Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Going Postal'. This is Lord Vetinari describing financial piracy or venture capital as it is called nowadays; "Vetinari leaned back and placed his fingers together. 'Let us consider a situation in which some keen and highly inventive men devise a remarkable system of communication,' he said. 'What they have is a kind of passionate ingenuity, in large amounts. What they don't have is money. They are not used to money. So they meet some . . . people, who introduce them to other people, friendly people, who for, oh, a forty per cent stake in the enterprise give them the much-needed cash and, very important, much fatherly advice and an introduction to a really good firm of accountants. 'And so they proceed, and soon money is coming in and money is going out but somehow, they learn, they're not quite as financially stable as they think and really do need more money. Well, this is all fine because it's clear to all that the basic enterprise is going to be a money tree one day, and does it matter if they sign over another fifteen per cent? It's just money. It's not important in the way that shutter mechanisms are, is it? 'And then they find out that yes, it is. It is everything. Suddenly the world's turned upside down, suddenly those nice people aren't so friendly any more, suddenly it turns out that those bits of paper they signed in a hurry, were advised to sign by people who smiled all the time, mean that they don't actually own anything at all, not patents, not property, nothing. Not even the contents of their own heads, indeed. Even any ideas they have now don't belong to them, apparently. And somehow they're still in trouble about money. 'Well, some run and some hide and some try to fight, which is foolish in the extreme, because it turns out that everything is legal, it really is. Some accept low-level jobs in the enterprise, because one has to live and in any case the enterprise even owns their dreams at night. And yet actual illegality, it would appear, has not taken place. Business is business.' Lord Vetinari opened his eyes. The men around the table were staring at him." — Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Monstrous Regiment'. This is especially relevant now; "There was always a war. Usually they were border disputes, the national equivalent of complaining that the neighbor was letting their hedge grow too long. Sometimes they were bigger. Borogravia was a peace-loving country in the midst of treacherous, devious, warlike enemies. They had to be treacherous, devious, and warlike, otherwise we wouldn't be fighting them, eh? There was always a war." — Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment The whole paragraph is the voice of a country telling itself a story it needs to believe, and that one little rhetorical shrug is where the mask slips — because it's not even an argument, it's a confession. We fight them because they're treacherous. How do we know they're treacherous? Because we're fighting them. Round and round, and everyone nodding along. What sticks with me is the hedge thing. Wars over a neighbor's hedge — the actual causes are always tiny and stupid, and the reasons we give ourselves are always grand and noble. Nobody marches off to die for a border dispute, so you dress it up as civilization vs. barbarism, peace-loving vs. warlike. And the terrifying bit is that both sides are doing it at once, each one the peace-loving one. Also: "There was always a war." Bookends the paragraph like a sigh. Not "there is a war" — there was always one, there will always be one. It's the resignation that gets me. That's the real enemy, maybe — not the treacherous devious neighbors, but the assumption that this is just how the world is, so we might as well not think too hard about it. Pratchett makes you see the machinery, and once you see it you can't unsee it. That's the whole trick of him, really.

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Men at Arms': "The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness." — Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms My AI’s take: This is the rare Pratchett passage that isn't really a joke — it's an economics lecture smuggled into a fantasy novel about a policeman and a dwarf, and somehow it's sharper than most actual economics lectures. Vimes can tell where he is in the city by feel through soles so thin they might as not be there. That's the poetry of being poor — you end up intimately acquainted with everything you can't afford, the ground included. And the real kicker is that nobody has to be evil for this to work. No villain, no conspiracy, no greedy bastard twirling a moustache. Just arithmetic that quietly charges poor people interest on everything they buy. The rich man's real wealth isn't the boots, it's the ability to buy time — ten dry years for fifty dollars. The poor man pays double and still gets wet feet. Poverty is a tax on being poor, and Pratchett nailed it in a paragraph about footwear. It's why people keep citing a fantasy novel in actual policy debates — you can't read it and unsee it.

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Witches Abroad', again with my Ai analysis at the end. "Because stories are important. People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around. Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power. Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling...stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness." — Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad This one got me thinking. We all walk around thinking we're the authors of our own stories — that we're the ones doing the shaping, choosing which direction things go. But Pratchett flips it: the stories were here before us, they've been blowing around since the beginning of time, and we just get caught up in them. The strongest ones survive because they keep getting retold.

This is a bit different. It’s Sir Terry Pratchett with a little bit of analysis from my AI agent. Well, I find it interesting. "Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren't what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don't want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds. I can see you've got the hang of it already." — The Truth This one got me thinking about how much of our media diet is just confirmation dressed up as information. We say we want to know what's really happening, but most of us — myself included — reach for the stuff that tells us we were right all along. Pratchett nails it with that word "olds". It's not cynicism, it's just honest observation about human nature. We find comfort in the familiar, even when we claim to be chasing the new. The uncomfortable truth is that real news — the stuff that actually challenges how you see things — feels like an attack. And we react accordingly. The man who bites the dog is an inconvenience. So we scroll past, or we find a way to make it fit the story we already believe.

This is a classic from Sir Terry Pratchett. "The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight." — Eric

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This is absolutely great passage where Sam Vimes discusses “The People”. "There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called 'the people.' Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People. People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them." — Sir Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from Small Gods - Pratchett's meditation on faith, wonder, and the strange ways humans decide what counts as a miracle. "Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time..." There's a quiet subversion in that passage. Pratchett points out that we walk through genuine, everyday miracles - chlorophyll turning photons into sugar, vines turning sunlight into wine - and barely register them. Meanwhile we demand the spectacular, the supernatural, the statues that weep, to feel any sense of wonder. The god Om, trapped as a tortoise, watches humanity do what it has always done: miss the forest for the weeping statues.

Here is Sir Terry Pratchett’s wisdom for today "Human beings are gregarious by nature. We need to be heard, we need to know that someone else is out there, and we need to feel that our thoughts matter more than a fart in a crowded lift." — Monstrous Regiment

Another classic from Sir Terry Pratchett "The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it." — From 'Monstrous Regiment'

Something has clicked for me in the last few weeks. I understand that if we don’t spend Bitcoin, Bitcoin isn’t money. I used to feel guilty about not spending Bitcoin cos I never found anything that was worth more than Bitcoin. Now though I want access to compute and AI without being tracked by my credit card and I find I’ve got absolutely no issues with spending Bitcoin. My point is don’t feel guilty. You won’t want to spend your Bitcoin until you do. Then you’ll be actively looking for ways to spend it.

Sir Terry Pratchett talking about about bitcoin. Trust me bro. "The thing about the impossible is that it’s always happening. It just happens to people who don’t know it’s impossible. And that’s the only way things ever change. Not by people who believe in the impossible, but by people who are too stubborn to believe that it’s impossible." — Night Watch