Simon Waller (00:01)
Welcome to Episode four of The Future With Friends. And today I’m being joined by a very good friend of mine, the man, the myth, the legend that is Cole Fink. Cole, welcome to the podcast.

Col (00:13)
Thank you, Simon. Super exciting to be here. I’m a person, I think about the future a lot. And I’m really excited to have a conversation with an actual futurist to see whether my future thinking is misguided or potentially accurate. So I’m stoked to be on the program and excited to see where the conversation goes.

Simon Waller (00:31)
Well, the good news is Cole is no one actually knows what’s going to happen in the future. So you can almost say whatever you want. We’re very, good as futurists. We try not to make predictions. We kind of just lay out some broad ideas around the future, which is kind of partly the point of the show. But I’m actually super excited about what you’ve chosen to talk about today. But before we get into that, just a little bit of a recap on the friendship. So I’ve known you now for around 12 years. When I first met you, you ran a online go-kart shop.

Col (01:02)
Yeah, correct.

So I had run a go-kart manufacturing business and then in one of the, I don’t know, sometimes I’m ahead of the curve, sometimes I’m behind, but one of the ways that I was ahead of the curve was I got into video promotion on YouTube way earlier than most people. And so I turned my manufacturing business into a online shop and distribution business, which actually went pretty well. And I think…

Within probably the first year or two of meeting you, I had made the decision to stop in the go-karting realm and kind of move into the next phase of my life. But I managed to build the business up to the point where I was able to sell it for an actual sum of money, which for a young entrepreneur was one of the most affirming moments of my life, honestly.

Simon Waller (01:46)
Yeah, look, I know lots of business owners that still haven’t reached that dream. So to have done that at that age, congratulations. And along the way, you met like all the superstars of motorsport. that like is that the whole bunch of them that go karting when they eight, nine years old?

Col (01:52)
You

You

Correct, yeah, so my claim to fame is that I taught Daniel Ricciardo, the Formula One driver, at least a small amount of what he knows about how to drive. And there were guys who, yeah, like, because you can start karting when you’re seven, like competitive karting when you’re seven years old, it’s…

unbelievable what the human child is able to learn to do honestly like the performance the level of performance at a seven-year-old of capable and of in a go-kart is utterly mind-blowing and these kids who are seven eight nine ten eleven twelve when i first met them and was in this community and coaching some of them and competing against many of them ⁓ they are now all the big names on the supercars grid ⁓ and you know they’re

Scott McLaughlin who races Indy cars in the USA and like literally Cameron Waters Chas Mosta all the guys who are like the big names of the sport now They were these little tackers when I was there and it’s I don’t know It’s a sign of my age that I’m now seeing these fully grown successful adult humans living amazing lives And I’m like, my gosh in my head. You’re still 11

Simon Waller (03:07)
I think that that that backstory though makes this conversation even I think more interesting and surprising. Because although that was what you were doing when we first met, what you do now is quite different. You now run this kind of what you call it the solopreneur community. I love this as a tool like a term that you coined and credit yourself. And that maybe it will be like virtual reality. Like so Jaron Lanier coined virtual reality in 1987. I imagine at the time no one

really knew what he was talking about, but now it’s like, yeah, I get what that is. That’s a normal thing now. And so solopreneurs, maybe this is your term that’s going to take off and in another 15 years or so time, I’ll get what that means. But for those who don’t, do you want to give a little recap on it?

Col (03:39)
Yeah, that’s just a normal thing, yeah.

Yeah, for sure. like traditionally, there’s been two ways to make a living. And one was that you would start your own business and you would try to create an enterprise and you’d employ people and you’d build up this big thing with scale. And the other way was that you would join a business and that you would be an employee. And if you had visions of greatness or whatever, then you would climb the ladder.

And there’s actually this third option, which is growing in popularity, but which I don’t think is still a particularly well understood field, which is the idea that you can actually be a business. And so rather than joining a business as an intrapreneur, you might say, or starting a business as an entrepreneur, what you can instead do is be a business as a solopreneur. And in particular, I’m interested in people who I describe as a solo pro. So a solo professional.

is someone who runs a solo business and generally what we’re doing is working with corporates or governments or organisations and we’re offering our skills as essentially a freelancer or a hired gun and

there’s this wonderful opportunity that exists in the modern world, especially now that technology has made it so easy for us to deliver value through all these different tools and strategies where you can essentially take your expertise and your insight and the knowledge that you’ve gleaned over the course of your life experience and offer it to, as I say, governments, organisations, anyone who you can help.

And to do so in a way where I love to say you can make money meaningfully and freedomfully. And so for people in particular who value freedom, I reckon the life of the solo pro is an incredible blessing because you get this unmatched ability to decide how you will spend your time. That’s a level of agency that people in organisations, whether they own them

or work for them don’t have because you’ve got so many other obligations as a solo pro. Of course, you have an obligation to serve your clients, but you get to do so in such a way that you just have far greater agency and control over what your life looks like. And so I’m leading a community of people who are exploring how

amazing it’s possible to live a life in the present world by making money as a solo pro in a really meaningful way and using the freedom that you’re afforded as a result to live life however you want to and to make choices to spend it however you want to. And I’m doing a bunch of things which I think are a bit sort of anti-status quo and exploring

different ways of living and that informs the scenario that I have put together with your help that we’re going to be discussing today.

Simon Waller (06:49)
Yes. So the reason I want you to share that is exactly the point you got to at the end there. This is not actually a conversation about what you do for work. There’s a conversation as friends, but yeah, I’m a part of this community. And one of the things that you are really big on pushing in that, that community is around this idea of freedom and how do we choose to live our lives. And as part of that, you’ve obviously shared a bunch of information around what you are doing in your personal life.

which very much does inform the scenario that we’re going to explore today. So do you want to start? So the future we’re going to explore today is the future of how we live. Do you want to share a little bit about what we have the reason and the rationale behind choosing that topic?

Col (07:34)
Yeah, well, my fundamental belief is that consciousness is the only place where value exists. If you imagine a universe where there is no consciousness, I think you’ve imagined a universe where there is no value. It’s not possible for gold to be valuable or freedom to be valuable if there’s not consciousness to value it. And so my fundamental underlying philosophy about what makes life

good is essentially the well-being of conscious creatures. My vision for a utopia, if you like, is a place where humans and every other conscious being, which is a very, very, very large number of beings, in my opinion, I think it’s crazy to assume that humans are the only conscious being, but essentially where the best world is the one where there’s the most amount of well-being among all conscious creatures. And so I think that

Whilst technology has been amazing and there’s been some undeniable pieces of progress, like for example the healthcare that means that infant mortality now is fractions of a fraction of a fraction of what it was even only 200 years ago, at the same time we’ve done some incredibly dumb stuff to make ourselves

grimly unhappy like the waves of depression and anxiety that are permeating modern society to me is incredibly sad and I think it’s a function of decisions that we’ve made like I think we have like unwittingly made decisions that have led to people in our

kind of Western developed society, reliably developing feelings of depression and anxiety and all sorts of other mental health conditions. And I think that they are directly related to choices that we’ve made deliberately or unwittingly, and they’re choices that we can change. And so the world that I want to see develop over the rest of my life is one where more and more people are made.

more more happy or to develop greater and greater well-being because we revisit some of the stupid choices that we’ve made as a collective and we make those choices again and you know whether there’s policy changes, regulatory changes, cultural shifts, I reckon it’s possible to take the technological advancements we’ve made

and apply them in ways that make us even more happy and even more well and lead even better lives. And I’m a relentless optimist. And so I hope to see the next, I don’t know, 40 or 50 years that I live to see loads and loads of progress. And so the scenario I’ve written is essentially a picture of what some version of an emerging utopia might look like.

Simon Waller (10:20)
And it is actually based on something that’s actually going on in your personal life as well. This is like in terms of, so don’t want to give away the scenario, but you want to talk a little bit about what you have been creating for your family that kind of has fed into this conversation as well.

Col (10:39)
For sure. So the scenario that I’ve drawn is an extension of something that I’m experimenting with with my own family right now. And the thing that I have to recognise and acknowledge is that I am the product of some of the most concentrated privilege that’s ever existed. I mean, already, I think everyone who lives in a developed nation at this time of year is one of the most privileged, I don’t know, 1 % of humans that’s ever lived.

And even within that 1%, like I’ve come from a family, I was very lucky. My parents made plenty of money and they were great people. And I feel incredibly grateful for the privilege that I’ve had. I make pretty good money myself now. And essentially my family and extended family has the financial means to try things that not everyone has available to them. And I want to acknowledge that what we’re doing is

in large part a function of that privilege and not that we’re just kind of special or deserve it. But what we’re doing is living communally. So we’ve actually bought a property on the outskirts of Melbourne. We live on 27 acres. We’ve got 50 sheep, 80 geese, 150 chickens, four dogs. We currently live in a family of…

It ranges between five and eight adults in the house at any given time. We currently have five kids. I’m expecting we’ll end up with anywhere between seven and 10 or something. I’m not quite sure. It includes three generations of people and it’s largely built around our family, but not exclusively. There are friends that live here full time who are not in any way blood related. All three of my children speak fluent Japanese.

I don’t speak a word of Japanese. And it’s because we have Japanese people living with us constantly. We have like a sporting connection through my wife and ultimate frisbee. That means we have this never ending stream of the most amazing Japanese women coming to live in our house. But essentially we live in what I would describe as a fairly unconventional and incredibly affirming and healthy way.

What I’m trying, like the way we live is largely a product of a sales pitch that I delivered to my family about seven or eight years ago, where I painted a picture of what our life could be. And fortunately, a bunch of them bought into it and took a financial risk by literally buying into it. And what we’re seeing is that the people in our family are very happy, very healthy, very supported.

and we have great relationships. And it’s largely a function not that we’re good people who happen to deserve it. I genuinely believe it’s largely a function of how we live. And I believe the modern world has made mistakes and we’ve turned an obsession with independence into an epidemic of isolation. And the way we’re living is a deliberate attempt to reverse that. And I’m trying

Funnily enough, so I really admire my father-in-law Rod. He’s an unbelievable human being, one of the coolest dudes I’ve ever met. And one of the things I’ve noticed about him is he never has his preferences met. Now this is a guy who’s made more money in his lifetime than most people ever would, right? He could buy whatever he wants, he could have whatever he wants, and his family loves him and respects him, they would do whatever he wants. He never, and I literally mean almost never,

has his first preference met. Because what he’s realised is he’d rather the people that he loves have their preferences met. And he’s willing for it to be his second or his third preference if it means he can be close to his peeps and for them to be getting what they want. And I’ve seen him doing that over the last 10 or 12 years that I’ve known him and I’ve thought, that’s a guy I wanna be like. I don’t wanna be the person who gets everything he wants. I wanna be surrounded by people who are healthy and happy. And so I’ve essentially

like seeing the way that Rod’s approached being one of the luckiest people on earth and shared that with everyone around him. And I thought, I want to do that too. And so our life is an experiment in yeah, living in a house that isn’t the exact house you want. And it’s not the house with the carpet that you would have chosen or the colour that you would have painted the walls or the TV show that you would want to watch right now. But what it means is you’re not alone.

You’re with people and I reckon that is way more fundamental to our wellbeing than any particular preference you might have for something that you want.

Simon Waller (15:25)
Awesome. So I think that’s enough of the backstory. We’re going to jump into the scenario in the second or it might even perhaps be more appropriately called a sales pitch, because it feels like you’ve pitched your family, they fully bought in. And now you have a chance to basically pitch everybody in the world on this. I mean, I’m not saying that the audience is quite that big yet, Cole, but we’ll get there. Excellent. Okay, so over to you, Cole.

Col (15:34)
Hahaha!

Yeah.

I’m sure you’ll get there, Simon. Eight billion people are gonna subscribe to your podcast one day.

Simon Waller (15:51)
Share us with your scenario about the future of how we will live.

Col (15:56)
Excellent.

Darwin wakes up. She checks her kids’ bedrooms and finds one still asleep. The other two are up and about. She can’t hear them, so they’re probably already at breakfast. She wakes up the three-year-old and carries him out of the house to the mess hall. The other two are indeed already eating breakfast, scrambled eggs on toast with their uncle Deacon, who is sharing a table with seven kids in total, leading a ridiculous discussion about who would win in a fight between a Tyrannosaurus-sized deer or a hundred deer-sized Tyrannosaurs.

Cam, Darwin’s uncle, is playing guitar in the corner by the fire. He’s about 85 years old at this point. She looks out the window. Mount Feathertop in the Great Dividing Range is capped with snow. And she’s glad the global carbon tax was implemented before the runaway tundra melt began. She eats her breakfast quietly with her partner, Jazz, because it’s her day to run the school today. And she doesn’t actually need extra time with the kids this morning before the school day begins.

The hall is actually a little quieter than it is most morning because Daisy, Darwin’s best friend since childhood, and her family are visiting Tanzania for a month. It’s been a little extra work tending to the chickens and mowing the lawns while they’ve been away because that’s the jobs that their family is usually contributing to the collective. Darwin and her collective, nine adults and seven kids at this point in time, are one of the happiest groups of people to have lived in the last 500 years.

They’re in the unique position of enjoying the benefits of modern technology, most importantly maternal and child health care and the dramatically reduced infant mortality that’s created, whilst also enjoying the benefits of a much more primitive aspect of human life that had been, for a time, largely forgotten. Communal living. Of course, culture shifts slowly and not everyone wants the more rural version of communal life that Darwin and her family enjoy.

There are small rural communities dotting up everywhere now in areas surrounded by the growing forests reclaiming unused farmland now that most animal protein is produced artificially. The idea of 15 minute cities in urbanized areas is still taking off and governments have started toying with regulatory strategies to allow groups of friends and families to find housing within the 15 minute walking distance that promotes great connection. Unfortunately,

There’s also a large group of people suffering from the great drug addiction of the 21st century, personalised entertainment. It’s possible to essentially plug yourself into a never-ending stream of dopamine-triggering entertainment, a form of leisure that unfortunately and reliably leads to anxiety and depression. The lesson we’re still learning at this time is that independence, the ability to do whatever we want, often leads to isolation.

Darwin hopes to teach her kids to use their independence to make choices that keep them in community with other people, compromising on many of their preferences in order to cultivate that which matters most. Strong relationships with people who you love and who love and support you.

Simon Waller (18:58)
Excellent. What a great scenario. I love this. I love the rampant optimism in it as well.

Col (19:06)
I am nothing if rampageingly optimistic.

Simon Waller (19:10)
I forgot to actually ask you this question before, but what year do you see this scenario as being set in?

Col (19:16)
So Darwin is actually my daughter. She’s currently three. No, she just turned four. And so I imagine this is when she’s in her early to mid 30s or 40s. So perhaps this is 2060, something like that.

Simon Waller (19:33)
2060, 2060. Okay, cool. I love that Uncle Cam is in the corner playing his guitar. For those who don’t know, Cam is Cole’s brother. And you often see them twinning it up together on LinkedIn doing little shows called the Fink Tank, which is beautifully titled. I know Cam as well and the idea of him sitting in the corner playing guitar is just a perfect contribution to this scenario as well.

Col (19:35)
something that…

Well, that

was a very selfish element too, I must admit, because my childhood, the soundtrack to my childhood was Cam becoming masterfully good at playing the guitar. And it’s interesting, I love music, but I find I very rarely put it on the stereo. And I had this realisation the other day, the reason is my entire childhood was punctuated by music played live by Cam, hours and hours and hours of practice every day.

And one of the things I miss most about him having found his own community and living over in New Zealand, he’s just bought a house in Wellington with Alicia. One of the things that disappoints me most about that is I don’t get to hear his guitar as often as I’d like. So in my Imagine Future scenario, they’ve moved back over here and they’re in the community and I get to start and end my life with the soundtrack of Cam playing guitar. So that was a little selfish element that I chucked in there.

Simon Waller (20:52)
Beautiful.

I love it. I love it. And I do want to talk a little bit more about that. I feel like there’s a thread for us to pull on there. But before we do so, I just like to check in with you because you are, as you pointed out earlier on, are a non-futurist. And so I’m curious for you what it was like to write this scenario. Like you’ve been asked to basically write a story about a future that could exist 30 years from now.

Col (21:00)
Yeah.

Simon Waller (21:20)
What was that like as an exercise?

Col (21:25)
⁓ really fun and exciting and also challenging the, the great realisation that I’ve had on the end of it. And it was really useful for me too, because honestly, what I’d love to do in 10 or 20 years is write a book about the experience that my family will have had by then in growing up in a community to hopefully influence culture and push it in a direction that I think would be healthy. And one of the things that I realised in writing this scenario was like,

how many different moving parts contribute to this. so elements that came to mind when I was thinking about it were things like, yeah, what I hope is that developments in the way that we can grow and produce animal protein, like I’m imagining we’re going to have solar powered factories that take the raw materials and energy from the sun to produce all the meat that we need. And it means that we can return the world to a more natural

kind of distribution of biomass, because at the moment, something like 80 % of all the mammal biomass in the world is human food, which is like sickening to me. And so I love the idea that all the farmland throughout Victoria, where I live, would start to be reclaimed by forest, because we don’t have to grow all those cows and sheep anymore. And then also things like, I’m thinking that a universal basic income or something of that sort is going to dramatically change how we all live and work and

I think that is the thing that might allow people who don’t have the financial means that my family has to experiment with the types of ways that we’re living because you don’t have to live near the city for your job because you don’t need a job because you get paid, I don’t know, $80,000 a year or $100,000 a year or whatever the equivalent figure is just for being a human at a time when robots do nearly all the productive stuff that we need done.

⁓ and then there’s the cultural shifts that would need to happen and like, there’s so many moving parts and no way am I smart enough or, you know, like no way is any human smart enough to predict the future, but it was really fun pulling together all the different elements and seeing how they might affect things. And I know that my bias and optimism has meant that I’ve kind of chosen to see the likely developments as being the ones that would lead to this.

somewhat utopian vision that I have for the future. But at the same time, if I can contribute to the way the world develops in any way, I want my optimism to be part of it. So don’t mind that I might have ignored some of the grim realities that wish your face along the way.

Simon Waller (23:55)
So look, I think there’s a role of futurism in being optimistic, like you have done, where it can kind of set a vision for us to aspire towards. I think what you touched on there, during the development of this is you’ve also kind of picked up some of those what we might describe as critical uncertainties, some of really big impact shifts that might be required for such a thing to happen.

Col (24:13)
Yes.

Simon Waller (24:18)
And we don’t know necessarily which way they’ll go on a great example of these things like UBI or universal basic income. And so there’s signals where we are seeing this being kind of talked about, we are seeing university kind of research being done, and whether actually literally handing out free money to people in villages in Africa, to see what the impact of this is over 5, 10, 15, 20 year timeframes. So this type of stuff is happening.

We don’t know yet whether we get it.

Col (24:49)
Yeah, well,

yeah. And the fearful thing for me is I see the logical endpoint of capitalism as technology continues to make human labour less and less necessary or relevant to productivity. The logical endpoint of capitalism is that one megalomaniacal sociopath ends up with all the resources in the world and the rest of us are a poor proletariat with nothing. And

The huge cultural shift that is essentially necessary to my scenario playing out is a shift in our fundamental beliefs around how value is earned and shared. Because I don’t think that, for example, Jeff Bezos is…

actually worth $250 billion or whatever he’s worth today, because almost all of the value that he creates is actually downstream of the language that humans created, the computers that other humans created, the roads that other humans created, the trucks that other humans created, the boats and the airplanes and like Jeff Bezos didn’t make any of those things. And the fact that he managed to create the one little system that leverages all of it to produce an insane amount of wealth

doesn’t, in my opinion, entitle him to all of the gains of that insane amount of wealth that is produced by that leverage. And as AI and physical automations and robotics continue to mean that we don’t need humans to work to create productivity, we need a fundamental cultural shift, which is the belief that every human being, or in my personal philosophical belief, every conscious being, is

worthy of the benefits of all the progress that has been made, not just a couple of generally intelligent and often sociopathic people who seek to create the most amount of leverage with that stuff. And yeah, honestly, the biggest fear or trepidation or uncertainty that exists in my scenario is that maybe we’re not capable of the cultural and political shift required. And we end up instead in a dystopia where a

very small number of people own nearly all the wealth and all the leverage and the rest of us have almost all of our freedom stripped away because we’re literally serfs, you know, battling over scraps in hovels in huge mega cities with almost no freedom and no joy. And yeah, it brings me no joy to consider that, but I recognise that it is like a fundamental shift that would have to happen for my scenario to become a reality.

Simon Waller (27:28)
Yeah. And interesting, like if we were doing this in a more kind of a complete sense, and we don’t just have a scenario, we have scenarios, and we would explore what those alternative things might look like and what the triggers would be that take us down one path or the other. And there’s value in both. There’s value in both the warning against this kind of centralisation of money and wealth. And then there’s kind of the lesson or to what to be learned or how we get to something that feels more

Col (27:36)
Yeah.

Simon Waller (27:56)
beneficial for a broader number of people. And then within that is also the acknowledgement that neither of these are good or bad, because good or bad in this is ultimately determined by perspective. I personally quite like this scenario, though, I do, I do think that this is a really beautiful thing. And then the slightly skeptical version of me kind of goes, yeah, but there’s some challenges with this that we need to also talk about. So we’re even in the utopian version.

Col (28:07)
Yes, 100%.

Simon Waller (28:24)
there are undercurrents of challenge that need to be probably discussed. And I think you mentioned that a little bit in doing so you’ve been thinking about, what are the moving parts to create it? Were you also thinking about what’s the moving parts in terms of sustaining it? Like if you talk about this communal group of people living together, like what are the mechanisms for them to be able to continue to do that in a healthy way?

Col (28:51)
Yeah, and like one of the things that I think our present, one of the reasons our present system doesn’t allow people to try the experiment that we’re presently running and that I hope a universal basic income and reform around housing might allow in a better future. At the moment, if a relationship breaks down, the housing situation is thrown into absolute chaos because

Like the average house price in Melbourne is 10 times the average family income, right, annual family income, which means the average mortgage stretches out to 25 to 30 years. It’s by far the biggest single expenditure that anyone in our present society usually makes in a whole lifetime. And when relationships break down or, cause like not everyone can live harmoniously with everyone else and

people do change and, you know, children become teenagers and gigantic shitheads. And as much as I love the idea of people living community, I recognise that sometimes just as communities form, communities also need to disband and there’s huge complexity in what I’m describing because if a community is disbanding and, you know, one family’s leaving, well, what do you do then? Do you introduce one more family at random and hope they fit in or like, how do we move?

not just a single family into a single house, how to hold groups of people move to new housing or a new town. Like honestly, mate, I’ve got no idea.

Simon Waller (30:22)
But I think this is I mean, this is the value of the scenario, right? Because we’re going like, cool. On one hand, just disregard for a second what might have had to trans a buyer in the world for us to get to this point. So in terms of the political shifts, in terms of the economic shifts, you know, the fact that we now have these robots and stuff now doing all the work for us, and we end up in this place. But then even then, when we’re in this place, I think it probably brings to the fore some of the other challenges that sit around this because

Col (30:32)
Yeah.

Yep.

Simon Waller (30:48)
I cannot tell you the number of conversations I have had with people over the last few years about communal living. Like it’s almost like something that people have this kind of innate craving for. Like there’s an acknowledgement I think of some of your underlying beliefs, coal and your own personal experiences around that that the isolationism isn’t good for us. It’s not good for our mental health. We are meant to be there.

Col (30:56)
Right.

Simon Waller (31:16)
in this kind more village like atmosphere. And yet, I think you point out that one of the kind of limitations to this at the moment is around how do we afford it and afford to stay in a place with a group of people. So that’s one. But I do think there’s other ones around as yes, there’s a regulatory issues and stuff at the moment where government doesn’t necessarily make that easy to create communal living. But I think the one that you touched on there about but if you got this group of people together,

And then one chooses to leave. How do you actually negotiate that? How do you then choose who takes their place? ⁓ yeah, I think that’s actually a really.

Col (31:52)
Correct. And like we’ve

had to deal with that in our experiment doing it here now. And the two things that we’ve been able to rely on to allow us to solve it is the fact that number one, it is the commune that we’re living in is centered around my wife’s family. So we live with my wife’s brother, his partner, their kids, and their parents live here a lot of the time. My mum lives here a lot of the time. We’re largely held together by family and their

It’s two family groups that we had very high confidence would maintain a harmonious relationship over a long period of time. But not only that, compared to the average person, we’ve got heaps of money. so we were able, like if someone leaves, essentially we’re able to buy that bit of it out. And so there’s some security in the fact that we won’t be forced to sell the whole place just because, you know, one person or one group decided to opt out.

We have the financial means to fill the hole that is left in a financial sense. And yeah, like if we’re all living on a universal basic income, that’s not going to be the solution. We’re not all going to have bags of cash sitting out the back that we can deploy if necessary. There’s going to need to be some kind of regulatory, societal, cultural, yeah.

and whether it is literally monetary policy or social norms that allow us to experiment with different elements of the tribe. like, I love the idea, I’m not an urban person myself, I don’t want to live in a city. But I recognise that the idea of 15 minute cities, I think is very much aligned with what I’m trying to do here. 15 minute cities are saying, can we allow people to live in urban areas, but where everything they need is within a 15 minute walk.

And within that 15 minute walk would include family and friends. And so I hope that governments who are designing 15 minute cities come up with, I don’t know if it’s social housing or like the way that housing is bought, sold, regulated to keep pricing at a level where houses almost become more fungible and you can move to one more easily and move out of one more easily. At the moment, moving house is a disaster economically in many cases. And…

Yeah, I’m not an economist nor a futurist. I don’t know what the answer is there. And the contribution I think I can make is around the value of the communal living. And I hope that other people smarter than me can work out what are the actual regulatory and process steps that we need to take to make it a reality for as many people, the greatest percentage of our population as we possibly can.

Simon Waller (34:32)
Well, you mentioned obviously that you’re, you you see this point in the future, maybe a decade from now where you write a book. the immediate thing I thought was like, well, you probably shouldn’t write it by yourself. Right. If it’s a book about communal living, it should be written communally. And this idea that we would have different people who’ve got different strengths to bring to that conversation. And so yeah, I love the idea of having a communal book about communal living. makes a lot of sense.

Col (34:41)
Yeah, no, definitely not.

Yes.

Yeah,

well, I literally think there’ll be a chapter by my 18 year old son at the end, he’d be 18 then and my 16 year old daughter and my 14 year old son and Ben’s partner Georgie and you know what I mean? Like the book would be written by this community in service to hopefully other future communities. So yeah, that’s a super fun idea.

Simon Waller (35:18)
So I love this concept that I read in a book recently by Jay Kunzo called his book called Breaking the Wheel. it wasn’t his quote, but it was attributed to someone else in the book. But he said, you know, the idea that the future doesn’t repeat. So the history doesn’t repeat, but it certainly rhymes. And yeah, and this concept that in the certain aspects of this feel like, you know, it rhymes with the 1960s.

Col (35:36)
I’ve heard that one before, yeah.

Simon Waller (35:48)
and kind of hippie culture and communal living. But then it also rhymes with kind of more, yeah, more ancient village type models of living, right.

Col (35:58)
Correct.

Yeah, that’s the bit. So I wouldn’t consider myself particularly woo woo. I like to think of myself as a rationalist. I certainly take most of my opinions or I try to take my opinions from the experts in any given field and the research that they’ve done. And my general perspective on what is likely to produce wellbeing in any biological animal or structure is,

well, whatever the natural environment that it evolved in is. And so if what’s gonna create wellbeing in a human being is essentially whatever conditions were likely to have existed in the place where we evolved. And the research points towards living in groups of 30 to 150 of multi-generational largely related communal living and even to the point of like what types of food did we eat?

And in the sense, what I want is for our future to rhyme with that past. And I don’t want to regress to that past. I don’t want to have infant mortality at 30 % or 50 % or 80%. Like I want many of the benefits of advancing technology, but I want our daily experience and our relationships to rhyme with what I imagine the depth.

of relationships were and the trust that existed in relationships were and the time span of the relationships that we would have had 3000 years ago, 5000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, because they are the conditions under which our brain evolved. And they are the conditions which I expect are most likely to produce long-term wellbeing in the brains that we’ve got. Our brains are not evolving anywhere near as fast as technology is. And so,

We should be applying technology to create the conditions where our brains get to exist as they could have or should have. And community, I believe, is central to that.

Simon Waller (38:03)
So when you first shared this idea of this scenario with me, I shared it with a couple of other people and because of what it that that rhyme came up for me. I thought about that kind of village way of living. got a very good friend of mine, Roy, who’s Balinese. He comes from the island of Lambongan, just off the coast of Bali. And we’ve shared, we’ve talked a lot in the past around the difference in the way we live in Western society versus

how they traditionally live in a lot of Southeast Asian communities. And I shared the same conversation with Jun, who works in my team, who’s based in the Philippines. And they still have these models, though some of those models are under threat from a kind of sense of modernism. And so one of the models and the kind of fundamental principles of it is that, so Roy has basically said, look, so my job is to, my dad’s job was to look after the family until he retires. He retires at 60. After that, it’s the family’s job to look after him.

Col (38:48)
Mmm.

Simon Waller (39:03)
And what that really means is it’s not necessarily Roy’s job, it’s actually Roy’s wife’s job to do that. Roy’s wife, and he had to have this conversation with his wife before they got married to say, do you still agree with these kind of traditional principles? Because a lot of younger females and young men are choosing to say, no, no, we’re going to not, I’m not buying into that anymore. I want the modernism version where I have my own apartment with the TV and I choose the colours of the paint on the walls.

Col (39:10)
Yeah.

Simon Waller (39:32)
But that’s kind of the agreement that that kind of Roy had to make with his wife to make sure that now his dad is literally just retired. She’s now going back to the village to provide that support. It’s like his superannuation. And so one of the first things that struck me in this is like, so you’ve got this scenario where your daughter Darwin is still living in your commune. Right. But if we kind of have different kind of rules and how are we going to manage this when, you know, Darwin’s partner has their own commune?

What makes you think Darwin’s saying in your one?

Col (40:04)
100 % she

could choose the other and and so there is no such thing as utopia right like Utopia where everyone gets what they want. That’s not a thing and so I am realistic and one of the things that I’m realistic about is I don’t think that we’re gonna get to the

The end point that I imagine is possible, I don’t think is gonna happen in my lifetime. And one of the reasons is because people who are wedded to old ways of thinking essentially just need to die off to allow new generations to embrace it. But as an example of how I could see society growing over time to make what I’m talking about more possible, I don’t think you can tell anyone what to do. But what you can do is demonstrate to them the value of

certain choices that they can make and which makes it more or less likely that they will make similar choices and so My kids who I hope I’m giving a head start on this like a way of potentially living in the future They’re gonna get raised in this communal environment they’re gonna see my mom live out the last of her days and die here on this property and They’re gonna see me make whatever sacrifices. I need to make to make that happen. I don’t care

how hard it is. I don’t care what I have to do. My mum gave me the most amazing life. I’m going to make sure she gets to live out her life with her family here. And I’m going to make whatever sacrifices required, not on the presumption or the caveat or the condition that Darwin, Deakin or Caspian will do that for me, but to set an example of how I want old people in our society to be treated. And I think that makes it more likely

not certain, but it makes it more likely that they would make a choice like that for me or for Mish or for the other older people in their lives. Even if Mish and Ben both died, I’ll look after both their parents here because I think that’s the right thing to do. And I think that those ideas, those memes about caring for each other and looking out for each other and doing the hard things in community as well as the easy things in community.

I just think it makes it more likely over time that more and more people will subscribe to those ideas. And I reckon you can actually already see that in today’s society. When you look at Italian and Greek immigrant communities who moved to Australia in the 1950s. And what we saw was houses that were cheap enough that allowed them to buy within two minutes walk of each other. They would buy six houses in a street. And it meant that Nonna…

looked after all the kids, right, when the parents were working. And it means that the parents looked after Nona, right. And so those communities in a different way that I’ve done it, but honestly, I think they’re demonstrating the same thing. They showed how housing affordability leads to communal situations. And now the young men and women that they raised are incredibly loyal to and caring for their older generations. They have a level of respect and care for their elders.

and they look after them and they make great decisions for them and they do that because they saw their parents do it and their parents did it because they saw their parents do it. And I just think that Western culture has forgotten how to do that, but we don’t have to forget forever. We can learn to do it again. And it’s not about forcing anyone to do something, but it is about showing them that it’s possible, which influences their likely future choices.

Simon Waller (43:39)
Hmm, that’s really just something that made me when you were going through that. It’s interesting. And you said this earlier on that you have created this experience for your family and your extended family group through a position of privilege. When I kind of talk to people though, like my friend Roy and to Jun about this, it’s not actually generated through privilege. It’s actually generated through hardship. It’s generated necessity. I remember we’re up there at Christmas and my wife Nomes was talking

Col (44:03)
Yeah, necessity. Yeah.

Simon Waller (44:09)
talking to Roy and says, what happens if your mom or dad gets sick? and he goes, like, he was almost like, that was most where you just look after them. Because there is no hospital there. But there’s no health care, there’s no hospital to send them to there’s no aged care facility they go to. Like, you just look after them and tell they pass away.

Col (44:20)
Yeah, what else would you do?

Simon Waller (44:33)
And so there is a necessity basis of that. There was nothing else we could do. We had to do that. And I do think that actually, weirdly, there’s a slightly more dystopian way of getting to this scenario in the future, which is not one that comes from privilege, but it comes from disadvantage, is that these family groups are forced to reconnect with each other and reform these kind of village communal type living arrangements because we can’t afford not to.

And I find that’s an interesting and wonder even if there’s certainly I know, know it sounds weird, but certain advantages to that, like that it comes through hardship rather than comes through privilege.

Col (45:01)
Yeah, correct.

Correct. And like one way that it could happen in a place like Australia where housing affordability is terrible and getting worse is people are simply forced by economics not to live in Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane or Adelaide or Perth. And that instead they have to move to, I don’t know, Castle Main or Orange or Parkes or Ipswich or Toowoomba or I don’t know, like.

I’m listing random towns, but essentially we may be forced by economics to experiment with living not in five metropolises dotted on the coast, but instead in smaller regional towns throughout the country. And if a group of friends, the interesting thing is I know a bunch of people who’ve moved to Bendigo or moved to Ballarat or moved to the outskirts of Geelong and they love it. And once they’ve left Melbourne, they’re like, I don’t know what

so afraid of. It’s awesome out here. We love it. And maybe a complete lack of housing affordability will actually be the trigger that leads a group of people to go, you know what, none of us can afford to live in Melbourne. Screw it. Let’s just all move to Bairnsdale, but we’ll all buy in the same street. at least whilst we’re miles away from where we grew up, we’re at least together. And one of the things that I want to see Western society do is

Take the groups that form through the share housing process when you go to university, right? What happens when you go to university is you experiment with different share houses until you find the five people who you can spend an unlimited amount of time with without getting tired of them, right? And when you’re in sixth year university, cause you failed eight units, you found the five people who you can tolerate in unlimited amounts.

It is my very firm belief that those are the people you should set up your community with because you can tolerate everything about each other and then you just bring in a few, you know, wives and husbands and kids and whatever, but you form the core of your little community and maybe a complete lack of housing affordability will mean that a share house in Brunswick goes, you know what, fuck it, let’s move to Bansdale, but we’ll all buy in the one street and we’ll hang out together. Maybe that’s the dystopian way to reach my future utopia.

Simon Waller (47:26)
feel like the real losers

in this scenario call other people who kind of pass university the first time. It’s like, I, I’ve only got three years. It’s like, not sure if these are the right people.

Col (47:32)
Exactly, you don’t have time to work out your peeps.

Totally. Yeah, I think that’s great. It means you factor in a little bit of benefit for the dysfunction that we all exhibit as 21 year olds.

Simon Waller (47:49)
One other thing that came up for me in reading this, I’m very fascinated with the formation of groups and how we see our sense of identity. And in this, and even I think in your own personal story Cole, there’s a real sense of identity that’s connected to the communal environment or the communal situation that you’re living in. It’s like, these are my people, right? They’re probably with any kind of sense of group like that is when we have an in group, we also have an out group.

And so our connection to other groups around us is not as strong because we have such a strong sense of identity with this group that we’re in. And I kind of wander around like we have, know, on one hand, I feel we are on a evolutionary process towards seeing ourselves as global citizens. And we’ve kind of gone through the model of we went through the village, and we went to the town and went to the city.

And then we kind of come to this. There’s also there’s good and bad versions of the nationalistic aspect of this. But there are certain people from a consciousness perspective kind of go, yeah, right. But the next step clearly then is one of internationalism, although we are part of a global community. And I kind of feel in this scenario, there’s a risk that we kind of almost shun a little bit of that for the sake of but these are the people around me.

Col (48:50)
Definitely.

Simon Waller (49:08)
Do you, what do you see as being that? I think you’re on one way, you kind of try and bridge those two things yourself. ⁓ both being a global citizen, but you know, what, how do you see this playing out in this scenario?

Col (49:14)
Definitely.

Yeah, I think this is one of the complexities of operating in a modern environment with a prehistoric operating system, right? Like we evolved in bands of 30 to 150 people and the biological operating system that we’ve been gifted was designed to thrive under those conditions. And it also

gave us an ability to cooperate on a grand scale unheard of in the natural world anywhere else. Like humans are the ultimate cooperators at the level of millions and billions, right? And I’m not in the least bit nationalist. I don’t think that a person born in Australia deserves more of my kindness than a person born in any other random country because where you’re born and who you’re born to is a complete fluke and there’s no kind of

You don’t deserve any credit for that. And so my vision for a future would be a really healthy global government. Like I would love it if the ultimate arbiter in the end was a UN or something related to it. And at the same time, what I have noticed, or at least what I believe I’ve seen, I don’t consider myself a political scientist by any stretch of the imagination, is that top down leadership.

has limited utility in the real world and that we need a combination of top-down leadership where we, for example, tackle things like carbon emissions. That has to be done from the very top down. Governments around the world have to cooperate and form global rules that we all adhere to as we did so successfully with chlorofluorocarbons and the hole in the ozone layer. We need to do those things at the very top level and filter the behaviors down.

And in the other direction, I reckon the minutiae of day to day, like the reason capitalism has been so effective is never has there been a better system of distributed decision making and resource allocation. And whilst in my vision of the future, and I think this is probably several hundred years away, we would have a global government and we all essentially consider ourselves to be a member of a single enormous nation.

Lots of decisions will happen at local level. And like, I know you’re an expert in local government and that you see the best way for you to influence the world around you is to help local governments make great decisions for the communities of, I don’t know, what are the numbers? 10 to 100,000, 200,000 people at a time?

Simon Waller (51:52)
Yeah, 100,000 people is

probably for municipal local government, cities might be a bigger, but 100,000 people is probably about the mark.

Col (51:56)
Yeah.

Right, and I think the world is a substantially better place because you do that work. And the fact that you’re focusing on these groups of a hundred thousand people at a time doesn’t need to be to the exclusion or detriment of all others. It simply says, we’re going to focus on this area and make decisions at this level, which are the best for these people, whilst also taking into account the impacts and ramifications of what the decisions we make at this level have.

when we look at the national or global scale. And equally, I see my focus is at the level of 10 to 20 or 30 people, right? You’re trying to help people make great decisions at the level of 100,000. I’m trying to help people make great decisions at the level of below 100. And there will be other people with bigger brains than you or me who are trying to help make great decisions at the level of 10 billion. And I think all of us

have an opportunity and an obligation to contribute at the level and that all those levels are important because the whole thing is not a monolith. It’s a deeply complex adaptive system, like ridiculously complex adaptive system. And utopia is one where the governance at the overall level is functional and healthy and useful, but also at every level below that, whether we’re talking about

10 billion people or a billion people or a million people or 100,000 people or a thousand people or 10 people and different people will have perspectives that are useful at those different levels. And I just see myself as being most interested by and having the most sort of expertise to offer at almost the very smallest level.

Simon Waller (53:48)
So I said earlier on, there was a thread that I wanted to pull and which was about the conversation you had about cam and playing guitar in the corner of the room at the end of your life, which is beautiful and what amazing sentiment. But what it made me really think about was about what it is that we choose to spend our time doing. That you said when you grew up, instead of listening to records or CDs, you got to listen to cam.

Col (54:01)
Yeah.

Simon Waller (54:15)
And that you valued that because of the effort that’s Cam’s put into the live experience. And throughout our life, we get made choices between what we choose to automate and what we choose to put our effort into. I think it was like in the book, 4,000 weeks. think it’s like the, the, one of the conclusions of the book is effectively we are what we are. We will give our time to.

In your scenario, there’s some certain choices around or certain, I suppose, pointers as to what it is that gets automated and what doesn’t. And I know there’s only some broad brushstroke stuff in there, but like we don’t automate schooling. Right. Do automate food production. Right. Don’t automate guitar playing in the corner. That’s definitely a cam. Just if you think about that, like in this idealistic utopian world that you are

Col (54:57)
Yeah.

Definitely not. Yeah.

Simon Waller (55:09)
describing what are some of the things that you would go, these are the things that we should never automate. These are the things that we should hold close to us. These are things that even though they’re hard, we should continue to do them because they are the things I think what really shape us or shape good us.

Col (55:26)
Yeah, we should never automate becoming better people. I think, so the most watched TED talk of all time is the one by Sir Ken Robinson, now sadly deceased. And the core message in that TED talk, which nearly everybody listened to this podcast has surely seen, is that school is killing creativity in our children. And

The reason is because there’s an element of school, and I say this not to besmirch teachers because scarcely could there be a group of people who I respect more, right? But there is an element of our present educational paradigm, which is it’s not an educational system, it’s an industrial childcare system. And I reckon that the subtle and pernicious effects of that have been very deep and very damaging.

And I don’t believe that most kids are born to be bullies. I believe the system that we are allowing to raise them is what is causing them to behave like bullies. And again, I think biological beings are most likely to flourish under the conditions under which they evolve. That’s just a fundamental belief of mine. Children didn’t evolve with one adult to 30 kids.

in a year level of 150 to 300 kids. Kids didn’t get raised by other kids and not by other kids who were all exactly the same age within kind of 12 to 18 months of each other. Kids grew up in communities where they were taught by an 80 year old, a 60 year old, a 40 year old, a 20 year old, a 15 year old, a 10 year old and a seven year old while they were three. And we should never…

seek to automate raising new people and we should never seek to automate dying. Both of those things are like the most human things that we can do and I think that we should be with our children when they’re born. I think we should be with them as they grow and I think they should be with us when we die and not all of it’s going to be fun but I think in total

what it is is what’s good for you and it’s what creates the most well-being overall and that is what is important to me in the way we live our lives.

Simon Waller (58:00)
Well, that’s gonna be a beautiful juxtaposition against the previous episode, which was around the future of death and dying for people who are listening back to back. we’re almost out of time. But before we go, I want to ask you and I know you did touch on this a little bit before when you talking about the process of developing the stories, but I’m really interested to know what you have taken out of this experience. Because on one hand, I know that you are so deeply invested in creating this.

But even like, I mean, I’m interested in knowing, has this conversation or even this exercise of creating a scenario, how has it shaped your thinking around what it is that you’re trying to create? How it is you might share it with others, or even just more broadly in terms of this obsession and I suppose that you have around, you know, meaningful and freedom for life.

Col (58:51)
been really useful. And as a person who’s long flirted with the idea of creating a book or some other kind of lasting record of what we’re trying to do here, it’s been really useful because obviously you being a trained futurist with a heap of experience and insight about ways that we can approach thinking about the future, I’ve always done it completely intuitively and kind of

while I’m doing other things. Like I’ll think about this stuff while I’m building a fence or fixing my truck or whatever. Like it’s just something that bubbles along on the verge of my subconscious and conscious like intersection. And what you’ve given me here was a very con- an opportunity to approach it in a very conscious way. And what that did is open up a lot more threads than it closed, to be perfectly honest.

But I’m really excited about that because I feel like the next two or three months is likely to be a really exciting period of ideation and exploration for me because this process, both the kind of prompts that you gave me to start with and then the conversation and the various threads that you’ve tugged thanks to your own curiosity has opened up a whole heap of unanswered questions and curiosities in my mind. And I think now I’m going to explore a bunch of those things in much greater depth.

than I might have if I just approach the whole thing intuitively. So the part that I’ve really appreciated about it is having kind of a framework and a structure and some guidance around how do you even think about the future? And my temptation now is for our next conversation, whether it’s recorded or not, I wanna do one on like a three to five year horizon for the community that I’m building. because I’ve just seen how powerful this process has been.

doing it for this more abstract and bigger and more longer term idea. And I’m now interested in doing a more concrete thing with a tighter time horizon, because I feel like that might create some opportunities that I can pursue in a really tangible way starting tomorrow. So it’s been super fun and I’ve really appreciated the opportunity. And hopefully you and anyone else who’s listened to it has found something useful in it from my contribution.

Simon Waller (1:01:03)
Well, first of all, it’d be an absolute privilege to do that with you. And yes, 100 % there’d be so much to be learned about what happens in that near future. But to be honest, it’s just been awesome to have you on the show. I think so many people are going to listen to this and feel inspired by that vision that you have created. And I think the willingness that you have shown to invest in this like quite literally financially and with your time to actually explore what this looks like, I find that super inspiring.

Because as I said, I’ve had so many conversations that are around this idea over the last few years to hear your story, to think about what that might evolve into, I think is super inspiring for a lot of people. So thank you so much. Yeah. And I know we will get a chance to talk again in the very near future, but until then, thank you so much for being on the show.

Col (1:01:48)
Love it. Thanks, mate.

Thanks, Simon. It’s been a real pleasure.