Pod Insights Michael Covel's Trend Following Ep. 1316: Zen Man with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio About this episode Please enjoy my monologue Zen Man with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive. --- I’m MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I’m proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I’d like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can’t get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel Facebook: @trendfollowing LinkedIn: @covel Instagram: @mikecovel Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 I hope everyone has enjoyed their holidays in the last week. Thanksgiving in America, Black Friday, Cyber Monday around the world, shop, shop till you drop. I happen to have been in America for Thanksgiving, quite the fun time with family. Today, I want to share with you one of my favorite guests. Now, I've never actually talked to him. He's not alive anymore. He's a fantastic voice for the psych side of trading, the emotional side of trading, the get your shit together side of trading.
0:41 Speaker 00 Now, most people that come to me, they come to my world, my podcasts, my books, my blog, etc. They're very open-minded. They want to learn something new. They want to understand trend following and they want specific systems they can use right now. And I've been helping people for a very long time. But occasionally, you get that one person who just thinks I could get rich overnight. And they come to me. I don't know why they come to me. But they want to get training from me. They want to get understanding from me.
1:22 Speaker 00 And then almost immediately, they have so many misunderstandings, so many biases, so many expectations that are so wrong, so incorrect, so messed up. You realize this person is going through their life like a Las Vegas slots player. They're in the casino their whole life. Now, they think they're smart. They think they've got it together. They think they can see everything. They think they can read 100 pages in two seconds. Why, if you're one of those types of people, do you come to me? I can't help you. Do you actually think that Richard Dennis chose people who argued with him about trading?
2:08 Speaker 00 Argued with him about rules? No. In fact, they didn't become turtles. They didn't get selected.
2:17 Speaker 00 The whole idea with passing along information and knowledge is to listen to somebody who has more experience than you, more knowledge than you, more rules than you. Listen to what they say, understand what they're saying, and then execute. And then also apply the scientific method. Meaning, challenge them. Get into the nitty gritty. That's fine. That's the way it's supposed to work. But the people who expect to find a million dollars under their bed the day after they supposedly have been exposed to trend following. Don't come to me. I can't help you. You're cooked. You're done.
3:00 Speaker 00 You're never going to be a winner if you expect to be rich overnight. I repeat, you don't have a chance in hell to become a winner in almost anything in life if you expect it to happen overnight. You will go through life chasing your tail. That's the way it works. Nothing new. Now, for the people who actually want to learn, the people that know they don't know everything. Let me get into my guest today because this guy has got amazing insights. Oh, one quick note. In the last couple of weeks, I've had a little bit of a special for my Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and a lot of new clients that I will help.
3:42 Speaker 00 But if you missed it, if you missed out on this exclusive offer, drop me an email. [email protected] . Again, [email protected] . C-O-V-E-L.com. I'm not saying I'm going to give you the same offer. Maybe if I'm feeling generous that day. But if you really want to get involved, hit me up. Now, without any further delay, let's jump right back into a blast from the past, a man who's no longer with us, and learn. Because damn it, that should be the galvanizing force for 2025. Let's learn together. I hope you enjoy, and I'll see you again next week.
4:36 Speaker 00 Alan Watts, the eastern philosopher, one of my favorites. A man who can wander and wind down many paths. And he doesn't necessarily reach only logical conclusions. But this man, his ability to bring out food for thought, to make you think, he's right there. For a little background, for those of you that don't know, Alan Watts introduced eastern traditions, Buddhism, to the West. His video on money, I have featured on this podcast many times because it never gets old. It's 100% brilliant. Is money the root of all evil? Is money the goal?
5:19 Speaker 00 What about confusing money with happiness? This sure happens a lot, doesn't it? Watts has some thoughts there too, as well. Making mistakes. Are you so afraid to make a mistake that you don't get anything done? Watts is fantastic at laying out why that is just a massive mistake in your life. The massive mistake in your life is if you're afraid to make mistakes, you never get anything done. You never learn a damn thing. But before I get into Watts, let me tell you why. This particular excerpt with Watts, and this is decades ago,
5:59 Speaker 00 why this came to be on this week's monologue. I was in Malibu, California recently. With my fiancee, driving down from San Francisco, we stopped at a seafood restaurant. I don't recall the name. You know, it's just one of these places. There's a lot of swanky places in Malibu. Down right on PCH, for those of you that are familiar with the area. We pulled in, we sat down. A few tables away from us were two couples. These two couples were everything that's wrong with money and wealth. I would estimate the two guys were probably in their 30s, the two girls were probably in their 20s.
6:44 Speaker 00 The one guy looked so drugged out of his mind, he could barely sit up straight. The other guy was standing at the table. Now, this is an outdoor beach seafood restaurant. So, there really wasn't a reason to stand. The other three people were sitting, they were having lunch. But this guy was standing. He was covered in so much bling. He looked like a cast member from The Jersey Shore. And no, that is not some take, some rip from me against Italian Americans. I'm just telling you what I saw. The guy was covered in so much bling. It was real bling, there was no doubt about it, from the gold around his neck to the watch. I couldn't see his eyes, but you know, I thought I recognized his voice. And he was preaching to the other people at the table.
7:26 Speaker 00 His, I assume his girlfriend or his wife and the other couple. Now, the girlfriends, they were just Barbie dolls. The only way these girls exist is if they live in LA. They weren't real at all. Now, the guys weren't real either. But this one guy standing up, I just gotta share with you some of the things he was talking about. He went on and on and on for minutes, talking about some sweater or shirt he bought from the high-end retailer Burberry. And these other people just sat there listening to it. And at some point in time, this guy standing, looked at the other two people, the other couple, and said, "You guys really look European."
8:09 Speaker 00 He then went on to talk about that he will soon be on another cover of Lifestyles of the Mega Rich. This is not a magazine I'm aware of. I assume it probably exists. And you know what? By looking at this guy, I assume this guy probably had boatloads of money, really. I don't necessarily know how he got it. Maybe he inherited it. Maybe he's a producer. Anyone that knows anything about LA, it's a crazy freaking place. And there's a lot of really dumb cartoon people that have immense fortunes. This table was one of the prime examples of everything that Alan Watts is about to
8:52 Speaker 00 talk about that's wrong. And I really think that people make such a mistake. If they see wealth, they just respect it. They respect. I mean, look, I'm sure plenty of people in LA respect this guy because of the things that adorned his body. They think, wow, that's awesome. He's cool. He's got it. He's made it. He's successful. The watch on his wrist makes me respect him. Now, it's a really sick thought for me. I could give a shit less. But it's one of those great reminders for me to sit down at that seaside seafood place.
9:35 Speaker 00 And I've not been to LA for several years, but to immediately get that visual of LA in all of its crazy glory when it comes to money and wealth. I knew when I saw that, that I had to go back and find an Alan Watts clip. They would put it all in perspective. Now, bringing Watts on my show today, even though he's dead, you're gonna find that this clip wanders to the left, wanders to the right, goes up, goes down, goes places that you might not expect. But let me give a clue on dealing with Watts. Dealing with Alan Watts. Don't word think him.
10:19 Speaker 00 Scott Adams of Dilbert fame has been bringing this up. Don't word think him. Think about the big picture of where he's trying to take you. Because, look, there's some things on the surface, I would immediately say, I don't agree with where Watts goes in this clip.
10:35 Speaker 00 But if you don't word think it, and you try and understand his big picture, and that's one of the reasons I'm having this on one week after Milton Friedman, it sounds like another episode of liberty. It's right there again, liberty in all its glory. But this time, instead of coming from Milton Friedman, the conservative economist, it's coming from Alan Watts, the Buddhist genius. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Alan Watts.
11:05 Speaker 01 So this goes very deep into us. It goes deep, deep, deep into a problem we have about guilt.
11:15 Speaker 01 I wonder often if there's any relationship between guilt and gold,
11:21 Speaker 01 that the love of money is the root of evil. Very true saying.
11:27 Speaker 01 Because you see, I was saying yesterday that the difference between having a job and having a vocation is that a job is some unpleasant work you do in order to make money, with the sole purpose of making money. There are plenty of jobs because there is still a certain amount of dirty work that nobody wants to do and that therefore they will pay someone to do it.
11:54 Speaker 01 There is essentially less and less of that kind of work because of mechanization.
12:00 Speaker 01 But if you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd.
12:10 Speaker 01 Because if money becomes the goal, and it does when you work that way,
12:18 Speaker 01 you begin increasingly to confuse it with happiness or with pleasure.
12:25 Speaker 01 Yes, one can take a whole handful of crisp dollar bills and practically water your mouth over them. But this is this kind of a person who is confused like a Pavlov dog who salivates on the wrong bell.
12:47 Speaker 01 It goes back, you see, to the ancient guilt
12:55 Speaker 01 that if you don't work, you have no right to eat.
13:04 Speaker 01 That if there are others in the world who don't have enough to eat, you shouldn't enjoy your dinner even though you have no possible means of conveying the food to them.
13:15 Speaker 01 While it is true that we are all one human family and that every individual involves every other individual,
13:26 Speaker 01 while it is true, therefore, we should do something about changing the situation. The one way of not doing anything about a situation is feeling guilty about it. Because when people feel guilty about a situation, they most usually, instead of doing something practical to change it, they resort to all sorts of symbolic methods of expiation.
13:52 Speaker 01 They go to confession, they see an analyst, they do all kinds of things which will be ways of actually not doing anything about the problem, but feeling all right about it instead. And guilt invariably produces that sort of reaction. It is a destructive emotion. Instead, we need to have a different attitude to our mistakes and to our misdeeds.
14:25 Speaker 01 Walt Whitman always admired animals because they do not lie awake at night and weep for their sins.
14:33 Speaker 01 Our animals are practical, in the real sense, as are children who haven't been taught this extraordinary hang-up of guilt.
14:47 Speaker 01 Because if you have done something wrong, you have made a mistake, and somebody makes you ashamed of it and guilty, you run around licking the sores of your wounded ego
15:03 Speaker 01 because you feel your pride has been hurt. The first thing to understand is that it is not a serious failing in a human being to make mistakes.
15:19 Speaker 01 Everybody has to make mistakes. There is no way out of it. You can't learn anything unless you make mistakes. We find, for example, in Japan, the Japanese have a terrible hang-up about making mistakes.
15:33 Speaker 01 They, therefore, never have the courage to practice their English properly. They've had seven years of English in school, most of it very, very badly taught, and it's irrelevant English. They learn all about Shakespeare and
15:52 Speaker 01 Dickens and Thackeray and Thomas Hardy and so on, and therefore they can't carry on an everyday conversation. It's like the way the English study French, all about pens of gardener's ants and things like that.
16:09 Speaker 01 But they are ashamed to try out their English unless drunk.
16:15 Speaker 01 So if you want to get into conversation with the Japanese in English, you have to go to bars. And then they say university students and so on there will loosen up and talk.
16:29 Speaker 01 Because they no longer have the inhibition, the shame, of saying the wrong thing.
16:34 Speaker 01 So likewise, I know a very great anthropologist who was taught music, playing the piano, in the same way I was. When I was taught music, the school mom who taught me used to put an India rubber, an eraser it's called in this country, on the top of each hand so that I would have my hands in good posture. And every time I'd play a wrong note, she'd hit my fingers with a pencil.
17:06 Speaker 01 And this great anthropologist had had a similar sort of musical education. And when confronted with a piano in the presence of an absolutely marvelous teacher in San Francisco, she said she was amazed. He was completely incapable of reading notes. He blocked at everything.
17:24 Speaker 01 So, another great teacher of the piano I knew said simply, "You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it. Play it wrong, and then eventually go over it again and you'll eventually get it right. But you must not block. Always keep the same rhythm going, even if you have to slow it down, but keep the proportionate rhythm of one note to another. And if it's the wrong note, play the wrong note, as long as you play something in the right rhythm."
18:05 Speaker 01 So, you know, this is a way of taking away people's blockage, people's guilt and shame about making mistakes.
18:16 Speaker 01 So, you absolutely... Freedom means, basically, the freedom to make mistakes.
18:24 Speaker 01 The freedom to be a damn fool. And then not to recriminate with yourself when you do finally realize that it was a mistake, but simply don't do it again.
18:37 Speaker 01 Or at least do it less often.
18:42 Speaker 01 So, you know, this is the puzzle. When you go to confession in the Catholic Church, which is an enormous method of inculcating a sense of guilt, very subtle. One says, of course, that Catholics are, on the whole, less guilty than Protestants. They're more relaxed. And there's some truth in that. But only some.
19:07 Speaker 01 Protestants, de toute évidence, ont une culpabilité chronique. Et vous pouvez trouver ça par une formule très simple. Quand les protestants en Angleterre ont abandonné ce qu'on appelle une confession orificale à un prêtre, ils ont inséré dans leur livre d'prayer une confession générale dans laquelle toute la congrégation a fait sa confession ensemble. Maintenant, qu'est-ce que dit un catholique quand il fait sa confession? La formule est: "Je confessais à Dieu l'Almighty, à Marie Bénédique, à la vierge, à Jean le Baptiste, aux apôtres Pétain et Paul, et tous les saints. Je suis né de façon excessivement mauvaise en pensant, en disant, en agissant, à ma faute, à ma propre faute, à ma faute la plus triste.
19:51 Speaker 01 Pour cela, je prie Marie Bénédique, etc., et vous, Père, pour me prier à Dieu notre Dieu." Et le prêtre dit: "Dieu l'Almighty, pardonnez vos péchés et amènez-les à la vie éternelle. Par l'autorité de notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, soumis à moi, je t'enlèverai de tous vos péchés, dans le nom du Père, du Fils et du Saint-Esprit." Maintenant, au lieu de ça, ce qu'ils ont dû introduire dans le formulette anglicane était au lieu de cette confession très simple de péchés et devant toute l'ensemble des cieux, une grêle absolue
20:34 Speaker 01 où ils disent qu'ils ont péché tellement et que le souvenirs de ces péchés sont tristes contre nous, que la charge de ces péchés est intolérable. "Pardonnez-nous, Père le plus miséricordieux." Et tout ça, craindre et pleurer, briser le sein et se faire graver en culpabilité. Et puis le prêtre, au lieu de dire une formule simple d'absolution, cite toutes sortes de textes scripturaux pour prouver de la Bible que ceux qui se repentent vraiment et honnêtement seront pardonnés par Dieu. Parce qu'ils sont très incertains à ce sujet, donc ils doivent citer toutes les autorités.
21:18 Speaker 01 And this absolutely groveling form of confession replaces the old one, because they were a little bit scared about abandoning the direct confession of sins to the priest. But now, going back to the Catholic problem about guilt,
21:38 Speaker 01 you say, when you have confessed, after saying this formula to all the saints, you confess the specific sins you've committed.
21:53 Speaker 01 And, you know, "I stole something, committed adultery three times," and so on, whatever it was. And then you say at the end, "For these and all my sins, which I cannot now remember,
22:12 Speaker 01 I firmly purpose amendment,
22:16 Speaker 01 and humbly ask pardon of God and of you, Father, absolution."
22:24 Speaker 01 Now, "I firmly purpose amendment," that is where the fly in the ointment consists, because the doctrine is that you have made a true confession if at the same time you have a severe intention of acting differently in the future. Now, no sensitive Catholic can say that without having grave doubts
22:49 Speaker 01 as to whether actually he isn't going to do some of these things again. So if you're a workaday Catholic, like a Mexican peasant or something like that, you know that the confession is just a safety valve. You're going to go on living just as lackadaisically as ever, but you go to church every so often and you get rid of the guilt and the evil. It's like going to the bathroom.
23:16 Speaker 01 But when you get thoughtful about these things and you wonder whether you do really mean what you say, whether your motive is pure and your intention is right, you get into a rightful hang-up.
23:31 Speaker 01 And one of the reasons that
23:34 Speaker 01 our technology is impeded and prevented from feeding the world properly is the failure of one of our networks.
23:49 Speaker 01 It's an information network, and it's called money.
23:54 Speaker 01 About which we have the most unbelievable superstitions.
23:59 Speaker 01 And psychological blocks, which have been gone into at some length by Freud,
24:05 Speaker 01 who equates our valuation of money with our attitude to excrement. And a very complicated lot of complexes grow up around that.
24:17 Speaker 01 But money and our psychological attitude to money
24:22 Speaker 01 is a major obstacle to a proper development of technology, enabling it to do what it is supposed to do, that is, to save labor. And to produce goods, services, and so on, adequately.
24:42 Speaker 01 So I must introduce this with a story which is entirely legendary, indeed, quite apocryphal. The great banks of the world, at one time, got absolutely sick of the expense and security measures involved in shipping consignments of gold from one bank to another. And so they decided that all the chief banks of the world would open offices on a certain island in the South Pacific, which was balmy and comfortable. And there they would store all the gold in the world. And they put it in great subterranean vaults reached by deep elevator shafts. And then all they had to do when one bank or one country owed gold to another
25:27 Speaker 01 was to trundle it across the street.
25:31 Speaker 01 And this was very efficient. And it went on beautifully for five or six years. And then the presidents of the world banks got together and said, "Let's have a convention out on this island and take our wives and families." So about seven years from the date of opening, all those presidents and their wives and families went out to this specific island and they inspected the books. And everything was beautifully in order. Then the children said, "Oh daddy, can't we see the gold?" They said, "Of course you may see the gold." And they said to the managers, "Let's take our children down to the vaults and show them the gold." And the managers said, "Well, um,
26:15 Speaker 01 it's a little bit inconvenient at this time and perhaps the children would,
26:22 Speaker 01 not really be very interested. After all, it's just only old plain gold." And the presidents said, "Oh, no, no, come now. They'd be thrilled. Let's go down and see." And there was further humming and whirring and delays. And finally it came out that a few years before, there had been a catastrophic subterranean earthquake. And all the vaults had been swallowed up and all the gold had disappeared. But so far as the bookkeeping was concerned, everything was in perfect order.
26:59 Speaker 01 What this means then is that money is nothing but bookkeeping. It is figures. It is a way of measuring
27:15 Speaker 01 what you owe the community and what the community owes you. It is of course, as you all know, a substitute for barter. If you worked on a farm and the farmer paid you in terms of years of corn, onions, cabbages, and other vegetables. And yet you wanted a pot and pan of some kind and you took a few vegetables over to the man who so made pots and pans and you swapped.
27:44 Speaker 01 Some people used cowry shells to stand for money, so that you wouldn't have to barter and carry around all these inconvenient loads of goods.
27:58 Speaker 01 And then, of course, gold was used, because gold was rare and because gold was supposed to have a constant value.
28:10 Speaker 01 You might ponder the question: "When a banker buys gold, with what does he pay for it?"
28:19 Speaker 01 The answer is a mystery called credit.
28:23 Speaker 01 Credit is bookkeeping.
28:26 Speaker 01 As the economy of the Western world developed, it was found that there was not enough gold around, if it were to remain constant in value, to exchange goods and services. You could, of course, have changed the picture by putting down the price of goods and services to keep pace with the amount of gold in circulation. But nobody will ever put down the price. There's something in our psychology whereby prices always tend to go up.
28:59 Speaker 01 But at the same time, therefore, because the amount of gold in the world did not provide an adequate channel for the circulation of goods and services, all great industrial nations went heavily into debt. They created a thing called the national debt, which year by year gets bigger and bigger and bigger to the horror and consternation of old-fashioned republicans who pay their bills.
29:24 Speaker 01 But the reason for the increase of the national debt is extremely obvious. It is that with an expanding gross national product, there needs to be more and more money, that is to say, tokens of exchange, in order to circulate the amount of goods produced, which is ever-increasing.
29:48 Speaker 01 Now, I'm not an economist, and I can refer you to the work of those who really are. But any fool can see certain extremely fundamental principles about this whole situation. And I'm speaking of the thought today of a man called Robert Theobald, who sort of ties in with the general picture of people like McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, in having very far-out thoughts and very adventurous thoughts about what we should do about money. But he is in the following of a man like Friedrich Sade, who was a Nobel Prize chemist, who was one of the first people
30:30 Speaker 01 to think really freshly about economics. Or people like Silvio Gassell in Austria and Major Douglas in England. Uh, he's in that following. And the proposition that he puts forward is very simple. That money is a circulation of information, and in itself has no value. Gold, of course, has some value. It has some value for an industry and some value for dentistry and some value for jewelry. But as a means of exchanging the goods and services of the world,
31:13 Speaker 01 it is as primitive, as, uh, post horses for carrying the mail.
31:29 Speaker 01 We must recognize, then, that money is a pure abstraction. I was on a television show a little while ago with, um...
31:43 Speaker 01 Ted Sorensen and Raymond Moley. And they were having a long, long discussion, which sounded like something that goes on in a smoke-filled back room of party bosses. Where they were talking about the prospects for the Republican Democratic Parties in 1968. And then they got on to the question of automation and the problems of unemployment that it was making and the difficulties of transferring workers from this to that when they were only trained for this. Finally, I said, "The trouble with you gentlemen is you still think money is real."
32:17 Speaker 01 And they looked at me and sort of said, "Oh, someone who doesn't think money is real," because every now and then everybody knows money is money and it's very important.
32:27 Speaker 01 But it just isn't real at all, because it has the same relationship to real wealth, that is to say, to actual goods and services, that words have to meaning, that words have to the physical world. And as words are not the physical world, money is not wealth. It only is an accounting of available energy, economic energy.
32:52 Speaker 01 Now, what happens then when you introduce technology into production?
33:00 Speaker 01 You produce enormous quantities of goods by technological methods. But at the same time, you put people out of work. You can say, "Oh, but it always creates more jobs." There will always be more jobs, yes, but they will be, lots of them will be futile jobs. They will be jobs making every kind of frippery and unnecessary contraption. And one will also, at the same time, have to beguile the public into feeling that they need and want these completely unnecessary things that aren't even beautiful. And therefore, an enormous amount of nonsense employment and busy work, bureaucratic and otherwise, has to be created in order to keep people working.
33:42 Speaker 01 Because we believe, as good Protestants, that the devil finds work for idle hands to do.
33:49 Speaker 01 But the basic principle of the whole thing has been completely overlooked, that the purpose of the machine is to make drudgery unnecessary.
34:00 Speaker 01 And if we don't allow it to achieve its purpose, we live in a constant state of self-frustration.
34:08 Speaker 01 So then if a given manufacturer automates his plant and dismisses his labor force,
34:17 Speaker 01 and they have to operate on a very much diminished income, say, some sort of dole,
34:26 Speaker 01 the manufacturer suddenly finds that the public does not have the wherewithal to buy his products.
34:34 Speaker 01 And therefore, he has invested in this expensive automated machinery to no purpose.
34:43 Speaker 01 And therefore, obviously, the public has to be provided with the means of purchasing what the machines produce. But people say, "That's not fair! Where's the money going to come from? Who's going to pay for it?" The answer is the machine. The machine pays for it. Because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community. This is not saying, you see, that... This is not the statist communist idea that you expropriate the manufacturer and say, "You can't own and run this factory anymore. It is owned by the government." It is only saying that the government or the people have to be responsible
35:28 Speaker 01 for issuing to themselves sufficient credit to circulate the goods they are producing and have to balance the measuring standard of money with the gross national product.
35:45 Speaker 01 That means that taxation is obsolete, completely obsolete. It ought to go the other way. Theobald points out that every individual should be assured of a minimum income. Now you see, that absolutely horrifies most people. Say, all these wastrels, these people who are out of job because they're really lazy. See? Uh, given them money? Yeah.
36:14 Speaker 01 Because otherwise, the machines can't work.
36:18 Speaker 01 They come to blockage. This was the situation of the Great Depression. When here, we were still, in a material sense, a very rich country. With plenty of fields and farms and mines and factories, everything going. But suddenly, because of a psychological hang-up. Because of a mysterious mumbo jumbo about the economy, about the banking. We were all miserable and poor.
36:49 Speaker 01 Starving in the midst of plenty. Just because of a psychological hang-up. And that hang-up is that money is real. And that people ought to suffer in order to get it.
37:03 Speaker 01 But the whole point of the machine is to relieve you of that suffering. Which is an ingenuity. You see, we are psychologically back in the 17th century. And technically, in the 20th.
37:16 Speaker 01 And here comes the problem. What we have to find out how to do
37:22 Speaker 01 is to change the psychological attitude. To money and to wealth. And furthermore, to pleasure. And furthermore, to the nature of work.
37:33 Speaker 01 And this is a formidable problem. It requires the best brains in public relations, in propaganda, in all that kind of thing. And all the media, television, radio, newspapers, everything.
37:48 Speaker 01 To try to get across a message to the vast general public about what money is. You see, the difficulty is this. When the public suspects that the money that is being issued, the dollar bills being issued by the government, are only paper and stand only for paper. They start putting up prices. So you get an inflationary situation, where the more paper money there is, the higher and higher and higher the prices go.
38:18 Speaker 01 Which is a very stupid psychological maneuver.
38:25 Speaker 01 And people have to be persuaded. Uh, the least effective way of persuading people is passing laws, but they have to be persuaded somehow not to put up the prices, but to play fair with each other.
38:40 Speaker 01 Now, true, we all need money.
38:44 Speaker 01 Simply because we've all agreed that we all need money. There's no other reason.
38:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's important to understand this about money. A lot of people don't know it.
38:59 Speaker 01 Money is a measure of wealth. Money is not wealth.
39:07 Speaker 01 Money is like inches. Dollars, let's say, are like inches. They are a way of measuring real wealth, which consists of material resources plus energy plus intelligence. That's wealth.
39:31 Speaker 01 Money represents it.
39:34 Speaker 01 We used to have the idea, you see, that gold was money. Gold is wealth. Well, that's perfectly absurd, because does the prosperity of the world constantly depend on discovering new gold mines?
39:52 Speaker 01 When a banker buys gold, what does he pay for it with?
39:59 Speaker 01 Book entries.
40:05 Speaker 01 And so, with this myth of gold in the background, we think money is real.
40:13 Speaker 01 And money is the most unreal thing in the world.
40:17 Speaker 01 It's a form of statistics.
40:22 Speaker 01 And so, therefore, we don't realize that as our wealth increases as a result of an expanded technology, we have to provide enough money to circulate it. In other words, we have to pay people for the work done on their behalf by machinery. Because otherwise, the manufacturer won't be able to move the goods off the shelf.
40:47 Speaker 02 Now that seems an outrageous idea, frankly, in disaccord with the Protestant ethic. You mean, give people money? Where's the money going to come from? Or money never did come from anywhere. It's like asking, "Where do inches come from?"
41:06 Speaker 02 It's simply a question of realizing that technology was invented to save labor. That doesn't mean in order to dismiss your employees. It means to let them have a vacation. In other words, a shorter work week. And for you yourself, as the owner, less to do, so that you can go and gaze at the moon or make love to your lady friend. And why not do it? Everybody feels guilty about it. They think, having archaic minds, when we didn't have this technology,
41:49 Speaker 02 that they've got to go on behaving the same ways when machines didn't exist. But now we have them. But we won't use them, except in silly ways. Like, for example, rushing around everywhere in automobiles, polluting the air. You know, you don't really have to commute in most businesses if you have a telephone. Ever thought about that? You don't need an office. You don't need to go rushing around, exhausting yourself and getting absolutely furious in the traffic jams on the freeway. You know, and we're all getting furious about things we can do nothing about. You know, we read the newspapers and look at TV
42:34 Speaker 02 and see the disasters occurring all over the world and feel upset and mad and there's nothing we can do. Why waste your time?
42:47 Speaker 02 Pick up the telephone. It saves you the cost of a secretary,
42:52 Speaker 02 the fag of mailing stuff, sticking stamps on it, going down to the post office. And if you count up all the hours, you'll realize that the electronic
43:03 Speaker 02 method of communication, that is the technology,
43:07 Speaker 02 is much less expensive than the ordinary way one goes about things. It's like an automobile is a mechanical imitation of a horse and carriage. It's completely irrational.
43:23 Speaker 02 Long ago, people have invented automobiles that were far more serviceable, but they somehow never get into use.
43:32 Speaker 02 So it is a matter of keeping your mind closely on what you really want to happen and what can be done, instead of going through meaningless rituals.
43:49 Speaker 02 Now, I was referring to the fact that everybody needs money.
43:57 Speaker 02 And while this is the system, while this is the social consensus, everybody doesn't need money. But while it is the social consensus that that's what we all need, let's be frank about it. And not say, therefore, the person whose interests is in higher things, whether it be academic, religious, or artistic, "Oh, you don't need money, because your satisfaction is surely in doing your work." The only people who need money are the people who are miserable at their work.
44:37 Speaker 02 They're because they're there to make money.
44:42 Speaker 02 Let's drop the hypocrisy. The scholar, the artist, in this context, where everybody has to have money to live, needs money just as much as everybody else and should be paid accordingly. This applies particularly to the teacher in the schools or whatever, you know, people who are put down and saying, "Oh, you're a teacher, or you're a clergyman.
45:08 Speaker 02 You don't need money, because you live on the spirit."
45:15 Speaker 02 That's rubbish.
45:19 Speaker 02 In, I repeat, in this context, where everybody has to have it. So, you know, you think you can be a dropout and be a hippie? You have to go out on the street and say, "You've gotten a spare change?" "No, you don't need money. You're a hippie."
45:39 Speaker 02 Don't fool yourselves. We all do.
45:45 Speaker 02 But we are living under conditions
45:52 Speaker 02 where money, as I have tried to explain, is not understood,
46:00 Speaker 02 where it is not seen for the fiction and the useful fiction which it is.
46:07 Speaker 02 And so what do we do? We have income tax,
46:13 Speaker 02 which is the most absurd system of accounting ever conceived.
46:18 Speaker 02 Have you ever figured out what it costs to pay income tax? Not just the tax itself, but the cost of paying it
46:28 Speaker 02 to yourself and to the government. It's colossal.
46:35 Speaker 02 And I raise the question then, why do it at all?
46:40 Speaker 02 Why doesn't the government simply take off the top as much money as it needs and issue the rest?
46:47 Speaker 02 It would be much simpler.
46:53 Speaker 02 Oh, the silly business that torments everybody would be cancelled. And the Department of Internal Revenue and all its officers, they needn't be frightened of losing their jobs
47:04 Speaker 02 because they could simply be the officials who work in the other direction. In other words, they could be the dispensers of the money to everybody to pay them for the amount of work done by machinery on their behalf.
47:23 Speaker 02 I mean, doesn't that make sense?
47:26 Speaker 02 What we've got against this is not, as it were, an intellectual or mathematical block, but a psychological block.
47:34 Speaker 02 And don't see that that is the inner meaning of technology.
47:43 Speaker 02 To save labor.
47:49 Speaker 02 In other words,
47:52 Speaker 02 you could say that the
47:56 Speaker 02 the Labor Party in all the various countries has never really understood that it has to be saved.
48:05 Speaker 02 And it works against its own salvation with ridiculous socialistic schemes
48:12 Speaker 02 of making everybody equally poor,
48:16 Speaker 02 which is what invariably happens,
48:20 Speaker 02 instead of making everybody equally rich.
48:24 Speaker 02 But of course, mind you,
48:29 Speaker 02 when we are all equally rich,
48:33 Speaker 02 there will always be people who want to outdo other people.
48:38 Speaker 02 And so feel psychologically that they're poor, even when they're in perfectly good health, very well fed, housed and clothed.
48:47 Speaker 02 They want to go a little bit beyond, so as to show, I'm more outstanding than you.
48:55 Speaker 02 And there, of course, we get into great metaphysical depths. But so far as the business of the matter is concerned, I think what I've said thus far should commend itself to your careful consideration.
49:11 Speaker 00 I mentioned it in the beginning, but if you've not seen the video, just type in Alan Watts money video into Google. Or if you've heard it on my show again, go listen to it.
49:25 Speaker 00 This is the way to think about money and wealth. Yeah, we all need it. Yeah, we all gotta make it.
49:32 Speaker 00 But how are you making it? Are you saying yes, sir, to an asshole every day of your life just to have money? If you're doing that,
49:46 Speaker 00 you don't really have money. I don't know what you've got.
49:51 Speaker 00 But it's not something I want.
49:58 Speaker 00 I see a time when those awake will understand how to make money in up, down, and surprise markets. Whether new trader or experienced, college student or financial advisor, protecting against a crash or just trying to make a lot of money, trend following offers everyone an answer in uncertain times. To get started immediately, send me an email, [email protected] . I will send you the right trend following steps to take along with my free video. But if you want to buy and hold, trust the government and trust Wall Street, this is absolutely not for you.
Previous Ep. 1315: Think and Grow Rich this Black Friday with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Next Ep. 1317: Tom Basso Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
