One lesson from Ricky Zhang

Asking why, rather than who

I’ve just published my first podcast episode.

Joining the show was Ricky Zhang, who was previously a successful travel creator, racking up 19 million views on YouTube sharing his experiences jet-setting around the world.

Ricky simultaneously built a business, Prince of Travel, aimed at helping people to maximise their credit card points and miles, enabling them not only to travel more cheaply, but also to have experiences that most would perceive as unattainable: travelling in first class, for example.

If you can bear the ‘erms’, ‘ums’ and my anxiety at being on camera for the first time, then I’d say it’s an honest discussion, worth 69 minutes of your time. Ricky is also an excellent communicator of ideas.

We speak about his transition from CEO and creator - and the hedonistic influencer lifestyle that accompanied it - to hosting a daily live show that, while simple in its design, sees him think aloud, attempting to find clarity in the financial and technological shifts we’re living through.

Ricky’s transition is one I describe as a kind of enlightenment. Not an overnight transformation, but an ongoing journey of self-reflection that you can see fragments of, even during his travelling days, when the attention he was getting had begun to outlast his belief in what he was doing.

The crux of the discussion is Ricky’s newfound faith in Bitcoin and how he sees it as a solution to the current woes in our financial system, where the ability to expand the money supply drives inflation, a higher cost of living and inequality he thinks has become grotesque.

While I have written about Bitcoin before, I know some of my readers might still wince at the word. To that, I would ask that you give our conversation a chance.

We do not skirt the difficult questions. I explain that I used to work in a law firm, surrounded by extremely smart but conservative, strait-laced colleagues, and ask what he’d say to those people whose immediate and valid first reaction to Bitcoin is that it has criminal associations, or that it’s speculation - a bubble, a Ponzi scheme.

You can be the judge of his answer.

What I took most from the discussion is that when we talk about the challenges we face, time is better spent asking why, rather than who.

It’s natural to blame governments, local councils or corporations, but these failings have accumulated over thousands of years of human experience. That is not to say we shouldn’t try to fix these problems, but that the process has to start with seeing the system clearly enough to be honest about finding the right solutions.

I think at times I’m guilty of being pessimistic. This tone has bled into my writing, and while never straying from the facts, I’ve expended a lot of energy on diagnosing problems, in our politics and economy especially, before finding myself 1,000 words in and surrendering hope altogether. This is instead of going deeper, asking why it’s happening and sharing my conviction that it can change.

This is why I wanted to start a podcast to run alongside my writing, to both learn from and feature other voices - reminding myself, and anyone who listens or reads, that naming what’s broken is the easy half. Realising the alternative is where the real proof of work comes in.

The line I keep coming back to:

“We don’t see the counterfactual, right? We just see the current state and we don’t see what the cities could look like if we did in fact have sound money, if we did in fact have incentives that pointed in the direction of low time preference and a longer time horizon.”

— Ricky Zhang, Orientation, Episode 1