what if your real edge is disobedience.

0:00Five, four, three, two, one, ladies and gentlemen, I'm done doing, I'm doing a follow-up. I know you wait, you wait months for a podcast from me and then two show up in a week. And I'm starting, I hope you can hear it, it's another banger, this is Graham Rabbit. These were like some ladies from the desert of California, Graham Rabbit and the song is the devil's playground from the 2004 classic album, music, music my friends to start, a cult, what's my kind of music? You know, I even, I referenced such a really talk about this, legal things, but I referenced this in my February 2005 investment letter at Equiptical.

1:06I was in the process of quitting the London micro hedge fund show, where I was number two, I was a partner. And very definitely, who do you felt like the devil's playground? No comment, anyway, you know someone in the mail bag from the last show asked me what the point of the show was, bitch, sorry, I'm sorry, fair enough, but in my defence, well let me tell you, what was the point? It reminded me of a Solomon story, Solomon was the fixed income house on Wall Street, Michael Lewis, Lyos Poker was based on stories around emanating from the Solomon trading

2:06desks. So picture this is mid was at the mid 1990s, I don't know, let's call it a long time ago. And Trader Mike, my great friend, he gets, he was really good at the, what am I doing here, my playing golf, I don't know, he was good at golf. And so they got a, they got an off site day, money's involved, they're playing golf. And so Mike gets paired with the senior rates guy. The guy that has lunch every month with the chairman of the Federal Reserve, as in the guy that has the best possible inside seat. And Trader Mike, he asks him, how do you find the edge in rates, in interest rates, where are they going? And the guy who looks at him, he's like, I don't know, I'm presenting, he's holding a

3:07potter, he's looking down, and he looks up at Mike. And the guy looks straight in the eyes and he says, rates are impossible to predict. And hoes for the party three, I don't know, think of it. The guy that has the best inside steer, I mean, there was the edge, and he couldn't make any sense of it. The more friends, it's the fucking point. You think following every data print gives you insight. Why not? It's definitely doesn't, it's a rehearse game that hoses you on fees, where you treat noise and you call it signal. It's a consensual hallucination. Now, this is Nick's show, which is very much, but last show, again, shall I actually do it?

4:13This is the Nick's show, it was like, it was like the Truman show sometimes. And it's not called Truman show, it's called, you don't need an edge, you need, what do you need? Anyone can anyone guess anyone, viola, viola, what do you need? You need disobedience, because alpha, which is a Greek letter, which is used by suits in the city in Austria, alpha begins where permission ends, like your style, your swag, your outperformance begins where permission ends, oh yeah, baby. Now this paper was inspired by my fucking great friend, Rick, R.Y.K. He's the genius, he's an artist, he creates these rings that I love wearing, and he sent me a whatsapp message on Sunday night, and it's a picture of him launching himself over

5:18a 12 foot gap, for sure, you're able to see it somewhere in the material. He launched himself as though he had a personal vendetta against hesitation, no helmet, no plan, no breaks in his head, just fucking launched himself into the void, full throttle, no pause, no second thought, just commitment. The more edge of chaos, the more edge of chaos itself, that's not some, believe me, that's not some co-culated edge, that's real shit with real consequences, and not my brothers and sisters, that's why I fucking love Rick, but you made me think of you guys, my little brothers and sisters, because I don't think, I don't think you're sitting there like obedient little bitches, glued to the two Wall Street screens, hunting for signal in the endless

6:20macro circles, I don't think about you, I hear you saying instead, fuck, they're rational analysis, fuck, they're well-formed arguments, they're decimal point, wrists in $3,000, Gucci suits, okay, where are Gucci suits, I don't know, I don't, although there was that time in the line where I bought the silver plastic Gucci suit, and I was an ass, my mother was a sister, she was saying, fuck you, in your 14 points, 14 basis points, was a basis point, basis point, bill of bill of, basis point is a hundredth of one percent, 14 hundredth of one percent is not yielded drift, and you know, watching Rick, like evil can evil launching himself, I had this strange thought, does this cross the old European thinker, do you call them an intellectual, what was it called, it's not Pornow, it's a

7:23dono, not Pornow, I don't know, E-D-O-R-N-O, he spent most of his life picking up the modern psyche, you're so, I reckon that fucker would have understood more about Rick's jump than the parasites on financial television pretending to understand the bond market, I don't know, he'd have phrased for it, the moment, the moment when you stop standing at a safe distance from the void, from the void from the world, that moment when you just say, fuck it, and he called it, what did he call it, he called it, mimetic, mimetic regression, I mean, you know, a pretentious expression, if ever I heard one, but keep the image of Rick launching himself, because under pressure or ecstasy, and a lot of ecstasy, Lee, Lee,

8:28that's not a drug, my eye is a drug, it's not a drug reference, under pressure ecstasy, fear, you know what happens, you can drop out of that polished fake version of yourself and fall back into something older, more primal, raw, less filtered, that person stops interpreting, measuring the storm, like an agent of the meteorological office, because before modern life turned everything into spreadsheets and forecast, before then, you know what we sucky survived by, a coming the storm, not thinking about it, not modeling it, not dressing it up with cute fucking metaphors about sticky bricks, we wear the fucking storm,

9:29you either the thing that moved, or you're the thing that didn't survive, but that old animal fire, meaning within us, it got varied, it got varied alive, so deep under layers of schooling, jobs, apps, algos, the dopamine of these huge platforms, and of course, the idea of the mall, central bank, fairy tales. The system told you all to be rational, to calculate every move, to chase meaning in every data point, to stay safe, and you know what, you all obeyed. And Rex bite John, that was something different, it was not conceived as like an Instagram fucking content picture, Rex is not a humble brother, you should check out his Instagram, however,

10:37you'll never find a picture of Rick, but you'll find the rings, star, lingier, star, L-I-N-G-E-E-A-R, something like that, I don't know, no, back to Rick in his jump, I don't even know what it was, I'm thinking potted cell, I'm thinking the etiquette of the potted cell, and I'm thinking that's a metaphor, my metaphor for modern, financial life. Rick was one guy stepping outside the soft prison of modern explanation, it was a bingo to my mind, it was a guy willing to be to be wrong on his terms, and fuck me, but don't the consequences, and that's why it feels so fucking good, whether people like to admit it or not, because the age we live in, it despises shit like that, it despises direct

11:43contact with reality, that buried fire within your soul has been tonned and corrupted has been tonned against you, is feeding you predigested narratives, federal open market committee meet minutes, producer price inflation, prints, gross domestic product, twigs, the suits, they want you copying their certainty, like the good little acid light slaves they want you to be, that's the weak regression, that's scrolling for the next insight, believing the TV suits when they tell you 14 fucking points is a revelation, which is not, if you're not careful, you become the NPC, you know, the non player character, in their game, you're

12:50chasing phantoms, phantom cycles, phantom data, phantom consequences, while they collect the trade and the exchange fee, their game demands that your life be buffered, narrated, translated, focus script, hedged, insured, and tonned into fucking panel discussion, the financial system wants man, I don't want to go all hydrotedia, but especially man, it wants them to become spectators of their own lives, wants some standing, standing there, hands playing pocket bill, you know, that is, I'm sorry, I'm standing, I'm not just realized, I'm wearing my suit pajamas, I don't have pockets, yeah, when I used to work in London, the posh guys, you heard of this like pocket billiards, hands of your pockets

13:52wearing, I don't know what they're doing, they're spectators of their own lives, they're watching the screen explain what's happening, instead of touching the thing, I'm not talking about that penis, don't touch your penis, I'm talking about touch the void, touch the life, do not become a spectator to your own life, because look what it does to people, they don't act anymore, they process, I hate process, they don't decide the console, I hate console, they don't, they don't see, but they react to the official captions, as a fucking week part, my neighbors are hitting off again, I'm in the ghetto, what was I saying, I was talking

14:52about you, I must speak slowly for my American cousins, I'm talking about your manhood dissolving into their micro circles, becoming you becoming another asset light, what do you mean, light means, you don't have any assets, scrolling with the next insight, believing the suits when they dress up noise as wisdom, they say to you maturity is distance good intelligence is permanent irony good, safety the highest good, I don't know because somewhere along the way distance becomes, distance becomes disengagement, irony becomes avoidance and safety becomes the only thing you optimize, you end up watching your own life instead of living it, that's

15:56so fucking weak, of course you don't notice it happening, you just become another in all band, trusting the same people who turn noise into a business model, nowhere, there's a bit of your frustration, there's no more advanced than the world of stalks and shares, where Ado careers about explaining trivial movements as if they were a message from God, a decimal shifts a basis point, twitches, a bureaucrat only clears his throat, Washington Londoner, Brussels, and the liturgy, rise, goal, the masses ended, I don't know one thing, I'm talking about men and expensive suits and mousseers, I took a flight from Glasgow to Paris, last year, last year I think, and there were lots, I mean it's meant to be beautiful

16:59lots of working-class families, taking their kids to your Disney World, and all the fathers were wearing mousseers, once you see men and mousseers, it's very hard to get out of your might, anyway men, Wall Street men and expensive suits and mousseers selling certainty on financial television, threads appearing, notes being circulated on trading desks, words like re-exceleration, resilience, and softening labour impulses, arranged like flowers around a corpse, and the whole time you know one, price, what is price? Price is the fucking boss, it's the only thing that matters, and it sits there, it's like it sits there indifferent, I want to say embarrassed about the circus, this should make you angry,

18:14use the suits, selling you this, they're not just relevant, they're fucking costly, not just irritating a little piece of interpretation, they constitute the public relations department of a system that's priced you and you and you and you, out of ownership, and then they hand you a podcast, not this podcast, but they hand you a warning podcast about personal discipline, how you got to do better, they inflate the assets, they cover stability, the stability is keeping the assets expensive and you outside, and then they tell the people you know you, the one that's outside, the one that can afford, the one that's living with your parents, they tell you, you've got to buckle up, you've got to improve your mindset, I mean, fuck, they've toned financial, suffocation into a soft landing of, and

19:16they demand an applause, thank you for fucking me, so yeah, back to my friend Rick, we launched them ourselves into that scary, crazy void, I didn't, I didn't, I did not see your treating strategy, I saw a wake up call, I'm not saying breakfast and this is good, I am not saying no, I'm not saying survival is overrated, survival was the most important thing I had, I just, I wanted to die another day, I so loved this and never, I wanted just one more day, so survival is not overrated, I mean, calm the fuck down, dearls, what I see, what I saw past tense in Rick's photograph was the living core of a person, I was seeing, I think I was seeing that the essence, the essence, the friendship, the sympathy, the soul

20:22and the person has to remain unadministered, do not fuck with the soul, you know, that's actually the one thing, I mean, this is very matrix, red, blue bills, it's the one thing the machine can't deal with, I mean, it can absorb dissent, it monetizes outrage, it can turn cynicism and irony into product, think of that, that James Kramer, Kramer, inverse ETF, which shorts his lungs, the system can even survive periodic collapse, but a lot of breaks down on when you have an individual, individuals who stop granting it any moral authority and just like, I'm closing my eyes, I guess you can't hear that, I'm closing my eyes, I've got my fingers in my ears, I drive you no moral authority, message to self-keep away from the

21:27counter too close, you see a person, you, you no longer feel obligated to pretend that every day to release matters, you will know, bow to the expert priesthood, you know, those boys who, basis points, we're going to remind you hundreds of one percentage point, the system bloody breaks on the individual, who says, surely the fucking money, and that's the real leap, I call it the ferocious leap, it's not obedience, it's not hunting signal inside their chaos, but it's stepping outside it completely, it's no longer calculating tomorrow like some terrified kid, it's a reset to the only thing that actually matters, price, and

22:31that's it, no move, no meaning, everything else is, I said that to a group, I'm thinking about price, no price move, honey, no meaning, everything is theater for clowns justifying their bonuses, let's go back to Trader Mike, Trader Mike is 21 years, and the Solomon, the head of the Trader desk is like, none of that max any sense, his clowns justifying their bonuses, so again, remember, the central, the only question, did the price move materially, if not, shut the fuck up, I'm sorry, forgive me, that sounds crude, but crude only to people whose business model depends on parting out this insanity, it's actually the cleanest, the rings, it's the

23:32cleanest intellectual hygiene I know, the system, the system keeps forcing you into fall, sentiment, see, irrelevance, it keeps, it wants your attention consumed or trapped, impermanent, low grade analysis, do not be that client, otherwise your, your adjustment will be so eroded that you can't distinguish between information and virtue, silence of the realms, my friends, so what a dawn of the European intellectual, what he was getting at is simple, modern systems, the matrix, they don't, don't, this clever, they don't dominate you by force, intimidation, they get inside your head with the dope on me and they shape how you see things, you get trained, you, you caught me on like kids with the parents, you caught

24:34their appearance, you caught me there thinking, without actually ever thinking for yourself, shame, shame, no, don't get me wrong, you will become employable, you will become house trade, but somewhere in that process, man, your soul is no longer your own, you'll find your soul is buried deep within you, in his own personal was allele, shame, spa, there's a strange dignity in anything that breaks the spell of managed passivity, and that's where I come back to something dangerous, something ridiculous, even a middle-aged man on a dirt bike trying to leap over a gap, the younger kids in the neighborhood were like,

25:40no thank you, it's too far, especially that, because finances no institutionalized hesitation, I like that, when I like it, I say it again, you know, good, I've got a great friend, Mr. Bell, when he likes the song, he plays it again, and again, and again, it's a bit like kids remember, my kids, we used to watch, we, I think I'd like to move the kids, bar, barbie, the mermaid too, oh my god, wholesome, energetic wonder, anyway, finances no institutionalized hesitation, dressed as wisdom, boom, baby, an entire civilization of man wearing most, he was, of course, looking for permission, please, can I buy, can I sell, should I think inflation is sticky,

26:44should I think growth is cracking, should I panic, should I sell, should I, that's why the only people worth reading these days are the ones who've walked far enough into markets to lose faith in the priesthood of explanation, your most commentaries, just people explaining what already happened, pretending it mattered when it didn't, and if you build your mind around that, you end up playing someone else's game, so again, okay, conclusion, conclusion, the game is known to become omniscient, something like old clever, the gate, and no, everyone can be old clever, all of the time, the task is easier, is to become the person that's harder to

27:45build shit, to be that person, and that starts with the kind of intellectual refusal where micro headlines, I'll tell you, they lose their authority, most of the time I don't know when they've been released, stop handing your sense of reality to men who've never risked anything except temporary embarrassment, start watching behavior instead of commentary, watch price instead of narrative, lose trapped, instead of who's talking, I promise you everything else fades into the background, it doesn't make you anti-intellectual, quite the opposite, it pulls you, it pulls your thought back from performance and it restores a brutal hierarchy, a demand for evidence, in a culture drowning in good stories, truth stops being, it's truth stops being whatever lets

28:53the most articulate conman take fraud and make it sound composed on camera, I don't think that's me, truth becomes what survives contact with your curiosity, if you've got a repair shark curiosity, I've got another question, I've got another question, another question, and I'm looking at the price, truth becomes what survives contact with your curiosity, so again, let me end in my homily to my, to this image of Rick in the deer, I guess, I don't think life should always be lived like that, I'm not saying dangerous automatically profound, far from it, I mean the night he sent me this picture, here's, here's what I wrote, I wrote, you know, I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, man, that is pure,

30:03I love energy, and I love it, I really do, but Jesus Christ, that's flirting with gravity in a bad mood, 12-foot gap, are you serious, I wouldn't even clear the idea of that, to massive respect, but yeah, that's the kind of story your bones remember, starting tomorrow and every day thereafter, that's what I wrote, to me, Rick is, Rick and his crazy fucking jump, is more honest than the whole fucking financial media complex, no fake wisdom, just bloody backed the wall commitment, and I think that's what most people are starving for now, not more information, not another model, I mean this is the whole problem with European politics, most people are starving for, not another smooth little sermon from a toa in a suit, his bonus depends on making confusion, sound, sophisticated,

31:03people want contact, they want reality, they want a voice that doesn't sound like it's being cleared by a fucking committee, and if, if, I know you're one of the people, that, no, I don't know, but if you're one of the people that, the machine, the matrix is left, asset light, feeling poor, feeling over credentialed, but underwroned, and talk down to, they talk down to you, class of managerial frauds, but you know why I say good, why do you think, because you've got less to unlearn than they do, you're not defending a mansion of lies, you're just trying to get out of this thing alive, and so the game inverse, they want you brushing in their terms, compliant inside their language, and you're not going to be, because every now and again, you kind of feel it, that brick moment for the story,

32:04through the narrative drops away, and all that's left is skating reality, it's not safe, you're there, not because, it's not safe, you shouldn't be doing it, and yet you are, you mad little fuckers, you're doing it, and something in you just, it just says, go launch yourself, no permission, no explanation, no desters, you, just you, and it, destiny. Most of you will drift back, back to the screen, the Bloomberg screen,

33:05back to the commentary, back to the suits, turning 14 bass points into something that sounds like a drift, and that's the tale, because once you've seen it, the whole of the moon, the performance after that, it looks thin, thick, desperate, but you know what, if you can still sit there taking it seriously, still nodding, as though it might have us, buddy, you already know you stand, you are not, you are not the player, you've become the bark, the stain, the foo, good night folks, be zoo and french kisses, be zoo and french kisses, you know what,

34:07I have to say that the, the, the, the dear lady asking me, what was the point last week's show, she did say, well she did not, really any understanding of what I was talking about, that she felt that she could have listened to me on repeat all night, that she slept very warmly, and that is my wish for all of you, and so I'm going to end this, again this rant, I'm going to, I'm going to suggest we end with cheer up my brother, by HNNY, there's a codenferess witty Stockholm DJ, to E. Johan Stigdoberkens, comes from 2015, I think it is a very smooth be zoo, be zoo, be zoo, it is the asicapulas I'm signing off, Hugh Andrews, St. Boss, good night

35:21you know what I am, along we understand why, cheer up my brothers, live in shine, we'll understand all by and by, tempted and tried years, live in sunshine, we'll understand all by and by, cheer up my brothers, all by and by

36:33all by and by, all by and by, all by and by, but they run along, we know all about it, along we understand why, cheer up my brothers, live in shine, we'll understand all by and by, tempted and tried years, live in sunshine, we'll understand

37:42all by and by, cheer up my brothers, all by and by, cheer up my brothers, all by and by, cheer up my brothers, all by and by, cheer up my brothers, all by and by, all by and by, cheer up my brothers, all by and by,

38:55cheer up my brothers, all by and by, cheer up my brothers, all by and by, cheer up my brothers, all by and by,

39:55cheer up my brothers, all by and by, cheer up my brothers, all by and by,