Einstein's Disease (Aired 04-02-2025) Einstein’s Disease: Exposing Corruption and Unlocking Economic

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Einstein's Disease. Through real world insights and powerful conversations with industry leaders, we help you break past limitations and rethink success. Are you ready to push the boundaries of what's possible? Good evening, this is Greg Ellers, host of Einstein's Disease where each and every week we come to you discussing a problem that is prevalent in society, prevalent in a business, or prevalent in your personal life. And our guests and ourselves, we provide you with solutions to some of those problems or a different lens to look through. Today we are fortunate to have a good and long standing friend of mine, Andy Lees. Andy is the partner in Macro Strategies Partnership and the author of the Corruption of Government, a best selling book in England. Andy, welcome to the show. [00:01:03] Speaker B: Thank you very much. [00:01:04] Speaker A: So Andy, I mean you and I talk fairly frequently about a lot of different things in the world. We've had different lenses at times and a lot of fun and our friendship has been something that I truly cherish. But today we've, and the last few months we've really been talking about the misallocation of capital and in many senses it can be described as corruption within the way that the United States government and governments around the world following the United States are really doing a disservice not only to their citizens but their fiduciary responsibility to help economic growth manifest itself in, in a method that is higher in productivity, providing people a much greater opportunity to make money. So what I want to do is spend this first segment here with you and give you the opportunity to really share some of the thesis and things that you study as a world renowned economist regarding some of this misallocation in capital and where that it's gone on for a long time but it's really accelerated, hasn't it Andy, over the last five to seven years and where it's taken us and what it's doing to society as a whole. So I'm going to leave that broad open ended question to you Andy, and let you give it a go. [00:02:30] Speaker B: Okay. Well this has been going on for a very long time. I mean decades in the UK's case, well over 100 years. I mean it's, it's a major problem and it comes down to basically one simple thing. Government. Government is the problem. There's just no question about this. What you have is you've got to understand that there's a real world cost to everything. If you understand that that everything must create the utility to pay for itself, otherwise it's at the expense of capital destruction, then you're halfway there. To understanding what the situation is. So once you've got that, I've said that there's a real cost to everything, but what is that cost? Ultimately, it's energy. Everything that we do, every aspect of GDP is just an energy conversion. 100% of GDP can be explained by energy. Now that will sound strange to people in our industry because people will say, no, it's not. It's 5 or 6% of GDP. No, that is the cost of getting energy, getting fossil fuels or some sort of equivalent out of the ground. Then on the surface it's just lumps of coal, barrels of oil. You still got to release the energy from that. So if we look at gdp, we'll describe it as, you know, steel production, car production, making computers, operating computers, travel, etc. That's one way of looking it, that's one side of the ledger. But what are all those things doing? They're effectively energy conversions. Each one of those is basically being powered by an energy conversion. So 100% of GDP can be explained by energy. If we just took all the fossil fuels out of the ground and just burnt them, then we wouldn't have any ability to produce any more fossil fuels, find any more, etc. So all of GDP is basically about energy production and maintaining that energy production. So this brings us to the important aspect. If we know that, then we can turn to physics to understand how society should work, what the laws of physics effectively tell us. And it comes down to a law called. It's Howard T oden's fifth law of thermodynamics. And it says that each, it says that energy flows follow a transformation hierarchy, productivity hierarchy. So each level of transformancy, which is the quality of work that energy can do, is equal to the amount of energy that's effectively embedded within that capital stock, etc. So if you think about it, if you think about a technology, an advanced technology, the further downstream it is. So the more processes that have gone into its production, the more energy, therefore energy conversions have gone into its production. So therefore it must be more productive to pay for those upstream energy conversions. So that's to understand. [00:05:42] Speaker A: Right, Sorry to take that to, to our viewers who are watching and they have a manufacturing company, a roofing company, they own a business. They're very close to the energy transformation in the sense that their business is productive based upon what they do each day, whereas other larger businesses or organizations require more energy and they may not see that output for months or days or years. [00:06:23] Speaker B: Well, I mean, it's, it's in My opinion, it's to do with, as I say, how far upstream. Sorry, how far downstream the process is. So still, production is obviously very, very close to. No, it is not far downstream. It's very simple. So you've got a clear energy transformation going into that. But what about making computers within that? You've had plastics created, you've had, you know, all these coppers created, etc combined, and all of these work processes are themselves energy conversions, aren't they? Everything that we do is an energy conversion. So the further downstream you are, the more energy conversions have gone into that process, so the more productive you've got to be to pay for all those upstream energy conversions. So this sets the system up to be what's called a trophic pyramid, or what I call a productive natural hierarchy. It's the same as nature. If you think of nature, you've got the sun coming onto the earth from there. That then through precipitation cycles, which is again, energy embedded within fresh water, creates trees and agriculture, etc. That covers the surface of the earth. But there's obviously not as much of that as there is energy coming in. Then you've got herbivores, fewer herbivores which eat that stuff, then you've got meat eaters which eat that stuff, and fewer apex predators again. So you've got this natural productive hierarchy. And this is the only way that the system pays for the energy within itself. Any other way, it's not creating the utility to pay for itself, it's not creating the utility to pay for the upstream energy within its own production. So the system basically starts to collapse. [00:08:31] Speaker A: So that collapse, Andy, if we can take it to the, to the point of government and to the point of lack of productivity. [00:08:42] Speaker B: If you think about this, what's preventing, what's holding that system away from that Again, let's keep it in the laws of physics just for a moment. Gravity, if you imagine gravity, you can't defy it other than with a localized energy source, a localized order. So you can hold a rock up from gravity with some kind of other force. This is what we're doing with government. Government is that force that keeping the system away from aligning to the laws of physics by misallocating capital. That's all government does. So we can go through that in more detail, but let, what we can also look, look at it a slightly different way. Let's strip out the energy aspect and let's just look at it in terms of the, in terms of the, the. What's it called? Left, Left. The sort of Whole profile of politics. On the left hand side we have let left wing government is big government, what's known as constructive rationalism. The right wing side is small government, what's known as critical rationalism. Now critical rationalism means the system is clearing to the real world to that reality, it's discovering prices is in a way like the scientific method clearing to truth, the constructivist method. The left wing side is clearing off truth to a government created ideology. So it's corrupting the system. There's just no way around this. So if you look at far right on that political spectrum, far right is obviously means I would say the Wild west as it were. So you can't have that. You've got to have some sort of rule of law to bring, to stop it being corrupted. So what is the rule of law? The rule of law, this is hugely important, is that which comes about by common consent. It's not the rule of legislation that's very different, it's that which comes about by common consent. So in that political spectrum the rule of law is where everyone can agree, which is effectively where the system will optimise itself. Any corruption, that is people denying that rule of law and know you killing me etc. On the far right, clearly that corrupts the system. Likewise though, any movement onto the left of that, any government beyond the rule of law is a corruption of the system. It is allocating capital other than what the common person wants. It's allocating capital for the majority or the minority. But in doing so it's discriminating, it's imposing price and it's creating a manufactured truth. And that is the problem. In doing that it's moving away from the real world, real world costs, real world values to its own manufactured value. And that is the problem. [00:11:50] Speaker A: So when, if we bring this, as we kind of begin to close out this segment, if we think about this, what you've described is the essence of a by a perfect economy and a perfect structure. And then the misallocation that's taken place due to policies that may benefit an ideology or may it benefit a group. And we're experiencing now a pendulum swift shift and that we're going to talk about extensively in the next segment where government leaders, people that have been elected are trying to reduce the amount of misallocated capital that was through legislation or through executive order that's put the put our country in a position where there's been such a high level of misallocated capital generating multi trillion dollar deficits with very little to show for it, other than a bit of economic data that would, that doesn't demonstrate the misallocation. [00:13:06] Speaker B: It's not just the deficits, Greg, that's important. It's the fact that this has resulted in any allocation of capital other than accordance with the utility it creates is at the expense of capital. [00:13:17] Speaker A: Right. [00:13:17] Speaker B: That's basically the expense of you're borrowing growth from the future because you're destroying your ability to produce. So you look at GDP growth, it's been trending down for decades and decades. That is the problem. The debt rising relative to GDP is one reflection of that, but it's been falling anyway, irrespective of that. And this goes back, you know, to the sort of, well, the six 50s and 60s, the US was still booming, but beyond then you've seen real GDP growth slump. And over in Europe, you know, it's just what's happened is that misallocation of capital has been a loss of capital, but it's been an opportunity cost so far of slower growth in the US Here we've got to the point now where the loss of capital is so big that it's now a loss of real output. So we followed through that tipping point. [00:14:15] Speaker A: So we're going to cut off here and let our sponsors share their insights in terms of what they do. And I'll be back shortly with Andy for the second segment of Einstein's Disease tonight, which is really going to delve into the misallocation of capital we have been seeing and as it comes out of the system, what that means for you, the business owner, the employer, and where the opportunities might lie. And with that, we'll be back shortly. Thank you very much. Thanks, Andy. We'll see you in a minute. Break past limitations and rethink success. Are you ready to push the boundaries of what's possible? Hi, this is Greg Ellers and we're back with Einstein's Disease tonight with our guest guest and good friend Andy Lees, author of the Corruption in Government, one of the best selling novels in England. Andy, it was a great first segment laying out to our audience what misallocation means. The basic tenets from talking about gravity and the sun and the clear unobstructed ways that production and productivity can be visualized. And what we really want to get into here tonight in this segment with our viewers is we're reading in the news about doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, looking at a lot of these different programs and saying this has to end. This was a misallocation of capital, as you discussed and Looking at other elements to our federal government, particular potentially shutting down the Department of Education. Another misallocation of capital by some people and all of these things taking place. People at home are saying I might lose my job or my neighbor lost their job or our company lost revenue because something has been shut down. What I'd like for you to kind of talk with me on in this segment is that's we need, our audience needs to understand that's an opportunity because that opportunity means that capital that was misallocated. If you are in a. If you are in a position or have the opportunity to do things new, there's going to be capital for you that can be allocated, that can have a much higher level of productivity, not only for yourselves, but as you mentioned in the last segment, GDP has been trending down for a considerable period of time and that's been due to the misallocation of capital. As we allocate capital correctly, we can actually see real GDP start to turn back up or stop falling. Would you. Would you kind of touch on that? [00:17:17] Speaker B: Is that I think you're right. There may initially be some correction. Of course there will. I think you can look at it similarly to Britain in the 1980s under Thatcher. We went into a recession, but that was the best thing that could happen to us at the time. It cleared out a load of rubbish and therefore allowed the system to gradually grow. People that were laid off from government, etc. Found productive jobs. But if we go back to that Department of Government Efficiency, from what I understand, and this may be out of date by now, but they've discovered what? 55 billion of cost savings, 50, 55 billion of waste, complete waste, which was so obviously corrupt that no one other than the recipients of that money could possibly suggest otherwise. The real issue is the money that's not so obvious, which is as we'll come to every aspect of government. But let's just look at some figures on this. Several years ago there was a report Tax Changes and Economic Growth. Empirical evidence for a panel of OECD countries. There's been numerous other reports along the same lines. What it basically found was that for every 1 percentage point increase in tax as a percentage of GDP, the the average person's wealth, GDP per capita went down by basically 1 percentage point. So if your tax rate is 50%, the country's tax rate is 50%, the economy is half of the size it should be, effectively. There was another major report, this was in January 2013, federal regulation and Aggregate Economic Growth, that found that between 1949 and 2005 the increased regulations in the US had lowered annual GDP growth by an average of about 2 percentage points. And that because of that US GDP in 2005 was just 28% of where it would otherwise been. In other words, the economy was less than a third of the size it should be. So there's been an enormous cost from all of this government. We need to get rid of government, free up resources to be used productively. You can look at what is the corruptions. It's everything. It's moral values, it's, it's education that's shifted from science and maths to literatures and arts and things. It's, it's the criminal justice system. I use an example in the UK because at the moment it's so sort of popular because of all the immigrants coming in. The government's hiding behind human rights laws. Well, human rights means life, the ability to stay alive really life, liberty and property. Well government has corrupted that to mean certain services, people are entitled to, certain services, certain, you know, government payments, etc. Well again come back to the fact that there's a real cost to everything. These laws are effectively against human rights. They, they're killing people in the name of human rights. But let's move back to industry as you say, we are going to have to expect to see government reduce in size. There's no question. But what has the government spending been on? Think about the Inflation Reduction Act. That was green energy. Everyone knows that green energy does not and cannot work. If you look at green electricity, a very different thing, that's electricity made by, we're getting the solar energy in, the wind energy in. But we made those solar cells and wind turbines on fossil fuels. So it's been massively subsidized. Even with that renewable energy in Europe is about five times the price of, of conventional electricity. Now if you look at it at a world level, it's more than 10 times because Europe pays more than twice fossil fuel price to the rest of the world. So there's no way the economies can survive on this. We are destroying society. So. [00:21:45] Speaker A: If we take a look at that energy element to that Andy, and the tax. So what our viewers need to understand in America, when we talk about green energy and tax, that means that our government itself, when it's inefficient to produce wind power, say in the state of Texas, they subsidize that by giving the rate purchaser a discount of 25 or 50 cents a kilowatt hour. So it's the same as what it would be if they were buying nuclear power or hydroelectric power. So that subsidy in and of itself that the government is providing so people can afford that electricity is a misallocation of capital because in a sense they could be using natural gas, they could be using fossil fuels, nuclear, they could be using water, but they're not. They're using these green energy solutions that aren't efficient. So that's a misallocation of capital in and of itself. [00:22:54] Speaker B: If we get rid of that and allow people to go back to industry to using fossil fuels, assuming there are fossil fuels available, energy price falls and so more, you can create more gdp. [00:23:09] Speaker A: And with that fall in energy prices, because energy, as you talked about in the first segment, Andy, is really at, at the very top of everything. We need energy to create all of the any and everything we use in society. So if energy prices are able to come down, then affordability, inflation falls. And that in and of itself helps the measurements of productivity because there's a less misallocation of capital that is improperly subsidizing and creating inflation. [00:23:42] Speaker B: You mentioned earlier education in the States, if I bring it back to the UK for a moment on education, because here you can see figures which make it very, very clear. So in the UK, and this is 2022 or 2023 data, we pay something like £7,600 per child per year to teach them. So there's 21 and 22 kids per class. That's £170,000 per class. Now if we were teaching them properly, wouldn't most of that money go to the teachers? Well, the teacher on average gets 39,000 pound. If there's more than 22 kids, or I think it is, they get a teacher's assistant which gets another 25 grand. So those two between them are just under 70 grand. Where's the other hundred thousand pound going? It's being paid to civil servants and local authority administrators. What are they doing to teach the kids? Nothing. They're putting up barriers, they're causing ridiculous sort of policy ideals, etc. Get rid of them. Get rid of them. Give all the money to teachers. Okay, to begin with yours, you still got relatively poor teachers, but if you're paying 170 grand a class, you're going to start over the next few years getting some good teachers, creating a lot of much better educated children. You've also then freed up all that labor from the government and the civil servants and the local authority administrators who can now find productive jobs. Go and find something real to do Something that creates the utility to pay for itself, not something that's destroying capital. [00:25:30] Speaker A: That is right there. And we're going to close out the segment with that point. But the misallocation of capital in education, we hear it all the time. It's something that's acknowledged and you touched on it perfectly, how much money is actually being allocated by that student for that class relative to the bureaucracy behind it. And that's endemic in all elements as the government's largeness has totally grown to, you know, more than a million more civil servants over the last decade or so. And that is where, when we think about this Department of Government Efficiency and misallocation of capital and spending 2 trillion more than what we actually take in as a government, that misallocation has grown substantially. And in the next segment, we're going to come back and talk about with our viewers some solutions to opportunity as this happens. So with that, we'll be back shortly. Andy, thank you very much. And we'll talk to you after we pay for our pay, our commercial sponsors. You break past limitations and rethink success. Are you ready to push the boundaries of what's possible? Hi, this is Greg Ellers. I'm back with Andy Lee's a good friend, author of the book Corruption of Government and partner in macro Strategies in London, renowned economist Andy, it's great to have you on the show today. I think our viewers today have gotten a little bit more of an education than they probably got in a lot of, a lot of different ways over the last few years. And it's important to really highlight that because misallocation of capital, corruption of government are synonymous in the sense that we're not doing the best and we are not being a fiduciary in leadership of a government, misallocating the tax dollars. If the tax dollars are too high, people are even having a reduction in not only in gdp, but their standard of living, which is something that we've definitely seen over the last 20 years relative to potential. So as we went through the last segment, we started to really talk about what is the misallocation of capital and what in this segment we really want our viewers to understand what's that going to look like when it's likely we see an uptick and disruption in unemployment, or people feel that there's a lost opportunity that they had. But you and I look at this differently, don't we, Andy? We say that's great. We need more people in the private sector. People need to think outside of civil service or civic duty to think about your civic duty is to work in the private sector, isn't it Andy? Become more productive, become a participant in GDP growing versus being on the side of misallocated capital. [00:28:50] Speaker B: Sorry. The idea of a life of service, which is what the people within the government and the public sector say again, if we go back to what we started with, rather than serving people, it is actually destroying capital and therefore is totally against people. It is a life of disservice at every level. But we can bring this misallocation of capital. It also applies to the private sector because they have to work within the constraints of government. All the rules, regulations, etc. And those corruptions have meant we've got record monopoly profits which is coming from the tech sector. These huge great margins are because we haven't got capital allocated properly. So in a proper system, the allocation of capital is in accordance with the work that the factors of production do. Well in the tech sector, those 50% margins are obviously in response to it's not for labor, it's not for capital, it's for risk capital. But they're not losing money. So that's clearly a monopoly profit that's gone to about 25% of corporate profits of revenues rather global. In the US that means that labor is not getting their share. As you say, they've basically been starved. So if government starts reversing this, if government starts to work properly, we will start to see some good middle class type jobs created in the private sector. Again, if we go back to that idea of a trophic pyramid, think of what that means. It's jobs at every level where everyone's competing to make something productive. Instead we've been hollowing that out. If we're going back to sorting this out, we need to replace those, we need to create competition and we need to basically create middle management, etc. We need to give people savings from that. So at the moment, through that destruction of capital, it means there's not the capital in those places and therefore not the savings or the knowledge in those places. That's all got to come back. So you've got to think about smaller companies starting to form and basically start to compete. All these smaller middle class, middle medium sized companies, that's what's all been sacrificed for years after year after year. Stripping out that to support a few big companies, that's all going to change. So I would say first of all you've got to look outside of government because you know, it's pretty obvious that government spending is complete waste it. If we're going to a productive system. You've got to look at those new jobs, creating those new jobs. And that will also mean much more in the way of community, et cetera, because it's going to be localized industries, et cetera. So I think this is all, you know, very, very positive in the medium. [00:31:56] Speaker A: Term what you really said there, and I hope our viewers picked up on it because we always hear regulation, new laws, be it executive order or be it from specific agencies or from the government, as those are repealed or just rewritten so they don't exist in the same form that gives businesses the ability to form capital formation. The opportunity exists because the barriers to entry or the, that are the benefit to these large multinational, in many cases technology companies, they start to break down and other people have opportunities that didn't currently exist. So our viewers, as they think about opportunity in the coming years and decades, if you're willing to accept the fact that the sustainability of this misallocation of capital has ended, the question becomes how much does it actually change and how is it felt and what those opportunities are. If we take it to the point that those opportunities are not only going to exist, Andy, but there's going to be many of them. It comes down to people realizing, yes, those big tech companies that exist are going to continue to exist, but their ability to be a monopoly is going to dissipate and that's going to give me in the private sector the opportunity potentially to start a business or to become part of a. [00:33:39] Speaker B: What are you doing at this moment, Greg? This is a business effectively, isn't it? I, I've got my own little business, used to work at big Institutional bank. You similarly, we've basically using the resources available to us, the modern technology, and we're now competing with the majors. That's what's going to happen more and more of this kind of thing. Not media, but you know, in business generally. [00:34:04] Speaker A: No, absolutely. So when we think about how do people identify some of these things, Andy? We, we, we've got 400 million people in America. So, so there's, there's, there's no way to, to put everybody and paint everybody with a broad brush. But when we start thinking about these changes and opportunities, spend a few minutes, if you can, talking about what opportunities you see in the near term as the government becomes more efficient and they allocate less capital incorrectly, and our GDP or our US economy is not measured by how much the government spending, which at some point I think, correct me if I'm wrong, and it was in the mid-20s as a percentage of GDP and that starts to come back down. Ideally we'd like to very low, but let's just say, you know, we see a 10 or 12% drop in that. Where are those opportunities for people? Where should they be looking initially to. To see these opportunities? Because technology in and of itself is, is grand. But we also know that there's a lot more operational capital required for that. But a lot of people out there and our viewers, that's not where they lie. They lie in an opportunity to start a business and to not do so with a heavy level of investment. [00:35:37] Speaker B: I understand that they don't have the heavy level of investment, but I think, I mean, you're asking the sort of $64 million question, aren't you? But what you've got to. [00:35:47] Speaker A: But you're worth 64 million, Andy. So I've got to ask you the question. [00:35:50] Speaker B: I think what you've got to consider again is values. What is a real value? When we talked before this, you said to me you wanted to look at career satisfaction. What is career satisfaction? And I thought, wow, well, that's a strange question. But then to me what it is, is it's about doing something real, something that really creates utility to pay for itself. And thereby through doing that, you are creating, you're realizing your own real value. I think that's what you've got to do. You've got to consider, think for yourself, what is it that someone might want some what you can do, what service you can offer someone sort of thing. And I think from that that's where you're going to get value. And again, whilst you say there's not the huge capital available to do big things, which I totally agree, don't forget the price of technology is so cheap now that a lot of things can be done. I don't think, you know, to compete with some of these bigger companies is not going to take a huge amount of capital. It's just the right ideas and that comes from people. I mean, again, this is where we've gone so badly wrong. We, through stripping out capital, we've stripped out knowledge, information, intangible capital and the ability to compete and thereby generate ideas. Price discovery. We've got to go back to price discovery and I can't do it for other people. But the point is you've got to find what you think is valuable. And the only way to realize whether something's valuable is, is to offer it out to the market. And what you'll find is the market says yes, I love that. Or no, I think that's dreadful. But that's where people find value. It's not what they think is good. I mean this is again part of this, the sort of problem we're told that right wing politics is ugly. It's, you know, looking after yourself, no one else. Truth is you only get make money by selling something that someone else wants that someone can make utility out of. So it's only by creating utility for someone else that you can make money, that's all. So you've got to basically try and find something where there is interest. But I think what's going to really happen is going to be the, the where it, where we've got industry at the moment, most of that industry will remain but you're going to start seeing smaller competitors growing within that. Whether it's cars getting small, you know, some specialist companies and what have you anything. I think you'll find at a small level people will start to, you know, compete and there will be demand for that competition and it's through that competition where the greatness will come from. [00:38:52] Speaker A: Absolutely. And so with that we're going to step away for our sponsors and come back and close out this great show with my friend Andy Lees, the author of Corruption of Government, best selling author and talk about career satisfaction, including Andy's himself in the next segment. With that we'll be back shortly. Thank you. Break past limitations and rethink success. Are you ready to push the boundaries of what's possible? Hi, this is Greg Ellers, host of Einstein's Disease and really had a fun afternoon or fun evening with my guest Andy Lees, good friend, author of Corruption of Government and partner in Macro Strategies, world renowned economist. Andy and I have really been trying to give you the audience the ability to think through the lens of as the government is forced to misallocate less capital, meaning spend less money inefficiently, what does that actually mean for you and what's your opportunity in life professionally from a family perspective as you think about these changes taking place that might be in your community or something you see as an opportunity. And as we closed out the last segment we were beginning to touch on Andy hit my softball career satisfaction that we had been talking about previously where career satisfaction, not only for myself, Andy and many of you out there, career satisfaction tends to have a higher level of productivity, a better allocation of capital because when you're in a position to have career satisfaction, you're probably providing something that other people are responding to in a positive way. I. E. Your sales go up or your service increases and all of those types of things give you the ability to get more capital, risk more capital and grow your business. So in this last segment, Andy, I'd like to kind of delve into to Andy Lees. Andy, have you and I have known each other since we both worked for a large institution? Talk to us a little bit about how you measure career satisfaction and, and, and your path to that so people can kind of get an understanding of someone that's been successful in becoming a better allocator of not only their personal capital, but the capital of who your clients are. [00:41:32] Speaker B: Right. [00:41:33] Speaker A: First of all, you like that one, don't you Andy? Put you on the spot. You like me, Put you on the spot like that. [00:41:38] Speaker B: Just before I answer that, I want to make. To me the most important thing to get out of this is to understand that there is this real cost to everything and any allocation of capital otherwise is a misallocation of capital. If you understand that, we can basically start to change government and that to me is the most important aspect, we can start to make the changes necessary. Going back to myself and this. I've obviously I'm as old as you or nearly as old as you, but I've pretty much enjoyed my. Everything I've done. To be honest, whatever job I've done, I've done it to the best of my ability. And therefore I felt that I've been, you know, doing something productive. I set up this place back in 2011. I used to work at an investment bank and obviously after GFC things changed, politics changed and it became obvious that no one could was allowed to basically express their own views anymore. So you couldn't basically help a client or what have you. So I set up this place and you know, it's been great ever since. And what, why do I like it? It's not necessarily the relationship with the clients, although that's all great. But the real thing is I'm trying for myself, I am trying to find what's happening. I'm trying to understand the world and that doing that for myself is obviously something that others value. And so that's what, you know, that's how it sort of works. You're creating a. A value for someone by doing something of interest. I think we can all do that, whatever our skill set is. And it's interesting, again the value is found by the user of that product. So you know, many people won't even understand their own value, what they do, what skill set they've got but if they just start to offer something out there, the market will find it and they will say, well, hold on, don't do it that way, do it slightly differently. And it's that that basically drives everything as far as I can see. Again with back to that trophic pyramid. If we look at systems, we can explain 100 of GDP through energy, but we can also explain it through tangible capital. Energy has to do its work on a medium, so on tangible capital. And through that work, information or knowledge or intangible capital is gained. So the point is that that system maximizes information, knowledge, both input and output knowledge. So the, the management of the system as well as the receipt of the information. And so again, we're back to this idea that what you need is a free system and then your value will be released, you will find that value. You've got to do some work, you've got to go and offer things. But it's through that, I mean, think of how many different kinds of jobs you've done. I've done over my, whatever number of years I've been through. You know, simple retail, retail business, life insurance, investment analysis, sales derivatives. You find your way. [00:45:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that what you really touch on there is you have found something that helps you grow every day and you're able to share that with other people and our viewers when they hear that. It's important for people to understand your ability to have a more fulfilling life is really at your own destiny. And the further you move away from the misallocated capital and professions that way, the more you're going to find yourself in a position where you're not only being more productive, you're learning more, you're providing something of value. And that value is what society is craving in and of itself for three reasons. The first is the current model is not sustainable. The current model is not providing optimal output or the ability for people to grow from an education a productive standpoint. It's not as free as what it has been. The more you reduce regulation, the more opportunity people have to increase, invent, to create, to provide something that others have been looking for or seeking in a fair value in a, in a, maybe in a small community versus nationally or or globally, but they're given that opportunity. And lastly, and most importantly is it's satisfaction for oneself. And that satisfaction for oneself is something that comes with the ability to be a free thinker and take that risk. As much as it might seem dramatic, the opportunities are there and there's going to be more of them. And the more people understand those opportunities are going to exist and they're looking to find them, the more likely it is they're going to have that satisfaction that currently doesn't exist. [00:47:05] Speaker B: Andy, I would just describe that again back to that political spectrum. Through price discovery, you're discovering wisdom, you're finding the truth, understanding how things go. Whereas on the other side, the constructivist side, you're basically clearing of truth, real world to an ideology. And I think that's where a lot of people as supposedly ill these days, mentally ill, et cetera, because they can see that the ideology that they're being told just doesn't stack up against the real world. And so there's this confusion, et cetera. So yeah, I mean it's government's in the way, get it out of the way and we can see growth, the economy grow, we can see our own lives prosper, everything. It's government that's the problem. [00:47:57] Speaker A: Absolutely. And I think that that's a great way to close out this show tonight. Really appreciate you being on it. One last thing. What's up for andy Lees in 2025? What do you, you here? Do you have any big, big mountains you're going to climb? [00:48:16] Speaker B: If we're talking markets, are we talking about just generally. [00:48:22] Speaker A: Just generally. [00:48:23] Speaker B: Just generally. No, just keep plodding on, keep progressing, keep pushing for to find new stories, find new truths. [00:48:32] Speaker A: Absolutely. Listen, it's, it's been great to have you as a guest on the show, Andy. I look forward to having you back again sometime. This is Andy Lees, the partner in Macro Strategies and the author of the Corruption of Government best selling book in England. Andy, it's been great to have you on the show and it's great to call you a friend. Thank you very much. And with that I will bid adieu for the evening show. Thank you very much. This has been a NOW Media Network's feature presentation. All rights reserved.