The Hundred Year Pivot Ep. 9 – Roger Mitchell

**Grant Williams** (0:10)
Before we get going, here's the bit where I remind you that nothing we discuss should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So, while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets. And now, on with the show. Welcome, everybody, to another edition of The Hundred Year Pivot. Joining me, as always, on this, is my friend and co-host, Demetri Kapitas. Demetri, how are you, buddy?

**Demetri Kapitas** (0:52)
I'm great. How are you doing, Grant?

**Grant Williams** (0:53)
I'm good. I'm good. It's been a while. We've been... I was going to say, it's been a while since we......doing a whole bunch of stuff.

**Demetri Kapitas** (0:58)
Yeah, since we did one of these shows, we text, but I haven't spoken to you in a while. Maybe it feels like it's been a while, but how long has it been? Like a month?

**Grant Williams** (1:06)
Yeah, you know, it probably has only been about a month, right? It's just weird. There's so much happening in the world and in each of our lives, and you just kind of get wrapped up in this stuff. And suddenly you look at a month's gone by, because of what you've packed into it, it feels like it's much longer.

**Demetri Kapitas** (1:18)
I've been tuning out a lot of the world. I don't know about you.

**Grant Williams** (1:21)
I've been trying to. I think you've been more successful than me.

**Demetri Kapitas** (1:24)
Oh, yeah. Well, one of the things I did was I deleted Twitter off my phone and it didn't even make an effort to do it. I really just, I think I finally reached a point because I've gone through a few phases here with this. I reached a point where it's like it wasn't even an effort. I just like, I just can't.

**Grant Williams** (1:39)
Oh, you know what? That's great. I need to do that.

**Demetri Kapitas** (1:41)
It's not even valuable from a business point of view anymore, but it's a form of pollution and I don't want to pollute my life with it.

**Grant Williams** (1:48)
Yeah, I agree with that. I still find it useful for finding stuff out, but you've got to be so surgical now and you just kind of got to wash all the filth off anything you find, you know?

**Demetri Kapitas** (1:59)
I've gone back to just ordering books and reading books now. My new hobby is learning about the disintegration and collapse of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Not because I'm looking for some kind of corollary to the United States, because I know that's a popular comparison point these days, but actually because of the resurgence in nationalist movements in Europe, as well as the events unfolding in the Middle East, and the desire to think more deeply about organizational forms of governance and how transitions from one form to another can lead us to all sorts of political upheavals and violence that, in the case of the Balkans or the former Ottoman territories in the Middle East, form the basis for the world that we are living in today, even if we don't realize it. Anyway, that's a whole other conversation obviously.

**Grant Williams** (2:51)
But an understanding of conflict and the nature of it and the paths to it has never been more important than now, right?

**Demetri Kapitas** (2:58)
Yeah, so I'm kind of geeking out on history at the moment.

**Grant Williams** (3:02)
Good man, doesn't make you a bad person. Well, listen, we've got a guest joining us in a second, a good mate of mine, Roger Mitchell. And the reason Roger's joining us back in February, one of the things that started this journey for Demetri and I was a collection of essays that I published in February of this year. I called the compendium Fandes Cieckla, End of Century, because I'd asked some friends of mine, because the same impetus, the same feelings that led to Demetri and I doing The Hundred Year Pivot, that I just felt things were changing and I wanted to get five people who I have an immense amount of respect and admiration for, to write their feelings about the nature of that change. One of those essays was written by Roger and each of my five friends was given a very broad brief. I didn't tell them what to write. I wanted them to come at it for whatever direction they wanted. Thinking that if they all came at it from the same direction, there was as much information as that as if they all came from a different direction. They did all come from different directions. Roger's direction was a direction of religion. It's something which plays a key role in his life.