Someone commented on last week's episode: "I don't care about flying cars when I'm struggling with the cost of living." Derek Whitaker took it seriously, and built this week's show around it.

He knows what it's like when all you can think about is the next bill, the next meal and whether you can pay for fuel to get to work. The problem, he says, is that you can stay in that vacuum and never break through it. Christmas penny-pinching tips help some people for a while, and Derek doesn't look down on them. They just don't get anyone out.

So Derek and Travis Carter look at the game itself. The old Babylonian system, where the borrower is servant to the lender. A European politician on how banks really work. A Senate Estimates exchange that has people in finance frustrated. Tax rules changing faster than accountants can plan for them. And a hard look at two popular explanations for the squeeze, immigration and oil prices, against the actual figures.

Then the way through. Why the savings account stopped working once interest fell below inflation. How the cost of getting started has dropped, from $5 crypto purchases to fractional shares. Travis's coffee budget, and the "discretionary number" most people spend without noticing. And Derek's closing thought: treat money as a game you can learn the rules of, and the emotion comes out of it.

▶ FREE MASTERCLASS: OPTIONS TRADING IN A FALLING MARKET

How experienced traders protect positions when markets move fast. No cost, nothing to book.

https://www.bluskyfactory.com/r/e0eb02d6

Recorded 21 October 2026 at Edge Studio, Perth, for The Greater Wealth on Edge Radio Australia.

Education only. Nothing here is personal financial, tax or legal advice.

A Tesla Roadster goes up a ramp, hangs upside down, and lands on the other side under its own power. Derek Whitaker and Travis Carter watched the footage that went around the world over the weekend, and spent the show on what comes after it.

Travis plays devil's advocate: is it flight or a very good hop, and who in your family would you trust behind the wheel of one? Derek makes the case that it's a Wright brothers moment, and that the marketing was as clever as the engineering.

Then the questions nobody has answered yet. Does a flying car need a pilot's licence or a driver's licence? Who insures one, and what happens when it lands on someone else's roof? What do three layers of traffic do to roads, to cities, and to the price of a house a long way from town? And what's left for the companies that build the world's most beautiful sports cars?

Derek's closing thought is for anyone running a business or building wealth: the technology behind moments like this is now within reach of the little guy, and the time to get ready is before it arrives.

▶ FREE AI MASTERCLASS

Where AI is actually taking work, and what to do about it in a business that isn't a tech company. No cost, nothing to book.

https://www.bluskyfactory.com/r/0217249b

Recorded Monday 19 October 2026 at Edge Studio, Perth, for The Greater Wealth on Edge Radio Australia.

Education only. Nothing here is personal financial, tax or legal advice.

On Thursday 8 October, Elon Musk received the National Medal of Science at the White House. The same day, SpaceX agreed to buy a block of US mobile spectrum that lets Starlink reach phones inside buildings, and said it intends to become a major mobile carrier. By the close, Verizon had its worst day since 2002, and AT&T and T-Mobile weren't far behind.

Derek Whitaker and Travis Carter go through what happened and what it means here.

Derek walks through the deal itself: why the 800 MHz band matters, why most phones already support it, and the medal ceremony and speech that came with it. Travis brings it home: what it means for Telstra and Optus, for the super funds that hold them, and for an NBN that cost a fortune to roll out and still leaves a city radio station on copper.

Then the market. Derek takes the charts one by one, and explains why a stop-loss gives no protection when a share opens far below where it closed, and what traders use instead. Travis asks the question nobody had an easy answer for: in a selloff like this, why didn't gold and silver go up?

Along the way: whether Starlink could own the internet, the TV and the phone in one household, how much data that puts in one company's hands, and Musk's plan, which Derek reckons ends on Mars.

▶ FREE MASTERCLASS: OPTIONS TRADING IN A FALLING MARKET

How traders protect positions when markets move fast and they can't be at the screen.

No cost, nothing to book.

https://www.bluskyfactory.com/r/e0eb02d6

Recorded Monday 12 October 2026 at Edge Studio, Perth, for The Greater Wealth on Edge Radio Australia.

Education only. Nothing here is personal financial, tax or legal advice.

From Sunday 6 December, New York time, US shares start trading 23 hours a day, five days a week. For Perth, the new overnight session lands at roughly 10 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon. The working day. For Sydney it's early afternoon into the evening.

Derek Whitaker and Travis Carter spend half an hour on what that actually changes.

Travis comes at it from the trades. He's been a roofer, a finance broker and an insurance broker, and the thing he hears most from tradies is how badly their super is doing and what to do with a bonus. His point is about cost: small trades on the ASX carry heavy commissions, and a US market open during business hours puts real competition on that.

Derek's concern is the part getting far less attention. The shares will trade overnight. The options over them won't. Which means there will be hours when someone holding options can watch the underlying stock move and can do nothing about it. That's a new kind of exposure, and it now sits in the Australian working day.

They get into the catch, thin markets, and the rules being put in place to manage it: limit orders only overnight, and price bands 20% either side of the reference price. And what happened in August 2024, when the main overnight venue hit capacity in a sell-off, cancelled trades and shut down for more than a week.

Along the way: a friend paying $2,000 a month for a strategy he could have run himself, why serious traders keep a backup plan, Robinhood's CEO on tokenised shares, and what Derek calls the "sleep at night factor": protection put in place before the market moves, not after.

▶ FREE MASTERCLASS: OPTIONS TRADING IN A FALLING MARKET

How traders protect positions when markets move fast and they can't be at the screen.

No cost, nothing to book.

https://www.bluskyfactory.com/r/e0eb02d6

Recorded Monday 5 October 2026 at Edge Studio, Perth, for The Greater Wealth on Edge Radio Australia.

Education only. Nothing here is personal financial, tax or legal advice.

Twenty Western Australian MPs from across the political spectrum have written to the Prime Minister asking for an AI kill switch. The Prime Minister was in the United States the same week, meeting the technology companies. And the question nobody in either conversation quite answers is what a government does when the thing it wants to regulate is built, hosted and understood by somebody else.

Derek Whitaker and Travis Carter spend half an hour there.

Travis takes the kill switch apart first, and not from the side you would expect. His objection is not that it is too strong — it is that it only works once. Hit it and everything is gone, and you are standing there with nothing. What he wants built instead is the opposite of a switch: an AI whose entire job is stopping other AI.

Derek's half of the argument is about capability, and it is less comfortable. Governments do not have the systems, the infrastructure or the capital that the technology companies have. Which is how you end up with the state asking the industry to handle the duty of care it cannot discharge itself — and why, when he asks how often a government website has frustrated you, it is not really a joke about websites.

Then it comes back to your own week.

The two of them go through what AI is already doing inside ordinary businesses — not the ones in Silicon Valley, the ones with four staff and no budget for an experiment. Derek walks through building a working tool for his own business over a weekend, something that used to take him half an hour a client, every client. Travis makes the case that this is the first technology in a long time that makes a small operation look bigger than it is, and that the advantage runs to whoever can change their mind fastest, which is rarely the biggest company in the room.

And there is the line the episode really turns on. The dividing line is not between people and AI. It is between people who know how to use it and people who do not.

It closes somewhere practical: four things worth doing now, and why the most expensive position available is deciding this does not apply to you.

▶ FREE AI MASTERCLASS

Where AI is actually taking work, and what to do about it in a business that isn't a tech company. No cost, nothing to book.

https://www.bluskyfactory.com/r/0217249b

Recorded Monday 21 September 2026 at Edge Studio, Perth, for The Greater Wealth on Edge Radio Australia.

Education only. Nothing here is personal financial, tax or legal advice.

The people building AI are asking for a speed limit. The politics is pulling the other way. And Australia's contribution to the argument, so far, is largely a discussion about copyright law.

Derek Whitaker and Travis Carter spend half an hour on that gap.

Derek opens with the call from Anthropic's Dario Amodei for the industry to pace itself — evaluations embedded inside every AI company, coordinated pacing across democracies, an agreement with China — and with the detail underneath it that is easy to miss: the curve is steepening because AI has become good at building the next generation of AI.

Travis takes the other side, and he takes it from the military rather than the market.

The last technology that genuinely changed warfare was the nuclear warhead, and what has kept it holstered since 1945 is not goodwill — it is inspection, control, and the certainty that someone stronger is watching. His question is what happens when somebody simply declines to sign.

Then the part that reaches your own week.

Australia's real exposure is not the copyright negotiation. It is electricity. The hidden AI race is a race for power, and it is already reshaping ordinary places — Texas pausing new data-centre approvals while it works out what the grid can carry, Geelong proposing a levy so a community gets something back for hosting one.

And it is work. Not "will there be jobs", but which ones change, and how fast. Derek and Travis go through the industries they think are most exposed, the ones that end up working alongside AI rather than being replaced by it, and the reason a business that automates every last human out of itself tends to lose the customers it was automating for. Humans buy from humans.

The episode lands somewhere practical. There are two honest responses available to one person: own something, or understand the infrastructure everything else is being built on. And there are two different needs inside that — if you are employed, keeping your skills current; if you run a business, building systems that keep the business current. Those are not the same job, and most advice treats them as though they are.

▶ FREE AI MASTERCLASS

Where AI is actually taking work, and what to do about it in a business that isn't a tech company. No cost, nothing to book.

https://www.bluskyfactory.com/r/0217249b

Recorded Monday 14 September 2026 at Edge Studio, Perth, for The Greater Wealth on Edge Radio Australia.

Education only. Nothing here is personal financial, tax or legal advice.

A former Australian Treasurer put a number on the next five years, and it barely made the news.

Joe Hockey's position, back in May, was that 15% unemployment across Australia and the Western world by 2030–31 was his base case if AI adoption accelerates while the country fails to innovate. That is his forecast, not a settled projection — but it deserves a longer look than it got.

This week's figures give it uncomfortable company. Australia's economy grew 0.4% in the June quarter and 2.1% across the year, while GDP per person was flat and productivity went backwards. The economy is growing. Is the individual Australian actually getting ahead?

Then there is the other half of the story. In Paris, the President of the European Commission described €10 trillion of European household savings sitting idle in bank deposits, and set out how Europe intends to put it to work. That is not a plan to confiscate anyone's savings, and this episode is careful about the difference — but it does say something about how institutions are starting to think about capital.

Two foundations of household prosperity are being reconsidered at the same time: how people earn income, and how institutions treat savings.

Derek Whitaker and Travis Carter, on Edge Radio Australia.

ONLINE THIS THURSDAY 10 SEPTEMBER

Accelerate into the New Economy: Preparing for 2030 and Beyond. 5:00pm Perth, 7:00pm Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, 6:30pm Adelaide and Darwin.

https://www.bluskyfactory.com/r/2030

IN THIS EPISODE

0:00 — 15% unemployment by 2030, the claim

1:08 — Joe Hockey, in his own words

2:20 — When welfare outruns income tax

3:14 — From taxing income to taxing capital

5:02 — Where the manufacturing booms went

8:02 — From a welfare state to an innovative state

11:40 — The $25,000 worker that never sleeps

13:50 — The economy grew. Did you?

18:59 — €10 trillion, and what was actually said

20:51 — No, nobody is confiscating bank accounts

21:14 — You think it's your money until it isn't

23:07 — What securitisation does to a deposit

27:07 — The two things changing at once

29:39 — Housing, and the buyer's market nobody planned

31:02 — The 5% deposit and the 120% problem

Recorded at Edge Studio, Perth, for The Greater Wealth on Edge Radio Australia.

Joe Hockey footage courtesy Sky News Australia. Von der Leyen audio: © European Union, 2026, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (excerpt).

Education only. Nothing here is personal financial, tax or legal advice. Blu Sky Factory is an education company, not a licensed financial planning, accounting or law firm.

For years artificial intelligence was a technology story. This month it became an Australian household story.

The Reserve Bank has now listed the AI and data-centre investment boom among the things that could keep inflation — and therefore interest rates — higher.

In the same few weeks unemployment rose to 4.5%, employment fell by 16,000, hours worked went backwards with Western Australia among the biggest contributors, and headline inflation eased to 3.5% while the underlying number sat at 3.6% and housing costs rose 5%.

Then Nvidia forecast roughly 70% revenue growth for next year, and Australian business investment fell 3.6% after the previous quarter's record data-centre spend — with planned investment for the year ahead revised up 15.5%.

Those look like separate stories. They aren't. Money, skills and economic power are being redirected into a new economy while households carry higher borrowing costs, stubborn living expenses and a softening job market. Same transition, different ends of it.

That's the conversation Aaron and I have on Edge Radio Australia in this episode — what the reallocation is, where it's going, and what it asks of you if you'd rather choose your response than react to it.

▶ Live in Perth — Thursday 3 September:

https://www.bluskyfactory.com/r/bed3b6dd

WHAT YOU'LL COME AWAY WITH

Why the Reserve Bank has started naming AI investment as an inflation factor — and the careful version of that claim, not the headline version• How to read a month where the headline inflation number improves and your actual cost of living doesn't

• What a 3.6% fall in business investment sits next to a 15.5% upgrade in planned investment actually tells you about where capital is going

• Why data centres compete with housing for the same builders, concrete and electricians — and what the RBA said about it

• What the last great technology shift did to work, and what the Luddites were actually responding to

• Why "work hard and you'll get ahead" stopped being sufficient advice, and what replaces it

• Where the opportunity sits for a small business owner who can't outspend anyone — including a project quoted in the hundreds of thousands that got done for about $120

• How to start changing before the pain forces you to, and why almost nobody does

Recorded at Edge Studio, Perth, for The Greater Wealth on Edge Radio Australia, with Aaron.