Where can people find you? You know, people can read your story when the book launches imminently, possibly by the time this, uh, this episode is published, it will already be out, which is very exciting. But would you tell us a little bit about if people wanted to connect with you or learn more about you and your work?

Totally. Can I ask a question before we finalize? How many women are in the Anthology?

That is an excellent question. So as a result of some pseudonyms that are used, I do not actually know for definite. I suspect it is mostly men.

The topic and yeah.

The space is a little male heavy.

No, just curious. No, no, sorry, I beg your pardon.

There are multiple women in the project and as part of the team working on the project. One thing I suggest you could do to help find out the answer to that question would be we have a tremendous Telegram group, the 21 Futures group. If you have Telegram—

I'm actually in it. I'm in it.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

So that, you know, there'll be some nice ladies in there to speak to. Absolutely.

No, I'm just curious because I know I went on a call and it was all men at the time. on the call. But anyway, so where to find me? LinkedIn is very handy. Thank you. I think I'm the only Gillian Gottschall in the world. I think we've decided. Congrats. And then because I'm a journalist, I use my name. I'm fully doxxed. And so, and also Twitter is quite good as well. So yes, LinkedIn, start a conversation, or Twitter.

Yeah. And then are we going to hear more about a novel from you in the future?

Yes, because I am— this is my— this is the year I, as I enter my 7th decade. Someone said, does that sound better than you're 60? I'm not quite sure which you're 7 was only single digits. 60, no. Yes, that's the next thing on my list is I need to, and I'm trying to figure out, I've got a couple of storylines in my head and I might go back to this one. I might go back to this one.

Yeah. Well, that's exciting. There's a lot of opportunity there and enjoy it, right? It's meant to be fun. We're meant to love writing and keep that humor and that naughtiness about it.

Well, do you know what's funny? When I wrote my erotica, I remember people would ask, maddest question. Someone said, do you have to get turned on to write erotica? I'm going, well, yeah, you do, because otherwise it's gonna be bang bang, otherwise it's an AI person writing whatever. But then I remember countering that, saying, if I write a nice tweet— so like, it's only the 150 characters, whatever it is now— and it's really nice, I could reread that about 10 times. So just the act of putting one word in front of the other excites me, you know. So it doesn't have to be erotic. Yeah, yeah. It just— I just, I like— if I write something, I kind of go Oh, I like that.

There's a huge, there is a huge market for it. There is a, there is a really wonderful, uh, writer of erotica who posted a very funny joke on Twitter. And I'm going to tell the joke now. And I don't know if it's too on the nose or not, but we can always edit it out later. Um, but she said, I write erotica, but in it, the women orgasm. So it's actually fantasy.

Yes, that is very true. Very true.

Yes. That's too funny, isn't it? I love it. It's so important to laugh and have a good time with what we're doing and not take anything too seriously. There's an irreverence to the freedom that comes with being involved in this stuff. And that's one of my favorite things. I will never be particularly serious. I will always be up for a beer and some banter and a laugh. So that's a good point. Next time you're at a London crypto event, let me know and we'll grab a beer.

I will. I will. I was there. I'll be there at the— oh, I'll be there in June for sure, if not before.

Tremendous. Well, it'll be upon us very soon. So on that note, I would like to say thank you so much, Gillian. It's been a real pleasure having you on and talking to you. And well done again on the story, because I'm not going to keep telling you how brilliant it is.

Oh no, you can. You can tell me again how much you liked it. I will never tire of hearing how much you like my story.

Daria's Dancing Emporium by Gillian Godsell, coming soon in 21 Futures Financial Fallout. And I do hope When we do future collections, not that we've confirmed any, but wait for it. I do hope you'll think about contributing some more in the future as well.

I definitely will.

Amazing. Amazing. All right. Well, you have a wonderful day and it was a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

It's been a pleasure. And thank you for all the compliments. Can I, can we just keep on talking about the compliments?

No. You take care, Gillian. Thank you.

Thank you.