Welcome to your favorite fourth tier Bitcoin podcast hosted by two guys who did not take a whole lot of effort to get their hair ready for today, but that's all right.
Ouch! I was slaving for hours for this moment, but go ahead, continue.
Slave away, slave away.
We'll have to work through this.
Yeah. Today, we're going to take a little bit of a turn. Instead of rolling through some canonical Bitcoin work and perhaps sticking our nose into something academic or highfalutin with large words that need to be described and rescribed and conscribed, we're going to take a little trip down fictional lane.
And we chose to read the book The Mandibles, which is by author Lionel Shriver.
Incredible book.
Just absolutely incredible.
My favorite fiction that I've read for, well, I take it back.
I did read the Foundation series, so I really liked that a year ago.
But it's really right up there.
To me, this book ranks alongside like Brave New World or Atlas Shrugged, kind of this very prescient, future looking historical fiction playing out in front of us, I guess.
give a little background on the author, Lionel Shriver. She's actually from North Carolina in
the States, but she has moved around quite a bit, is actually living in Portugal right now.
I find that interesting, given that there are so many people that have left affluent places to go
live in Portugal. She was born Margaret Ann and changed her name to Lionel at age 15,
kind of a sort of reflection.
At age 15 she changed it?
Yeah.
That's pretty awesome.
That is.
Which is cool.
It shows a lot of agency, right?
I mean.
Yeah, exactly.
A lot.
Yeah.
And to kind of reflect her tomboyish personality
and just kind of reject these traditional feminine expectations,
which.
It's very literary sounding too.
Like Lionel Trilling is a famous essayist.
When I hear Lionel, I do think you think English and kind of,
I don't know, it's very literary.
So it's a good move as a 15 year old.
It does sound very English. Yeah, it does. She's the author of another great book called We Need to Talk About Kevin, which was made into a movie starring Tilda Swinton and some other ones, too.
But we want to get into talking about The Mandibles, A Family, 2029 to 2047. That's the title of this book, The Mandibles, A Family, 2029 to 2047.
So what this book does is it kind of takes us over a course of years.
And it's a tale of money, which is a tale that we're all living right now.
It's a tale of family and the slow motion fall of an empire.
It's a tale of social classes and race dynamics in kind of late empire United States, right?
So it's how all of these trends. Yeah, 2016 is when it's written. And like you said, it begins nominally in 2029. Very prescient, we'll see, that she nails some of the things that happened between 2016 and 2026 now where we're filming this today.
Yeah. So to start it off, just imagine, imagine a country that prints money like there's no tomorrow, throws it up in the air like confetti for, oh, 80 plus years or more.
I just want to say, in case you're going to go into this spoiler alert, maybe, because I think throughout this podcast, like we're going to talk about the plot.
I mean, this was published in 2016. So if you haven't read it, I mean, listen to it. Yeah.
But also, you're going to want to read it even after we talk about it, I think.
So, yeah, I can listen to it if you want, read it if you want.
But either way, there are probably going to be things that you wouldn't know if hadn't read it, and you're going to know after you listen.
Yeah.
Anyways, yeah.
So just imagine, to set the stage, imagine a country that keeps printing money like there's no tomorrow, throws it up in the air like confetti.
One day the music stops. The only thing left is a family arguing over who gets the last cabbage.
This is the story of the mandibles.
And it's the story of every empire that ever thought tomorrow would pay for today.
This is what we're living through right now.
And we're going to see how the author, Lionel Shriver, presents it to us into the future.
So we begin with the last normal summer. It's in 2029. This is where the book starts. And we get introduced to some characters here. Douglas Mandible, he's the grandfather, the patriarch, I guess, but really not the patriarch.
As we'll find out later in the book, there's family money, and that family money didn't come from Douglas Mandible. It came from, I believe, Douglas's grandfather, if I'm right.
He was an engineer or something, some sort of diesel contraption, diesel technology.
They made diesel engines.
Yeah.
Diesel engines.
Yeah.
So, but at this point, Douglas Mandible is, he's 97 years old.
He's a former literary agent.
So, you know, a book dude.
And he's just crushing life.
He's living in this like super swanky, luxurious retirement home with his demented second wife, Luella.
Who was the, it's kind of like the original gold digger, I guess, is kind of the way it's presented, I guess.
He left his wife for her.
Yeah, she's maybe that, but she's demented now.
So it's kind of like a reverse gold digger situation.
Exactly.
When they meet, she is kind of.
It serves you right.
Yeah, she's a black lady and very debonair and like well-spoken and just like high class like him who was a literary agent.
and they get together.
And then one day they walk in
and she's eating her shit off the walls.
Almost literally, yeah.
And so this switch is like,
she is the gold digger,
but then he ends up her caretaker
as a 90-year-old caretaking a 70-year-old
or 60 or whatever she is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, she's a lot younger, yeah.
So you've got Douglas.
He's the old guy.
He's got the young wife,
but she's lost her mind.
He's in retirement home.
And then you've got their kids.
So Carter and Jane,
That's Carter's son.
And Carter and Jane, they had three kids.
They had Florence.
But the kids, though, of Douglas, it's Carter and Enola or Noly.
And Noly.
Yeah, Jane is Douglas's.
Carter and Noly.
Yeah.
Yeah, so he had a daughter and a son.
Carter is this guy who, let's see, what does Carter do?
Newspaper writer, kind of a failed.
Kind of like a no, never did anything great.
Yeah, not as great as he would have wanted. I think maybe he ends up at the New York Times, like toward the end of his career, at which point it's also kind of at the end of the New York Times. This is kind of the trajectory of society.
It's like working for the New York Times today.
Yeah, got it.
Exactly.
Right.
Yeah.
And then the other daughter is Noli.
And she like went and became an author and went and lived abroad.
And she's kind of this like hip old lady.
She's like in her 70s and she works out and she does her jumping jacks and her sit-ups and push-ups or whatever all the time.
But she's also like never married, kind of a spinster gal.
um and uh and so so that's so we've got douglas we've got douglas's kids and then then we've um
uh then we've got carter's kids and this is where i think we really start to you know dig in because
we've we've got four generations that we're talking about here just to start off with um
and uh florence uh florence is like uh she's kind of this she's sort of like the bleeding heart
who's like always like supposedly doing these things that are giving away,
you know, like she works at a shelter and she is always taking these jobs that are not,
they're kind of virtuous, but they're not high paying.
Yeah. And it's spelled out specifically at one point, but this is a fiction novel.
So think of the names as well. Florence, Florence Nightingale.
She has kind of a, you know, a do-gooder outwardly, but it also reflects on her interior state.
And she's like, I'm actually not. I was at one point a do-gooder. She gets kind of a useless double major at Barnard College, a virtue signaling type major, a major very humanities oriented. And then she's working at a homeless shelter. But that's not, she's like, this is not virtue signaling anymore. It's like the best job she can get. And she's like thankful for it.
So exactly. And so that's that's kind of like what we learn is like she she sort of lets everybody believe that she's doing this to be virtuous.
But in reality, it's just literally the only job is it's the best job she can get.
Yeah. And and she's she's kind of got she's not married, but she's got this kind of live in boyfriend.
His name's Ernesto. Esteban. I think it's Esteban. Esteban. Esteban. Yeah. Esteban.
and uh and uh and then she's got a son and a son from like a uh from a one night stand
and the son's name is willing um and then there she she owns her own house and there's this guy
that lives down in the basement and uh pays rent he's this kind of sad lonely guy who plays the
saxophone but he's really nice and meek and timid and his name's kurt yeah um and kurt has
wrecked teeth and this is mentioned
wrecked teeth right like rotted or
something and it's it's interesting and
it's dwelled on because like bad teeth
is something that kind of is
disappearing more and more in the United
States but something that also crops up
more and more as poverty increases and
Kurt is one of those people who's caught
with that who is on the downward
downwardly mobile type person who has
bad teeth as a show of that and it's a
really sad thing because like Florence
and one of her interior kind of monologue or thoughts,
she's like, Kurt is kind of optimistic
about finding a gal and stuff.
And Florence is like, it's not going to happen.
Yeah, she's like zero chance with those chompers.
Yeah, he's kind of a charity case.
Yeah, exactly.
And so the three kids, Florence and then Avery.
And Avery is kind of the well-to-do
and she's married to this guy
that's a Georgetown, like,
modern monetary theory economist kind of guy.
Keynesian, yeah, for sure.
Who's, you know, real self-important and really, yeah,
thinks he knows everything.
Lowell, is that right?
Lowell, yeah.
And they've got some kids.
And then there's a brother, Jared.
And we don't really hear a whole lot about Jared.
Uncle Jared, yeah.
Yeah, he's living with the parents,
and apparently he's never really done much.
He's just kind of there.
And then, yeah, so we've got, like, so the grandpa's doing really well.
Grandpa Douglas.
Yeah, Grandpa Douglas.
And then Carter's not doing so great.
Carter and Jane, man, not really.
They're doing okay.
But Avery and Lowell, they're, like, they're living in D.C.
They're big time.
You know, she does Pilates therapy type stuff.
And she's just, yeah, healing the world through motion.
Yeah.
And then Jared, he's not worth a shit, apparently.
and uh but then then you got noli and she's like living over in france and she's always got money
stuff like that so so yeah so that kind of sets the stage here's the characters i guess um but
sort of the the the hook here is that like every every collapsing empire they have one last normal
summer they have one last normal year basically before all of a sudden the music stops and um
Things just turn sour.
For, like, Weimar Germany, this was 1922.
For Rome, it was, like, 450 AD.
Argentina, it was 2000.
For America, 2026, it's going to be a good one.
2029, according to Lionel.
But, man, if I was a betting man, 2026 was going to be on my – that's going to rank up high on my board.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's going to be a big one.
But and you start to you start to get hints about this.
You start to get hints about this already because you hear about Douglas who, you know, he's in the he's in the nursing home.
But he's bragging because his nursing home serves real turkey on Thanksgiving, not that locust protein substitute the poors eat.
Yeah. So clearly we've already moved on to eating bugs and having insect protein because it's because it's much cheaper and stuff.
And it's already an inverted wealth thing where we see all this wealth at the top and kind of the retiring boomer generation.
And that's in the mandibles, too.
So you have Douglas at the top, Carter below that.
The generation below that is Florence and Avery.
And the generation below that, the children of Florence and Avery, Willing.
And then Bing, Goog, and Savannah, the children of Avery.
And so like Carter is kind of, you know, abashedly, guiltily waiting for Douglas to die so we can get the mandible wealth.
And then Florence and Avery are kind of like twice removed from that, kind of also waiting on a double death so they can get the wealth too.
So it's kind of everybody's troubled by this relation to wealth, but that's just the way it is.
Everybody's just sitting around waiting for somebody else to die, trying to be polite in the meantime.
Yeah, yeah, it is kind of a forced politeness amongst them, even though they will see that they do love each other. And that's very heightened once we'll see the wealth is removed, the love comes out.
Yeah. So what happened? So we go through this and then there's kind of the second act is sort of, it's sort of like the, it's the renunciation. This is in 2030, 2031. And it's the day the world stopped lending us money.
So it's got this trigger event.
And this trigger event, of course, is something that we are already seeing in the United States, which is that there's no bidders at the Treasury auction, which means that the Fed is buying its own debt, eating its own tail, basically, or eating its own shit.
And this, by the way, is something that's happened before in the UK back in 2022.
And at the same time, Vladimir Putin and China, they launched this new currency, this Bancor, which I find is interesting, right?
The Bancor, that was the proposed currency after Bretton Woods at the end of World War II, the Bretton Woods Agreement.
And the proposal was, hey, we either link gold to the U.S. dollar or we could create this new world currency called the Bancor.
and that lost out.
Yeah, back then, yeah, the U.S. killed it.
And the Bancor would have been just,
right, and the Bancor,
John Maynard Keynes' invention,
it would have been tied to,
instead of the dollar floating,
like it would have been based on a basket
of world currencies.
Of currencies.
Yeah, around the world,
instead of just having the dollar
as the world's reserve currency,
but the dollar won.
They criminalized gold.
Go figure.
So this is something that we've lived through the United States.
1933, this is what happened during the bank holiday when FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Executive Order 6102.
This made it illegal for citizens to hold gold.
And so this happens here in the mandibles as well.
And it happens, interestingly, through a presidential address from President Alvarez.
There's a whole racial dynamic in this book where Hispanics have become the majority or are almost ready to become the majority.
And there's a Hispanic president, Alvarez, and they have his speech word for word.
And it's kind of like a regulent of Nixon when – back when they go – when Nixon does the executive order.
And he blames all these other countries for like financial warfare against the United States.
It's a moment of threat.
We're all under threat.
We need to rally together.
And so he gives this speech.
Yeah.
Wait, do you have that?
And do you have that pulled up?
Yeah, I do.
It is on the paper version, but it's page 53.
It's kind of a long thing, but here's a good passage from it.
Coordinating their chicanery, countries that wish this nation ill have played on the cowardly compliance of our allies.
In the last 10 days, a sequence of carefully timed financial dominoes were toppled, designed to raise the cost of financing our national debt, which would translate into you, the American taxpayer.
This is the TV address.
Keeping less of your hard-earned income.
Our currency was also sabotaged on the international exchange markets.
Most perfidiously of all, world leaders who resent the power, prestige, and success of our great nation
have cobbled together the so-called Bancor, an artificial pretender currency,
with no history as legal tender, and goes on and on in that vein.
And he, yeah, doesn't do gold seizure order in that speech.
And that's a speech that's given by President Dante Alvarado, who's a Mexican, but he's allowed to run for president due to an amendment that passed in 2024 called the Arnold Amendment, named after Arnold Schwarzenegger.
And he thus with that speech, not only is he recriminalizing gold, but he is declaring a global debt reset. So anyone who holds U.S. Treasuries is now owed nothing instead of being owed what the U.S. Treasury says.
So this is a reset and it renders United States debt absolutely worthless.
We just say, hey, we're not going to pay it.
So good luck with that.
That's a great renunciation.
The U.S. basically renounces all of its debt.
It's a debt jubilee, but just for the state.
And by the way, I find this fun.
So I took my notes and I loaded my notes into Grok and I said, hey, help me clean this up a little bit and then like help add some historical parallels.
And so this is great.
It says so a real life parallel to this debt reset would be the 1917 Russian default.
OK.
The 1982 Latin American defaults.
Sometimes.
And the coming U.S. version.
just literally shit yeah you're coming out of the box model who let this thing out yeah
rock knows the score coming from the future reaching back in time hyperstition yeah and
and of course so so now you've got the guy that's opportunistic that's like oh wait a second yeah
so this debt it's it's not worthless it's on sale right buy when there's blood in the streets and
And so Lowell, the Keynesian economist, the modern monetary theory professor, he goes, oh, this is just a balance sheet adjustment.
Hoarding is the problem.
That's the problem is that people are hoarding.
People are hoarding.
Like, remember during COVID, like people were hoarding toilet paper, right?
Yeah.
They were hoarding milk replacer, baby milk replacer, all these other things.
We were hoarding things.
That's what the problem was.
The problem was not that there wasn't supply and the problem was not that the money was worth nothing.
It's that the hoarders had gotten there first, taken everything, and now there is only this tiny amount to be split up by everybody else.
So, yeah, it's a hoarding.
He goes all in on the stock market at the bottom and then, of course, loses even more because the stock market's not coming back.
And they end up having to sell their home, Avery and Lowell.
They sell their home to a Chinese buyer.
So the Chinese now are coming over and they're moving into America.
They're buying everything in America because it's way cheaper in America than it is in China.
Go figure.
They've got a nice slang term for them.
They call them plate faces.
I hadn't actually heard that one before.
But it's funny how, yeah, they always introduce, like, anytime you read a book like Brave New World or Atlas Shrugged or something, they always seem to introduce some new, like, racial slang or, like, class slang.
Yeah.
There's a lot of that in here.
Yeah.
She adds, we'll have some quotes from the book, and we'll run through some of that slang, like, shrivs for old people, lats for Latinos, a splug for something kind of bad or worthless.
And then later on in the book, treasury.
The knppers.
Or the slumberers.
The slumbers.
Yeah.
That's kind of further on.
So even later on, yeah, later on, Treasury becomes the word for bullshit.
Yeah.
Worthless bullshit.
Worth nothing.
Yeah.
In this speech that we're talking about with Alvarado, there's another part that's really good.
So we all, we all, if you listen to this, you may be familiar with the previous executive order where Nixon ordered the gold seizure.
But it was gold seizure in the sense of turn over your gold.
Wait, Nixon ordered gold seizure?
No, no, no. Roosevelt.
Delano Roosevelt, right.
Yeah, yeah.
6102.
Yeah, and he'll talk about Roosevelt in here.
This is a portion I'm going to read.
But that gold seizure order was not – it was kind of like just turn over your gold, right?
Here's Alvarado talking about it here.
This is good.
Using – and this is something we may hear.
This could be, again, a predictor could be telling the truth about the summer of 2026, 627, whatever.
Using the powers vested in your president by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, a real thing, I'm calling in all gold reserves held in private hands.
Gold mining operations within our borders will be required to sell ore exclusively to the United States Treasury.
Gold stocks, ETFs, and bullion will likewise be transferred to the Treasury.
In contrast to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's gold nationalization of 1933 when FDR made his bold bid to rescue our suffering nation from the Great Depression, there will be no exceptions for jewelers or jewelry.
All such patriotic forfeitures will be compensated by weight, albeit at a rate that does not reflect the hysterical inflation of gold stocks and the lead up to this emerging.
Emergency hoarding will not be tolerated.
Punitive fines, et cetera, et cetera.
And we see later on they go door to door and ransack houses searching for private gold stores.
Yeah. Yeah. Which is something that they didn't do in the 30s. And in fact, when we look back on it, really not a whole lot of people gave up their gold.
A lot of people just hit it or they found out that if they had it in like a trust, I guess, that the trust then wasn't subject to the seizure.
Nice. What are there things like ETFs back in the 30s? I mean, that's a thing that makes it really easy here because the Douglas Fortune part of that, he thinks he's doing a good job. He's diversified demandable fortune into stocks and like all these different things. And he also has gold ETFs and gold miners, some in cash. So he thinks he's doing good. But the gold ETFs, obviously the easiest thing to confiscate, right? Something to think about as you put your money into Bitcoin ETFs, obviously.
Well, yeah, because, I mean, you have nothing, right?
You have nothing.
You have a paper claim.
You have a claim.
Yeah.
The first ETF was launched in Canada in 1990.
Oh, yeah, so definitely not.
So, yeah, they're not old at all.
Some equivalent, though, of DTFs that I'm talking about.
Do people have paper claims to gold in the 30s?
Was there a similar?
I suppose they may have been custodied in some sort of banking situation sometimes, but I don't know.
I suppose when he sort of paper claims to gold.
In the 30s.
I don't know.
We're asking Grok as we go.
And it's going to tell us.
Yes, actually.
Well, so, I mean, yeah.
Grok wasn't alive in the 30s.
It don't know shit.
Gold certificates, right?
Okay.
So, like, we have gold certificates.
Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, that's what so like gold certificates are just like that's what every fiat currency begins as.
Right. Right. Like every fiat currency begins as a claim on the precious metal or whatever that's backing it.
I was thinking about this last night, too, is like that.
Like just, it's not just what we learned from Lynn Alden that gold was always doomed to be centralized and fiat certificates issued upon it.
It's that any physical commodity is doomed to be centralized.
Because if it's something that is very small and has very little value, then you can't carry enough of it in order to do business like seashells or like tobacco.
But if it's something that's very heavy and very small, then you have to carry too much of it, basically.
So the risk is too high. And so it doesn't matter if it's seashells or cattle or tobacco or gold or silver or titanium or Jimmy Choo shoes or Mercedes Benz cars. If it's a physical commodity, it will always have to be centralized in order to be used as money for the convenience of being able to conduct everyday transactions. So, yeah, I found that interesting, I guess.
All right. So let's see. So we've we've got to the point where things are getting shitty. People are eating bugs instead of turkey. And they think that that's a OK. The United States just defaulted on its debt. That's not great. And they've made gold illegal. You've got to give up your gold. They're going to come ransack your house.
and uh now what's going to happen well now now we've we've reached this downward mobility kind
of stage where basically everything's just sort of going to hell um you get one shower a week um
and and that's if you're lucky right if you're lucky enough to have a house which which they
you know like uh florence has a house and avery had a house um but uh things don't work out so
well for them because they end up selling their house to the Chinese. They end up moving in with
Florence. And this is like the cruel and essential part of the book is that this is a hundred or
hundreds of pages, this kind of slow decline where there's the great renunciation, there's this radio
address or TV address, and it's kind of met by Florence with maybe a sense of curiosity. Oh,
hears politicians doing another thing. Her son, Willing, we learn, is much more prescient, much
more, he understands something real is happening. You can sense that as a child. But she's like,
okay, another thing is happening. Lowell, the Keynesian, he's not worried again. It's a fire
sale on assets, right? Time to hold or whatever. But then over these hundreds of pages, we see the
deterioration of society in an inflationary, highly inflationary environment, in an environment
where the U.S. currency is crashing relative to the bank
or this currency held by brick-style nations, other nations.
And that, it's a part that's almost difficult to read
because of how plausible it is.
And because if you've traveled abroad,
you've seen this from the other side.
Like, I haven't traveled a lot.
But having been in Colombia, I go there,
and I even think back to some of the things I would say.
They're like, oh, this is so cheap here.
I would say that almost as a compliment to people that like how great it is to live where things are cheap.
But now I wonder how grating that must have sounded because, of course, it was not as cheap to the people in Colombia.
Just as in the United States when this currency is deteriorating and now the Chinese are coming over and how cheap everything is to them.
But we see like how the poverty that begins to set into middle and upper middle class families, a $25 head of cabbage, all the luxuries of life gone.
And it's tough because of how close to home it is, right?
I mean, we see it would be so easy.
I'm looking over my meager liquor store of a couple bottles of wine and, you know, my meager vices.
Even those like disappear in this book for the people that are so used to being able, as we all are, order stuff off Amazon, go down to Trader Joe's, grab what you want, you know, endless shrimp and prime rib.
All that's gone.
Yeah.
Yeah. And so just to kind of recap what all happened. So Douglas and Luella, they get kicked out of the nursing home because they can't afford to pay for it anymore. And they end up going to live with Carter and Jane, which is obviously a pain because they're having to take care of Luella and Luella was crazy.
Imagine you're in your 60s, retired, and then your 90-year-old grandfather comes with his gold-dicking...
Your age wife.
Yeah gold demented stepmother and you have to take care of her like literally change her diaper and she yeah so keep her from destroying stuff and so they they keep her and and by the way like
this is this is real yes you know this is this is real like what are you going to do you you
obviously can't pay to put her into a care facility um and yet you you have enough humanity
that you don't just kick her out into the street and let her dive.
Yeah.
Not only is this real, it's normal.
And we don't see it as normal in the United States
because we're so used to different generations
living in strictly different dwellings
after the childhood period is done,
where around the world you see multi-generational dwellings.
You see people caring for their own.
And you just don't see that in the United States.
We're very individualistic as part of it,
But also it's just like there is the wealth where everybody has their own abode and they're cared for by caretakers.
Yeah.
When I was in Germany, my host family had four generations under the same roof.
And it was just that was common.
Yeah.
That was normal.
And every, you know, every morning they ate together and every night they ate together and they talked and they shared.
Yeah.
Yeah, there is something to be said for like the closeness and the tightness of the family because of that.
And I feel that, you know, I've got four sisters and I've got a brother and now we live in three or four different states.
And I don't get to see half of my family, but once every two years.
and um i miss them so much you know like to to feel to feel that that might be permanent you know
like to like you read about this stuff in books and you see stuff in movies like oh you know
that's my sister it's a 70 year old guy and he's like oh that's my sister we haven't seen each
other for 20 years it's like that could happen like that could that could happen in in my life
And that seems very sad. But yeah, so the grandfather and Luella, what's his name? The grandfather?
Douglas.
Douglas, yes. So Douglas and Luella, they move in with Carter and Jane. And Avery and Lowell and their three kids, there's, is it Savannah?
Savannah, yep.
Savannah and Goog, named after Google, and Bing, named after Bing, named after search engines.
They move in.
Bing's cool.
Goog is kind of a douchebag.
And Savannah is this, like, gorgeous girl that was going to go to the Rhode Island School of Design.
But she decides they can't or her parents tell her they can't afford to send her there.
And so she starts smoking cigarettes and turns herself at the age of 18 into a high-end prostitute.
Yeah.
Which is –
This is very sad.
Which is a recession – like, interestingly enough, we find out later in the book, it's a fairly recession-proof industry to get into.
Yeah.
And it's sad how normal that is around the world, too.
Like, it's very impactful to read this as an American because you know that Lowell is a professor at Georgetown University.
Avery is like the equivalent of like a Lacanian or a Freudian therapist, somebody whose therapy is woo-woo and like really theoretical, only paid for in a very like specific environment where people are flush with money and they can afford that type of woo-woo therapy.
So they're like—
It's luxury.
Luxury therapies, right.
And then to see them descend to first lose their house and have to move into this cramped dwelling with the lesser off sister, really, Florence, and then to see their children.
Again, you said, as you noticed, Florence is getting ready or Savannah is getting ready to go to an art school to get some, you know, a useless art degree, as you do when you're of that social milieu, instead forced into prostitution.
And again, it's impactful because we can feel what it's like when members of our social classes do that.
And yet this is happening around the world.
It happens in the United States, too.
It happens kind of to people in hard times because, as you know, like sex is recession proof.
Yeah.
And it starts to get at this point is when it really starts to get dark, I guess.
So so willing, willing.
He seems like a bit character when we start this book, but then we kind of, we sort of find out as this progresses, like Willing is going to be the guy that's holding this all together.
Yeah, like 15 year old or so, I think.
15 years old.
Yeah, he's turning 16.
He's not going to school anymore.
You know, there's a scene where he's talking with Douglas and they're talking about money and they're talking about, you know, Douglas is, you know, they're talking together about, oh, you know, like money has three purposes.
It's a medium of exchange and it's a store of value and it's a unit of account, et cetera.
And they're talking about why the money's failed and Willing's always, he's on his Flex Max, Max Max Flex, which is like a, it's like a foldable iPhone basically that gives you access to everything.
He's always reading and stuff and learning about, about what's going on in the world, you know, digging around on all these sites.
But when he's 16, he's walking around with a sock full of coins, beating up other kids and stealing stuff from them.
Yeah.
And they have his birthday.
His birthday, he has a cake.
His cake is painted cardboard.
Yeah.
It's not even real cake.
And it's around this time that he announces that they need a gun.
And the reason they need a gun is to protect them from people like him.
Yeah.
So, you know, he's realizing that it's a dog eat dog out there.
Yeah.
Yeah, and he is really, he is, you know, he is the moral compass in a sense of this book.
And when he says it's doggy dog, it's because the moral compass changes in a state of nature, which they're entering.
And he realizes that.
And you look, again, this is a work of literary fiction.
We look at his name, Willing.
I mean, he's like the person who has agency when this is happening.
Everybody else is kind of buffeted about by what is happening.
And he's the one who understands this is a new climb.
We need to adjust to it and act accordingly.
And so he does.
And it's funny.
It's interesting or whatever.
His last name that he evidently takes from his father is Darkly.
So his name was Willing Darkly.
And at this stage, you can see that if you have agency and you're acting in this sort of environment, dog eat dog, you're going to be Willing Darkly.
You're going to be doing things that are expressions of a part of your human nature that we only see expressed as we get closer to the state of nature as society and law fray.
And people realize that violence is no longer a monopoly of the state, but is a prerogative of each individual that is going to survive if they want to survive.
Right.
Yeah.
And this is where so we can tie this.
Here's another kind of historical context that I – this is what I was trying to do is sort of link this to other instances.
So hyperinflation, it's always given us child criminals.
It's always given us the youth going out there and engaging in violence and engaging in criminality.
Weimar, the Weimar Republic in Germany in 1923, they had 10-year-olds that were fences for gold and Deutschmarks.
And, you know, it makes sense because they're not yet socialized into a world of prosperity like the adults are. And so they're going to have they're going to be more ready in a sense.
They're native. They're native to struggle.
Yeah. They're going to adjust more quickly to the new environment and see like, no, I'm going to go out with a sock full of coins and get what I need.
Yeah. And they just become very stoic and very matter of fact. There's a scene in here that is, you would think it would be a huge turning point. And I guess in some ways it is. So Lowell, the modern monetary theorist, the husband of Avery, they're already moved in. They're living under this house because he's not working. He gets his final paycheck from Georgetown.
His back pay.
Yeah, his back pay.
And he's all excited about this.
He finally volunteers to go get groceries.
He hasn't helped get groceries at all.
He hasn't helped do anything, really.
He is sat in the basement working on his treaties on Keynesian economics.
Exactly.
Yeah, he's solving the world's problems from a typewriter.
As professors do.
Yeah.
And so he's got his paycheck.
He gets dressed up as he does.
He's fashionable.
He's got his pink loafers.
He's got his fancy jacket.
He fills up the tank completely on the car, full of gas, goes to the grocery store,
loads two carts full of groceries, gets his favorite wine or whatever,
gets there to the checkout counter and realizes he doesn't have enough money to pay for anything.
Three months of back pay, yeah.
He doesn't pay for the groceries.
Like two loaves of bread or something like that.
He puts it, he's just too ashamed.
He just leaves it, leaves it, puts it all, you know, just walks out.
Ashamed in the way that a professor is ashamed.
He affects indignation and leaves.
Yes, exactly.
Yes.
And then as he's walking, he gets mugged by two Wall Street bros with a paring knife.
Yeah.
And he ends up walking away.
No money, no shoes, no car, nothing.
Yeah.
Loses it all.
Here's a good quote. They're talking, Avery ends up chiding Lowell a lot because Lowell keeps his head in the clouds, in the Keynesian clouds, thinking everything is still going to be all right. That leads to this moment that we've just recounted here. And Avery says, they're kind of bickering. So here's the question. Are you worried about what's actually happening? Because I think you're more worried about being wrong.
And I just I feel like I see that and a lot of the modern monetary theorists that I see arguing on Twitter. It's like, are they really concerned or think that they're right? Or are they going to cling to their theories, their neat models and whatnot? Because at the end of the day, they just don't want to be wrong.
yeah yeah there's they're professors right strongest the strongest force in the world
is the need to say consistent with your beliefs yeah and so changing your beliefs you know in
bitcoin like humility is the first step towards accepting bitcoin into your life right like that
everybody who was not hal finning essentially has to have a measure of humility because they
weren't on the ground floor. And, you know, all of us have to have that humility moment where we
say, OK, I was wrong for the last X number of years. I'm not going to let that hold me back.
I'm going to, you know, suck it up and begin. Yeah. So in and amongst this, by the way,
something we forgot to mention, while while this is all happening, Jared has has moved out. He's
bought a little farm in upstate New York and he's moved up there. He's become kind of like a
sort of like a libertarian, sort of a sovereign citizen type of guy.
Calls his farm the citadel.
Yeah.
Thinks, you know, thinks kind of the end is coming sort of deal.
And of course, as we find out, turns out he's exactly right.
And but one thing that I had in my notes before, like I forgot to mention that I thought this
was funny.
So the Dante Alvarado guy, he becomes president.
He becomes president because of this amendment for Arnold Schwarzenegger, which was put in place by one of the justices of the Supreme Court, Judge Judy.
So Judge Judy is on the – and this is what we're seeing in the United States, right?
This is the rise of the celebrity politician, the rise of the celebrity everything.
Politicians become celebrities.
Celebrities become politicians.
um you can't tell a difference between the two uh and so uh you end up with uh yeah it just seems
like uh seems like the craziest reality tv show uh that could could exist um yeah yeah let's see
what else do we have where are we at a lot of the a lot of the interesting parts of this book
are so lionel shriver is a very good writer so what a really good writer does is not just just
not just kind of recount a good tale they also explore the psychology of their characters and
a lot of this this book is rife with the psychology of money how people see value in relation to
their other values, essentially, and how a person experiences inflation from a first-person
perspective. You can talk about inflation with charts and talk about what it's going to mean
in terms of purchasing power, but to see it from a lived perspective, there's a lot of value in this.
And it reminds me, like Sal Pinedo, when we talked about with him, he's talking about structural
violence, right? The way that inflation actually affects real people. That's incredibly important.
He does a really good job of talking about this and Shriver does an excellent job of depicting
that violence from a first-person perspective. And people kind of reflect on this. And there's
some dialogue here I'll read. So I'll just read the dialogue and we'll extract something from this.
Do you feel less valuable as a person because the dollar is less valuable?
Well, in a way, I haven't worked it out yet, but what's going on may not only have to do with what we can buy.
It may also have to do with how we feel like smaller.
Maybe I feel smaller.
You might not realize it, but maybe you feel smaller, too.
Part of this narrative is about the diminishment of the United States on the world stage.
And the dollar is king, right?
The dollar is almighty.
And these people are dealing with that, too.
losing not just purchasing power individually, but the precipitous decline of U.S. power relative
to the world's status, right? And people feel that in their bones, right? I mean, we feel the pride.
Sal brings this up absolutely. He talks about the shame.
Shame. Yeah, they feel the shame on a national level. It's in your DNA to be proud of being an
American. There's a bigness and a swagger to it. And as the currency dies, we see how much of that
is tied to the strength of the currency and not pride in the nation as such, not pride in the
founder's vision, not pride in our national monuments, simply pride in being able to buy
whatever we want in relation to other nations. And so when the dollar declines, people feel,
as the characters kind of parse it out here, smaller, like diminished. It's interesting to
think how we would feel personally when if i say when if perhaps this could happen someday right
yeah it does it makes you um i felt it when i was in colombia three years ago um
because just in the three months that i was there the exchange rate
stiffened up. And so I was getting fewer pesos for my dollar just after 90 days. And
there is much less reverence and concern for Americans than previously and much more for
Chinese. And so, yeah, it does really put you back because you are, you're used to walking around
being born into being better.
Yeah.
And not knowing what it's like to be humble from the start, from the jump.
Oh.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it's been tough, right?
Yeah.
It's tough, but also there is a readjusting of value.
So maybe it's not good to always feel big.
And we talked about part of this movie, part of this book is about the effects, the corrupting and perverting effects of intergenerational wealth on future generations when they are not doing as well and are depending on that, but it's not coming.
And so what happens when that intergenerational wealth, that inheritance dissipates overnight? The person that you kind of secretly, embarrassedly were hoping would die, your own father, you're kind of like almost wishing that they would die and you feel terrible for it. And all of a sudden the wealth is gone. And so there's a passage that addresses this.
deprived of his mighty financial cudgel
Douglas Mandible was just a very old man
with a host of heartbreaking vanities
no influence and scads of dead friends
Carter felt he could see his father clearly for the first time
there was no colossal edifice to rage against
just a half-broken man who needed his help
obliviously Douglas could still be exasperating
and the practical consequences of Pop's insolvency were cataclysmic
But in the main, to his son's astonishment, on every visit here this year, Carter had been flushed with tenderness, sometimes to the point of tears, cleansed of ulterior motives he had continued to visit had he not.
Perversely, the divestiture bestowed a gift.
He'd woken one morning to discover that he was not a monster.
He hadn't even realized that he'd felt like a monster.
That's how monstrous he had become.
And so there's two sides to this psychology of money, this fiat system we live within. One is a feeling of bigness, maybe, because we have that on the world stage, our relative purchasing power. But another is the corruption of our personal relations with other people who have more money than we do. And especially when those people are our, you know, the people who will one day pass that money on to us, and yet they cling to life selfishly. Right? And so, it's interesting.
Yeah. There's a shift that occurs around this time, again, where people start divesting of things. Things that were previously assets are now liabilities. So, obviously, a family member like Luella described as a pissing, shitting, shrieking shell.
In my better days, sometimes.
Oh, yeah. And Carter, Carter, you know, Carter is contemplating this. He's thinking, you know, he's like, I've already changed the thousand plus diapers that I'd planned to. And at least my infant children didn't bite him in the process, but they sell their car. So they, they sell their, they have a Beetle, B-E-E-T-L, which is an electric car, electric Beetle.
Yeah. And they decided, like, who needs a car? Because you can A, you can never go anywhere. But B, it's a liability because the cops don't investigate crime. Yeah. But they do write parking tickets because they're trying to get revenue. And boy, is this not something that I see, like, in the United States?
You know, like investigating crime is not really the purview of the police anymore until it gets up to like a certain extent, like a murder.
But man, are they hot when it comes to like writing infractions and citations and taking advantage of civil forfeiture.
Yeah. You know, stuff like that. Being able to seize assets from the public and say, oh, now you have to prove to us that this is yours, this cash that's yours. You shouldn't have this much cash. If you have this much cash, you must be a drug dealer.
Yeah. And you have to prove to us that you're not a drug dealer. This would be, I think, the opposite of innocent until proven guilty. It's guilty until proven innocent, I believe, is kind of the way that civil forfeiture works.
It's a civil process. So essentially, yeah, the burden is different and it's, yeah, it's different.
Unfortunate. Unfortunate. Okay. So let's see. Now what do we got here?
Here's another. This is a book that incisively discusses class. And if you're an author, an American author, and you're writing a social novel, you're going to want to talk about class. And this book does it very well. And it's good because it turns the mirror on class on our current society by talking about it, you know, five, ten years from now.
So we see the extrapolation of certain trends and what they maybe will signify and mean.
And one of the things is that the boomers, the older people, they refuse to accept the nobility of aging.
And instead, they dress like children.
Carter and Jane, who are the parents of Florence and Avery and the grandparents of Willing, Goog, Bing, and Savannah, they insist on being called by their first name to their grandchildren.
And the grandchildren willing, like he kind of reflects that he has like this, he respects them less for that.
And it's, there's a, here's a passage.
Grand Mimi, so this was Douglas's first wife.
Grand Mimi wore silk brocades, stockings, and tasteful pumps for trips to the post office.
But the following generation dressed badly, first as a political statement, later out of indolence and laterally from delusion.
Boomers considered old age one more conspiracy to expose, like the Pentagon Papers.
Yeah.
You see that as well, don't you?
We do.
I mean, yeah, today's 60-year-old kind of dresses like yesterday's 30-year-old, I suppose.
And they dress like they're always going to the sporting event or like we're going to sleep.
You know, we got pajamas on or like sports paraphernalia.
You don't see many dapper gents and ladies, right, going to the store that way.
That's not, you know, if they're doing that, somebody died or somebody's getting married.
Yeah.
I don't know.
You know, do you think that that is something that is due to economic downturn?
Or do you think that it is a no, just like a move towards, you know, it's a it's Star Trek and we're all going to wear the same jumpsuit.
It's a refusal to die. It's a refusal to accept mortality.
It's a refusal to accept aging, which is something that happens as religious sentiment declines and people cling to this life.
And I'm not saying this to that. I'm better than that. I'm obviously not. I'm dressed like shit.
My hair is shit, according to you. So I, you know, I have no presentation.
But it is you look at old photographs and you see like old black and white photographs of the poorest of the poor dock workers, you know, where people go in the streets of some town with dirt roads.
Everybody's dressed to the nines, it seems like, with jackets and stuff like that.
And you see a photo now with people walking around in T-shirts and all, you know, with logos and stuff like that.
And you do feel, I feel like there's just less dignity on display and it cheapens human interaction and it cheapens other people's estimation of others. And I don't think it's a, it's actually an indication of increasing wealth again, because increasing wealth leads to maybe a wanting to live forever, which leads to a refusal to age and accept the trappings of aging with dignity.
Yeah, materialism, which by the way, I just, I heard something really fascinating yesterday, which was a theory from a neuroscientist that our decrease in exposure to sunlight as a result of having more creature comforts, air conditioning and, you know, inside lighting and all this other stuff.
that you can actually plot that side by side with an increase in materialism.
Yeah.
In that, you know, like if you go outside, you just feel good.
Like you just feel good being in sunlight and you don't need as much.
And then if you're out of sunlight, if you're inside the house
and you're constantly being bombarded by blue light, then you need, you need something.
You need quick, you need like snack food or you need like television or you need whatever, but you need something to fulfill you that otherwise you would have been satiated by just being outside.
And so, yeah, that's right. The thing about clothes, I just, I'm not quite sure because like a ratty t-shirt or a pair of sweatpants just literally did not exist in the 1930s.
like that was not technology we had everything was handmade it was you know it was sewn um
it was uh it was not you know not machine stitched more if it was it was hand stitched you know
and and so you know all your shoes were handmade everything basically was was handmade and so
um that was the low end right the low end of clothing was that is what we would call the high
end today and i don't think that we went to this low-end clothing simply as a desire to be
to appear to not age i think we you know like when did the white t-shirt and blue jeans become
the thing in america it was right after world war ii when we started to experience a lot of inflation
yeah um so i yeah i don't know it's many societal trends always always yeah it's always both so the
creation of the consumer citizen who needs to express themselves through their clothing it
becomes your identity and so the logos that you wear what you represent becomes a very important
thing and so yeah i don't know a lot of different things come into yeah around about this time
luella burns the house down carter and jane uh they uh they no longer have a place to live and
Now everybody's got to move in with Florence and Willing and Ernesto and Avery and Lowell, the whole gang.
So now they're all living in this house together.
And Enola has moved back from France.
She's there too.
Yeah.
The aunt.
So the entire family has now collapsed into this house, this black hole that's drawing them together.
Douglas remarks, by the way, in the fire.
He remarks that, you know, you didn't have to save Luella, that you could have just let her burn.
This will be a recurring theme, which will come to a point.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
But this is also relevant, this entire loss of the possessions of Carter, Jane, Douglas, and I guess Luella too or whatever.
Yeah.
So we've lost everything, right?
Yeah.
Like we now have nothing.
Like the family fortune is gone.
Yeah.
So Carter and Jane, the only thing that they're able to save is the silver service, the silver like like knives and spoons and stuff.
And then Avery and Avery and Douglas, they have they have nothing.
Avery and Lowell.
Sorry, Avery and Lowell.
What they leave under foreclosure, they sign over the contents of their house as part of the deal.
And there's a passage here where she reflects.
So they've lost a lot of possessions, a lot of material things.
We were just talking about this, like material possessions, what that means.
yet once she accepted the inevitability of near total divestiture Avery felt surprisingly powerful
not only lighter and less encumbered but strong as if she were flinging desks and bed frames off
her shoulders like an adrenalized survivor of an earthquake she was moved to consider the dual
meaning of the word possession an object of which you take custody but also a wraith taking custody
of you had she ever owned those mango wood side tables or had they laid claim to her
yeah i i thought about this when i quit my job and i moved out of my house and sold my house and
i gave away a lot of my stuff i'd come to the conclusion that anything that you own also owns
you. Um, and, and it's only by being a master of that thing that you own it. Like even, you know,
playing a guitar, like if you, if you, if you don't know how to play that guitar, then it's
something that just hangs over you. It's just taking up space and it's looking at you and it's
calling you names and it's telling you that you're not worthy, um, that you're not capable and, uh,
and you're, you're a loser, you know, you just aren't, aren't succeeding. And everything,
everything in our lives are like that. Unless you master the thing, or at least learn how to use it
with, um, some amount of, some amount of, of, uh, expertise, um, then it owns you just as much as
you own it. Think about the older people that struggle to use their smart TV, um, or they,
They struggle to use the navigation system on a fancy car.
You know, that thing is exerting its power over you and you're unable to stand above it, I guess.
Yeah. And you're responsible to shepherd these objects.
If you move, you're encumbered with them.
You can't take up and go to another place easily.
You have to keep the lights on, keep things going.
It interesting again the psychology of wealth and value how things change when things change So we look at it as all a negative and it seems horrific when the currency dissipates hyperinflates but we do see the emergence of more
healthy attitudes as well. Like the scalpel takes away the unnecessary, and here we have emerging
maybe a healthier relation to objects that only the truly vital is what you will take.
and you'll be happy with a simple table, a couple of chairs,
and you don't need the mango wood side table.
You don't need all that stuff that you can, you know,
sweep into Ikea and get the latest of this or that.
You just need the truly functional.
Yeah, it makes me, I mean, like I've lived this, right?
You know, I went to college and I remember being in my dorm room
and I remember feeling so accomplished, I guess,
and so like I had all my needs met
because I got a screwdriver and some screws
and I screwed some empty soup cans to my loft,
to the two by fours,
so that I could have a place to put a drink
and I could have a place to put my, you know, my pencils or whatever.
Like everything was taken care of, you know.
And then you fast forward to that 20 years later and you've got a house
and that house has, you know, it's got a water heater and it's got a dishwasher
and it's got an air conditioner.
It's got all these things and all these things that need constant upkeep
and they need constant attention.
Yeah.
When they break, there's almost like a feeling of shame or something like that, you know, like that I'm now without, that I have less.
But when you start from nothing or you just, yeah, you get used to nothing, then you find that beautiful simplicity in not having.
No, this is the Friends virus, the TV show Friends, where the expectation is that you should effortlessly own a large apartment in Manhattan with no discernible source of income, that you should have this sort of lifestyle as like baseline.
Like this is just what you're expected to have.
And people are like, oh, shit, I need to have that because the TV says this is the baseline.
And so you go out and everybody strives to meet that baseline, which is, of course, incredibly unreal that people live as we live.
And yet, if you don't live like that, you're going to have like the dying fire alarm chirp in the back of your mind always that something is wrong.
Even if you tell yourself that you like to live simpler, there's always that chert because there's always that sensation of being judged by others or that you won't, you're not doing it right because you don't have the appurtenances, the what is the new chic thing?
There's that type of style of furniture that everybody's after.
What do they call something modern?
Oh, goodness.
Everybody wants these types.
There's different styles that are always coming to fashion and out of fashion.
If you don't have the current fashion, then you feel inadequate. And that's, you know, part of living in a consumerist society driven by the Keynesian need to stimulate the economy is we have to buy, buy, buy, replace, replace, replace, and constantly maintain that friends level baseline of effortless wealth.
yeah i don't even know what to reflect on now i'm just sitting here thinking about
yeah you just think about all the things that we have and um
what little thing what little they give to us in return yeah you know especially coming out of this
season right of coming out of the christmas season that's become so um so materialistic
and so focused on, you know, although I will say the last couple of years, it seems a little
less that way just because like you look around and people just don't have, people just don't
have the money and they just can't afford. That and also people, there's that feeling
simultaneously beside the feeling of everybody already has what they want because they've
already got it on Amazon. And so they've got everything. The thought that you're going to
find something that somebody else needs that they don't already have, like they've already
found the thing that they want and anything you do will be a lesser iteration of that or something.
So shopping is difficult. Yeah. So stuff starts to get wild here. So the house burns down. Carter
and Jane and Douglas and Luella, they move in. They don't get any insurance money for the house
because, of course, the insurance company has gone bankrupt. And it's around this time that
All the paper claims that people have, all the wealth we think we have, all the securities, all the ways people have prudently tried to protect themselves with diversification and insurance.
All those paper claims mean nothing in this environment.
Yep.
Absolutely nothing.
And it's been proven time and again in the real world.
And we're seeing it in this book here.
It's about this time that the neighbors show up and they've got a sick kid.
They're asking for some help.
And they let him in only to find out that they're there to point a gun at him and take everything they have.
And they give him 10 minutes or 15 minutes to get out of there.
And Willing asks if he can take his bike.
And the child, their kid says, no, I want his bike.
Well, it turns out this is one of the kids that Willing has robbed with his sock of coins.
But Noli, she, interestingly enough, she refuses to give up.
So the winter before, they burnt all her books.
She's this author, and they had all these books that she never sold.
And they burnt her books for firewood the year before.
But she refuses to give up her unpublished manuscripts.
Yes. Which, of course, nobody wants. Nobody cares. The foul matter is what it's called.
Surely she will sell them to some university archive in the future. Right.
Yeah. And you're starting to maybe suspect something about Noli. You know, she's never really freaked out about money and she's never really.
Yeah. She's published like a few novels and yet she's independently wealthy mysteriously.
Yeah. Yeah. So she's she's always been helpful. Yeah.
And we know from Chekhov, the gun is always fired in the third act.
If there's a gun that's displayed, if there's some object of concern in the narrative, the gun's going to go off.
The box that she's mysteriously attached to, maybe this will be an object of concern to the plot later on.
We will see.
Well, the gun is about to get fired because now they're kicked out.
Well, there's a good quote.
It's a fun quote I want to read.
So Douglas, they call him Grandman, the grandfather Grandman.
They call him Grandman.
Great Grandman.
Here's a quote from Douglas, which is also a little bit more foreshadowing, but also just kind of objectively hilarious.
So this guy, of course, busts in with the gun.
You got a sick kid.
He wants the house.
I'm just taking care of my family, guys.
You know, don't blame me.
It's the circumstances.
Get out of your house.
I'm doing this for my family like anybody would do.
Grand Man says, in my day, Grand Man piped up, any reputable American man facing ruin would shoot his own family and then himself.
Tradition was efficient, like the self-cleaning oven.
I mean, like, what a thing that an older person would say.
Why don't you shoot your own family?
Come on, have some sense of honor here.
That's what we would do in my day.
Where's your samurai ethic?
So I just thought that was like, I mean, we do see this relevant to the plot later on.
But in the moment, I was just like, what an old person thing to say.
I love it.
Yeah.
Is there any character that you felt like somewhat drawn to or that you felt like brought more color than anything else?
Or do you feel that it was – I just – gosh, I felt like – I think you said like Lowell.
Lowell's really one of the more interesting characters and willing.
They're kind of like opposite.
They're kind of like opposed.
Yeah.
Like you've got this like 13-year-old kid that's stoic and quoting Austrian economics.
And he's going up against his, you know, Ph.D. hoity-toity uncle.
Georgetown professor of Keynesian economics.
Yeah.
Real bad man.
Yeah.
Real bad man with his pink loafers.
I've only been in the, like, the Twitter perimeter of people like that.
And I'm already like, oh, this person must be insufferable in real life.
He exists.
And yeah.
And Lowell is that person.
And you mentioned it with the pink boots and the pompousness.
And even as his wife chided him early on, like, do you want to be correct or you just don't want to be wrong?
And that's kind of the pompousness is palpable.
Yeah.
So now things have really taken a turn.
Like, they got no house.
They're homeless.
They're going to walk to the park and it's time to put up in the homeless encampment.
That's pretty shit.
They decide that they're going to walk all the way to Jared's farm, which is going to be a very, very, very long ways.
And probably not going to make it.
It's around this time that the great grand man, he comes and lives true to his promise that he says the other guy should have done.
He asks Willing if he can borrow the gun to make sure that it's loaded properly, cleaned and everything.
He promptly shoots Luella and then himself.
Yeah.
and lightens the burden for everybody else.
So he lives true to what he was talking about.
It's a very selfless act.
Yeah, it's a very selfless.
Yeah, very.
And it's selfless in a way.
You weigh the humanity of that act.
And, you know, Douglas vocalizes to Willing.
So Willing, this 15-year-old,
is kind of guiding this expedition north to the Citadel.
It's like they're going to have to walk like 190 miles,
this tattered family with all their possessions.
And Douglas is 90 some years old. Luella is being led on a leash. She's demented. And they're like, you know, you Douglas is like, we're not going to make you can't take us. And Willing just says, you're coming with us. We'll take you. And Douglas, you know, he knows that that's not going to happen. They're not going to make it. They're going to bog them down to give them a chance. He does what they will not do.
Like willing, as much as he lives close to a state of nature, he is not going to kill his own grandfather.
And so he does, I guess, what you have to do when the ship is sinking, which is sacrifice yourself.
It's a selfless act.
It's a brutal act.
But in the context of the story and in these times, such acts are acts of compassion, I guess, and moral, maybe.
Yeah, we really are just animals, you know.
Like animals, but animals with a conscience, animals who, you know, self-sacrifice is an interesting thing among humans.
Yeah.
And I suppose you witness it in the animal kingdom, but probably not to the same extent that you do during hard times for humanity.
And it's almost something, too, that you perceive that Douglas's generation would self-sacrifice in that way, but it's much harder to see Carter's generation, somebody in there, like a true boomer, them doing that.
Boris Carter, you know, in his 90s, his generation, a little bit, you know, having gone through tougher times.
You can see that maybe.
There's a quote here.
I think this is relevant, kind of what we're talking about.
willing has a view toward the state that is kind of uncolored with emotion a lot of people are
angry at what's happening a lot of people react emotionally they feel aggrieved willing says
the state a cyclone that sucked up houses trailers pets and children in its wake it was better he
would remain calmer if he thought of it as weather so just look at the state and all of its violence
and machinations and thievery, not as a thing, not as a person who was doing that.
Look at it as the weather, as something impersonal that simply does what it does.
You know, that's maybe a much healthier way to see the state.
People become so aggrieved, so angry, but it's like, no, that's what the state does.
Be honest, just nakedly observe it.
And then you'll be much more able to react and predict it once you see it as the weather,
as something that simply is.
It is like human nature. It is nature, the state. It happens in accordance with the predicts of how humans behave when they have power.
He just adopts this stoic approach.
You know, he even says, you know, when the neighbors come, he says it's a good thing, right?
Because it's, you know, like at least they were nice about it.
They let him leave.
Obviously, it was time to get out of the neighborhood because he talks about complexity theory.
and complexity theory that complex systems work until they don't.
And when they don't, then they fail catastrophically.
The straw that breaks the camel's back.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So everything is fine until it's not.
And when it's not, then it is not in a way that can never be fixed.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Cataclysmic.
Yeah.
Tears it all down.
Yeah.
So, yeah, they move on.
They go to the farm.
They're there for a while.
And then we advance quite a bit in time, right?
We move forward quite a bit.
And let's see.
Let me see if I get this right.
So Carter and Jane, I'm not quite sure what they're doing.
Are they alive still?
They remain alive, yes.
Yeah, they remain alive.
And Avery and Lowell.
I think what's important at this stage is that now Willing at some point leaves the Citadel, the farm.
All the people are there working.
Willing decides after a point.
He respects Uncle Jared's project there.
But it's kind of Uncle Jared's project.
And Uncle Jared is a temper.
And Willing decides to go back and reclaim the family house.
And so he does.
And he ends up there with a girlfriend named FIFA.
and he accepts, this is kind of the plot development at this point,
he accepts being chipped.
So what chipped is, is at some point,
this is like the CBDC directly in your skull.
People have a chip implanted so that money can be instantly debited
when you go to do transactions.
And it can also be, if you save money too long,
they can impose a penalty on you.
So you need to spend your money.
and if you don't you know that is deducted from your account everybody has one account that's tied
to their dna and planted their skull to their spinal cord to their spinal cord which they could
have put it anywhere but they choose to put it there so that people can't so they don't dig it
out of them you paralyze like yeah so people get willing this person willing darkly somebody so
close to human nature who has seen so presciently he decides to get chipped in a moment of kind of
like kind of i don't know assimilation resignation or like it's what's the only way he's going to get
a job that's it yeah i mean he's like he goes to get a job in health care which is like the only
field that anybody gets jobs in now is caring for the elderly at this point um and he mentions it
almost as an aside that he has not been chipped since he's been at the citadel um and they but
he's aghast and they say you need to get chipped and he finally does it and this is a dark part of
the novel because i didn't understand what was happening at first it just kind of driver just
says that he was raped and i was like what happened was this like a revelation from his
childhood was he sexually abused like he was raped like no she goes on to describe it that
having the implant being chipped was a rape it was and it's like he feels different afterwards
he feels violated his name willing now takes on a second a second significance as somebody who was
willing to comply and he loses his agency as a result of this violation to his personhood
and so like a different willing begins to live kind of under state surveillance with the rest
of them at this point and they kind of settle into the house him and fifa yeah and it really
does it starts to get really dark like the only jobs that are available are like like fifa builds
like handicap railings access ways and railings and stuff like that.
And you can go care for old people or you can.
One of the jobs is to go take care of I think they're they called the slumberers or the napper.
I don't know. Something like that.
Something like that. But basically it's it's it's become vogue for people to save up money and have themselves put in a chemically induced coma for a number.
And this is it's an interesting because it's cheaper.
Yeah. And not only that, but like all of the drugs have become legalized. You can buy heroin and crack at Walgreens. And so with that, they're kind of passe. And people are like, you know, the actual luxury, the actual narcotic that we all desire is the narcotic of sleep.
And so people save up money to be put in these facilities where a drum of nutrients are fed into them while narcotics are also fed into them.
So they have a dream filled sleep and pass their life as such.
Yeah.
And for that to be an option, like I said, this is where this where the book gets kind of like gut riching.
It's like, oh, God, Savannah is still a prostitute.
And you know that she's a really good one because there's robot prostitutes now.
And she's one of the few humans that's good enough to maintain her job.
And she even has a degree in it.
She's gotten a certificate.
By the way, this is a joke I heard one time.
I guess there is like an actual school of prostitution somewhere in Europe.
Okay.
And the joke was just the question, like, as a father, what do you want to hear from your daughter that's going to that school?
Would you rather hear that she flunked out or that she's on the honor roll?
Yeah. And that's kind of what happens here is, like you mentioned, she gets a certification, goes to a school.
It's formalized. It's regularized.
Prostitution is part of the economy because it's just so prevalent, I guess.
And this becomes a normal thing where the people are like, might as well regulate it, might as well teach people how to do it better.
And it's kind of sadly, strangely, we see that now, right, with OnlyFans.
I mean, we see the regularization of a type of prostitution and incorporation into the economy.
Yep. And extremely legitimized.
By the way, apparently only, I don't know, I shouldn't say this without.
a rare moment of restraint yeah i shouldn't say this that's not like you lucas
uh a you uh consulting the oracle there grok should i say this crock will i be fired from
my podcast if i say this will i be unemployed from podcasting i'm gonna i think we're just
gonna pass on what i was gonna say wise decision probably wise yeah certainly wise um anyway
So, yeah, they get together for a party.
A gathering.
A loose.
Yeah, a gathering.
Yeah.
FIFA and Savannah and Noli.
Yeah, the cousins plus Noli.
Plus Noli.
The aging ads.
Yeah.
Goog, by the way, is now working for the government.
Is he working for the IRS?
The IRS renamed as the Bureau of Social Contribution, and they're kind of colloquially referred to as scabs.
Yeah, the scabs.
um yeah anyways uh yeah yeah well okay i mean i am gonna not say what i was gonna say
i'm still lurking back really want to say yeah uh anyways and so then the discussion kind of
turns to like there apparently is in is it uh is it new mexico it is nevada um nevada it's nevada
that is like,
uh,
the United States of Nevada,
like Nevada has become its own,
like free separate country.
Um,
and there's all these rumors about it,
you know,
like if you,
if you go there that,
uh,
like your chip will blow your head off or,
um,
that sniper's going to get you when you cross the border.
Yeah.
And,
uh,
yet,
yet they finally decide,
uh,
um,
finally decided it's worth it.
So,
yeah,
you know,
I'm going to take a run for it.
Him and Nolio are like, we're going to do this.
Lucas, I got to read this because this is one of the best parts of the book.
I think this chapter is just like utter perfection as far as the grotesqueness of this social novel, what it achieves.
I want to read the title of this chapter.
Okay.
Chapter three, part one, ever two or eight or who knows.
their chapter is return of the somethingness shooting somebody going somewhere else or both
and the idea is that the only way things change for anybody the only excitement that there is
is if you shoot somebody or you go somewhere that him and uh willing and noly kind of have this
discussion and what happens is willing by habit has gone he's carried the gun around still that he
had from back in the day, although it's illegal.
He's working at a healthcare facility.
It turns out there's a spate of mass shootings in these healthcare facilities,
like the oppressed younger Zoomer generation caring for the elderly
while the elderly just squanders all the wealth.
Some of them just snap and go shoot a bunch of geriatrics,
shribs as they're called, in these care facilities.
So that happens where Willing is working.
One of the workers snaps, shoots like 100 people, and then finally Willing, aiming from a utility closet, takes him out and then flees the premises, right?
And then he gets back, tells Noly what he's done.
And he – the thing is, remember, Willing has been raped.
Willing has been chipped.
Willing has lost his agency.
Suddenly, he's flush with agency.
He's excited again because he shot somebody.
It's an incredibly American phenomenon.
We should all try it.
That's almost the implication.
It's like, it's the implication of, do you want to live forever or do you want to die with glory?
Something like that.
They've reached a point where everybody's terrified.
Everybody has a chip in their brain that's tracking their every transaction.
And they only permit that because they fear that something worse will happen.
But once you lose the fear that something worse is going to happen and you just fucking pull the trigger, right?
Which is the point that Willing gets to, although as a hero, kind of nominally, then he feels something again.
He feels alive.
It kind of reminds me of something Adam Seneca mentioned in our conversation where he's talking about, like, the Second Amendment is the most important amendment, the right to have firearms.
And a firearm, I mean, that's agency and a piece of metal in kind of maybe a terrible sense.
But it's life and death that you hold in your hand.
It's the ability to adjudicate that ultimate matter in the instant.
it's it's everything right i mean it's the ability to protect yourself your family your value um
but shoot yourself not yourself shoot somebody or go somewhere so willing shoot somebody he's
flush with excitement and agency for having done something finally for himself and then noly's like
look at you look how you feel in this moment like the grayness is gone you're a human being again
And then she's like, let's go to Nevada.
You know, who cares about the rumors?
I'm going to go buy a car right now.
Let's go to Nevada.
And, yeah, they decide to do that.
Turns out the box of loose manuscripts was loaded with gold.
Turns out that it was.
Yeah.
And so she goes and buys herself a car.
And they're getting ready.
They're getting ready to leave.
And all of a sudden, Goog shows up.
Yeah, the IRS agent, Scab.
The Scab is there.
So they kidnap his ass.
Yeah. They're like, well, we got to kill him. I thought they were going to shoot him. Like Willing has his gun pointed at him. And I was like, they're going to have to kill him. There's no other way out. But instead, they kind of gook has been he's like this petty bureaucrat, the person at the DMV who's twisted with a small amount of power they have. And so they exercise it as a tyrant. I mean, that's the type of IRS agent he is. But they kidnap him kind of benevolently. He's Willing's cousin. He's Noli's. What do you call it?
aunt's relation to a nephew yeah he's a nephew um second cousin yeah so they take him to they
head to the united states of nevada they it's a road trip and they the thing is too like these
kids these people poverty is set in people don't travel anymore they hit the open road
noly begins playing like the kind of the music from the 60s and the 70s 80s maybe and the kids
feel freedom even goog the the irs agent they all begin to like feel rock and roll entering their
veins as they scoot across the prairie right towards nevada and it's kind of a liberating
moment after the grayness of the novel like the greatness of the country is how it makes you feel
as you move with freedom across it and that's like the sense of like after so much suffocation
and claustrophobia in the novel when they finally get out of freaking new york and begin to go
across the wide country that they've forgotten, there is a sense of freedom. And so, you know,
shoot somebody else or go somewhere and they're going somewhere and they're feeling that excitement.
Yeah. As they're going, they're going through Nebraska and they come upon a nuclear missile
silo that's been turned into a fallout shelter, like what we see. I've been, I've actually been
I was thinking about you. You mentioned that. Yeah. I've been in one of these that it was a,
you know, a nuclear missile silo that somebody turned into a luxury home. And I remember, by
the way, I remember the, there's a quote from the guy, he was like a social studies teacher,
like a high school social studies teacher. And he bought this decommissioned nuclear missile silo.
And they asked him why. And he said, you know, like, look, this is a modern day castle. Like,
this is the thing that is in, you know, like this will withstand a nuclear blast. You know,
it's a cave and a castle all in one and it's self-sufficient.
I can live like no human has ever lived.
But anyways, they go to this, they stop there and they're like looking for water
and looking for shelter and stuff.
They end up kind of going through the facility and they come to the realization that,
you know, they had gone through this suffering thinking that part of the reason
why they were suffering was that the rich had taken everything and that there was nothing left
for them. And then they go through and they find, you know, here's the freezer that's stocked with
all this, you know, prime rib and salmon and all the magnums of champagne and the home gym and
everything. Yet their corpses and their suffering evident and they realize that,
that it was everyone who suffered the same fate, that even being wealthy did not save you.
And so that's kind of like this revelation for him.
Yeah.
And they continue on, on to Nevada.
Yeah. There are more important things than merely living. It's one of the constant revelations of life, I think, if you're maturing, but also in this novel.
There's a quote here that I think is relevant.
in the fields at citadel i forget who's talking there in the fields at citadel he went on we had
plenty of time to talk avery told me about how hard it was for cancer patients when they got
better she said when you were um bigging sick making it the next day was a victory when you're
well again being alive isn't a triumph anymore she said patients often got depressed not during
chemo, but after it had worked. And the idea is that the problem is not staying alive. It's
finding a reason to stay alive. Like that's the hard thing to do. The hard work is meaning itself.
And we obfuscate that problem by trying to stay alive, by confusing ourselves with so many creature
comforts. But those aren't the solution because the problem is not how, it's not like staying
alive as long as you can it's like why am i staying alive what even is the purpose and what
is a purpose so great that i would cease to want to stay alive if i had to sacrifice that purpose
and that's kind of what they're realizing as they as they fly across the the countryside too
yeah um
yeah i don't know i'm just like reading through my notes and thinking about like it's just taking
me back to reading it and feeling this yes there's like this excitement of adventure and there's also
kind of the sadness of what they're leaving behind um they they make it to the border um
they they make it across and their heads do not explode yeah yep their heads do not explode they
find out that things are are not as great as they that they things things are things are at all times never what you think they are And you know they go there and yeah things are free free much more free
But, you know, things are scarce.
And the only way that you can survive is to contribute.
Yeah, you might say.
There's no leeching off society.
People are free.
things are not in the other society objects we tried to make them free we had to make people
slaves in order to make you know goods services quote-unquote free to other people but here you
pay for everything and so you have to find a person willing to confer that value to you
contract with them because the state's not going to make somebody give you that thing and so yeah
Yeah, the transitioning of wealth from the rich to the poor and from the young to the old, I think, is how they put it in the book, that that's what everything devolves into.
But they find their way there, and Jared's there.
He's got a little house.
He's getting by.
He's not doing great.
Jared is living how I want to live.
A simple table, a naked bulb suspended by a wire.
Like, that's my friend's apartment I've always dreamed about.
And I felt so shamed because I've been forced to have objects so that other people don't feel like they're entering the den of a serial killer when they come into my apartment.
But, like, that's the monastic space that is, like, the true dream.
Oh, interesting.
But surrounded by books.
Oh, yeah.
You need your books.
Although Wittgenstein, he slept on a simple cot, famous philosopher, and he had like one or two books on his bedside.
And there's something to say for that, too.
I haven't decided.
You either have to have all the books or two books.
And so you kind of – and I've gone between that.
I've divested.
I mean, you've seen my bookshelves, Lucas.
There's many books.
And yet this is the third iteration.
I've gone through periods where I gave them all away because I'm like, I don't need all these books.
I need two books.
and then I built it back up when I've given it away.
And this is the third iteration.
What were those two books?
Well, not literally two books, but the idea is like many less, right?
I cut.
And so I still had a healthy shelf.
It wasn't as romantic as I'm making a scene probably,
but I did get rid of a lot.
There's a lesson I learned when I sold guitars,
and that lesson is never sell guitars.
And I would assume that the lesson you learn when you give away books
is never give away books.
But I don't know.
Yeah.
Now, you always do think like you do and you're like, I need to reference that book.
I need to read something in it.
And I had an underline that was pertinent to this moment I'm living.
But yeah.
So they're in the United States of Nevada.
There's no one of the interesting things is there's no social safety net.
So they go from a society that is pretty much engineered as a social safety net and which has become so inverted.
where all of these aging elderly people
are essentially, you know,
the slave masters de facto of the younger generation
because they own all the wealth
and all of it's being used
so that the young will care for them in a way.
And yet there's no social safety net
in the USN, the United States of Nevada.
The guy, the first person who addresses them
after they enter says,
you bring in, he sees Noly there,
who's an aging person.
He says, you bring in old people,
You pay for old people. No Medicare here. No Social Security. No Part D prescription drug plans. No Medicaid subsidized nursing homes. No so-called safety net. Every citizen in this rough and tumble republic got to walk the high wire with nada underneath but the cold hard ground. Trip up. Somebody who cares about you catch you or you fall in your ass. So Lucas, which is preferable?
hey it's tough isn't it because you want like you when you're young you think that that's the way
like when you're young you think oh yeah well everybody should stand on their own but then
when you get to the point where you're looking at parents that are struggling and
um maybe not able to do the things that they were before and you realize that
their only option may be for for you to go take care of them um that
it's either that or they suffer because you can't afford to pay for something.
And at that point, you do.
You do kind of wish for some sort of social safety net that comes in.
Because we don't want to be the social safety net.
We're so greedy and selfish, and we don't live that way anymore.
It's not American to care for your parents.
It's not American to take them into your house.
You put them in the nursing home with the robots and the foreign hired help who will work for low wages and let them live that way.
Let the dead bury themselves or something like that.
It's not American.
I know there's people that have good experiences with it.
But my grandma, she's in an assisted living facility and it's been hell.
Like it's just been hell.
She hates every second of it.
And she's lucid sometimes and not lucid other times.
And when she's lucid, she hates it out loud.
And when she's not lucid, she hates it louder, basically.
You know, and so it's hard on everybody.
It tears the family apart.
They use it against each other.
Yeah.
So the interesting thing.
It's the circle of life.
It is a circle in this novel, too, because they're all at a point in the novel, 14 people are living together in Florence's tiny New York townhouse or whatever it is or apartment or whatever it is.
And then at the end of the novel, they all make their way to the USN and they're again all living together, I think with more space, but they're once again a multigenerational household.
And so I think one of the implicit themes is, you know, the inhuman thing is to delegate your responsibilities to care for the next generation to the state instead of taking on your moral responsibility to either, you know, like Douglas did, take matters into your own hand or like the children did, to insist that you care for them, that they're not a burden and take them in.
And there's a serious moral weight. I mean, it's easy to talk about this. It's a very difficult thing to do to care for aging parents, right? When you have a job, a family, things you want to do, you want to go to freaking Thailand or whatever, Vietnam, I don't know, South America, you want to travel, go to Bali, but no, you have to care for your parents.
and so there's a moral way to saying
you know maybe that's
not worth having a social safety
net that devours 85%
of our income if we have
to do that maybe it is better if
we have stronger social bonds
maybe individualism
is allowed if
individuals by
personal choice act
in like the good for the good of others
yeah
and I think this
One thing you could say is, oh, maybe we wouldn't have to give 85% of everything if there wasn't so much corruption.
But the problem is we don't really know how to get rid of the corruption.
We just know how to let somebody else be trusted.
Man, and the thing is policing the corruption leads to more surveillance.
That's the thing.
Maybe there's a way to do it where it doesn't lead to surveillance, but it's always used.
And that's the thing that kind of freaks me out about all of the, quote unquote, like the Somali daycare fraud, right?
is maybe it'll be dealt with correctly
or maybe it's just going to be used as an excuse
to tighten the financial surveillance on everybody, right?
And that's why, I mean, I don't know.
Fraud is often a justification for more documentation,
more paperwork, more red tape,
and the burden oftentimes doesn't fall on those
who aren't going to do it anyways.
Yeah. $35 million they gave to political contribution, political campaigns. They gave more, the Somali daycare centers in Minnesota gave more money to political campaigns than any of the Mag 7 companies did. More than Google or Facebook. Incredible.
Yeah, incredible.
So that I'm not libeling, can you ask Grok, how much money did Ilhan Omar have when she began her political career and how much money does she have now?
Like, what's her net worth?
Yeah, it was like, we'll say it out.
How do you spell that?
I-L-I-L-N-O-M-A-R.
I don't know.
I thought it was like negative $46,000 to $30 million.
That's the graphic I saw where she had a negative net worth.
I don't know if this is true.
It's a Twitter thing.
It's an X thing.
I'm just reporting a random thing I read that she had a negative net worth when she began her political career.
And now she has like 38 million or something like that.
I mean, like Nancy Pelosi levels of sudden wealth accumulation.
And yeah, she she in 2019, she disclosed an S she disclosed negative forty five thousand dollars.
So six years ago, 2019, six ish.
Yeah. So seven tech technically.
Yes. Going on seven.
And as of the latest disclosure in 2024, filed in 2025, reported in broad ranges, six million.
So they report a range, I guess, which is the range is six to 30 million.
So it could be, yeah.
Being generous, she's only a six millionaire.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a winery that's $1 to $5 million, and there's a venture capital LLC that's $5 to $25 million.
And what I don't get is, obviously, she has her salary, I guess, as a politician.
Like, what other justification can there be for any of that?
I mean, that's just me being ignorant as to how people get money, I guess.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Jason Lowry talks about how as a military individual, he had to report his sudden wealth due to his Bitcoin accumulating drastically over time.
And, you know, they kept track of that.
Maybe, yes, they should for a public servant.
Is there not anything like that for politicians?
They are public servants.
The servant phrase is, yeah.
They're the definition of public servants.
Right.
So maybe that's a detour a bit into a little bit of indignation due to the social, the news of the time.
But it's relevant.
Like the social safety net is something that sounds beautiful.
But what lurks within that is all of the exploitation that springs from the human heart when they're given the opportunity to take wealth without giving value.
And I mean, that's just endless and immense.
Even Nick Shirley, the guy who valiantly exposes all the wealth, did he not issue a meme coin?
That's what I'm hearing.
Like everybody.
Really?
That's what I heard.
I don't think he did.
I think maybe somebody did for him.
So I won't say.
Yeah, I'm not going to.
I think.
I'm not sure.
My point is simply that any human being, this is human nature again.
And this is Willing's idea that let's regard the kind of outgrowths of human nature as nature itself, as weather, as things that simply happen.
And let's take account of them.
We know that when humans are given any sort of power, any sort of ability to divert value to themselves, they will do that.
And so we need to organize society, you know, in accordance. We need to have value that people can hold for themselves, cryptographically secure, through merely having information in their brain cells that nobody else can access. That's what we need.
yeah uh i checked you are actually correct nick surely did issue a meme coin and so it's uh
on on the zora platform which uh that's i i know bology uh has one on there so it might be it might
be controversial to say that a meme coin is de facto fraud i think kind of is that like you know
he's a young kid i'm not gonna blame him whatever who knows this but just the thought that you know
anybody can cash in wants to have a modicum of fame and take money from other people who are also
scrabbling to cash in by being the first people to recognize that somebody else is cashing in
it's just a pyramid that's just vicious uh that's one yeah that's one way to look at it i think the
other way to look at it is that um like you should be able to put yourself on the open market
and take advantage of interest in your talents
without having to go through everything that it takes
to become a publicly traded company.
You know, like being a publicly traded company
is prohibitive for nearly all companies.
But this is not...
About 99...
I mean, Mean Coins are not selling stock in an individual, though.
They like explicitly say they're not that because they're not securitized.
They don't fall within that framework.
Right.
And you're trying to say that they're a form of like selling stock in an individual.
I just think they're not that.
This is called a it's called a creator coin, whatever a creator coin is.
So a creator coin is meant to monetize attention, surely earns royalties from the trading volume.
These are these are.
And by the way, I've heard I've heard Arthur Hayes talk about this and he talks about like the utility of meme coins.
is that they are a measure of public consciousness.
They're not.
And there is utility in that.
The only thing they're measuring is who could rug who.
But it's what people are interested in.
I mean, the people are-
And they are, I'm not saying everybody's doing this
like with perfect knowledge,
but it's people buying something that they think has value.
And because they think it has value, it has value.
The same way that people think a spin at a roulette table has value, it's gambling.
And that's fine.
Like, I'm not saying it should be illegal.
I'm just saying it should be in the same social category as prostitution.
That's how I feel about it.
And OnlyFans.
Like, MemeCoins is OnlyFans for dudes, is what they are.
A spin on a roulette table is just a gradient.
a, it's just a different version of gambling as a medical degree. You're just gambling that that
knowledge is going to be useful. And you're going to invest X amount in time. Like you're, yeah,
you're, you're always taking risk. You're always, you're always giving up something.
And again, I don't think it should be illegal, but I think pure forms of risk taking should be
scorned socially. And I, you know, we should look down on them. That's all I'm saying. I'm just,
I'm a fan of shame.
I think shame is a good thing.
Certain things should be shamed.
Maybe OnlyFans, maybe meme coins.
How very Catholic are you?
Yeah, I know.
Yeah.
A thing struck me also from our Adam Sinek conversation
that I think bared more exfoliation.
That's not the right word.
I think you said something like,
man, I'm glad that OnlyFans wasn't around in my day
and I wasn't female or something like that.
You had a comment like that.
That's like, that's a very honest thing to say.
That's a very genuine and open comment.
I appreciate that.
I mean, when you see all these people going and they're like, you know, this changed my life.
Like I went from working the drive-thru to now I own my own, you know, I own seven houses and I own eight cars and stuff.
It's like, I don't know.
I could probably stand a little.
You want to make a deal, a deal with the devil?
That's it.
Let's say I think nobody knows that they make a deal with the devil until the deal is done.
I don't think they realized it at the time.
But your point was so valid that I'm not going to sit here and judge anybody that does or did or will do that thing because I've made my deals with the devil.
And, you know, we all have.
We all live in a fiat economy.
This is all a terrible roulette system we live in.
And so nobody judges anybody.
Nobody should be the ultimate judge of the thing that happens.
There's an incredible song by Shane Smith and the Saints, and it's called Right Side of the Ground.
And he's singing about how he's thankful to be on the right side of the ground after the age of 40.
And the line in it is that I've spent time on the wrong side of the church door and I've held hands with the devil into more than just one town.
I pray by 40.
I pray by 40 is the stories make you question me.
I hope by 40 I'm on the right side of the ground.
Yeah, it's good.
And yeah, I mean, you know, everybody's made their own deal.
And everybody, I guess, is probably equally worthy of accepting and understanding.
Yeah.
And Willing, in this novel, he robs, you know, he robs a kid with this sock filled with coins.
He permits himself to get chipped at a situation that he regards with shame.
But none of that dominates his life.
the things that he had to do during moments of dire extremity,
the things that he permitted to be done to him out of ignorance or acquiescence,
none of that defined the course of his life.
And so if a person had done OnlyFans or launched a meme coin,
that doesn't define that person henceforth.
It's always like tomorrow is defined by the decision you make tomorrow.
And, you know, there's always a new start.
And Willing does that in the USN.
He does something, you know, he goes back to school, gets a degree in hydrology.
He looks toward the future.
Yeah, he's trying to raise some lemons, turn lemons into lemon juice, lemonade.
You know, we usually talk about Bitcoin in this podcast.
What's this podcast even called?
I forget.
What's the title?
There is.
And it's literally mentioned one time in the entire book.
I got the passage.
And it's just this passing reference.
We got to read it.
We got to read it because this is a Bitcoin podcast.
So, I have the page, but you're literally right.
It's a passing reference.
And what do they say, Lucas?
What's the point of the passing reference?
The point of the passing reference is that it's just this vague mention.
So, here's the question.
Are you worried about what – no, that's not it.
Never mind.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry I interrupted.
I thought I had it.
You lost it.
I lost it.
Let's see.
I'll find it.
It's just this vague reference.
And it's just it's just saying, you know, like, I hope that or like things go the way of Bitcoin.
Like, it's just this like vague thing that like apparently Bitcoin is dead and nobody knows why or in some and everybody knows why.
But we don't know why.
We're not in on this.
Two years, his cousin senior.
Goog wasn't giving ground.
So here Goog is arguing with the other cousins.
Goog always does this.
He argues with them.
The dollar is a history currency that stabilized the international economy for over a century.
Wilbur, which is what he calls willing to annoy him.
The Bancor is an upstart pretender whose constraints are unworkably strict.
We just have to hold our nerve.
I think this is Lowell, actually, not Gook.
After all, look what happened to Bitcoin.
And that's the only reference.
And so it's...
Boom.
That's literally all we know.
And so the implication, look what happened to Bitcoin.
And that what?
It must have failed or that it didn't get...
That it was too strict.
Yeah.
But, you know, it doesn't...
And people have...
I listened to some other podcasts, but I was talking about this.
everybody kind of assumes that it means that it failed or something but it doesn't say that i mean
look what happened to bitcoin maybe something good happened i don't know i don't think anything
good happened i don't think anything this is written also this is but it was written in 16
back when like the idea like we nobody like brady swinson had yet to i believe coin the term
tick-to-neck block. I don't think that that came about until 17 or even later.
I wasn't even born in Bitcoin terms in 2016, man.
Exactly. And so it was back in the time when there was a lot of uncertainty.
And I would say that we're probably past that point now, that the FUD, the fear, uncertainty,
a doubt has shifted from, you know, they're going to say that it's illegal to only criminals
use it to environmental stuff to it uses too much energy to now it's quantum, et cetera.
Oh, the quantum is a good, that's a critique that's valid.
You think it's a good one.
I'm not going to say it's a critique that's valid in that like quantum is going to wreck
Bitcoin.
It's a critique that's valid in that in some X number of years, it's a concern we need
to take into account.
Things move slowly as far as updating a decentralized protocol. So things need to begin to move towards resolving this potential problem. That's all.
sure yeah i i mean yeah i think so i think the risk is not as great um for like hacking because
if you have the quantum computer and you hack bitcoin then you instantly render it valueless
and so by doing so you are out whatever you've done like your only your only thing would be if
you would be the person who would benefit from the reset you would be much more advantageous
to just use that to mine Bitcoin and get paid with it and win every block.
Two responses.
The question I have about that, though, is like,
so what if you do have the quantum computer and it solves the block
instead of in 10 minutes, it solves it in a millisecond.
The thing is...
And then it just keeps solving blocks in a millisecond.
Does that mean that it's going to eat the entire supply to the end
before we hit the next two-week adjustment?
This is...
It's something where kind of a generalized ignorance of what quantum computing even signifies for me as well. But my understanding from reading like some of Nick Carter's stuff and some other people who are kind of pushing the need to deal with this threat kind of responsibly.
The FUD.
Well, I mean, it's fear, it's uncertainty, and it's doubt.
And these are bad things.
We need to deal with these things to get rid of uncertainty and doubt so that we don't have them.
But in any case, it's like quantum computing, as I understand it, there's something called Shor's equation that can be used to derive the private key from a public key.
That's something that quantum computing can do.
Whereas the hashing is not something that it would be necessarily so, like, I don't think it's just like a 10x on computing power, but maybe it's more specialized. Again, this is me talking very ignorantly, but people seem to be focusing their fears on the derivation of the private keys from the public keys in certain situations, like with very old, like the types of UTXOs or whatever that Satoshi coins are living on.
But again, to go back to something else you said earlier, it's not that it's going to render Bitcoin instantly valueless.
It's like the poaching would be slow.
Like the first quantum computers are going to poach some coins after, you know, maybe running the computation for 10 days or something like that.
So they're going to get some of the old outputs that are Satoshi coins.
So maybe it's not going to be a flip.
Yeah, but we'll know it instantly, right?
I think we're going to see Satoshi.
The blockchain is monitored at all times until you would instantly know it.
Yeah, we would know it and the value would drop accordingly. But also, even if it did, say it did have the effect of rendering Bitcoin valueless, and also say that the U.S. doubles down on Bitcoin, has a Bitcoin reserve, then would not China want to do exactly that thing as a way to kind of deep six the United States, go after Bitcoin's value?
China is the second largest holder of Bitcoin in the world.
But just say that they're also like a huge holder of gold.
Maybe they divest them.
Maybe they get the ability to quantum compute.
They sell their Bitcoin to the United States.
You know, these are all just speculative scenarios.
And I'm saying it is a threat.
Somebody would do it.
And so it needs to be taken care of.
That's all I'm saying.
I mean, I know nothing about quantum computing.
The word quantum, I mean, it seems like something out of a Marvel movie.
So I have no idea.
It does.
well we'll learn something about it maybe no i do read something on it there's some good stuff
out there and i don't want to hand wave it away because it's it's an interesting topic um and i
hope to learn more about it yeah i agree i agree uh as for this topic do we have anything else on
um i mean there's a lot of things to say i got a lot more quotes but we're kind of
and we're getting to two hours here so um i thought it was a good i thought it was a good
book very well written um i i wonder if lionel shriver is a bitcoiner at this point past 2016
i would really i'd like to know that fact um she's a contrarian thinker in all of her works
um she writes big social novels that tackle big themes to write a novel about the financial system
with keynesian economists spouting keynesian talking points and to make it readable that's
a feat and this is something i gave to a friend who is not a bitcoiner to read and he's reading
it and enjoying it. And so this might be a good entry point to introduce themes of
Bitcoin's viability to people who are not Bitcoiners.
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a great, even though it doesn't talk about Bitcoin as being like the
great savior, what it does talk about is the reality of what happens when a nation hyper
inflates its currency, when there's no longer demand for the debt and the suffering that ensues.
And this is something that's a reality every single year in countries around the world. And
eventually, it will be a reality for the U.S. dollar. It may not be a reality for the United
States. Hopefully we've done something to secure our future. But just like every other fiat currency,
it will go the way of the dodo bird. So yeah, it's something that it's kind of scary to think about,
but also very enjoyable to read about and understand.
Cariness is so important.
Like this first personalizes all of the more abstract talk of what inflation even means.
You say inflation and most people, their eyes just glaze over.
But then you start talking about $25 for a head of cabbage.
You know, your daughter who was going to go to some ritzy art school having to be a prostitute.
People understand what that means.
And so this is a good introduction into what are otherwise very dry topics for kind of your uninitiated person.
Yeah, I try to give people the example of like, I mean, when I was in Malaysia, you could buy Wagyu steak for the same price as hamburger, regular hamburger cost of the United States.
And so that's hard for people to understand, but it's a reality. You can get your Australian grass-fed wagyu, you know, the primo to primo, and it costs you the same amount as regular factory-fed chopped up beef in the U.S.
so it's a reality that's not in the future it's a reality that we're living every day and so
this is this is why people talk about moving to other countries going to live in Portugal going
to live in Colombia going to live in El Salvador Malaysia etc etc so you know it funny like I saw
I saw a chart some economists put up yesterday that was trying to prove that the level of quality of life in China still was not approaching that of the United States because the average income of the United States is like 60,000 and the average in China is like 20.
Yet, you know, everything costs one tenth as much over there.
And so, you know, we have this idea that how much we make is going to be a measure of our wealth, but it's how much you spend.
That's really going to show what you can do.
And it's how you live your life, how you derive your value, how you relate psychologically to your own possessions, whether you possess them or they possess you.
And so that's another valuable thing about this book.
You know, even Bitcoiners can become over-focused on Bitcoin as a fiat money machine instead of, you know, just value and preserving it and passing it on.
And so, you know, let's have a healthy relationship to our things, to our objects.
Let's possess them and not vice versa.
Yep.
And that's a great way to go out.
for everybody
for myself
for Grant
for the 13 of you
that listen
we really appreciate
you tuning in
to your favorite
fourth tier podcast
with third tier jokes
and eighth tier haircuts
haircuts
yeah
thanks again guys
Merry Christmas
Happy New Year
and we'll be back
with a new book soon
Happy New Year