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You can have it all too. Visit cmhserviceindustry.com to learn more. As I pass through my incarnations, in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the gods of the marketplace. Peering through reverent fingers, I watch them flourish and fall. And the gods of the copybook headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn that water would certainly wet us, as fire would certainly burn. But we found them lacking in uplift, vision, and breadth of mind. So we left them to teach the gorillas, while we followed the march of mankind.

We moved as the spirit listed. They never altered their pace, being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the gods of the marketplace. But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come that a tribe had been wiped off its ice field, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the hopes that our world is built on, they were utterly out of touch. They denied that the moon was Stilton. They denied she was even Dutch. They denied that wishes were horses. They denied that a pig had wings. So we worshipped the gods of the market, who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, they promised perpetual peace. They swore if we gave them our weapons that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed, they sold us and delivered us bound to our foe. And the gods of the copybook headings said, "Stick to the devil you know." On the first Feminian sandstones we were promised the fuller life, which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife.

Till our women had no more children, and the men lost reason and faith. And the gods of the copybook headings said, "The wages of sin is death." In the Carboniferous epoch we were promised abundance for all, by robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul. But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy.

And the gods of the copybook headings said, "If you don't work, you die." Then the gods of the market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew. And the hearts of the meanest were humbled, and began to believe it was true, that all is not gold that glitters, and two and two make four.

And the gods of the copybook headings limped up to explain it once more. As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of man, there are only four things certain since social progress began. That the dog returns to his vomit, and the sow returns to her mire, and the burnt fool's bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the fire.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins, when all men are paid for existing, and no man must pay for his sins. As surely as water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn, the gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter return.

That poem is by Rudyard Kipling, it's titled "The Gods of the Copybook Headings," and it's one of my two favorite Kipling poems. My other favorite is the classic Kipling poem "If," but this is my second favorite. And I've thought about this a lot over the last week or two.

This last month in October we read Kipling poems every day at our breakfast table, among other assorted readings we read a poem together. And this last month we were reading Kipling, and I was reminded of this classic excellent poem. I've been reading it for a few years, when reading it to my family, and it's just been burning in my mind ever since I read it, as I've watched events happen in the world.

Let me give you a quick bit of analysis to help the uninitiated to understand and perhaps appreciate this poem on a deeper level. Rudyard Kipling wrote this poem, or at least it was published, in the year 1919, the end of the year in England, and then early the next year in the United States.

If you think for a moment about what was happening in the world in 1919 and 1920, you'll quickly come to realize that World War I had officially come to a close. But what is very important to understand about World War I and its impact on the world is that World War I basically destroyed the progressivism of the era.

A little bit of broad social commentary. Remember that the 19th century and the early 20th century was a time of high-flying ambition for most of the cultural elites in the West. Coming out of the Renaissance, the Renaissance period, where people believed that all things were being reborn and rebirthed and that we were coming together to create the dream world that we wanted.

You look around the world, you see various revolutions in many places, revolutions in social thought, etc. A lot of those violent revolutions had died down in the 19th century, and the elites of the world, especially the elites of the West, were flying high, believing that we were in a brand new era where none of the old rules applied and we had the choice to remake everything exactly as we wanted to be, to basically remake the world in our image as the most enlightened, most informed human beings of all time.

This was a heady and euphoric era in the cultural elites. And yet an event happened that destroyed all of that. That event is called World War I. World War I devastated, on really a global basis, the culture, because it proved that not only were the many predictions of eternal peace and prosperity, etc., certainly wrong.

Worse than that, World War I was so exceedingly destructive that it proved that on the flip side all of the worst things of the human experience were available to a much higher degree, and war could now be more destructive than ever before. So in the wake of World War I, Rudyard Kipling wrote this poem called "The Gods of the Copybook Headings." Now, who are the gods of the copybook headings?

What is a copybook heading? In those days, a century back, it was very common and normal that in order to learn and practice handwriting, you would be given a copybook. A copybook was a bound collection of pages with lines drawn on them, and at the top of the copybook would be a pithy aphorism or a proverb or some other maxim or verse.

It could be a verse of poetry, a verse of scripture, etc. And this was given to you to copy multiple times as a way of simultaneously perfecting your handwriting, but also as a way of drilling into your head the moral instruction that mattered. And this would have been very commonly understood at the time when he published the poem.

For example, he makes three specific quotes in this poem from the copybook headings. "Stick to the devil you know," "The wages of sin is death," and "If you don't work, you die." And of course there were many others. But these gods of the copybook headings were part of the common culture.

This is the classic wisdom of the centuries collected into a form that we could use to instruct our children. And yet there was this... we wanted to disregard all of the gods of the copybook headings. We wanted to disregard these classic forms of wisdom, and we want to show that these things are out of touch.

We wanted to show that the gods of the market, the comparison here between the gods of the market is the ideas of the current day, showing that all the ideas of the past are out of touch. And this was a time of tremendous social change. But of course, on virtually every level, as you see Kipling's analysis here, is social commentary showing that no, actually the wisdom of the ages is here to stay, and it's not changing.

It's the gods of the market who are foolish and deluded, and what's worse, they may be more than foolish and deluded. They may genuinely be immoral. They may genuinely be... they may not just be wrong, they may be worse than that. Now the temptation for all of us is to assume that our situations...

that we understand exactly what the flow of history is going to look like. And yet throughout history, it's very difficult to see why you're in the middle of it. And so I want to be cautious, because I of course have my own opinions and my own perspectives on the things that will work and the things that will not work in our day and age, ranging from financial topics, which is my primary focus here at Radical Personal Finance, to social topics and cultural topics, political topics, etc.

We all have our biases, our understanding and our perspectives. And I would say that history will show us that things can change, and things often should change. But there's also that classic maxim that we have, saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same. That most of the things that we argue about, most of the changes, are actually...

don't accomplish the things that we hope that they accomplish. And even the changes that stick wind up with a whole long list of unintended consequences. I think when you think about social issues or cultural issues, you can see this classic tension more than financial issues. But in financial issues, we have to grow increasingly confident with our perspectives.

And yet this is... meaning we have to make sure that we understand the wisdom of the past, and then use whatever useful frameworks we can find from the past in order to be clear and understanding of what is working today. And yet this is difficult, because it flies in the face of what seems to be apparent today.

The change that we're particularly excited about today. I was struck by, of course, the event of this past week, right? FTX, the collapse of FTX, the collapse of various cryptocurrencies, complete destruction across the marketplace in terms of stealing of customer money, many accounts disappeared, just massive levels of destruction, right?

We've talked about that elsewhere. But I was thinking about this when comparing a little meme that I saw showing the collapse of the net worth of Mr. Facebook, Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg compared to Warren Buffett's net worth over the past months. And Warren Buffett is basically this archetype of the classic traditional investor, right?

This is Warren Buffett who owns Nebraska Furniture Mart, and who owns railroads, and who invests in these long companies. And this is the Warren Buffett who said, "I don't invest in tech because I don't understand it." Now, always remember with Warren Buffett that a lot of his folksiness is more of an image that he has cultivated rather than a genuine expression of who he is.

If you read a biography of Warren Buffett, you'll quickly see that he is exceedingly smart, he is exceedingly current, he is extremely progressive, but he has cultivated over the years this impression of kind of the folksy grandfather from Omaha. So don't be fooled by the image that he has cultivated.

But there is also a sense in which we see a tremendous truthfulness behind kind of the tried and true. If we look at, for example, Buffett, his investing philosophy goes back to Benjamin Graham and the writers of a century back, and the philosophies of a century back. And in that context, we can see that you can still use the tools and tactics and techniques of the past century very, very effectively in our modern age.

I myself find myself drawn consistently to the concept of value investing because it aligns with this idea that there is value, here's how we arrive at the value, we buy when the markets are inexpensive and we keep for a very long time and sell when they're overvalued. The problem is this requires you to go against what is often years of seeming wrongness.

And I want to bring our attention to this in the wake of the cryptocurrency markets over the past few years. There was a time, feels like a year ago, maybe about a year ago, when I looked around and I wondered, are all of the rules of finance completely broken?

I looked around and I looked at the rates that people were earning on various schemes in cryptocurrency, the rates of return, etc. And I thought, what's wrong with me? Why do I not see that this stuff could work? But I didn't come out and just completely oppose it all as scams because I don't think it all is.

But it was very evident, especially in hindsight, and again, I'm fully aware that it can be easy to talk about, oh, look, I was so smart after the fact. But it was evident that, wait a second, this can't continue because the numbers just don't make sense. So always remember that markets can be very irrational for a significant period of time.

And those may be interesting and fun times to speculate, but you always want to make sure that you go back to what has always worked, the traditional things that are proven, because the irrationality of today will eventually be corrected by the gods of the copybook headings, that true wisdom that has been collected from our forebears.

My first argument is simply that you should accept that. You should accept that there is wisdom in the past. If I were starting Radical Personal Finance over again, I'm not sure I would choose the name Radical Personal Finance. I still like it. I'm going with it because I believe it expresses some very useful truths.

But over the years, over the last almost 10 years that I've done this podcast, I have come to appreciate how... I have come to appreciate the wisdom of the past on so many issues. And I've come to realize that this is more to simply a reflection of my age, and what a man learns as he grows older.

When I started with the name Radical Personal Finance, I was frustrated by the world as it was, and I wanted to change it in a very progressive shape. And so I had many ideas about how everything should be different from the past, and I wasn't paying attention to the wisdom of the ages the way that I should have.

And what I found very interesting and ironic is that as I have tested many ongoing radical ideas, I have frequently found that there was a wisdom in the traditional conservative culture of the day that I didn't appreciate. And I've come to believe that I should be very slow about just simply throwing out the old system and wiping my hands of it and just saying, "Oh, it's all worthless." I think any long-time listeners would notice that I have tried to become much more cautious in my commentary and be more accurate, rather than being flippant and revolutionary in my comments, to be accurate and thoughtful and acknowledge what has gone well, and acknowledge that I may not understand until many years from now why a certain structure exists.

And that if we replace something we don't understand, we often reap consequences that we didn't anticipate. And unfortunately I see this happening very broadly. I'll give you an example from the financial space, and then we'll go on to other examples as well. The example from the financial space simply has to do with how we create money.

I myself don't think a lot of the modern Federal Reserve System of fiat money creation. But where I've always tried to temper myself is to say, "Until I can clearly explain why fiat money was created to supersede the previous system and what was attractive about it, I should be cautious in just systematically waving my hand and saying it's for nothing." And I find this very interesting as an example.

Why did we disconnect money from the gold standard? Right now in our day there is increasing conversations about the need to anchor money to an external unchangeable standard. And I'm a fan of those things. I'm not a flag-waving, unconditional supporter, but that makes a lot of sense to me because I look at the destruction that happens and inflation of fiat systems when government bureaucrats can just wave their hands and fund everything they want and destroy it.

Let's go back to that stanza from Kipling's poem. In the Carboniferous epoch, we were promised abundance for all by robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul. Welcome to the "there's nothing new about the progressive tax systems, etc. that we live under and argue about today." Next line, "But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy." And the gods of the copybook headings said, "If you don't work, you die." And so the point is simply that if you can't explain clearly the problems that the money system that was unlinked from the gold-backed system was trying to accomplish, then I hesitate to follow your advice about what the new system should be, because you can create a whole bunch of new problems.

And we could do this in many—again, on social issues or on environmental issues. If you go back and you look, I have a real passion for smart urban planning and urban design. And what I find interesting is how we've, in many cases, transformed cities into hellscapes. Many modern cities, especially in the United States, just feel like urban hellscapes.

They're not pleasant places to be. Nobody wants to come and visit them. And we go back to an old city in Europe and we walk around and we take our cameras and we dream of our vacation to Venice or we dream of our vacation to a small Swiss town or to a great kind of classic 500-year-old city.

And people love to be in those places. But we created something new without understanding what was brilliant about the old design. And we ignored, in many cases, the collected wisdom of millennia of human experience. And we paved it all over in the United States. We paved it all over.

We destroyed our cities and put parking lots up instead, made these massive roads. And they're just unpleasant places to be. Last night I shared a great YouTube video by the Not Just Bikes channel, a wonderful channel on social commentary. It goes and talks about why nobody wants to raise children, why you should never live in the suburbs when you want to raise children.

I'd encourage you to look at it and think about it because it's a perfect encapsulation of this rule of unintended consequences. The suburbs in the United States, which were very, very commonly built, the suburbs were created without an understanding in a time of massive expansion where people didn't understand what was happening and what would be created.

And so the suburbs were created because people said, "Oh, that's where I want to go to raise my children." The suburbs became exceedingly car dependent and they kind of created this whole culture. But that culture itself is very, very unfriendly to children. And it's funny, there's an argument about this, about, well, do people want to move to the suburbs when they have children?

Right? I have four children, so I know something about this. But while I appreciate certain aspects of the suburbs, and I try to be cautious in my commentary, what we created is a world that is completely unfriendly to children. It continues to have ongoing impact on our child rearing.

And our world continues to be emptied of children. We could look at the same thing on social issues. One of the single biggest issues of our day is population collapse. We're not having children. You can see this all over the world in different areas. In the United States, we can trace this back dramatically towards the rise of industrialization.

We can trace this back to the invention of the birth control pill. We can trace this directly to liberalizing divorce laws, no-fault divorce, which started during the 1980s. We can continue on through the era to today, through even to right now, the US Congress and Senate are debating the so-called Respect for Marriage Act.

And yet, if we look at the results of these things, we see that in reality, if marriage formation has collapsed, marriage continuation has fallen apart, and the production of children in our society has collapsed, which has massive impacts for the long term. So the social progressives that have wrought the future that we now live in didn't understand the things that contributed to a basic, functioning, stable society.

And they've systematically built a world in which the idea of getting married is very unattractive, the idea of having children while continuing to be a strong biological urge is very unattractive, etc. So you can go and look at China, right? China is collapsing right now. Why is China collapsing?

Because social progressives and communists came in and said, "We have way too many people, population control is out of control." And so they came in and implemented the one-child policy, and in a single generation, an entire population is already and is going to be completely wrecked, with no ability to continue itself in a meaningful way, because a millennia-old civilization was destroyed in some decades by revolutionaries.

Now let's go to money and to finance. We have to be on guard for this same thing happening in money and in finance, because there are always going to be – the more things change, the more they stay the same – there's always going to be these basic human impulses.

There's always going to be swindlers, there's always going to be Ponzi schemes, there's always going to be people promising a brand new solution to a problem you didn't have, and you need to firmly keep in mind the truths that will endure. You need to firmly keep in mind these truths as you approach your life, your earning, your spending, your investments, and think about how you can align yourself with those long-won truths.

The question that I can't answer for you is, where do you draw the line? So let's deal with a couple of obvious examples. When we wade into the collapse of the cryptocurrency space over the last week, there is a strong distinction between the crypto people and the Bitcoiners. The Bitcoiners say everything except Bitcoin is worthless, and the crypto people say, "But we innovated on the back of Bitcoin." Now I myself am drawn and swayed to a distinction, to want to distinguish between Bitcoin and various other tokens that are made up and created.

But at its core, let's be very humble and acknowledge that while indeed we may have solved a very long embedded problem with the ability to transact between individuals and to externally verify those transactions, Bitcoin may indeed have solved that problem in a new and innovative way. Let's be exceedingly humble about the relative newness on the human stage.

And it concerns me deeply when individuals get so wrapped up in their revolutionary fervor and their ideological blindness that they ignore the wisdom of the ages. They ignore the classic things like owning your home. They ignore the classic things like keeping cash on hand, etc., and put everything in favor of something new and revolutionary.

When everything is going up, it feels exciting, it feels euphoric. But when all of a sudden you face brand new headwinds, the wisdom of the ages, the copybook headings come into play. Now let's go back and go a step further. Go back a century and you have a completely different perspective on stock market investing than we have today.

Today stock market investing, through the use of a balanced, diversified portfolio of mutual funds, is considered to be the wisdom of the ages. But even there, I think we should always be skeptical. I am perfectly fine with stock market investing, but stock market investing is a fundamentally new concept.

And even though it's more than a century old, it's still a fundamentally new concept. And what has never been tested, to my knowledge, anywhere at any time in human history, is even the concept of broad-scale stock market investing. If you went back 70 years and look at who owned stocks, it was a very small percentage of the population.

Wealthy elites who owned stocks. You fast forward to today and increasingly, virtually all of the citizenry is engaged in stock market investing. I don't oppose it, I support it, but I support balancing that with the wisdom of the ages, with the wisdom of other forms of assets, with the wisdom of owning physical assets, with the wisdom of being prudent with regard to debt and the modern financial system, etc.

And we can go back and back and back and back. Now of course I've been reading systematically chapters from the excellent book The Richest Man in Babylon here on Radical Personal Finance. That's an old book, it's in the public domain, that's why I'm reading the entirety of it. It's an old and classic book, and that book is written as an allegory.

It's written in the context of it being a millennia old. But what you see in that book is you see wisdom expressed. Obviously the book is an invention of the modern age, but by using the old-fashioned language and the old-fashioned concepts, we can see the truth that has existed throughout time.

We can see that there very well could have been these characters who learned these lessons, and they learned their lessons in the context of copper pennies and pieces of silver and gold, and we apply them in our modern age through dollars or yen or pounds or euros, but yet those lessons are—there is a continuity, a similarity between these lessons that arches over the millennia.

So it's very important that we study our history, that we understand past events of history, that we look at the arc of history, we understand what is the wisdom that does not change, and then how do we embrace the changes that are truly new and useful, that solve the problems of the past.

And we need to understand that in order to look at our modern day. This is clearly hard, because history in some cases is faster than we think it should be, and in some cases is much slower than we think it should be. We think that our predictions of what will happen should happen immediately, but as I grow older what I realize is I can be more right—I can be very right on the direction of change, but I can find it very difficult to predict the timing of change.

I think about this—I guess a relationship would be—an example would be relationships and also financial events. I have some close friends who have recently separated, husband and wife, and what's interesting to me is the arc of change, that the prediction of where they would wind up, has been obvious to me for a good number of years.

It started with financial problems, continuing financial problems, those financial problems weren't addressed, change didn't happen, and you could see the direction of change that seemed inevitable in terms of the relationship. But what couldn't be predicted was the particular timing at which the relationship would collapse. And so as I've grown older I've learned to trust my intuition and my predictions on where things will go, but simultaneously to be less confident in my timing of exactly when things will go there, because sometimes good situations seem to continue long after we think they should end, and bad situations come at times that are completely unforeseen.

So we need to be cautious and try to incorporate history, but make plans that work well regardless of the particular timing of events. I want to close with my favorite quote on this tension. This of course comes from another author writing a century ago, G.K. Chesterton, the British author and commentator.

And this is the quote on progressives and conservatives that I think is so powerful for us to continue. Here it is. "The whole modern world has divided itself into conservatives and progressives. The business of progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types, the advanced person who rushes us into ruin and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine.

Each new blunder of the progressive, or prig, becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our constitution." I share that because it's something I think about a lot, this tension between those who identify themselves as progressives and those who identify themselves as conservatives.

I have broad application to this in the political and social sphere, but I'm less interested in the context of this particular podcast about that as I am in making sure that you think of yourself as someone who can understand that things should be changed and embrace new solutions without rushing headlong into them and making huge mistakes that are very difficult to recover from.

We need to be informed by the past and we need to write our book of those things that will not change. The wisdom of the ages is things that will not change. I try to do that in my work at Radical Personal Finance. That means that at times there are things that I miss, but what my desire to do is to focus on those concepts, those ideas, those principles that are timeless in their application, that will work just as well in 2022 as they did in 1922 or in 1622.

My ambition is that those same things will work in the year 2622. Again, we don't know the specific tools, but we can see the course of history. Although the specific tools will change, the dollar will have—I'll make my prediction, you can come back and do it—the dollar will have long ceased to exist and become utterly worthless by the year 2622.

How's that for a safe prediction? It's already collapsed multiple times. No chance it makes it another century. I don't know what will have replaced it. Pretty skeptical it's Bitcoin, but hey, who knows. The point is that whatever currency you're dealing with, you can deal with it intelligently between here and the year 2622 if you recognize that virtually all currencies collapse, but the value endures.

This is why when you dig into what do the wealthy invest in, well, you invest into businesses that can change and adapt, and they can just switch out and say, "Hey, we'll start accepting this currency. We'll accept that currency from there," and they're building wealth and money and then turning around, investing it into hard assets and investing it into business expansion.

And then, of course, the flip side is hard assets. Why does Bill Gates, who made his fortune in computer software, why is he now one of the largest landowners in the United States? Because food and land are still continually important. And so the lesson is not that you should go and invest in land if you're broke.

The lesson is that if you're looking for long-term perspectives, you need a business or a job that's going to create income for you. Then once you have enough of it, you deploy it into multi-generational assets, et cetera. I'll continue. I want to close today. That's enough. I don't want to go on with example after example, but just recognize the importance of understanding the past and then making sure that you are being wise about what you're involved in today.

I want to close with, I'll read this poem to you again because there's great wisdom in here and I would encourage you now that you understand a little bit of the background, some of the terms, et cetera, listen again as we close today's show. The Gods of the Copybook Headings by Rudyard Kipling.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the gods of the marketplace. Peering through reverent fingers, I watch them flourish and fall. And the gods of the copybook headings, I notice, outlast them all. We were living in trees when they met us.

They showed us each in turn that water would certainly wet us, as fire would certainly burn. But we found them lacking in uplift, vision, and breadth of mind. So we left them to teach the gorillas while we followed the march of mankind. We moved as the spirit listed. They never altered their pace, being neither cloud nor wind borne like the gods of the marketplace.

But they always caught up with our progress and presently word would come that a tribe had been wiped off its ice field or the lights had gone out in Rome. With the hopes that our world is built on, they were utterly out of touch. They denied that the moon was Stilton.

They denied she was even Dutch. They denied that wishes were horses. They denied that a pig had wings. So we worshipped the gods of the market who promised these beautiful things. When the Cambrian measures were forming, they promised perpetual peace. They swore if we gave them our weapons that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed, they sold us and delivered us bound to our foe. And the gods of the copybook headings said, "Stick to the devil you know." On the first Feminian sandstones, we were promised the fuller life, which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife.

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith. And the gods of the copybook headings said, "The wages of sin is death." In the Carboniferous epoch, we were promised abundance for all by robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul. But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy.

And the gods of the copybook headings said, "If you don't work, you die." Then the gods of the market tumbled and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew. And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true, that all is not gold that glitters, and two and two make four.

And the gods of the copybook headings limped up to explain it once more. As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of man, there are only four things certain since social progress began. That the dog returns to his vomit and the sow returns to her mire, and the burnt fool's bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the fire.

And that after this is accomplished and the brave new world begins, when all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, as surely as water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn, the gods of the copybook headings, with terror and slaughter, return.

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