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The Hidden Cost of Money: Why Modern Life Feels Harder Than It Should
26 Plays5 days ago
Why does money feel harder to manage today? Why do so many people feel behind, even when they’re doing everything “right”?
In this episode, Jim and Cade sit down with author Seb Bunney to unpack the hidden ways our current money system affects behavior, stress, and long-term planning.
Seb explains how inflation, declining purchasing power, and broken incentives quietly shape the choices people make every day. Together, they explore why financial goals feel further away, how money functions as a language, and what happens when essential goods—like housing—turn into investment assets.
This episode gives listeners clarity, language, and perspective for understanding the pressure they feel around money. If you’ve ever wondered why modern financial life feels heavier than it should, this conversation will help you see the root causes—and what you can do to navigate them with more confidence and intention.
Topics include:
• Why money feels “broken” today
• How inflation changes behavior and priorities
• Why long-term goals feel harder to reach
• Money as a language and communication tool
• The emotional impact of unstable purchasing power
• The difference between saving and investing in today’s economy
• Why housing has become an investment instead of a home
• How curiosity creates clarity and agency
A grounded, eye-opening conversation for anyone feeling stretched financially or looking to understand the deeper forces shaping modern life.
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Transcript
Introduction and Topic Overview
00:00:01
Jim Crider
All right, Cade and Seb here today. This is Seb Bunny. We are going to be talking about about money some more.
00:00:11
Jim Crider
Seb, I got to know him a know a month or so ago in Montana hanging out and found out in that conversation that he's actually written a book on money and works in money and pretty deeply.
00:00:22
Jim Crider
And over the last few weeks, I've i've read his book and realized, and then we were just talking a minute before before recording, that we have almost the exact same verbiage around money and the way that we view the the role of money and people's lives and societally, and then also the
The Nature of Money: Good vs Bad Money
00:00:39
Jim Crider
implications of unhealth money. So I think this would be a fun conversation talking with someone.
00:00:43
Jim Crider
Yeah, talking you about this today. So appreciate you joining us.
00:00:46
Seb Bunney
Oh man, honestly, it's my pleasure. And again, like as Jim just mentioned, we only met like a month or so ago. And there's something so amazing about meeting like-minded individuals because when you're spending time with people that are curious, you really can dive into all of these different topics. And it's amazing how aligned you are in so many of these different topics. And when you're not aligned, there's a curiosity there because you know how much time and energy they're put into getting to the point at which they're at.
00:01:11
Seb Bunney
And so I find being around like minded individuals, curious individuals, malleable individuals is just such a pleasure. And so I had a blast in Montana. looking forward to chatting.
00:01:23
Jim Crider
Well, we could take this conversation a lot of ways. don't know. A lot of the premise of your book, chapter after chapter, sort of discussing the implications of bad money and how it impacts different areas of life. So I guess do you want to start off there? What makes...
00:01:44
Jim Crider
what makes money good or bad. And then obviously that could be a whole conversation itself. And then sort of going from there to like, what are, what can be implications personally, familially, societally with having good or bad money?
00:02:00
Seb Bunney
Absolutely. So this is, oh man, again, it's such a big conversation. And I think that a lot of people, we never actually ask the question of just like, what is money? And I think here if you ever go and listen to Robert Breedlover's podcast, What is Money? He's got some amazing people talking about this idea, but there's so many different ways that you can talk about this. And I think really to start is that we have a society that has a fear around money. There's a negative connotation around money.
00:02:25
Seb Bunney
It's like, don't talk about money. Money is the root of all evil. There's a lot of these kind of like negative sayings related to money. But if you actually just kind of step back for a second, money is really just a tool.
00:02:36
Seb Bunney
Money is apolitical. Money is amoral. Just like how you can use a knife to go and carve up food to share food with the family, you could use it in negative ways as well. And it's the same thing with money.
00:02:49
Seb Bunney
Money itself is not inherently bad. But I think that the reason why there is this negative connotation around money is the fact that over time, our money is increasingly being impacted to the point where it's not serving us in the same way as it's done in the past.
00:02:55
Cade Grimm
Okay.
00:03:04
Seb Bunney
And that means that it impacts how we show up as individuals. And so I think if I was to kind of take this conversation in kind of one direction, it would be that the way that I tend to look at money is like language, money is a medium of expression.
Inflation and Monetary Interventions
00:03:20
Seb Bunney
It's how we express to the world what it is that we value. Just like how through language we're able to communicate, express to the world what it is that we value. Well, you can see money is exactly the same. If I go into a grocery store and I see someone purchasing grass-fed beef, organic vegetables, and then I go and see someone else going and purchasing cigarettes, microwave we meals, you can see by how they direct their money, what it is that they value.
00:03:44
Seb Bunney
But I think that the problem which we face today in society is that as we're seeing more and more intervention monetarily and our purchasing power is being decimated, well, that's it impacting what it is that we're directing our capital towards because we can maybe no longer afford to buy the good quality food, support our families and our kids.
00:04:02
Seb Bunney
We may no longer be able to direct capital into certain areas of the economy because we're seeing capital regulations that are preventing us from directing capital there. Or let's say i live in China and you've got capital controls. If I want to go and save up and try and protect my family by saving my pennies and trying to build for a better life, there's capital controls that prevent me from investing overseas and protecting my purchasing power so the government can devalue the currency, impacting my ability to protect my family. and so I think that there are these things, whether it's inflation and the devastation of purchasing power, whether it's capital controls preventing me from moving my money outside of certain borders, whether it's regulation preventing me from directing capital to certain areas of the economy that are actually impeding our ability to express ourselves monetarily in a way that is healthy and and in a way that is able to build a future to our liking.
00:04:51
Seb Bunney
I'm curious to hear what you guys' thoughts are.
00:04:53
Jim Crider
I mean, even just foundationally, we define how we define what money is like our working definition of money is money is a means of communicating, storing and transferring value across space and time. So you mean, you mentioned that money is an X is a means of expression. And we would say that, yeah, and money is a means of communicating. And of course, yeah, the, the way, the way that you use your money, be it, save it for the future, spend it on healthy food, spend it on a like, uh,
00:05:25
Jim Crider
a quick pleasurable purpose or spending it to put a roof over your head. You're communicating that this something is important to me. And I'd venture to say, yeah if you, if you show, show someone your, your calendar, your checkbook, like they all have a pretty good idea of what you value in life. And the the issue is, this is where we get in other conversations as far as the money being a primary leader to divorce and other issues is that,
00:05:52
Jim Crider
you can say what you, you might have certain words to what you value, but then your other means of expressing your time and your money are not congruent with what your words are saying. And,
00:06:03
Jim Crider
I think that happens for a few reasons. One, it happens on the personal side of things of not taking inventory of what's really important to you and stopping to pause. Like most people in my observation, most people go through life reacting to their situations and maybe making a decision in a and a fleeting moment.
00:06:20
Jim Crider
And it's the responding to circumstance versus sitting, thinking deeply about what is truly important to me and how do I align my resources, my time, my money, my talent, relationships, business with what I value.
00:06:34
Jim Crider
uh, thinking about the opportunity cost, the trade-offs that will come from that decision, and then finally be able to take action, articulately instead of just responding, thus communicating maybe something accidentally, you know, it's like, uh,
00:06:48
Jim Crider
If you stub your toe, you might say something that if you were more patient or weren't in pain, you wouldn't yell that out. Or you know if you're just frustrated, you know my my kids, i have I have four young kids and there's times, most nights after i put the kids to bed, I take inventory of the words I said that day and usually i have a little bit of regret of how responded too harshly to them.
00:07:08
Jim Crider
like, man, now that they're in bed and i can I can think more slowly and calmly, I wish I wouldn't have responded like that to them. And, I think it's how a lot of people live there live with their money is responding in a way that is not actually in tandem with what they would would hope it would communicate.
00:07:15
Seb Bunney
Mm-hmm.
00:07:26
Jim Crider
so that's, that's one side. And then obviously you bring in this other side of like, you know, the more technical side of money as a communications method, a mechanism, uh, for orchestrating, uh, the.
00:07:40
Jim Crider
yeah the purchasing and selling of goods and services. And if you bring in more units of that money and everything, then also that can, that can mess up the communication mechanism and that's, you know, inflation and controls.
00:07:51
Cade Grimm
right.
00:07:55
Jim Crider
So we have two sides of things that are impacting this communication method mechanism.
Generational Perspectives on Purchasing Power
00:08:00
Jim Crider
And even that, like, I don't know if I'm using this term properly. I feel like this is a new term that's sort of Gen Z is gaslighting.
00:08:08
Jim Crider
But I feel like a lot of times now people are feeling gaslit of, you know, they they can't buy a house for their family and they're working too much and they feel like it's all my fault. But in reality, they don't recognize that there is something else going on behind the scenes that is also disrupting what they're trying to communicate.
00:08:25
Jim Crider
Now not going to say that everything is the government's fault. Like maybe you are also blowing money and like using it poorly. But we have, we have to recognize there's two places coming in that that money communicates and there's two means of distortion. There's that, that personal taking inventory. And there's also like our money systems broken as well.
00:08:41
Jim Crider
And even if you're taking inventory and being very intentional about your priorities, it still can be very difficult to align the two, the priorities and your resources. Yeah.
00:08:50
Seb Bunney
No, I think you're absolutely spot on. And I think that the it's almost like the unit bias of the dollar where it's like, well, $1 when my parents were around $1 now, <unk>s it's just a dollar. And it's just like, no, there's a very big difference in what a dollar could buy 50 years ago, 100 years ago, even 20 years ago to present day. Like when you start looking at a lot of these studies, these statistics, you realize that the baby boomer generation at the average age of 30 owned of the housing market.
00:09:19
Seb Bunney
Well, the millennial generation at the average age of 30 owns 3% of the housing market. And so start to see that because our purchasing power has been decimated, yes, a dollar is a dollar, but where it goes, it buys far, far, far less.
00:09:33
Seb Bunney
And so I always find it really interesting. Like we can get into the mechanics of the monetary side of things, but there's countless podcasts where you can dive into that kind of stuff. And so I find it interesting talking about more how it impacts us and how we show up as individuals and the psychology of money.
00:09:49
Seb Bunney
And one of those areas is really like, how is it that money impacts us as an individual and how we're able to pursue the things we want to be able to support those around us to be able to show up authentically.
00:09:49
Cade Grimm
Thank you.
00:10:01
Seb Bunney
And so in my book, The Hidden Cost of Money, I talk about kind of three main areas of how money impacts us. And these areas ultimately impact really our trajectory in life and kind of what we're capable of doing. And the the first one is time preference.
00:10:17
Seb Bunney
So time preference, for those that aren't familiar with it, you can think of it as like a spectrum. You've got on the low end of time preference and on the high end of time preference, on the low end, you've got people that are thinking about the future. They want to build an intentional life.
00:10:30
Seb Bunney
They want to be able to increase their capacity. So they're thinking about what can I do today, even if that takes sacrifice today to build a better life tomorrow. And then on the flip side of that spectrum, you've got the high-end, high-time preference thinking.
00:10:43
Seb Bunney
And this is, you know what? I'm just going to be impulsive. I want to meet my immediate needs right now. I'm not thinking about the future. And I think that what ends up happening is when money is losing purchasing power over time, we're no longer incentivized to save.
00:10:55
Jim Crider
Thank you.
00:10:56
Seb Bunney
We're now incentivized to consume because our purchasing power is buying less each day. And so because of this, money is unconsciously shrinking shifting our perspective from this ability to save this thinking about the future to being impulsive.
00:11:10
Seb Bunney
My purchasing power is greatest in the present moment. I'm goingnna spend it now. And you see this throughout society. There's so many repercussions, whether it's on the environment because of our consumption habits, whether it's on the individual, because we're not thinking about building prosperity for us and our families. Instead, we're just thinking about the present moment. And so you start to see the first aspect, our time preference shifting from low to high.
00:11:32
Seb Bunney
And then the second aspect is like meaninglessness. Like you can really see if I'm an individual and I'm like, you know what? Based on my income, I think it's going to take me 15 years to save for a down payment for a house.
00:11:43
Seb Bunney
And then so five years into that 15 years, you're like, Oh man, house prices have doubled. So now it's going to take me 25 years instead of 15 years. It's really easy for meaninglessness, depression, anxiety, frustration to kind of kick in when every time we set a goal, that goal ends up getting further away as opposed to coming towards us. And I think that's what a lot of millennials, a lot of individuals are feeling today is they're trying to show up authentically.
00:12:08
Seb Bunney
They're trying to set goals, but life continues to get harder and harder and harder. So feels like they're on a bit of a rat race. And so I think it's no wonder that we're seeing substance abuse, highest rates of depression, anxiety, these types of things.
00:12:20
Seb Bunney
And then the final one that I'll just mention is kind of like compassion and altruism. And I should say that they're on average, people are a product of their environment. But that's not to say that you're going to get people that have been brought up in heinous environments, challenging oppressive situations, and then being able to escape that, rise above it, and create an amazing intentional life.
00:12:39
Seb Bunney
However, I think for the majority, when our purchasing power is being decimated, when life is getting harder and harder to be able to show up, and when we're living quite impulsively, it impacts our ability to be altruistic, to be able to give back to our society, our community.
00:12:54
Seb Bunney
And in psychology, there's this idea of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And it's kind of this like five tier pyramid. And at the top, you've got like self-actualization, spiritual beliefs. Below that, you start getting into self-esteem needs, confidence, friends, those types things.
00:13:09
Seb Bunney
And then as you go down the levels, you start to get down to our base needs, which is our survival needs, food and shelter. Well, the challenge is, is as money starts breaking down, as our purchasing power starts to deteriorating, we start getting pushed down these levels and we get stuck on the bottom.
00:13:25
Seb Bunney
Our aperture of awareness starts to narrow as a result of fear and survival instinct. And so we don't have the capacity to really give back at the same extent, to be able to be as compassionate as maybe we might be able
The Broken Money System and Societal Impact
00:13:36
Seb Bunney
to.
00:13:36
Seb Bunney
And so I think that ultimately money is this lever, which when we have greater purchasing power, we have greater capacity to show up more authentically in general. That's not to say that everyone is like that. But I find money really does influence how we show up as individuals.
00:13:54
Cade Grimm
Yeah, hearing hearing you say that, Seb, reminded me of a meeting that we had earlier today, and there's countless meetings like this. It was the first real deep conversation that that we've had with this particular person, and he's not a client. We're just kind of currently exploring, like, hey, how how can we potentially help this person?
00:14:14
Cade Grimm
He feels super behind, like, man, what have I done? I haven't saved enough for myself, haven't saved enough for my kids. I'm swamped at work because I'm just trying to play catch up.
00:14:27
Cade Grimm
And he's putting a lot of that blame on himself, which like you like you alluded to and in in your book mentions, like if if our money system is broken, we're forced to use our money and our time, frankly, in ways that don't actually reflect what our true values might be.
00:14:46
Cade Grimm
So this, as long as the money system is broken, then, then money as a communicator it's, it's not, it's not as efficient as it maybe would be if if the money system was not as broken as it is. Well, we hear stories like that all the time of people, people putting blame on themselves. and And there are of course cases where someone could have made better decisions and and their decisions directly impacted where they're at today, but there's so many people that are out there just grinding and doing what they can.
00:15:14
Cade Grimm
But constantly feel like they're not making up any ground. And and it's not always not always because you've made wrong decisions, but because something that's frankly kind of out of your control, in a sense, is is the root cause of that.
00:15:29
Cade Grimm
it's It's really, it's sad to see that.
00:15:31
Seb Bunney
Oh, I could not agree more. And I think it's challenging as well because many times as individuals or as a society, we end up constantly talking about the symptoms of this stuff.
00:15:43
Seb Bunney
I wish I could have saved more. I wish I could have done this. Oh, this is what's happening in society. And we play to these symptoms when in reality, we need to go back to the root cause. What's really happening? And I think that at a foundational level, our money is losing purchasing power.
00:15:57
Seb Bunney
And I always find like my my background, I've always been fascinated with psychology, childhood trauma development. And so I always try and find analogies. And so we're talking about expression and the importance of expression with authenticity.
00:16:10
Seb Bunney
Well, imagine if you grew up and your parents didn't allow you to express certain emotions. They deem them as like negative emotions. So let's take, i don't know, frustration, anger, sadness.
00:16:21
Seb Bunney
Nope, they're not allowed in this household. So anytime you go to feel those emotions, you express them, no, you're not allowed.
00:16:26
Cade Grimm
Thank
00:16:27
Seb Bunney
What that means is as we grow up through life, if we don't know how to express certain emotions, it can lead to depression. Depression is the depressing of emotions. We never learned how to express those things. And so the symptoms of not being able to express ourselves as a kid resulted in depression.
00:16:42
Seb Bunney
anxiety, frustration, because we never learned how to express them. Well, it's the same things with money. We look at society today and we say, man, we've got like really poor consumer habits because of our consumption. We're just kind of like decimating this natural environment. We're kind of destroying the forest. We're ripping up all the minerals and such.
00:16:59
Seb Bunney
We've got kind of a lot of global issues when it comes to labor workforce, human rights, all this kind of stuff. And we're focused on the symptoms of But actually, if we go back to the root, it's the same thing as a child who has never learned to express himself as a child.
00:17:10
Cade Grimm
you
00:17:12
Seb Bunney
We have a monetary system that doesn't allow us to preserve purchasing power and express ourselves naturally. And so I very much believe that if we have a monetary system that allows us to preserve purchasing power and save, what happens to consumption?
00:17:25
Seb Bunney
What means that people are now incentivized to save over consume. So we start to see a change in consumption habits. If we see a drop in consumption, you see less of an impact on the natural resources that are being extracted from the ground. And so a lot of these repercussions that we see in society are simply symptoms of broken money is what I would argue.
00:17:51
Jim Crider
Seb, we're back.
00:17:53
Seb Bunney
Did I, did I disappear there for a second?
00:17:56
Jim Crider
For about five seconds.
00:17:59
Seb Bunney
What, what, what point did I get to? Sorry, because I saw you guys the whole time.
00:18:03
Cade Grimm
You were, so you had spoken about how you're you're making the the, you're connecting how children who are, grow up in a household and where they cannot express their emotions. You were connecting that with having any a monetary system that doesn't allow, doesn't allow for preservation of purchasing power and saving.
00:18:21
Cade Grimm
You're making that connection.
00:18:21
Seb Bunney
did i did i mention it okay Did I mention the change in consumption habits as a result of actually having money that allows us to purchase?
00:18:22
Cade Grimm
you
00:18:29
Cade Grimm
I think that's right about where you, where we lost you.
00:18:30
Jim Crider
You're getting right there. Yeah.
00:18:31
Seb Bunney
Okay, yeah.
00:18:31
Cade Grimm
Yeah.
00:18:33
Seb Bunney
So I think that what this means is that when we actually have money that allows us to preserve purchasing power, what ends up happening is you see an incentive towards saving as opposed to consumption.
00:18:43
Seb Bunney
So if you've got incentive towards saving as opposed to consumption, then that impacts our consumption habits. And what Vice versa, if you're impacting consumption habits, you're impacting the amount we're in drawing resources from the ground, the impact on the natural environment. And so you start to see that at the the root of a lot of these symptoms that we face throughout society is broken money, money that doesn't store purchasing power.
Questioning Economic Assumptions
00:19:07
Jim Crider
Then you you face this systemic, like a lot of what you're coming against is like systemic. And like i had like i was kind have a conversation with someone about a week ago and we were talking about what I believe will happen in the next decade is this proliferation of universal basic income. And I'll come on the heels of some sort of like government digital currency or CBDC that will be digital, make it easier for some sort of UBI, universal basic income.
00:19:40
Jim Crider
And how I believe that that happens, it'll probably have some sort of controls over, hey, Seb, if you're a good citizen, we'll give you $1,000 month. but if you, if you use your money in a way that we don't agree with, then the next month you'll get 500.
00:19:53
Jim Crider
And if you do it again, we'll cut it off. Oh, and also at thousand dollars, you get this month, you have to spend it all within the next 30 days before it disappears. And ironically, I said that i so i was telling someone that that's my, I think that's going to happen. Maybe I'm crazy, but said, Oh, well that'd be great because that would allow the economy to keep going because it encourages and it forces ongoing spending.
00:20:15
Jim Crider
And
00:20:18
Jim Crider
Again, until you stop to question even that premise of what what is money and what is an economy and what causes a healthy economy, if you think, oh, well, money is just a means of transaction and the economy is continually healthy because there's just always money in circulation, even be it arbitrarily because it just has to circulate.
00:20:37
Jim Crider
Well, then the more money that's circling, the healthier economy will be. You'll lead to these false conclusions. And it seems like a silly question to say, hold on, hold on, let's step back. what is money?
00:20:48
Jim Crider
And, you know, people are like, again, I, that's what Kate and I do. We've worked in money for over a decade at each and to stop and say, well, wait a second, what is money? Just sounds like a foolish question. Cause it's so simple. Cause we handle it day in, day out, but it's, I think it's of paramount importance.
00:21:05
Jim Crider
You know, be like, uh, uh, a master architect stopping and say, hold on, what's a ruler? But then you find out all these other architects are measuring out their boards and stuff all day.
00:21:17
Jim Crider
And they're going, they're they're building this custom home and they're using a ruler to measure and to cut and everything.
00:21:18
Seb Bunney
you
00:21:21
Cade Grimm
Thank you.
00:21:23
Jim Crider
But then we find out that they never stopped asking what a ruler is. and this whole time they're they're measuring using a ruler that at one point it's nine inches, the next point it's 14 inches. It's like, wait a second, what is this thing? And how does this impact how we're designing everything else?
00:21:37
Jim Crider
And suddenly you realize, well, goodness, if our ruler is changing, that ruler is meant to communicate the length and the standard size of something. But if the ruler is changing, well, suddenly you don't know if you're measuring the ruler, if you're measuring the table that you're supposed to be measuring.
00:21:50
Jim Crider
So yeah, that's, these are both communication mechanisms and it seems like a simple thing. Well, what is a ruler and what is money? But if you don't stop and ask that, you might be dealing with something that is a complete,
00:22:03
Jim Crider
I guess, manipulated or falsified version of what you think you're dealing with this whole time.
00:22:09
Seb Bunney
No, you're at your spot on. And I think that the way I kind of tend to look at things is there's a really famous quote. And it's one of my favorite quotes. And it says, the map is not the territory. And I think that we have these maps at which we navigate this world.
00:22:23
Seb Bunney
One of those maps is money. It's how we think money is meant to operate. And there's a few common held beliefs around this. You kind of briefly touched on them, but there's a few common held beliefs. that It's just like, well, money needs to be centralized. There needs to be an issuer who controls this money.
00:22:37
Seb Bunney
It's that our natural environment is inflationary. Prices rise over time. If we have deflation, well, that's going to destabilize our economy. we can't have deflation. And so there's this map that kind of tells us how money works, how our economy works.
00:22:51
Seb Bunney
And I think it's really important to your point, Jim, to go back and actually question those assumptions. Is this map representative of reality? And what's interesting is when you start to get into this stuff, you're just like, well, do prices have to rise over time?
00:23:05
Seb Bunney
And if you ever go and read Jeff Booth's book, The Price of Tomorrow, what you start to recognize is you're like, wait, humans, since the dawn of time, we've always strived to get more for less.
00:23:16
Seb Bunney
We're always trying to increase productivity, increase efficiency. And so because of our desire to increase productivity and efficiency, prices should be falling over time, not rising. But the challenge is if prices are falling over time, we've got a debt-based economy.
00:23:31
Seb Bunney
If margins are being squeezed, then we're going to see absolute devastation from a corporate standpoint. And so in a debt-based economy, that deflation is a threat. And so it's kind of like going back and starting to question some of these assumptions.
00:23:43
Seb Bunney
And I think what's really interesting is this idea that like GDP, gross domestic product, needs to continually grow. Because naturally, if I want to go and release a... Let's say I start a non-profit.
00:23:54
Seb Bunney
and I go and release a service to this world that is free. And at the time, that service, given that it's free, it doesn't impact GDP. GDP, for those who familiar, is basically just like for any nation, it is all of the monetary transactions that take place in that nation in any given year.
00:24:10
Seb Bunney
Well, if I'm offering a product or service for free, it doesn't impact GDP. Well, if I'm offering a so service for free, does that not say that I'm creating value in society, even if it's not impacting GDP?
00:24:21
Seb Bunney
However, if I'm struggling and I'm like, you know what, i've got I've got to turn this free service into something that's now paid, all of a sudden that impacts GDP positively. So it looks like there's now growth in the economy.
00:24:33
Seb Bunney
But have I actually created value or have actually taken value away?
00:24:36
Jim Crider
Thank you.
00:24:36
Seb Bunney
Because I've taken a product that was free and now i'm charging for it, which is impacting people's access to it. And so I think that in a society that is absolutely thriving, where technology advancing, innovation is like booming, what I actually think we would be seeing is prices falling.
00:24:52
Seb Bunney
So in effect, we could have GDP falling while we're having absolute amazing abundance in society. And it's hard for some people to wrap their head around this.
00:25:01
Jim Crider
Yeah, you mentioned earlier something that triggered this thought in my head. So a few months ago, there was another financial planner. They're talking about how a of millennials and Gen Zs are whining about how... Oh, you mentioned the stat earlier about the the number of homeowners of different demographics.
00:25:19
Jim Crider
And he was mentioning that like, oh, well, yeah, but look at my... my generation and the generation before me look at their average house was 800 square feet. It was a shotgun house and the average closet was the size and didn't have the air conditioning versus the starter home that these kids want is the hope, the home that our parents hope they would eventually have.
00:25:39
Jim Crider
And I can concede that point to an extent, but what he's failing to recognize is I would, i would actually argue it's two things. One, the quality of a home, the quality of the average home 60 years ago is substantially greater than the quality of average home today from the, obviously there's the, there's, there's portions of a house that's still good, but from the bare bones standpoint, mo the average home was better, better constructed.
00:26:01
Jim Crider
and then two is again, go into this framework of, uh, if we have better technology and greater efficiencies and building capabilities,
00:26:12
Jim Crider
why Why should we not have better quality houses or at least equal quality of houses for similar cost?
00:26:23
Jim Crider
you know and You get into this, well, you know only percent. I forgot the stat you mentioned earlier, but X percent of 30s own a house now versus you know decades back.
00:26:35
Jim Crider
i I don't think it's fair to point towards the fact that that that same starter level house is substantially better than it was then because we we have to we have to adjust for technological advancements.
00:26:46
Jim Crider
And if we take that out, that removes – if we remove that from the equation, suddenly we're left with, yeah, it's the money itself. That is – I think that is the common denominator amongst all these issues.
00:26:57
Jim Crider
don't know. Maybe I'm not thinking that throughout properly, but when whenever I heard that argument of, yeah, well, the the the average starter home is substantially better than it was then. Again, I think that was disingenuous. And again, I would say that term that I don't really love is is sort of gaslighting this generation to say, well, of course, you should go get a house that doesn't have air conditioning because that's what our grandparents had to do.
00:27:16
Jim Crider
When, well, of course, the technology is here that wasn't there to make that on scale on a relatively cost efficient way.
00:27:24
Seb Bunney
No, i I couldn't agree more. And I think that the other thing is you just got to look at what percentage of people are living in apartments today as single family homes. And we've seen a huge shift, even over the last hundred years.
00:27:37
Seb Bunney
If I remember correctly, there's a book called Tribe by a guy called Sebastian Junger. It's fascinating book. And he talks about the shift from kind of this hunter-gatherer style lifestyle to kind of modern day.
00:27:47
Seb Bunney
And even the transition through the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution. And one of the things he mentions is that 100, 150 years ago, It was something like 90% of individuals lived in rural areas, 10% lived in cities, because ultimately, we needed to be able to support ourselves and sustain ourselves. We had to grow our food, we have to be self resourceful.
00:28:07
Seb Bunney
Whereas today, because of the way we've seen mass manufacturing, mass farming, monocrop agriculture, which has had its own issues on the environment and the soil and all that kind of stuff. What we've seen is this transition where most people don't have jobs.
00:28:20
Seb Bunney
Machinery has taken their jobs, they've moved to the city. So most people live in apartments. So instead of it being 90% living in rural areas, 10% in cities, we've now flipped and it's now 90% in cities, 10% in rural
Free Market vs Central Planning
00:28:33
Seb Bunney
areas. And so the amount of people that even live just in single family homes in general is like such a small amount in comparison to what it was even in our parents' day.
00:28:43
Seb Bunney
And I think that on top of that, you're just looking at the incentives of the system today. Unfortunately, like I very much believe in a free market, which is when you create value, capital can flow towards you.
00:28:56
Seb Bunney
And so ultimately, when you have a free market and there's no central planner that is able to fund operations without support from the populace, what it means is, again, capital flows to where value is being created.
00:29:07
Seb Bunney
Well, that is what is most important in society, because if you're not offering value, you're going to slowly wither away and someone is going to rise up. If a company wants to be fiscally irresponsible, cool, go ahead, be fiscally irresponsible.
00:29:19
Seb Bunney
But by the time that we have a recession or a downturn, if you can't support your expenses, you're going to wither away. Those staff are going to have to go back out into the market. They're going to have to be innovative, find another job, which creates value.
00:29:32
Seb Bunney
There was a podcast I was listening to about two, three years ago. it was Lynn Olden on Peter McCormack's What Bitcoin Did. And she mentioned that in the 1920s, there was a depression before the 1930s depression that everyone knows about.
00:29:46
Seb Bunney
and the reason why it doesn't get talked about is the fact that the depression was only one to two years long but supposedly it had just as much of a drawdown on the labor workforce but it recovered in one to two years and she argues that the reason why it recovered so quickly in relation to the 1930s depression is at the time the federal reserve the central bank didn't have the far-reaching oversight to go and intervene monetarily and because of that These companies were effectively wiped out.
00:30:14
Seb Bunney
People went back into the market, rebuilt, and the economy recovered so quickly. Whereas the moment you step in financially, you create all of this moral hazard. You create all of these negative repercussions. And I'll give one quick example, which was during the pandemic here in Canada,
00:30:30
Seb Bunney
there was this thing called the CERB, the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit. And again, I talk about it very briefly in my book, but we very much felt it. And the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit was, if you're an individual and you've lost more than 10% of your income because of COVID, then you're entitled to $2,000 a month from the government.
00:30:48
Seb Bunney
Well, $2,000 a month is frickin' $24,000 a year. If you go into the tax receipts, you realize that one third of Canadians earn less than $24,000 a year. So you have now just given the option to one third of Canadians, do you want to just stay at home and watch Netflix?
00:31:05
Seb Bunney
Or do you want to go and work full time and earn the same amount? Well, of course, they're going to take the latter as opposed to the former. So you end up having all of these Canadians that effectively quit their jobs. So all of the mum and pup shops, the cafes, the bike shops, the restaurants, they could not find workers.
00:31:20
Seb Bunney
And so most of them had to close down. Most of them went under. Or even if they didn't, they'd have one or two staff members and they'd have signs up saying, we cannot find staff members. And so when you step back and you look at this, you're like,
00:31:31
Seb Bunney
Well, if people are struggling financially, give them free money. But the problem is the repercussions of giving them free money is you create all these misaligned incentives. People are not going to want to work if they've been given money for free.
00:31:43
Seb Bunney
That impacts all of the mum and pup shops, but it didn't impact a lot of the corporate monopolies that had access to a lot of this free and easy capital. So it's it's a lot of these misaligned incentives as a result of broken money.
00:31:54
Jim Crider
yeah again, money communicates things and money is one, it's a means of communicating value. it It's, it's stores value and it's communicating that there's value that was, uh, created or derived from, from this. And this represents that that money in turn.
00:32:09
Jim Crider
And the, who, uh, can't remember it was, but remember hearing them as a quick snippet talk. And he was saying, well, i if we if we wanted everyone to be educated, could we just go ahead and print everyone a diploma?
00:32:21
Jim Crider
Like, no, of course not. Because a diploma just signifies a a sense of value of of an education standpoint. The same way, just arbitrarily creating units does not all sudden make everyone wealthier.
00:32:31
Jim Crider
So I love there there's a quote in the book that sort of goes in this. It says, our allocation of time holds as a direct reflection of our priorities, values, and aspirations. And then later on, you said money is, in a sense, a method of storing time.
00:32:47
Jim Crider
And i love how you connect those those pieces. And of course, when we think of we think of saving money, it's like, okay, well, if if one, you're going to be more incentivized to save money if you believe that money is going to hold value later on because you are effectively giving yourself opportunities, so time, or other opportunities down the road.
00:33:06
Jim Crider
You're saying, you know what? It's more important to that i have, I want to have time with my family, to be able to make memories in 10 years or when I'm old or whatever. So therefore i will, I will go without something now so I can have more time with my wife in our fifties and sixties and seventies later on.
00:33:23
Jim Crider
And that's, that's, that is one role that money's supposed to have is preserve time and be able to transmit that time from now until a time that I feel is a date that feels more appropriate.
00:33:35
Jim Crider
And again, like if you, if the money's manipulated, suddenly you can be stealing time from people.
Money as a Time Store
00:33:41
Jim Crider
If, if I decide I want to save 20% of my income, that is 20% of the time that I have spent to deliver value.
00:33:50
Jim Crider
I decide I want to wait till later on to receive the benefit of that time. So therefore I want to have that 20% of time later on. But suddenly if suddenly we have 3% inflation, well, every roughly 24 years that the value of that dollar is cut in half. Therefore that time, that 10, that 20% of time that I gave up, now I'm only getting 10% of that back.
00:34:11
Jim Crider
So we have to, it's again, it's connecting how do all these things relate and what's the impact of having centralized money that is, would argue, is not, it's not actually money, or at least it's not the best form of money we can and should have.
00:34:27
Seb Bunney
there's There's an interesting quote, which is, the best slave is a slave that doesn't know he's a slave. And I've probably butchered that quote. You guys may have heard it before. But there's a Robert Breedlove.
00:34:37
Seb Bunney
He wrote an article. This is kind of a long form blog article post. This must have been maybe four years ago. And I think it was called like Masters and Slaves. And one of the things he did is let's just take a look at like the African slave trade in comparison to the decimation of purchasing power since the intervention but like in the invention of kind of the Federal Reserve.
00:34:57
Seb Bunney
And what you realize is that if you take into account all of the time and energy, all of those slaves put into the cotton farms and whatnot in the States during that period, in comparison to the decimation of purchasing power and the extra time that people would have to work to be able to make up that purchasing power, what you realize is that we have seen and And I don't want to discount what happened in the past.
00:35:18
Seb Bunney
But if you're simply taking the labor hours worked, we have seen an absolute far and above decimation of per of labor over the last, say, 50, 100 years than we ever saw during any slave trade.
00:35:33
Seb Bunney
And people just don't know they're slaves. They're having to go and work 40, 50, 60 hours a week just to be able to get by. And even when you look at it in more of a historical context, I think we tend to think, well, we're at the forefront of technology.
00:35:46
Seb Bunney
Life is better than it's ever been ever before. And actually, if you go back and study like hunter-gatherer tribes, the ability to go hunt big game, find good quality meat. Most of the time, these individuals in the hunt-gather tribes were spending like 10 to 13 hours a week hunting.
00:36:03
Seb Bunney
The rest of that time, it was on community endeavors. It was on kind of like... giving back to society, being able to kind of show up more with your family, things like that, which we just don't have today. People are spending 40, 50, 60 hours at work and they're just trying to exist. And so I think we are arguably at a time in history where we are working more than ever.
00:36:23
Seb Bunney
We have limited capacity more than ever. And I think that a lot of people don't recognize, again, that it's stemming from a monetary system that isn't conducive to being able to save and put forward a better future.
00:36:36
Cade Grimm
Jack, Jack Mallers talks about that a lot. I've heard him say it several times of like, man, if the money system wasn't broken, then you could just go be a teacher, you could go be a doctor, you could go be a banker, could go, you could just be your career and spend your time on things that are important to you. But but we are like you just mentioned,
00:36:56
Cade Grimm
we are forced to not just be a teacher, be a doctor, be a banker. We also have to we have to do that way more than we otherwise would want to, to create the means to save.
00:37:07
Cade Grimm
Because if we don't, then we're we're just a slave to the system.
00:37:11
Seb Bunney
Totally. And then on top of that, you're going and working your 40, 50 hours a week as your day job. And then you're going to have to spend another 15 hours a week trying to figure out, okay, I've saved 10% of my paycheck.
00:37:17
Cade Grimm
Hmm.
00:37:22
Seb Bunney
Where do I go and put that 10%? And so then when we've got this monetary system that doesn't allow us to simply save in the currency, well, we've now got to figure out this whole investment world.
00:37:24
Cade Grimm
yeah
00:37:30
Seb Bunney
And I think what a lot of people don't recognize is that there's a big difference between saving and investing. historically saving is just excess capital you've earned through your job and you're putting aside as like a vehicle that can hopefully improve your life down in the long term investing on the other hand is taking risk risk to try and better that return but as a result of taking risk well you could potentially lose that capital and you've got the time investment of trying to figure out where to invest that capital and so i think the Today, everyone in their dog has to become an investor and they've got to figure out the financial markets, equities, real estate, all of these things to try and get by and because or simply because saving is no longer a viable solution.
00:38:12
Jim Crider
Yeah, it's it's interesting to think the implications of if money just retained its purchasing power, not even getting into if we're in a deflationary market, but if if money simply retained its purchasing power over a prolonged period of time, how much simpler that would make so many conversations and decisions. And of course, like for let's think about the housing industry. Of course, you're going to have areas of centralized like inflation or deflation because of maybe like outsized population growth.
00:38:39
Jim Crider
But in general, if The population, if the average home stayed flat compared to the purchasing power of a dollar, and you knew need to have 20% down, I want have $50,000 down, and to save $50,000.
00:38:56
Jim Crider
fifty thousand dollars down and i can afford to say $10,000 per year in five years, I will have X versus we're forced to speculate. Well, I need 50 grand right now, but the housing market, I mean, it was like 2021, the average housing, the average house in the town we live in went up by 33%.
00:39:15
Jim Crider
So suddenly you're speculating on your, your, your, to buy a house. If all I want to buy a house in a couple of years, but if the house, if the house goes up by 33%, I need to just, I need to at least have my money go up by 33%. That way I'm not losing ground on that.
00:39:28
Jim Crider
now if going to invest, and of course, then you have, know, let's say inflation's 5% and you invest your money and you make 10%, five of that is just to keep up with inflation. But the the government's not recognizing that from a tax perspective.
00:39:40
Jim Crider
So you're paying capital gains tax on the first 5% that actually just kept pace with inflation.
00:39:44
Cade Grimm
Thank you.
00:39:45
Jim Crider
and So the more you start thinking through this, the more can lead to frustration. and you're You're thinking the amount of time and energy wasted.
00:39:50
Seb Bunney
Totally. and And I think that... yeah
00:39:54
Seb Bunney
And I think that the other thing is a lot of these narratives get weaponized politically. And so like where I live is extremely left leaning. And what ends up happening is people say, well, landlords are the worst and corporations are the worst. All of these rising prices and the heinous rental rates are because of landlords and corporations. And it's just like, come on, dig, peel back the layer, at least one more layer.
00:40:17
Seb Bunney
And as you start peeling back the layer, you realize it's got nothing to do with corporations and landlords. Yes, you can get the greedy landlord here and there. Yes, you can find the occasional corporation that is just kind of raising prices unnecessarily just to maximize margins.
00:40:30
Seb Bunney
But in general, people are a product of their environment. And I think that when money, to your point, Jim, when money does not store purchasing power, what ends up happening is if you have capital in the bank,
00:40:41
Seb Bunney
What are you going to do? You're not just going to keep it in the dollar. You're going to try and preserve that purchasing power somewhere else. And so people are now pushed out into things like real estate, pushed out into things like farmland, not because they actually want to go and own real estate and farmland, but it's simply to preserve purchasing power. And so these vehicles now become stores of value.
00:40:59
Seb Bunney
They become assets as opposed to these things that were once just utility vehicles for society. And we see it time and time again, like the wealthy are buying up farmland left, right, and center all over the world.
00:41:09
Seb Bunney
but they're not using that farmland to grow crops or to raise cattle to provide food for society. Instead, they're using it simply to preserve purchasing power. Where I live in Canada, what we're, sorry, I used to live in Whistler, a little ski town and and and here in BC in Canada.
00:41:24
Seb Bunney
And 61% of the houses are empty, yet we've got a housing crisis. And it's got nothing to do with the wealthy buying up the houses to preserve purchasing power. What it's got everything to do with is the fact that our money doesn't store value.
00:41:36
Seb Bunney
So they're pushed into real estate to preserve purchasing power. And so a lot of these rise in prices is a result of artificial demand because there's no incentive to save in the currency.
Root Causes of Economic Symptoms
00:41:48
Jim Crider
Yeah, that's monetization of assets. That's the frustration. If you have a family that's just trying to go get a home to raise their family in and make memories together and the place that they can call home, they're they're not just competing against another family who's also trying to get a home. They're competing against hedge funds and private equity and and mutual funds and real estate investment trusts. And all these people are not using it as a home. It's an investment asset.
00:42:12
Jim Crider
also we have this
00:42:12
Seb Bunney
Mm-hmm.
00:42:14
Jim Crider
demand that bloats the prices. And suddenly the family who just wants a home is bought is, is forced out because there's someone else who can outbid them because they need, they need to place their park, their, their purchasing power.
00:42:25
Cade Grimm
Thank you.
00:42:27
Jim Crider
And again, that's a symptom of the fact that the money itself is not doing one of its primary roles, which is storing money or storing purchasing power across time.
00:42:27
Seb Bunney
totally
00:42:37
Seb Bunney
And I think this is where when you've got the stickiness of wages, unfortunately, it's on the onus is on the employee to be able to request their employer raises their wage. And if the employer even has the capacity to raise their wage, what we find is that wages lag inflation.
00:42:52
Seb Bunney
And so you end up with these individuals where, again, like talking about house prices here in Canada, and I know it's pretty similar in the States, the average house in the 1970s was three times the average person's wage.
00:43:04
Seb Bunney
Well, now the average house is 9.7 times the average person's wage. And if you live in a desirable location, so like I live 30 minutes south of Whistler in little town called Squamish, the average house here is 1.5 million.
00:43:15
Seb Bunney
And the average person's wage is like 30 to $40,000 a year. And you're just like, how on earth are they ever going to be able to buy a house when it's 30 times the average person's wage? It's just kind of just getting ridiculous. And so I think that, again,
00:43:30
Seb Bunney
I really urge like people when we first go down this rabbit hole, sometimes we can get stuck on the symptom and it's like asking the question to get behind the symptom. There was a famous famous founder of Toyota.
00:43:43
Seb Bunney
His name is Takoda. Dakota something, of a complete blank his name, it's an Asian name. And what he talks about is the five whys. And he was like, okay, I want everyone in Toyota to be a critical thinker.
00:43:55
Seb Bunney
If you have a problem, get to the root, don't just focus on the symptom. And so he asks everyone to ask the the the the question of why five times minimum. So he's just like, okay, let's say we're talking about rising prices in grocery stores.
00:44:10
Seb Bunney
Well, why are prices rising? That's the first question. You could say, well, the grocery store is raising prices. Yeah, yeah that that could be the answer. Why is the grocery store raising prices? Well, it's because the cost of goods are increasing.
00:44:23
Seb Bunney
So why are the cost of goods increasing? Well, the input costs that go into those goods are increasing. Why the input costs of goods going into this? Because there's more demand for those resources. Why is there more demand? Because there's more dollars.
00:44:35
Seb Bunney
Why there more dollars? Because it's a central bank. And so you start digging down deeper, asking why, and you actually get to the root. And so it's just like being able to get people rather than just superficially asking why once,
00:44:46
Seb Bunney
Go deeper, get to the root of these issues. And many times you realize, and it's not even just rising prices, it can be anything. Why is it that kids today are struggling and they're not having their emotional needs met?
00:44:57
Seb Bunney
Well, it could be the fact that since 1970 to present day, we've seen a doubling of dual earner households and a halving of single earner households where both parents having to go out and work. So if both parents working, they're spending less time with their kids.
00:45:10
Seb Bunney
If kids are spending more time with their peers, well, peer relationships are very superficial. They want to sound the same, look the same, same mannerisms. And then you wonder when a kid hasn't individuated, he doesn't know who he is, he's got no sense of purpose.
00:45:22
Seb Bunney
You wonder why we're facing depression, anxiety and such. And I would argue it's because money again is breaking down the relationship between the parent and the child. And so again, I think that money really is at the root of so many of the challenges we face in society.
00:45:35
Jim Crider
Yeah, I'd agree. i i I appreciate i know we we sort of went a lot of directions and we sort of teased out like, okay, well, clearly for the last hour, we've harped on the fact that we think our something's wrong with our current money problem.
Encouraging Curiosity and Critical Thinking
00:45:49
Jim Crider
And maybe we'll have you come back sometime and we'll talk through what we think the solution is. But I guess from from this conversation, is there anything, like if you had to summarize in a one bullet point Cade, Seb, like, what would you like?
00:46:04
Jim Crider
What's the one little nugget you would want someone walk away with?
00:46:09
Cade Grimm
I, uh, uh, not, not to steal Seb's words, but I think it's a great way to describe it is most people are experiencing the symptoms of a broken money system.
00:46:22
Cade Grimm
And i think everyone should pause and try to understand the root of the brokenness. instead of continue to just feel like, man, maybe this is my fault. I'm in this rat race. There's nothing I can do about this.
00:46:37
Cade Grimm
pause and try to understand the root of the symptoms you're experiencing.
00:46:41
Seb Bunney
I love that. I love that. And I think that like kind of echoing that, it's this idea that light life is getting harder and it doesn't have to be that way. But I think the key thing, and I'm sure you guys probably resonate, is that the circles in which we walk in and some of the individuals we spend our time with, these individuals that we were spending our time with in Montana,
00:47:01
Seb Bunney
I would say if there's one thing that kind of the common thread amongst all of these individuals is curiosity. And it's just like, be curious, like be curious, question things, dig deeper, try to be malleable. And it's kind of like this idea of like strong opinions loosely held.
00:47:15
Seb Bunney
It's just like absolutely debate and try to show up as your best self and don't character attack and
00:47:15
Jim Crider
Thank you.
00:47:21
Seb Bunney
question like, huh, I have this belief. Is this belief accurate? Am I simply holding this belief because I was told that's the way that it is when I went through school? And kind of be curious about these kind of beliefs that we hold. And I very much urge people, like the most inspiring, curious individuals.
00:47:40
Seb Bunney
It's amazing how you end up finding yourselves down very similar paths.
00:47:44
Jim Crider
Yeah, I think it's important to be willing to ask the questions that might seem like they're too simple. I wish would have known that when I was in high school and middle school, high school, college, was being willing to ask the these the stupid questions.
00:47:59
Jim Crider
Because i realized once I was bold enough to start asking those that everyone else was actually wondering the same thing. They were just afraid to ask it. So again, just be willing to ask, why? Why is this the case?
00:48:11
Jim Crider
Okay, what what is this? What's what's a ruler? What is money? And it might sound like a simple a silly question in its simplicity, but I i would venture to say these are questions that most people have not stopped to ask. And if you can get to that that first principle, that that root question, only from there can you build out on a strongly and structurally as you get further and further out on these things that you're trying to build upon. So be willing to ask those simple questions.
Fun and Personal Insights
00:48:37
Jim Crider
speaking of simple questions, uh, Seb, Hey, was in the show asking, asking each other just goofy question of the day. I usually go with, I like to ask my kids questions.
00:48:46
Jim Crider
So, one of my questions we we had recently was, uh, if you could have and any animal as a pet and you don't, you wouldn't have to worry about it like harming you or destroying the house. If you have any animals, as a pet, uh, what would it be?
00:49:00
Seb Bunney
Oh man, that is such a good question. If I could have any, you know what I have, you may have seen during the, during this podcast, I had a Husky that walked out of this door behind me, wandered up behind me and then tried to go outside and I was like, Nope, I'm on a podcast right now, but I love like wolf dogs.
00:49:12
Cade Grimm
No, no, no, no.
00:49:18
Seb Bunney
I would love to have a wolf, like an actual wolf. I just think it would just be phenomenal. and And I think at some point in my life, I will, It would be amazing to have like an acreage and to be able to yeah raise a pack of wolves that otherwise have... they've kind of We have a problem, I would say, in Canada and even in the US in general, where I think some people, they like the idea of having wolf dog, so they adopt a wolf and then they realize way too much.
00:49:43
Seb Bunney
I've got an apartment. I can't have a wolf in an apartment.
00:49:45
Cade Grimm
I would say
00:49:46
Jim Crider
Wait a second.
00:49:46
Seb Bunney
And so...
00:49:46
Jim Crider
That's a wolf. They realize that.
00:49:47
Seb Bunney
says system so It's a wolf. And so be nice to be able to have like an acreage to be able to these dogs that have been kind of rehomed that don't have the capacity to live in the wild again, to be able to still give them the space to be able roam and stuff. I would absolutely love that.
00:50:02
Seb Bunney
I'm curious about you, Kate, what would you go with?
00:50:07
Cade Grimm
i would say bald eagle
00:50:11
Cade Grimm
I've always been fascinated by birds of prey. I think they're majestic and incredible. And if I could have a bald eagle come land on my shoulder and hang out with me all day long, that'd be really neat.
00:50:22
Seb Bunney
Matt, you should, so where I live here in Squamish is Bald Eagle capital of the world. We have so many bald eagles flying around all the time. And do you guys see them down in Texas? Like, do they make it down that far?
00:50:36
Cade Grimm
Sometimes, yes.
00:50:36
Jim Crider
Rarely, occasionally.
00:50:37
Cade Grimm
Actually, in this In this part of we've seen a couple in this area and actually where where we lived before this was and was in southeast Oklahoma and we did see them occasionally.
00:50:47
Seb Bunney
Oh my God, they're they're app they're one of the most but like majestic birds. you know
00:50:51
Cade Grimm
Yeah.
00:50:52
Seb Bunney
few years back, I used to work in the school district as kind of like a support teacher. And we used to do these little activities and we went to this place called elf Elphinstone camp Campground. And it's basically just like a camp for kids, getting them out into nature, doing your standard things, canoeing and woodworking and stuff like that. And anyway, I was sat on the beach one evening. was It was October, November, and here it's quite cold. It was only just above freezing.
00:51:16
Seb Bunney
And all of the kids wanted to do like polar dips, jump in the cold water. And I sat there with one of the other teachers and I look over and there's a bald eagle at the top of one of these big cedar trees. It's probably 300 foot tall.
00:51:29
Seb Bunney
And this bald eagle, huge bald eagle sat at the top. And then it just... like jumps, dives into like a quick, like tucked wing dive, picks out a salmon out of the water and then just flies off with a full size salmon. I just remember just being like, oh my God, like nature truly is incredible. When you spend time in nature and you see these animals and their element, these birds and their element is profound.
00:51:51
Cade Grimm
Yeah, that that would be really neat. I've seen in Wyoming fly fishing. I've gotten some really good pictures of of eagles perched up in a tree right next to the river. I've i've never gotten to see one dive down and and grab a fish. But yeah, I definitely definitely would have a bald eagle if I could.
00:52:13
Cade Grimm
Jim?
00:52:13
Jim Crider
Seb, Kate, do you have a question? Oh, well, for me, I don't know. Maybe a bear. in fact yeah you know I think everyone wants to cuddle with a bear, but then we realize that, oh yeah, it's a bear and it would eat me.
00:52:18
Cade Grimm
Oh, yeah.
00:52:24
Jim Crider
But I would love to, i think it'd be fun to have a bear, be able cuddle up with. And you know it's big enough, you can also ride on it. So think it'd be they' pretty awesome.
00:52:34
Seb Bunney
Isn't there the guy, the grizzly guy, the he he raised grizzlies? I think had they were his best friends, but then eventually one just turned one day and ate him. I think it's
00:52:44
Jim Crider
Yeah. yep Yeah. He, he would get dropped off and and live with them in Alaska for a couple of months every summer. And then, yeah, one day i think they said, they said it was a new bear that he didn't recognize and yeah, it ate him.
00:52:55
Jim Crider
So yeah. Yeah.
00:52:57
Cade Grimm
this
00:52:58
Seb Bunney
As for questions, the only thing that comes to mind and this is this a super random question. And so you can answer it however you want to. Years ago, I went to this job interview. And at the very end of the interview, similar to this, they had just like a random question. And the random question was, if you were a sandwich or a burger, what sandwich or burger best describes your personality?
00:53:24
Cade Grimm
Oh, man.
00:53:36
Jim Crider
Let's see.
00:53:36
Cade Grimm
That's tough.
00:53:37
Jim Crider
yeah yeah
00:53:40
Cade Grimm
and For me, I'll go and say maybe a club sandwich. Because it seems like a really common thing at the surface level. Like, it's just a club sandwich. You can get that anywhere.
00:53:53
Cade Grimm
But there are layers of complexity that make the club sandwich what it is. That's amazing.
00:53:58
Seb Bunney
that. love that
00:54:00
Jim Crider
Mine's like the opposite. I was good i would, for me, it'd probably be a grill. Mine would be a grilled cheese because it's super simple, but you can still make it really good. If you do it well, it's simple, but can still be great.
00:54:10
Seb Bunney
It was like the Michelin star grilled cheese.
00:54:13
Jim Crider
Yeah.
00:54:13
Cade Grimm
that's amazing
00:54:15
Seb Bunney
You know what I'd say? I've always been curious about just like making really, really good quality food. And so I went deep down the rabbit hole of sourdough bread for a while before I went carnivore. And then I realized I probably shouldn't be eating grain and was devastated.
00:54:28
Seb Bunney
But I bought like a mill, would bring in kind of like organic grain from one of the local farms, mill the grain. So it'd probably some, I would say it would be some like grass fed beef of some sort on like a handmade like sourdough loaf with freshly milled grain. And it's it's just about like the quality of ingredients, being conscious about and intentional about what goes into it.
00:54:50
Jim Crider
Nice. might I don't know. we didn't really get to talk too much Montana. My wife is super organic-y and she buys organic raw grain and she soaks it and sprouts it and dehydrates it and then mills all of own grain. So like last night we had breakfast for dinner. So she she we had waffles with the grain that she ground and milled and all that stuff. Or Friday night's pizza night. She makes the the dough and tortillas and all that. So it's pretty cool. It's good.
00:55:18
Seb Bunney
That is so cool. and And you know what, like I would say of walking in these circles, especially everyone again, that we were around in Montana, being around people that are curious, being around people that are increasingly seeing their capacity increase.
00:55:31
Seb Bunney
It's amazing how their focus becomes. And it's just like, I want to be conscious about what I put my body. want to be conscious about who I spend my time with. I want to be conscious about how I show up in the world, spending more time in nature. And I just, I love it.
00:55:41
Seb Bunney
Absolutely love it. People that want to be intentional about how they show up. I think it's just one of the most rewarding things being around such individuals.
00:55:48
Jim Crider
Yeah, dude. Kate, what you got?
00:55:52
Cade Grimm
My question,
00:55:54
Jim Crider
Yeah.
00:55:56
Cade Grimm
oh would you rather rather be able to fall asleep instantly or not need to sleep?
00:56:09
Jim Crider
Can I still sleep if I wanted to, but don't need to?
00:56:15
Seb Bunney
That's a really good point.
00:56:16
Cade Grimm
That is a good point.
00:56:16
Jim Crider
yeah
00:56:17
Cade Grimm
I didn't think that deeply about it.
00:56:18
Jim Crider
yeah I can already fall asleep pretty instantly.
00:56:22
Cade Grimm
I'll say no. I'll say no.
00:56:23
Jim Crider
Oh, man. Man, well, if I don't need to, I guess I can just relax. I guess not need to sleep. I enjoy sleeping, but I can rest through other things. So if I didn't need a sleep, I can go rest by reading a book, laying by the fire, laying in my hammock. So I'll go that way. I can already fall asleep pretty much instantly every night because I'm so stinking tired by the time i get the kids down.
00:56:43
Jim Crider
So that's not an issue. It's nice, but maybe I'll give I'll give not need to sleep a try.
00:56:49
Cade Grimm
Okay, Seb?
00:56:49
Seb Bunney
i want I wonder, like, man, this is a tough one because to me, i i would classify myself as like a extroverted introvert.
00:57:00
Seb Bunney
As in like, i I'm not really a big fan of like big, big, big group environments when there's a lot of people that don't necessarily know. But when I'm in these tight-knit communities, when you're around people you care about, I can be quite extroverted.
00:57:07
Cade Grimm
Mm-hmm.
00:57:13
Seb Bunney
And the thing is, I still really appreciate, even though I would say that I'm overly interview inverted in many ways, I still really appreciate socializing. And I think that if you lived on schedule where you're awake and everyone else is asleep, I think it'd be really hard.
00:57:29
Seb Bunney
i've i've I've definitely seen people that do like night shifts. They've got much higher rates of depression and all of these kind of things.
00:57:34
Jim Crider
yeah that's just curious this the psychological impact of not needing to sleep and how that would wear on day after day i think that'd be really bad for you yeah did you have to supplement instead of sleeping
00:57:40
Cade Grimm
Yeah.
00:57:43
Seb Bunney
Totally.
00:57:44
Cade Grimm
Yeah.
00:57:45
Seb Bunney
Yeah, you're kind of out of sync with everyone else.
00:57:48
Cade Grimm
Yeah. I struggle to fall asleep and stay asleep.
00:57:52
Seb Bunney
So you're going with being able to fall asleep instantly.
00:57:55
Cade Grimm
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
00:57:57
Jim Crider
just go have a few more kids and uh then it won't be a problem
00:58:03
Cade Grimm
Yeah.
00:58:03
Jim Crider
I, the moment Kendra, Kendra every night I hear, take a drink of water, close her water bottle, turn off the lamp.
00:58:04
Cade Grimm
That.
00:58:11
Jim Crider
And then i don't remember anything after that.
00:58:18
Cade Grimm
I've always struggled to fall asleep and stay asleep. So I don't know that adding more kids would help. it would just, it would give my, give my mind one more thing to, to stew on while I was trying to fall asleep. So
00:58:30
Jim Crider
fair. Well, fellas, thanks for hanging out. It's good conversation.
00:58:35
Seb Bunney
No, i great to see you guys again.
00:58:35
Cade Grimm
yeah, it was awesome.
00:58:37
Seb Bunney
And yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing you guys in person again and i really appreciate having me on. Really enjoyed the conversation.
00:58:43
Jim Crider
Yes, sir. Thanks.