Trust Revolution

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In this hard-hitting episode of Trust Revolution, Shawn sits down with Bronwyn Williams, a South African futurist and economist, to dissect the collapse of trust in centralized systems. Bronwyn analyzes how globalization and technology challenge institutional credibility, using South Africa’s governance struggles as a backdrop. She critiques AI’s centralizing risks, questions Bitcoin’s decentralized promise, and discusses ways businesses and individuals can rebuild trust. This conversation unravels the dynamics of power and agency in a low-trust world.

About Bronwyn Williams

Bronwyn Williams is a futurist, economist, and partner at Flux Trends, a leading consultancy focused on strategic foresight and trend analysis. Based in Johannesburg, she brings nearly two decades of experience advising global public and private sector clients on fintech, alternative economic models, and sustainable futures. She is the author of Rescuing Our Republic, a book tackling South Africa’s systemic crises, and co-author of The Future Starts Now (Bloomsbury UK), which explores global trends shaping the future. A sought-after speaker and media commentator on platforms like CNBC Africa and eNCA, she also runs What The Future Now?, unpacking chaos theory and future scenarios.

Quotes to Remember 

• “Institutions work as long as they give people what they want.” — Bronwyn Williams
• “Democracy is governance by the governed, not a menu of services.” — Bronwyn Williams
• “Automate away your costs, not your value.” — Bronwyn Williams
• “Money is an illusion… Power equals money, not the other way around.” — Bronwyn Williams
• “Bitcoin opened Pandora’s box… It accelerated CBDCs.” — Bronwyn Williams

Resources & Links

• Book: Rescuing Our Republic by Bronwyn Williams – Analysis of South Africa’s governance challenges. 
• Book: The Future Starts Now by Bronwyn Williams – Exploring future trends and economic models. 
• Book: The Human Experience by John Sills – Insights on building trust in business. 
• Follow Bronwyn on X. 
• Flux Trends: fluxtrends.com for her trend reports. 
• Blog: What The Future Now? for chaos theory and future insights. 

Subscribe: https://podcast.trustrevolution.co

Music in this episode by More Ghost Than Man.

[00:00:03] Shawn Yeager:

Bronwyn, welcome.   Hello.   Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.   I   reached out to you having followed your work on Twitter back when I was there in LinkedIn,   and very intrigued   very intrigued by,   your   commentary, which I think goes against a lot of the grain, as a futurist, perhaps. You're not just riding, the technology trends.   And so where where I'd love to start is, you know, you've noted, and it certainly goes to the core of of what we're looking to,   to tackle with trust trust revolution is, you've noted that centralized systems   face growing skepticism   as society shifts and I think for most people, that would be somewhat apparent, but you've taken,   I think that to task. What's fueling in your mind this loss of confidence in institutions   and how can futures thinking help us as individuals reclaim agency?  



[00:01:00] Bronwyn Williams:

Well, institutions   work as long as they support it, and they are supported as long as they are giving people what they want. That's that's as blunt as it gets. And we're seeing a pushback against,   centralized institutions   and the perception   of the man and the perception of where power lies all across the board. Particularly,   we're seeing this pushback   in   current and, shall we say, soon to be formally wealthy nations.   So this pushback we're generally seeing in the so called waste. Right? The weird waste. The place where where power and wealth has congregated.   And it is congregated due to the fact that the by definition,   power and wealth means that you have more of those things than someone else does. Right? So we have this very strange point in history at the moment where   in some ways, equality is actually happening, which is something that people have demanded for a very long time, whether it's equality between the sexes or between races or between nations or between spaces.  

We are actually starting to get a bit about that. And what people didn't realize was that equality meant your position,   your place in society,   your place in the hierarchy   was, by definition, disrupted. Right?   So suddenly, all these institutions that formerly were set up to preserve and maintain,   let's be quite frank, like privilege. Right? The privilege of,   you know, the westerner in their Western country to be wealthier than an African in their African country. I mean, that that's as that's as blunt as it was. And those systems are no longer doing that. This is why many of the conflict points we see are around migration.   Someone coming to eat my cheese or what I think is my cheese.  

They're about,   technology,   and we see optimism,   around   technology in formerly underprivileged places in your Africa's and in your Asia's, but we see pessimism particularly around young people, around technology,   largely because technology is coming to disrupt their place on the human totem pole. Right? And globalization is, of course, at the backbone of this, but so is technology again. In that technology became   a democratizer of information, if not a democratizer   of democracy,   in that it showed everyone how everyone else was living and enabled people who were formerly   excluded by the systems that we are talking about to connect with the systems, to play with or even against the systems. And if we're looking against the systems, I mean, the last couple of weeks of China literally putting out propaganda   slash, you know, pop culture videos,   literally ripping out the core of, you know, Western copyright and Western brand hegemony saying, come get the goods that we make for you cheaper without your overpriced brand stamp on them, like, completely ripping back the curtain.  

This is what we've seen. And this is why people have basically turned against systems in the West. And let's be honest, most systems that govern our world are from the West, whether you're talking about international banking systems   or your massive political institutions   and the multinational,   organizations   that govern our world. They were set up by the world's winners. And as long as those, systems were defending   the winners or the people who think they deserve their place in our global society,   they were kind of left alone. As soon as those systems started doing what people told them they wanted,   which was let's make this place more equal, more fair,   as soon as they started doing that, people didn't really like that very much, which is why we're now seeing two things happening. Either we see people voting either literally or figuratively   against systems,   like, of course, the Trump administration. Trump came on in a very   anti establishment ticket, and that's what we're talking about when we're talking about centralization or the rest of it. He's a destabiling force even within his own party, but people who votes for him, by and large, saw him as being anti establishment,   not part of the establishment.  

So you see people undermining the establishment in that sort of way, but you also see the counterforce of people doubling down on the establishments to try and essentially hang on to those old privileges. And that's by and large my sense of my assessment of everything that's going on in the world at the moment. If you wanna look at that sort of   geopolitical fallout, why are we getting zero sum thinking everywhere?   Why are we seeing Europe drawing up its drawbridges, both physical and physical,   in terms of immigration, in terms of trade? Whether you see reactionary   politics, whether you see, people flocking to things like alternative currencies.  

We either when we sense that we're losing something, we either try double down what we were doing before or we try and rage against that machine.   And, I think it's an it's an interesting place to to be, but when you get to the sort of scratch underneath that surface,   and this is about perceived loss   of unearned gains, suddenly, we can have a little bit more perspective on the global picture and as to why some people at this point in time are so much more optimistic   and so much more pessimistic about what's going on and why increasingly   so, the bulk of the world is act actually anti system, anti establishment,   anti the center,   and frankly, anti the center holding at all because there are now more people   outside the system than they are within the system. And that number is only growing along with inequality and all these other sorts of things. So when I talk about inequality being reduced, just being reduced kind of in name, but not in terms of monetary nature. Of course, these things take a bit longer, but, where we are seeing people losing privilege is generally in the middle strata of society, which is the most powerful real political block for for change one way or another. And I I take from all that, and I I suppose it is part and parcel of your work that you're looking predominantly at the macro.  



[00:06:43] Shawn Yeager:

At the micro,   what do you see   as the most   productive   activities, behaviors? I mean, we you've you've talked a lot about being anti one thing or the other. What is   what is something that you see individuals running toward as opposed to running away from that you see as productive?  

[00:07:03] Bronwyn Williams:

Well well, that's exactly the the issue. People aren't running towards anything at the moment. We're in kind of an unraveling cycle in society. We don't have to be too pessimistic about that. These are cycles. We have cycles of reveling and cycles of unraveling. If we look at global   society, whatever it is, we have times when society becomes stronger and then when society becomes weaker and out of those ashes, something new is shaped. We're very much in an unraveling cycle at the moment in that the world as we knew it,   is not working for most people. So there are more people actively trying to unravel the system than there are people who are supporting the system. Of course, that only means the people that are supporting the system are more desperate to keep on supporting it. So, of course, you have the reaction reports as as well as the sort of progressive force, which is kind of the moment that we see ourselves within. And you talk about, me looking at the macro, but I think this is the same dynamic playing out in the micro. If you wanna look at people's individual homes and relationships,   we're seeing an unraveling of all of our traditional nuclear family norms. Right?  

We're seeing women rejecting the idea of men outright. We're seeing people not mating and dating, not connecting.   We're seeing parents divorcing their children and children divorcing their parents. We're seeing an isolationism   among the homes as much as we're seeing an isolationism   among geopolitics   and national politics.   And a lot of this is to do with the fact that the systems and the norms that we have don't work for everyone. So those norms are being rejected.   So on the one hand, again, you still have reactionary gender politics. We see young men tending more conservative. Everyone knows about those old tropes by now. We see the resurrection of the the trad wives and the the reactionary rights, even in the in the very nuclear, very personal sense, trying to hold on to their idea of what your place in society used to be. But at the same time, you also got great progressive forces trying to redefine   what a successful life in a family dynamic, in a personal life kind of looks like. Right? But we haven't figured out what that is.  

What happens though is we have to first break things before you can kind of rebuild them. So I'm not advocating for   accelerationism   at all, but that's basically the phase that we are finding ourselves within. We're finding ourselves within a much more accelerationist   phase of society   as things are unraveling, and we have to now work together   to redefine a new picture.   So we can't predict looking ahead if that new picture is going to be a spring back to the old world. That sort of a scenario would be more likely if a really major crisis takes place. So we might have thought   COVID was the big one, but I'm talking about a real existential crisis,   like where people are having to sort of eat in the dirt to try and find their food. I mean, like a real reckoning where all of our hubris and all of our wealth, because even the poorest among us now have excessive fast fashion and more than we need to survive in most countries across the world, unless you live in a real war torn nation. Most of us, even in uncomfortable places, are quite comfortable.  

In other words, too uncomfortable   to do the kind of work required to redefine this picture from an entirely blank slate perspective. Right? So you've always got this pull and push between a system that's kind of protecting what you already have and the kind of picture of the world that you really want, which is going to require quite a lot of unraveling to get there. So whether we get there fast through a real crisis, a global crisis,   or whether we get there slow from rebuilding is the kind of the the world views that we have to figure out together day by day. Right? So we've gotta negotiate this. That's the   the great slash terrible thing about the future is that it is negotiated. It's the sum total of all of our choices.  

But what's new about this point in time is that more people's choices actually count. Because as I said, from a macro perspective, we've actually done quite a lot of work. We're not there yet. We've done quite a lot of work in terms of equality of highlighting different people's voices who were previously   shut out altogether   from conversations that now have space at that table. But the question is, do we really like what those new voices are saying, or do we want to kind of, like, you know, shush them because it was nicer for us on the other side? And while because there is still real power within the systems that are guiding our society.   So,   you you know, we're contending with that. We're contending with the residual world while the new world kind of wants to be reborn.  

And I think why it feels more intense now, or at least one of the reasons,   is that previously, while quite frankly, generations died off quicker. Right? I mean, like, your your generational sort of power dynamics shifted by the time a generation got to, like, 60 years old. Now that generation is sticking around to 90. So you've got that many more generations all contending the space. So the old world or the new world struggles to be born because there's so much weight is in the residual.   And globally, of course, we know there's more people over the age of 35 than under the age 35, and those that are older fairly have a stake in the existing world.   So you have a lot of action without actual resolution, which is something we're going to have to get used to. And so that we can't solve this problem by saying people must just retire and disappear at the age 60. That's not gonna happen. More of us are going to live longer, fall longer, and we're going to have to renegotiate all of that space. So that's gonna be coming to us. So that's gonna be like a a global conversation we're going to have around space sharing,   but we're going to have to have it. And, from my perspective, I think the world that comes out of this   does ultimately end up being a more equitable world, but that doesn't mean that it's necessarily a better world for people that are listening to this call.  

Let's be perfectly honest and frank. I live in Africa,   and, sort of our idea of a good life is very different to yours, right? And these are the uncomfortable things about space sharing.   And we're here because we've opened the space to hear the voices and to see the voices, but I don't think we've fully reconciled the fact of just how much has to change. This is very similar to the conversations around climate excess and around what we need to do to make ourselves smaller, to fit into a more sustainable world. No one wants to hear that. I'm certainly not an advocate of degrowth, but at the same time, some level   of reckoning has to take place in terms of the the levels of comfort that we have got used to in that that's not sustainable for everyone   unless we change   what that standard of living really is. So this is a conversation around,   sharing toys   and it's not a pleasant one, right? So   it's not supposed to be at a macro scale a negative conversation. It's actually quite a positive thing from a if you zoom out and you're like a benevolent god watching all of us. But I bet you have to I bet you have to issue that disclaimer a lot, don't you? Which is this is not a black pill. This is not something to be depressed about. Well, to to zoom in a bit,  

[00:13:47] Shawn Yeager:

I believe, Brahman, you're in South Africa. Johannesburg, I believe you have you have noted, publicly.   In Yeah. Rescuing Our Republic,   you tackle South Africa's   systemic crises, plural.   My wife is Moroccan. I've spent a fair bit of time there. It it is not South Africa, but it has given me some tiny glimpse,   at least onto the continent.   What is one perhaps radical lesson from the book   for rebuilding   trust between citizens and the state that you feel those of us in the West or elsewhere should take,   and what happens if we fail to heed it?  

[00:14:22] Bronwyn Williams:

Well, I I think this I made this quite clear in the book. Like, the the the most potent quote that comes out of that is a Terry Pratchett quote, of course, saying, even if it's not your fault, it is your responsibility.   And this is like the ultimate conversation around democracy.   We we we think we like democracy or at least as older people do. Younger people don't think they like democracy. But the reason we both like it and younger people don't like it is actually because none of us really understand what it means. Younger people don't like democracy because they've seen democracy as it is served to them, which is really like a crony capitalist   sort of oligarchy kind of a state where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And they see that as democracy because that's their lived experience thereof. And they're like, we don't like democracy. I was like, no, you don't like this sham of a democracy in your two party state, which has nothing to do with democracy in theory. That's why you don't like it because you don't understand it. Yeah. We like to express older people,   we also don't understand democracy.  

We remember democracy when it, quote unquote, worked for us, like I was saying, when it served our privilege, when democracy sort of, you know, upheld   the desires of the minority. I speak very bluntly, I come from South Africa. This is what we had democracy in apartheid. Right?   Democracy upheld the privilege of the few. So it worked, but it only worked for the few who were benefiting from that privilege.   And so you have a lot of older people who say, oh, we like democracy. And I don't just speak about South Africa. Racism is endemic in many parts of the world. It wasn't as explicit as it was here, but it was implicit in the systems, in voting systems, in how things worked, in redlining and restricting and all the rest of it. We know about sexism, how it worked the same way. You excluded some people and off you went. But democracy felt comfortable for those who were getting what they wanted, right, so a part of the system. That's why we tend to like it based on what we experienced. But again, we're not understanding what democracy really is. Democracy isn't about the state serving you or giving you what you want or ordering, you know, services off a menu card.   Democracy is governance by the government for the governed. Democracy, in other words, is participatory. It's active, not passive.  

So we have these different perceptions. Either we like the idea, we don't like the idea, but none of us have actually understood the idea, which this only works if we're all part of it. And that was probably the big lesson that is coming out of the book, and it's a conversation many interesting people are having in different parts of the world where you kind of realize that it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility. If you want society to work, your responsibility isn't voting. Your responsibility is is building and governing your own country and starting with your own home   too, which is really, really interesting. So it means you have to get out there and be part of it. But conversely, we can come back to the conversation around systems, which means that it's very, very hard to go and preach to someone like I'm doing now. There could be part of democracy. Go, like, build your own country, participate   if you feel like you are disenfranchised   not by your vote, but through your place in society and in that system. Coming back to this point that we have to understand we're gonna have to power share as communities. We have to actually do what we said. If we believe in democracy,   that means economic democracy as well as political democracy.  

That means having a fair playing field, not just nominally, but actually in action. And that's why the other side of it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility   is this idea of ownership.   You can't expect someone to participate   in whatever game you're playing   unless they've kind of got skin in the game, if they've got ownership.   And I speak about this a lot with my clients, but ownership isn't just about physical ownership or about financial ownership. It's also about the the more philosophical ownership of the concept of the idea of my own life, this idea of agency. So ownership and agency go really, really closely together. And that's a lesson again, we can explore Trump South Africa because we did a very good job of democracy in name, but a terrible job of democracy in practice. We still have   ridiculous   inequality,   the largest in the world, and that leads to crime. It leads to instability.  

It leads to an inability for people to work together because inequality, what does it do? It separates people. Right? It puts some of us here and some of us there.   In order to bridge that gap, there has to be again some kind of a of a wayfinding.   So you you have to give up some privilege in order for someone else to have it too. And the ownership question is a question that's simply not going away in my country.   That's this idea, of course, that's the land question. So when people were expropriated   of their land   by the illegal but totally legal democratic government that was the apartheid government back a generation ago and the legacy of that. And you know this as Americans, as westerners,   you know that land ownership is so tied to resentment, intergenerational   resentment, racial resentment,   all the rest of it. You have to have this ability to own a piece of your own future and your own society to feel like you're a part of it. So that's the other question we still haven't resolved in South Africa, but it's a question we're going to have to resolve.  

This idea that people who own a stake   in your company, in your country, in your society,   then become stewards of that. They don't just own their own house or they own stock or they own their own share of the incentive.   They're also owning a stake in being positively   incentivized   to look after the society   around which is that of that that they own. Right? You own a house. You're incentivized to make sure your neighborhood looks good.   Your property values affected by the trash on your neighbor's verge. You're incentivized to help clean that up too because it's new part of a society.   So the ownership question is something that we are, in many ways, I've said this also many times, South Africa is in many ways a warning, a bellwether, a lesson, and a preview   of the issues that the West is starting to face now. Because as much as we are African nominally, we have one foot in the in the West and one foot in in the sort of global South,   culturally,   politically, the ideas that govern our society are very western here in the new South Africa. And being a new country in the nineteen nineties, a lot of the ideas that were put in theory in academic institutions   across the Western world were put into practice in my country. So we can be seen as a kind of petri dish for a lot of the ideas that worked, the ideas that didn't work, and the things that were ignored altogether that have now come sort of as chickens back to roost.  

If you are wise, you will definitely look at us, the things we got right, the things we got wrong, the things we ignored, and you will try to see that as as a lesson to rather than a than a than a interesting case study going on somewhere else in the world. I mean, this ownership issue,   housing, it's not just a South African thing. We're not talking it was farming, but now it's actually places to live, you know? Inequality, yeah, we did it first, but,   this is this is the topic of the day, you know? Democracy, who who counts, who doesn't count? And, you know, there's still people who are marginalized in our society. We still haven't got all this sort of stuff right. What are what have we ignored? What do we need to fix? So those are some maybe they maybe those are interesting points for some of you to dive into today. Absolutely.  

[00:21:28] Shawn Yeager:

Absolutely.   If we if we if we move then from   nation state to   organization, corporation, brand,   your work certainly in,   great volume tracks economic shifts reshaping markets.   And so what's the first step for a business, a brand,   if you think it is feasible, to actively   rebuild trust with today's savvier, more skeptical customer?  

[00:21:58] Bronwyn Williams:

Yeah. So I I think this is a very similar conversation. Again, you said, like, the difference between macro and micro. As far as I'm concerned, any issue that's of any real importance   is nice and fractal. It will be found in the home, in the workplace, and in the wild at large. So this idea of rebuilding trust is critical.   Trust is pivotal   towards pretty much any source of resilience, whether you're talking about a company,   whether you're talking about a country, whether you're talking about a marriage or a relationship between a friend and a parent and a child, trust is absolutely pivotal to doing anything.   Without trust, we can't take chances, we can't invest, we can't grow, we can't build, we can't get people to come along together.  

But trust is like weight loss, although less so these days because we've got, like, fancy drugs that can, like, help help us cheat the system. It's very easy   to it's or it's much easier to maintain than it is to to rebuild. Right? It's like it's much easier to maintain your weight than it is to sort of, like, lose it after you've let things go. It's   so once trust is gone, there's no quick fix to getting trust back.   However,   there can be an understanding   that trust that is broken down at the moment that we see in most places   is generally due to a sense of grievance, the sense that I've given, but I haven't got back in exchange what I thought I was entitled to or that I was promised. So that's implicit or explicit breakdown in trust. Right? So an employee,   there might be an implicit   expectation that if I work hard, I could get promoted. Right? There's an explicit contract that said, if we if you achieve this target, you'll get a bonus. So now an explicit break in trust would be you achieved the target, but you didn't get the bonus,   because the company was in dire straits and it was like, look, we've made some hard choices. But that's a breach in trust. There was a contract in place and it failed, it failed to happen.  

But the implicit breaks also sort of weighed down on the trust there, this idea that if I work hard, I'm gonna have job security, right? And then you end up getting retrenched. Like, there was never any guarantee that you wouldn't, but there was this implicit idea that I've made sacrifices for you. I've spent time in your office instead of spending time with my children, instead of indulging in the hobbies that I have, and you've let me down there.   Also with things like promotions, you've worked and someone else got the promotion. Right? This is implicit wear down. So much sort of slower burn breakdown in trust. Very comparable to that within, like, a marriage or a romantic relationship. You've got the explicit breaks in trust. Someone cheated on someone. It was dramatic. There was like naked pictures, whatever. It was a big fallout. But there's also the slow way down where one party feels like they're giving more than the other party. Right? And that's where sort of like this resentment   builds up. And we're seeing a lot more of the second kind of breakdown in society where we see year on year, even if the employee's relationship with the employer is still working according to contract,   suddenly though cost of living is higher than the increase that you're getting every year. And there's the sense of a slow way down that I'm giving more than I'm getting here. It could be the same thing with your customers, of course. We've seen this increase in customer rage or my favorite sort of little, like, signal trend of the year, this fact that, like, 46%   of Gen Z Americans think it's totally fine to commit fraud against companies because companies price gouge and capitalists are bad, you know? Like, this is a huge breakdown in morality. But this is kind of like downstream of the slow erosion of trust, this idea of so called grievance is the word, where I'm giving more than I'm getting.  

And the way to the way to fix that   is for us to actually stop making our relationships   so explicit   and to focus on the implicit parts of our relationship.   So again, I can use the metaphor of a marriage because I think that these sort of personal metaphors are often easier to get the concepts across, but it translates directly back to the business.   There's this idea that if you kind of keeping mental score every time your spouse does a chore versus what you do and you can see your list is longer than his list or her list, you get quite resentful. Right? Because now you've reduced your relationship down to something that can be measured,   very similar to the employee employer relationship. And this cuts both ways again from the manager and from the employee side.  

If you   your entire relationship with your staff member is based on the paycheck that they own and based on being micromanaged   to a KPI or OKR   rubric on the other side, you have flattened that relationship   to be purely monetary. And purely monetary or purely quantified or purely   counted for relationship   is a very brittle relationship because now it's a relationship that has a total price and there's no value outside of that. This is a trustless   relationship that we have developed.   Trust comes from investing in those nonquantifiable,   non measurable, non economic   components.  

And that trues where only enjoyment of your relationship with your spouse or with your employees or with your team or with the business that you're building really comes from. This whole idea of life is worth more than just your paycheck, but we flatten so much of life. We commoditize   so much of life that we've set ourselves up for a very low trust environment. Right? This idea that that which cannot be measured doesn't count and we've conflated the ideas of value and invaluable.   Invaluable things are invaluable because they're too precious to price,   not because they are cheap. And we've kind of forgotten that. So from a from a commercial perspective, whether you're dealing with customers, whether you're dealing with employees, whoever you're dealing with, you've got to focus on the intrinsic parts if you want resilient relationships. That's if you want tenure from your staff or if you want your customers to be loyal in a world where brand loyalty is dead. And, again, almost 50% of your customers are actively trying to steal from you. Okay? And what does I mean, if if we,  

[00:27:45] Shawn Yeager:

perhaps you have examples, you can strip the names away. But, you know, at least here in The US, I think of my telecom relationship, my Internet provider Oh, yeah. Yeah. Those those big faceless corporations   with which it is certainly transactional.   What would they do or what would you what perhaps have you seen,   banks,   you know, large organizations like that? What are the steps they're taking that go   to the advice you're giving?  

[00:28:11] Bronwyn Williams:

Well, I I won't say too much, but I will point you towards a source where you can dive into this in great detail. My good friend, John Soules, from the foundation in The UK. They're a customer services. I like to call them detective agencies. So they do a lot of, like, the the infield kind of customer analysis   along with the big quantitative studies.   And, as John says, the the bad news is,   customer loyalty is dead, but he says the good news is the customers are loyal to individuals. That even if you are a big faceless monolith of a bank, he's been amazed to see how little old ladies and not so old, quite young ladies and gentlemen in The UK   have real relationships   with their bank manager or their bank teller that they are in connection   with. Right? I thought that was true. Why couldn't that be a point. Right? Like, what do you lose when you sort of try and automate away efficiency? Yes. People want efficiency. They want self-service. When they have a problem, they wanna be heard, and they wanna be seen as being more than just a number. But he's got a book called The Customer Experience, John Sills, which dives into a lot of these details of really big companies, in the in the big transport sector and in the banking sector mainly, who have done quite a good job of connecting with their customers in a world that's trying to stop people from connecting with each other. That's trying to tell us that human relationships   are cheap or worse that they are quantified, that you are only worth to the company what you have spent with them. Right? So he's got great examples there. And even just yesterday on his LinkedIn profile,   he was talking about one of his clients as a bank. He went to the bank and, like, the lanyard they gave him   didn't say guest or visitor. It said, like, special special guest, you know, like, he made him feel like he was a real person, like, not just a intruder into this crazy space. Limited to high net worth client. Yeah. Yeah. Like, compare and contrast that to my clients. And South African banks will make you go through, like, a seventeen point biometric check and then, like, give up your blood and your name of your first born child. Absolutely. Privilege of crossing over their threshold   for the invitation for the meeting that they invited me to. You know? Like, it's, it's those little things that matter. So But it's an extreme example that we all experience, I think, most of us experience.  

Not loyal to the brand, loyal to people. What does that say? That says the value and your resilience and your competitive advantage is in the intrinsic parts of your business. It's all the stuff that you can't manage that goes off KPI. It's the call center person that calls you back after they've after they've logged out to make sure your thing was resolved. Right? It's the guy that that follows up. It's the person that smiles and stay not because he has to, because he's happy to see you. And, ultimately,   every business is selling to a person. Even if you're selling to a person through an Againsec   AI adversarial bot that's been designed to extract as much value from your system, maybe still a bit more on the side too. Ultimately, there's a person on the other side there   who has a need and a desire that you can either fulfill or and delight or you can annoy and piss off.  



[00:31:04] Shawn Yeager:

Absolutely. Well, and I think that's a that's a perfect,   segue into   hyper accelerating technologies, AI being the most, I think, profound,   or or poignant, and and you've spoken to this a great deal.   When you mentioned call centers, I thought about, I'm aware of a number as I'm sure you are, of companies that are   doing real time   accent removal. So someone in India in a call center can sound, should they wish, like me.   And so the point being,   there is, in my mind, more and more   optimization,   some would say manipulation   of customers at scale. Further to what we just discussed, what should leaders   look to do to navigate   or to counterbalance   some of these hyper accelerating technologies like AI? How do they,   build the trust you've discussed   and and not,   let this thing run off   with them holding on to its tail, you know, for dear life?  



[00:32:08] Bronwyn Williams:

Yeah. I mean, the the accent manipulation is, of course, really interesting. I mean, we've experienced that here too. I mean, I live in a third world country,   but we still have like accent manipulation, like call center agents that phoned us, like how much less are those people earning, even like us without very low minimum wage is like too expensive, which really does make you feel as a customer, just how cheap you are to that organization. Right? Just how little they value you. And, like, I've got a personal example of a of a company here. I don't mind naming them even. They're they're, like, dreadful.   Their name their name is Rain, and they were billed as a online, like, Internet company. So they're they're all, like, high-tech, and they got the nice start up funding and the big press releases,   and they deliver you Internet directly to your house. It's all very nice when you sign up, but now you try and move house   or you try and cancel with them, and they will actively not speak to you as a human being. They'll put you through on hold for, like, two hours so that you pause the chat to their chatbot, and their chatbot can't, like, solve your problem. And they, like, deliberately   annoy you for no reason. So the only way to talk to them, we figured out, was to call sales department, which still has real people, which is when you really know exactly how much you you matter to this company. Right? That's a good hack. That's always a good hack. Them. You get a lot you can pull a loyal relationship with them, and they'll they'll might help you with the with the cancellation or transfer or just moving house kind of admin, which is just impossible to do with the bot.  

So this is so much think they're very clever. You know, they're, like, they've reduced all these customer touch points. They've cut all these costs. But here I am busy talking about them on an international podcast. Right? Is that what is that what they really want? Do they think they do they think they've won here? What what are you actually winning out of this relationship long term? And by the same token,   I'm not saying be frightened of automation. Your customers love automation   when it works, but they really want real help when something doesn't work. And there's always going to be something that doesn't quite work to plan. And that's where you should probably be putting your attention because those are the stories people remember. Those are the stories people tell. Those are the stories   consumers tell each other, and those are the stories procurement managers tell each other at conferences. Right?  

So it's like, it's it's fine. Have a have an automated process for everything you can. Automation is the new baseline.   I mean, you can't be idiotic about   this. If everybody else is using Excel, you can't still be doing your books on a on a hand drawn spreadsheet, you know, like, however much you might want to. The world has shifted.   You've gotta keep up, but that becomes the baseline. It doesn't become the top line.   A lot of the mistakes we see around automation and organizational adoption   is organizations, and particularly like IT departments, they come and they tell you how clever they are. They've adopted this technology that everybody else has. You know? Like, this was just your basic job. I know it was a big project, and it took a lot of effort. It costs a lot of money, but all that's done is just kept you up ahead of the water. It isn't a competitive advantage. It isn't where your value lies. And our big thing at the moment is looking for organizations to focus on the value. Right?   Automate away your costs as much as you possibly can. Don't automate away your value. Hang on to your value. Protect your value. Guard your value. But first of all, understand what your value really is.  

Certain people get that wrong. They think that their value is in the automated process, whereas their value really is   in that very nice call center agent that called you back, or the value is in something else. I mean, I don't know what your value is. I don't know what your business does, but you need to go find out where the value is in the eyes of your customer,   which might not be in the smartest technology. It might not be in something else. That's not to say that technology isn't business critical to your service offering,   but value is in the eye of the customer.  

And that's where you need to focus your time and your attention. If you're a leader, you've got so many things to be distracted about. Focus be ruthless about be focused   on defending and protecting your value   from automation. Because here's the other thing,   automation works both ways. Anything that can be automated can be replicated. That's great news for you. You can copy someone else's automation and rise your boats along with that tide. But conversely,   it's gonna go the other way.   And this used to speak about large systems, the fact that all of us were dependent on the same cloud based platforms. Everyone has teams. Everyone has outlook. Everyone has cloud. Everyone has chat GPT.   But increasingly, that automation   is also about intellectual property.  

I mean, again, coming back to the the Chinese factories, they don't behold into the same laws, and they might have the technical know how to do these things. Right? The question is, in the short term, what's your defense? And in the long term,   your defense is only your value, and your value is probably going to be found in the intrinsic segments of your business, not in the explicit assets, which can be copy pasted   and, replicated by someone else.  

[00:36:47] Shawn Yeager:

If we I'm curious if we invert that, what comes to mind is   conversations I've had my own uses of a grok or Claude   to pull the power back to me. And so to negotiate with a large organization, to push back about something they've declared as policy when it's not, to find the phone number of a human, something so trivial.   So my question in that,   are you seeing any trends? Are you seeing any pointers   that companies, organizations   are   wrestling with or or,   failing to sort of respond to consumer empowerment, for lack of a better way to put it, in in in in using some of these technologies?   Well, I mean, it's a good balance of power.  



[00:37:31] Bronwyn Williams:

Yeah. Yeah. In the long term, the balance of power with these technologies is very centralizing to come back to the beginning of our conversation. In the short term, there's a bit of chaos. Again, that sort of unraveling kind of phase where it feels like these technologies are democratizing,   flattening, equaling the playing field, but they're only doing that for the fastest movers, which do tend to be individuals.   So for a short time, consumers are gonna feel they've got some power back for short term   employees who are using AI to replicate their CV   and even use their they're they're like their little three d avatars to to scam interviewers and thinking they're much smarter and sexier than they really are. In the short term, your adversarial agent will be able to negotiate with the lawyers of a large Fortune 500 company because they haven't employed them yet. But come the future,   this is simply not the case because when it comes to this technology, adversarial   AI technology,   the most powerful model wins. Right?  

There's like, this is a winner takes all situation. And while larger organizations   will take longer to institutionalize   these things, there will be an opportunity   for some, especially as sort of like the middle sized businesses to gain a little bit of power in this marketplace, and customers, as I said, might be for a bit. But longer term,   people that can afford better technology will have a a large   advantage here. And here we can look at examples of what's happened in the world of finance, which has actually been using automation to do exactly that, adversarial agents for a very long time. Michael Lewis' Flash Boys, which is, like, 20 years old now, goes into this great detail. Great book. Yeah. Fantastic writer. But I mean, the principle of that whole book is so relevant to this conversation here. And that is the guy with the fattest cable   and the fastest computer   can front run the market.  



[00:39:15] Shawn Yeager:

And A few microseconds makes the difference.  

[00:39:18] Bronwyn Williams:

Now got, like, its own AI in the market. Did it take did it take them a bit longer than that little, like, DIY guy in, like, Czechoslovakia   who, like, you know, did his is in his own little DIY thing and was scalping money off the crypto markets? Sure. It took them a bit longer, but guess what? Their model is now more powerful than yours. That's like,   you you can't win when that size of the market is being is is being played against you. And that's just sort of like on the on the finance side. Right? You know, like,   when when it comes to markets, exactly the same thing is gonna happen. We saw, like, chat GPT launched. Everyone was excited. It was free. We've, of course, got, like, DeepSeek now, which is even freer. But at the same time, we're also seeing the enterprise models of those those free models   scaling out at subscription levels that even at the sort of basic subscription level, let me tell you right now, no South African can afford that. No middle class South African can afford that, let alone a working class South African. Probably working class Americans still kind of okay with that. But unemployed, you can't compete with that. So if someone's using the pro version when you're using the free version,   I'm afraid it's not going to give you that advantage going forward. So longer term, this does tend to favor,   institutional knowledge, but that's not an excuse. Just like I said, I'm not keeping up with the baseline. All of us have to keep up with that baseline as much as we possibly can, but we're gonna see divergence there in terms of not front end, but back end power. And I would I would hesitate to to think that, in the long term,   your sort of personal negotiating bots like Joshua Broder. He used to do this again, like, fifteen years ago.  

Had his little, like, AI bots to negotiate your parking tickets. We spoke to him. Great. I mean, like, it lawyers can do the same thing back. You know? This is works both ways. LexisNexis  

[00:40:57] Shawn Yeager:

now has an LLM product, which is just Yes. Unbelievable,   to your point. Well and I think, you know, that I I I think it is an excellent point, which is that   in something like AI, the ability to outspend,   an individual   will will always, as you say, drive centralization.   So if we go to where there are glimpses of hope   for true decentralization,   real self sovereign   re reclamation of power,   disclaimer, I'm one of those Bitcoin maxis   and, many many of the listeners will be, but I do wanna have   a   very, very sort of open conversation with you about your work in and your   support of DeFi, crypto,   you know, certainly the original vision.  

Where is   a few years later? I believe you got started in 2122   Metanomic.   Somewhere in that area, you'll tell me if I'm wrong. So where has your thinking on that or how has your thinking on that evolved?   And be it Bitcoin or whatever else you see, where are the real opportunities   for   lasting,   decentralization   for the ability for the individual to resist that reclamation or power, that centralization   that we just talked about with regard to AI?  

[00:42:19] Bronwyn Williams:

This one this is a tough one because I got I've been involved with, like, the sort of philosophy of this space for quite a long time. I was introduced to Bitcoin. I think it was in 2011   at a conference, and I came back home and wrote a book called how to be a Bitcoin millionaire with my boss's company at that time.   Needless to say, I didn't follow my own advice particularly well, but that You and I, we would not be having this delightful conversation probably if you had. I have I have strange sort of philosophy   and, like, kind of personal ethics with these things. And I was like, I I don't wanna buy Bitcoin. I wanna earn it. And it took a lot longer to earn it than to buy it. Right? So it just felt like that was the whole point. If you could buy into the system,   the whole philosophy broke down.  

You know, if you could buy your way in   to ownership,   it just it just the whole philosophy fell apart for this idea. This is supposed to be,   a decentralized,   destabilizing   kind of a system. So that was very frustrating to Do you differentiate  

[00:43:13] Shawn Yeager:

between   the pre   mining, the,   initial, you know, token offerings,   etcetera   versus  

[00:43:22] Bronwyn Williams:

currency trades? You know, Adam wanna steer you, and I know you push back. Currency. Earning it is like a like, of course, mining is earning it, but not now anymore. Now it's just an industrial sort of, like, business. Right? So, like Fair. The question always was with Bitcoin and with all these decentralized currencies and and peer to peer currencies you always had, and that is, does it subsume the state or does it become subsumed by the state? And the critical flaw in in any currency based   response   to power, to systems, to all those things you've spoken about is the fact   the very big fact that, like, this is this is the big thing that we're missing here if you are actually interested in decentralizing power, and that is   money is an illusion. Like, it's all nonsense. Like, this is why fixes for inequality at the policy level that are focused on money instead of reality   are doomed to fail and doomed to make the world more unequal over time. Here, I speak about universal basic income. Hello. Again, you wanna come see what universal basic income looks like? We got it. Here in South Africa, we call it a slightly different name. We call it social grants.  

More than half the population is dependent upon them. That's pretty much the definition of universal basic income, like, whether you're doing it through negative tax and credits, whatever you like. What has happened? Inequality   has deepened, especially wealth inequality because it's a monetary solution to a nominal problem.   And the the problem that Bitcoin kind of nominally tries to fix is this idea that we can control our own money because money equals power. But it's actually the other way around. Power equals money when you actually think about it. And, ultimately,   the real defense in terms of power, and I'm getting it put into the weeds here, comes   down   to how do you defend what is yours? So Bitcoin offers you nominal,   but it doesn't give you real real ownership,   not when the government knocks on your door or refuses to sign the property into your name or doesn't let you off the plane or into the or into the party or whatever the case might be. So for me, in the beginning, I was really excited about it. But over time, it was like, this is a distraction from the real work, which is how do you change your own garden? How do you defend your own garden? These are the real questions, and Bitcoin can't do that.  



[00:45:24] Shawn Yeager:

Now let me ask you this. Is that is it fair to say that   I'll push back a bit.  

[00:45:30] Bronwyn Williams:

And and perf perfect being the enemy of good or the enemy of good. I I am totally for that. They're they're definitely made some roads, but at the same time,   as much as as much as you've made some roads towards independence, and, yes, we can point to the case studies, and I know the guys all will, in, like, Nigeria and in, like, war torn countries where people have been able to get some money out in tough times. But that's not really what's happened with the with the major part of the market. It's become exact it's become a speculative asset. Right?   Do you know a Ben Hunt?  



[00:45:58] Shawn Yeager:

I believe and and in what reference? I know a few bins. There's in fact, in Bitcoin circles, there's the there's the joke that it's a council of bins.  

[00:46:06] Bronwyn Williams:

The council of Ben Hunt.   No. I don't know that bin. Ben Hunt, the the sort of the the libertarian ish commentator and writer. I think him and myself have come similar sort of confusions around the whole sort of Bitcoin journey, where you go from, like, polls of being really, really excited to being less excited. And, of course, we can separate   from that, of course, the real cynical, like, can we make money off this stuff? I mean, sure, we can.   You can make money trading any sort of forex. Sure, sure. In terms of the deeper change that's likely to happen with the system, I think that probably the biggest sin Bitcoin's gonna have to grapple with is that we wouldn't be getting central bank digital currencies without it. So thanks, guys.  

[00:46:45] Shawn Yeager:

Interesting. Okay. Unpack that. Because I I can just I can I can see and hear,   dozens of people now just on fire, you know, their head on fire,   in that in that remark? So how does how does Bitcoin necessarily   enable or lead to CBDCs,   which which could not be a,  

[00:47:03] Bronwyn Williams:

a more pressing evil, I think, in our world. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm glad we we aligned on that. The other thing is that Bitcoin accelerated   if what I seem to be is an inevitable. Like, unfortunately, I won't I won't be too depressing today, but,   unfortunately,   Dion and myself have been very right about the last I've been working with him since 2011.   We've been right about many things.   Usually five years too early about being right, but there's a lot of there's a lot of things like all the features in the undetermined. There are, however, some laws of nature. Like, if a shoe comes up, it's gonna either come down or get stuck on the telephone pole, right? There are laws of physics. There are consequences for things that we've done, and there are patterns and trajectories that once unlocked,   can't be relocked. There are ideas, and once they are out there, you can't take back. Bitcoin is one of those ideas, this idea that I can be self sovereign, that I can have my own money, that I can be independent from Caesar.  

Of course, you can't because Caesar's still the one that gets to decide whether you pay taxes or not or whether you're allowed to come and go in the country or not. Right? And, of course, you can bribe your way around that, but that's defeating the point. If you have to sort of, you know, bribe the system in order to protect yourself from the system, you're still part of the system. You know, like, that's that's the other sort of thing. So any monetary sovereignty has to come with physical sovereignty too. And you're like, this is why we've got, like, micronation movements and seasteading movements that are symbiotic with this. But ultimately, you can't protect yourself on a seasteading nation unless you've got the permission.   You live by the by the will of of the bigger powers that have the boats, that have the rockets, you know, that there are well. Ultimately, what's   going to be linked to someone else's protection, right, which is Right. Which is the philosophical flaw here. So that's why it's like, yeah. It's it you you you go so far, but we can't fully protect ourselves from something like that without it. But what Bitcoin did is it opened Pandora's box.  

It gave very defined code and a pathway   as to how to have digital money, which is something we haven't had, and we hadn't and we weren't able to do for many, many decades, for generations, in fact. I am not that old, although I'm getting older by the day. But I remember when I wanted to buy my first stocks, I had to, like, put a large chunk of money in. I had to save up. You couldn't buy fractions. You had to go through a broker. You first had to have a brokerage account and then a bank account, and then you had to pay your SOF fees, and you had to do the whole thing. And it was it was and still is expensive to move money around.   And it was also   impossible for governments to track all of our purchases until we can digitize these things. And Bitcoin essentially opened up the conversation and legitimized the idea   of digital money as distinct from plastic money or debt money,   which normalized the idea in population's minds.  

And it also accelerated the code and development and did a lot of testing for free for for government. So we're now able to implement these systems that are not designed to be for the people, but are rather being designed for surveillance control and taxation.   Taxation first and foremost,   and, of course, then,   all the nice little incentives and disincentives, carrots and stuff like that. Social credit scores.   Tempting. I mean, like, if you're a if you are even a noble politician and you have the ability to eliminate money laundering,   child trafficking,   terrorist flows,   at least in theory, of course, you're gonna try it. Yeah. I I always think of It's too beautiful   not to try. It's inevitable. This is this the writing here is on the wall. I don't think hello. There's always, like, deus of machine, kind of last minute things. Mhmm. But the digital central bank currencies with controls, rewards, and punishments,   and surveillance of all activities are coming.  

And many people will welcome it, and many people in the Bitcoin and crypto community will accelerate it and cheer it along too because not everyone in this community is here for the philosophy. There are a lot of people that are here for the for the for the physical and physical gains that come with it.  

[00:50:53] Shawn Yeager:

I I have to try. I have to try, Bronwyn. What do you say, pardon me, to   the argument? Certainly, I hold this argument that   the harder money will win,   in which which I I hope, I believe that we can agree that there is no harder money with its fixed   cap and its, predictable supply schedule than Bitcoin. So so do you have faith that   some percentage of the population will seek out the harder money having been,   made victim to hyperinflation   or or inflation that we face in the West   as compose as a pair, as   opposed rather to a CBDC?  

[00:51:32] Bronwyn Williams:

Economically, historically speaking, hard money doesn't win. Hard money loses. Well, you know, this is this is, gold was the previous hard money.   Hard money loses at being money, like, by by nature.   Like,   that's that's what it does.   Storing of wealth and storing of money are two different things, and I always like to the the easiest way to sort of crack into this conversation in people's heads is to say, okay. But what about the real world? Right?   Like, the money is just the money is a money all money is a software layer.   And what's actually happening now with the digital currencies is we're actually moving beyond money as software towards a different form of software.  

And we've started doing this. It's obviously been a slow process. So in terms of the future of money as we know it, it's not the hardest currency that wins. The hardest currency becomes a store of value, which is a savings mechanism. It's not money. So we have to sort of distinguish that. But then what's actually happening with money is we're moving into a full credit economy,   which we haven't had before. We've had a debt based economy, which is not quite the same thing. We're moving into a full credit based economy. And what is credit?   What's the difference between credits and money?  

Credit is personal. Money is impersonal.   Bitcoin is impersonal, so it could it's still part of, like, the the monetary era that we've had, but we're moving into a new era, which is a credit based era, which is personal,   which means that which which in many ways is   decentralized to the max. Again, thanks, Bitcoin. Another great idea there. But on the other hand, also bakes in inequalities and privileges   and and all sorts of other things that we're going to have to grapple with. But that's what we're heading towards. Look like in practice? So so for for those who,  

[00:53:16] Shawn Yeager:

you know, may not grasp   the the difference, can you can you illustrate,   debt based versus credit based?  

[00:53:24] Bronwyn Williams:

Yeah. So so so, like, we're also in the in the work market. We're moving beyond meritocracy. I mean, like, there's no, like, you know, bullshit jobs. You know, people paid far more far more than they worth than other people that work far far harder than they've got. So this normally could be seen as a way to say, okay. What what is my real worth? But really, your real credit is now the sum total of your value to society   as accounted for by society, right,   and also money By society or by the state? I'd say society with a capital h. So by the by the Okay. The clause of the system. But some of these systems will be purely democratic. I mean, like, we only need to look at how social credit scores have been implemented in practice in China. It's society societally enforced.   Your value is determined by your neighbors, not by your government. The government provides the system, not the score.  

So there there's a difference there. So   the difference between,   money and money was actually a good thing. People are gonna miss money when it's gone. Money was neutral.   Money   was cold. Right? But money   was   was entirely fungible.   Bitcoin is supposed to be this too. Right? Bitcoin is money. It's it's hard money, so it's not gonna be the winning money, but it's, it's money,   with this idea that   your dollar and my dollar are the same dollar.   Money was separate from us. Right? It was it was removed from us. The credit, however, is personal.   Credit is individual.  

My dollar is not the same as your dollar, just like my DNA is not the same as your DNA.   I'm female. You're a male. I come with a certain set of attributes   and privileges   based on how I look and how my brain works and who my connections are. And what the credit error does is it makes all those   privileges   explicit.   So we've been moving in this direction for a long time.   So debt is just debt used to be impersonal.   You know? Like,   people didn't know enough about us. If we both went to the bank The ledger entry. Same business plan, we both had the same collateral, we both get the same loan.   Credit over time has become personal.  

Your insurer knows about your DNA. They know about your risk. Your price becomes personal.   Your premium is not the same as my premium.   Uber knows whether I shout at drivers or you don't. My ride price is different. I'm not paying money now. I'm paying credit.   Credit is personal,   and it's nontransferable.   So you can use it to buy things,   but I can't trade it just like I can't trade privilege. You can use your privilege for good or for ill, but you can't give your privilege to someone else. Right?   Credit is personable,   it's immutable,   and it's permanent.  

So we've seen this again. It's been really interesting to watch how this has evolved. At the same time, Bitcoin evolved, the same time social media evolved.   And social media, through its quantifying   of popularity,   suddenly decided that you had two different forms of credit that made up your worth. You had your bank account, but you also had your social credit. We are talking in a very Western sense. Like, if you are more popular than I am, you have more followers, you equal that equals money.   What is money, though? Money is just a price, whereas credit is the full bouquet of access to goods, services, and opportunities that is available to you and you alone.   So   this is what central bank digital currencies will do to us, but coined it a little bit, but central bank digital currencies have taken an idea and run with it. And this is this idea that your personality,   your social connections,   your education,   your racial identity, your gender identity,   your actual bank accounts too, your earning potential, your educational credentials,   how many fights you've got into, how many accidents you've had, your DNA,   all of that becomes your credit. That becomes your access to good services and opportunities. And, of course, this has always been the case throughout history. But previously, in the monetary era,   we separated the implicit from the explicit.  

Money became explicit, so it actually became a democratizer.   Because although some of us had more money than others, we all had the opportunity   to earn the same pile of money.   And if we had money, whether we earned it, stole it, inherited it, whatever the case was,   we could use it to buy the same things for the same price. But that's falling apart.   What we are moving into is the credit era where money is replaced by credit   and your ability to exchange is personal and non transferable.  

[00:57:51] Shawn Yeager:

I hope that kind of explains it, but Yes. Yes. My wheels are spinning. Well, as as the sun literally goes down on you in South Africa,   and as we wrap up, I say this somewhat in jest. Leave us on a on a note of hope, Bronwyn. What what gives you hope? And I mean this sincerely. So with regard to   call it decentralization,   call it self sovereignty,   call it, you know,   the individual   sort of reclaiming the ability to choose who they trust versus being forced to trust,   Where do you see hope? Where do you see signals that, that are reason for for a positive outlook?  

[00:58:30] Bronwyn Williams:

Well, I I think every generation sows the seeds of its own destruction and construction in the in the next, and I think that, for for for some of us of a of a certain age, we are going to live through the consequences of previous generations' actions. But at the same time, we have the opportunity   to change that. Right? You know, our choices   are planted now. We all get to choose the future we have. We don't choose it for tomorrow. We get to choose it, you know, as these things take time to propagate and to grow and and to pull through. And although in the shorter term, I think that, we're going to spare experience some time in the collective cage and, first, chaos and then a bit of a cage is kind of my prediction for the macro of humanity. So in other words, an era of chaos that we are well in the middle of and, heading towards an era of,   quite intense control, but I don't think we'll be able to break out of that control we kind of alluded to and discussed today   until we've been through it.  

And until   we're able to see what that cage is, we can't kind of break out of it. Right? At the moment, there's still, like, quite a big desire to get into the cage. We're tired of the chaos. We're, like, please lock us in. We're quite keen on the bunker, very literally. Like, lock us in. I don't wanna live in a bunker. I don't wanna go to space. And that doesn't sound fun. But, like, I I I would like to be free, but people don't see that at the moment. And freedom is, in fact, sounds sounds like you're a loony. Like, if you say in believe in freedom now, they're like, oh, where's your tinfoil hat? You know? Like, or what are you? You're one of those? No. Not at all. It's just like we have to kind of understand that. And I don't think we can understand what it is that we're losing until we've lost it, unfortunately. That's the kind of the bad news. But the good news   is there's more generations coming on board, and they won't make the same mistakes. They won't Wait. So you're saying we're we there's nothing for us.  

Well, we still we still have quite nice lives, but there's there's turmoil here. There is disruption. I hear you. I hear you. There's   also an equalizing forces taking place like what we started with.   Your loss in privilege, my loss in privilege is going to be matched by a gain in privilege and freedom for many, many more people in other places, right? So so there is that. The the bad news is, you know, like the the Western twenty something year old is not gonna have the same lifestyle that their parents did unless they contribute a whole lot more. I can't lie to you and tell you that's gonna happen.   Like but at the same time,   the fact that you might be living in a slightly smaller apartment doesn't mean you're gonna be destitute, but it does mean that people in China, India, and Africa are gonna have a chance to maybe get on a plane in their life. Right? Like, you know, we have to see this as a whole as a bigger picture going on here. So I know a lot of people talk about this sort of the more fuzzy stuff about sort of, you know, global awakenings and all the rest of it. I don't think it's as   altruistic or as esoteric as that, but I think it is the sense that,   humanity has got humanity scale problems coming up that we're gonna have to work with together and that our small petty sort of nationalist   problems   are going to sooner rather than later be a be a thing of the past. So there's always gonna be conflicts, but   our our kind of limited myopic way of seeing the whole world in our national borders and behind our city colored flags is something that's well overdue for a reckoning. And ideas like Bitcoin are great because they are global. They show that they are. This is about global consciousness,   very much so. Right?  

But that global consciousness   can be a global cage or it can be a global playground. Right? And that's what we're gonna have to sort of guard against. We can we can really make these decisions one at a time, but I suppose my advice to people, especially if you've got children,   is don't let them think that the water they swim in is all the water that there is. Right? This is this is polluted water and quite a small small pool that they're swimming in. There's a great big ocean out there. And our children can't miss   what they never experienced.  

Like, even me as a millennial, I still missed out on the era of being able to play in streets without my parents' permission.   But I still hear stories of that, and that sounds quite cool. We'd like to get back to that. Right? It was good. We gotta remember   we we gotta remember, and we gotta hang on to the memories   of the good of the past and the present so that we can take that forward. We're very we're very good at looking at talking about the bad of the presence and the past. But what what's here right now   that we need to preserve? Because it won't be preserved without us passing that on, passing those stories on, telling those tales as we go down. So I don't know if I'm as cheerful as you as you wanted me to be there. I mean, at the same time, chaos is a great time to bid on the markets. There's gonna be lots of opportunities to trade. Great time to be a forex trader. Great time to be shorting pretty much anything in the planet. But, you know, like, go go have fun, make money.  

But I understand Coasters can be fun if you take the right position. Right? There's a lot there's a lot of things we're going to lose, and let's hope we lose the the bad ones, not the good ones. Right? There there is going to be a loss. The world as we know it right now is not sustainable,   and there's as long as there's more people out the system of privilege than within it, that's not a comfortable space to be. Again, this is a very South African metaphor. Like, as long as as long as there are hungry people outside, it doesn't matter how high you build the walls of your compound, you're never gonna be safe. So, yeah, let down those bridges, right,   rather than trying to To building bridges.  

Yeah. Yeah. That's just the whole, like, central bank thing is also about drawing up bridges and holding on to protecting ourselves. Right? Absolutely.   That season, it's like it's the sense of drawing back, but, ultimately, we'll have to we'll have to break down those those barriers.  

[01:03:46] Shawn Yeager:

So, anyway Perfect. No. That's that's fantastic. It's a great place to wrap it up, Raman. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Have a good evening,   there in South Africa, and I hope we can do this again soon.  

[01:03:58] Bronwyn Williams:

Great. Thank you. Bye.