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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.

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Ouch! I was slaving for hours for this moment, but go ahead, continue.

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Slave away, slave away.

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We'll have to work through this.

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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.

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And we chose to read the book The Mandibles, which is by author Lionel Shriver.

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Incredible book.

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Just absolutely incredible.

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My favorite fiction that I've read for, well, I take it back.

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I did read the Foundation series, so I really liked that a year ago.

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But it's really right up there.

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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.

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give a little background on the author, Lionel Shriver. She's actually from North Carolina in

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the States, but she has moved around quite a bit, is actually living in Portugal right now.

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I find that interesting, given that there are so many people that have left affluent places to go

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live in Portugal. She was born Margaret Ann and changed her name to Lionel at age 15,

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kind of a sort of reflection.

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At age 15 she changed it?

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Yeah.

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That's pretty awesome.

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That is.

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Which is cool.

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It shows a lot of agency, right?

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I mean.

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Yeah, exactly.

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A lot.

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Yeah.

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And to kind of reflect her tomboyish personality

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and just kind of reject these traditional feminine expectations,

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which.

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It's very literary sounding too.

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Like Lionel Trilling is a famous essayist.

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When I hear Lionel, I do think you think English and kind of,

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I don't know, it's very literary.

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So it's a good move as a 15 year old.

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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.

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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.

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So what this book does is it kind of takes us over a course of years.

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And it's a tale of money, which is a tale that we're all living right now.

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It's a tale of family and the slow motion fall of an empire.

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It's a tale of social classes and race dynamics in kind of late empire United States, right?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I mean, this was published in 2016. So if you haven't read it, I mean, listen to it. Yeah.

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But also, you're going to want to read it even after we talk about it, I think.

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So, yeah, I can listen to it if you want, read it if you want.

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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.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Anyways, yeah.

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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.

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One day the music stops. The only thing left is a family arguing over who gets the last cabbage.

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This is the story of the mandibles.

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And it's the story of every empire that ever thought tomorrow would pay for today.

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This is what we're living through right now.

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And we're going to see how the author, Lionel Shriver, presents it to us into the future.

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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.

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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.

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He was an engineer or something, some sort of diesel contraption, diesel technology.

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They made diesel engines.

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Yeah.

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Diesel engines.

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Yeah.

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So, but at this point, Douglas Mandible is, he's 97 years old.

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He's a former literary agent.

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So, you know, a book dude.

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And he's just crushing life.

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He's living in this like super swanky, luxurious retirement home with his demented second wife, Luella.

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Who was the, it's kind of like the original gold digger, I guess, is kind of the way it's presented, I guess.

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He left his wife for her.

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Yeah, she's maybe that, but she's demented now.

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So it's kind of like a reverse gold digger situation.

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Exactly.

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When they meet, she is kind of.

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It serves you right.

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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.

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and they get together.

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And then one day they walk in

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and she's eating her shit off the walls.

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Almost literally, yeah.

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And so this switch is like,

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she is the gold digger,

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but then he ends up her caretaker

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as a 90-year-old caretaking a 70-year-old

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or 60 or whatever she is.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Yeah, she's a lot younger, yeah.

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So you've got Douglas.

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He's the old guy.

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He's got the young wife,

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but she's lost her mind.

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He's in retirement home.

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And then you've got their kids.

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So Carter and Jane,

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That's Carter's son.

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And Carter and Jane, they had three kids.

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They had Florence.

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But the kids, though, of Douglas, it's Carter and Enola or Noly.

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And Noly.

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Yeah, Jane is Douglas's.

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Carter and Noly.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, so he had a daughter and a son.

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Carter is this guy who, let's see, what does Carter do?

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Newspaper writer, kind of a failed.

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Kind of like a no, never did anything great.

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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.

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It's like working for the New York Times today.

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Yeah, got it.

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Exactly.

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Right.

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Yeah.

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And then the other daughter is Noli.

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And she like went and became an author and went and lived abroad.

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And she's kind of this like hip old lady.

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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.

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But she's also like never married, kind of a spinster gal.

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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

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uh then we've got carter's kids and this is where i think we really start to you know dig in because

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we've we've got four generations that we're talking about here just to start off with um

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and uh florence uh florence is like uh she's kind of this she's sort of like the bleeding heart

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who's like always like supposedly doing these things that are giving away,

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you know, like she works at a shelter and she is always taking these jobs that are not,

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they're kind of virtuous, but they're not high paying.

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Yeah. And it's spelled out specifically at one point, but this is a fiction novel.

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So think of the names as well. Florence, Florence Nightingale.

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She has kind of a, you know, a do-gooder outwardly, but it also reflects on her interior state.

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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.

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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.

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But in reality, it's just literally the only job is it's the best job she can get.

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Yeah. And and she's she's kind of got she's not married, but she's got this kind of live in boyfriend.

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His name's Ernesto. Esteban. I think it's Esteban. Esteban. Esteban. Yeah. Esteban.

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and uh and uh and then she's got a son and a son from like a uh from a one night stand

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and the son's name is willing um and then there she she owns her own house and there's this guy

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that lives down in the basement and uh pays rent he's this kind of sad lonely guy who plays the

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saxophone but he's really nice and meek and timid and his name's kurt yeah um and kurt has

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wrecked teeth and this is mentioned

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wrecked teeth right like rotted or

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something and it's it's interesting and

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it's dwelled on because like bad teeth

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is something that kind of is

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disappearing more and more in the United

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States but something that also crops up

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more and more as poverty increases and

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Kurt is one of those people who's caught

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with that who is on the downward

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downwardly mobile type person who has

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bad teeth as a show of that and it's a

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really sad thing because like Florence

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and one of her interior kind of monologue or thoughts,

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she's like, Kurt is kind of optimistic

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about finding a gal and stuff.

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And Florence is like, it's not going to happen.

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Yeah, she's like zero chance with those chompers.

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Yeah, he's kind of a charity case.

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Yeah, exactly.

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And so the three kids, Florence and then Avery.

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And Avery is kind of the well-to-do

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and she's married to this guy

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that's a Georgetown, like,

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modern monetary theory economist kind of guy.

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Keynesian, yeah, for sure.

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Who's, you know, real self-important and really, yeah,

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thinks he knows everything.

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Lowell, is that right?

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Lowell, yeah.

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Lowell, yeah.

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And they've got some kids.

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And then there's a brother, Jared.

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And we don't really hear a whole lot about Jared.

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Uncle Jared, yeah.

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Yeah, he's living with the parents,

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and apparently he's never really done much.

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He's just kind of there.

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And then, yeah, so we've got, like, so the grandpa's doing really well.

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Grandpa Douglas.

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Yeah, Grandpa Douglas.

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And then Carter's not doing so great.

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Carter and Jane, man, not really.

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They're doing okay.

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But Avery and Lowell, they're, like, they're living in D.C.

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They're big time.

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You know, she does Pilates therapy type stuff.

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And she's just, yeah, healing the world through motion.

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Yeah.

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And then Jared, he's not worth a shit, apparently.

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and uh but then then you got noli and she's like living over in france and she's always got money

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stuff like that so so yeah so that kind of sets the stage here's the characters i guess um but

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sort of the the the hook here is that like every every collapsing empire they have one last normal

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summer they have one last normal year basically before all of a sudden the music stops and um

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Things just turn sour.

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For, like, Weimar Germany, this was 1922.

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For Rome, it was, like, 450 AD.

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Argentina, it was 2000.

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For America, 2026, it's going to be a good one.

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2029, according to Lionel.

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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.

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Yeah.

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Yeah, I think it's going to be a big one.

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But and you start to you start to get hints about this.

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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.

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But he's bragging because his nursing home serves real turkey on Thanksgiving, not that locust protein substitute the poors eat.

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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.

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And it's already an inverted wealth thing where we see all this wealth at the top and kind of the retiring boomer generation.

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And that's in the mandibles, too.

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So you have Douglas at the top, Carter below that.

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The generation below that is Florence and Avery.

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And the generation below that, the children of Florence and Avery, Willing.

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And then Bing, Goog, and Savannah, the children of Avery.

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And so like Carter is kind of, you know, abashedly, guiltily waiting for Douglas to die so we can get the mandible wealth.

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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.

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So it's kind of everybody's troubled by this relation to wealth, but that's just the way it is.

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Everybody's just sitting around waiting for somebody else to die, trying to be polite in the meantime.

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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.

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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.

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So it's got this trigger event.

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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.

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And this, by the way, is something that's happened before in the UK back in 2022.

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And at the same time, Vladimir Putin and China, they launched this new currency, this Bancor, which I find is interesting, right?

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The Bancor, that was the proposed currency after Bretton Woods at the end of World War II, the Bretton Woods Agreement.

222
00:15:33,500 --> 00:15:43,880
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.

223
00:15:43,880 --> 00:15:45,380
and that lost out.

224
00:15:47,000 --> 00:15:49,540
Yeah, back then, yeah, the U.S. killed it.

225
00:15:49,760 --> 00:15:51,080
And the Bancor would have been just,

226
00:15:51,560 --> 00:15:52,460
right, and the Bancor,

227
00:15:53,100 --> 00:15:54,660
John Maynard Keynes' invention,

228
00:15:54,900 --> 00:15:56,400
it would have been tied to,

229
00:15:57,060 --> 00:15:58,420
instead of the dollar floating,

230
00:15:58,900 --> 00:16:00,820
like it would have been based on a basket

231
00:16:00,820 --> 00:16:02,180
of world currencies.

232
00:16:02,320 --> 00:16:02,820
Of currencies.

233
00:16:03,020 --> 00:16:04,180
Yeah, around the world,

234
00:16:04,240 --> 00:16:05,220
instead of just having the dollar

235
00:16:05,220 --> 00:16:06,260
as the world's reserve currency,

236
00:16:06,700 --> 00:16:07,340
but the dollar won.

237
00:16:09,140 --> 00:16:11,000
They criminalized gold.

238
00:16:11,860 --> 00:16:12,620
Go figure.

239
00:16:12,620 --> 00:16:15,940
So this is something that we've lived through the United States.

240
00:16:16,400 --> 00:16:23,720
1933, this is what happened during the bank holiday when FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

241
00:16:24,380 --> 00:16:26,720
Executive Order 6102.

242
00:16:27,100 --> 00:16:30,560
This made it illegal for citizens to hold gold.

243
00:16:31,280 --> 00:16:34,780
And so this happens here in the mandibles as well.

244
00:16:35,020 --> 00:16:40,000
And it happens, interestingly, through a presidential address from President Alvarez.

245
00:16:40,000 --> 00:16:46,520
There's a whole racial dynamic in this book where Hispanics have become the majority or are almost ready to become the majority.

246
00:16:47,060 --> 00:16:52,480
And there's a Hispanic president, Alvarez, and they have his speech word for word.

247
00:16:52,720 --> 00:16:59,360
And it's kind of like a regulent of Nixon when – back when they go – when Nixon does the executive order.

248
00:16:59,740 --> 00:17:05,920
And he blames all these other countries for like financial warfare against the United States.

249
00:17:06,080 --> 00:17:07,100
It's a moment of threat.

250
00:17:07,240 --> 00:17:08,120
We're all under threat.

251
00:17:08,120 --> 00:17:09,180
We need to rally together.

252
00:17:09,780 --> 00:17:11,320
And so he gives this speech.

253
00:17:11,560 --> 00:17:11,700
Yeah.

254
00:17:12,040 --> 00:17:13,020
Wait, do you have that?

255
00:17:13,160 --> 00:17:14,240
And do you have that pulled up?

256
00:17:14,440 --> 00:17:15,020
Yeah, I do.

257
00:17:15,180 --> 00:17:18,500
It is on the paper version, but it's page 53.

258
00:17:18,780 --> 00:17:21,060
It's kind of a long thing, but here's a good passage from it.

259
00:17:22,300 --> 00:17:28,000
Coordinating their chicanery, countries that wish this nation ill have played on the cowardly compliance of our allies.

260
00:17:28,000 --> 00:17:38,700
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.

261
00:17:38,700 --> 00:17:39,800
This is the TV address.

262
00:17:40,140 --> 00:17:41,940
Keeping less of your hard-earned income.

263
00:17:42,300 --> 00:17:45,820
Our currency was also sabotaged on the international exchange markets.

264
00:17:46,180 --> 00:17:52,220
Most perfidiously of all, world leaders who resent the power, prestige, and success of our great nation

265
00:17:52,220 --> 00:17:57,440
have cobbled together the so-called Bancor, an artificial pretender currency,

266
00:17:57,660 --> 00:18:01,460
with no history as legal tender, and goes on and on in that vein.

267
00:18:01,460 --> 00:18:06,620
And he, yeah, doesn't do gold seizure order in that speech.

268
00:18:06,620 --> 00:18:26,020
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.

269
00:18:26,020 --> 00:18:47,760
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.

270
00:18:47,760 --> 00:18:55,800
So this is a reset and it renders United States debt absolutely worthless.

271
00:18:56,020 --> 00:18:58,560
We just say, hey, we're not going to pay it.

272
00:18:59,260 --> 00:19:01,500
So good luck with that.

273
00:19:02,040 --> 00:19:03,180
That's a great renunciation.

274
00:19:03,700 --> 00:19:06,280
The U.S. basically renounces all of its debt.

275
00:19:06,400 --> 00:19:08,640
It's a debt jubilee, but just for the state.

276
00:19:09,400 --> 00:19:11,580
And by the way, I find this fun.

277
00:19:11,580 --> 00:19:21,480
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.

278
00:19:22,940 --> 00:19:24,580
And so this is great.

279
00:19:25,300 --> 00:19:32,660
It says so a real life parallel to this debt reset would be the 1917 Russian default.

280
00:19:33,060 --> 00:19:33,280
OK.

281
00:19:33,980 --> 00:19:36,580
The 1982 Latin American defaults.

282
00:19:37,400 --> 00:19:37,760
Sometimes.

283
00:19:38,600 --> 00:19:40,660
And the coming U.S. version.

284
00:19:40,660 --> 00:19:47,900
just literally shit yeah you're coming out of the box model who let this thing out yeah

285
00:19:47,900 --> 00:19:54,560
rock knows the score coming from the future reaching back in time hyperstition yeah and

286
00:19:54,560 --> 00:19:59,900
and of course so so now you've got the guy that's opportunistic that's like oh wait a second yeah

287
00:19:59,900 --> 00:20:06,340
so this debt it's it's not worthless it's on sale right buy when there's blood in the streets and

288
00:20:06,340 --> 00:20:15,220
And so Lowell, the Keynesian economist, the modern monetary theory professor, he goes, oh, this is just a balance sheet adjustment.

289
00:20:15,940 --> 00:20:17,840
Hoarding is the problem.

290
00:20:17,960 --> 00:20:19,920
That's the problem is that people are hoarding.

291
00:20:20,000 --> 00:20:20,700
People are hoarding.

292
00:20:20,960 --> 00:20:24,740
Like, remember during COVID, like people were hoarding toilet paper, right?

293
00:20:24,820 --> 00:20:25,040
Yeah.

294
00:20:25,040 --> 00:20:32,780
They were hoarding milk replacer, baby milk replacer, all these other things.

295
00:20:32,840 --> 00:20:33,860
We were hoarding things.

296
00:20:34,640 --> 00:20:36,180
That's what the problem was.

297
00:20:36,340 --> 00:20:44,020
The problem was not that there wasn't supply and the problem was not that the money was worth nothing.

298
00:20:44,160 --> 00:20:53,360
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.

299
00:20:53,500 --> 00:20:54,560
So, yeah, it's a hoarding.

300
00:20:54,560 --> 00:21:04,720
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.

301
00:21:06,340 --> 00:21:10,440
And they end up having to sell their home, Avery and Lowell.

302
00:21:10,720 --> 00:21:12,740
They sell their home to a Chinese buyer.

303
00:21:14,160 --> 00:21:20,480
So the Chinese now are coming over and they're moving into America.

304
00:21:20,640 --> 00:21:26,000
They're buying everything in America because it's way cheaper in America than it is in China.

305
00:21:26,200 --> 00:21:26,640
Go figure.

306
00:21:27,800 --> 00:21:30,160
They've got a nice slang term for them.

307
00:21:30,240 --> 00:21:31,600
They call them plate faces.

308
00:21:32,360 --> 00:21:34,360
I hadn't actually heard that one before.

309
00:21:34,360 --> 00:21:46,640
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.

310
00:21:46,900 --> 00:21:47,120
Yeah.

311
00:21:47,680 --> 00:21:48,840
There's a lot of that in here.

312
00:21:48,980 --> 00:21:49,140
Yeah.

313
00:21:49,260 --> 00:22:00,460
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.

314
00:22:00,720 --> 00:22:02,560
And then later on in the book, treasury.

315
00:22:02,560 --> 00:22:03,160
The knppers.

316
00:22:03,160 --> 00:22:05,160
Or the slumberers.

317
00:22:05,960 --> 00:22:07,160
The slumbers.

318
00:22:07,460 --> 00:22:07,700
Yeah.

319
00:22:07,820 --> 00:22:08,720
That's kind of further on.

320
00:22:08,960 --> 00:22:14,100
So even later on, yeah, later on, Treasury becomes the word for bullshit.

321
00:22:14,340 --> 00:22:14,600
Yeah.

322
00:22:14,820 --> 00:22:15,000
Yeah.

323
00:22:15,120 --> 00:22:15,980
Worthless bullshit.

324
00:22:16,240 --> 00:22:16,680
Worth nothing.

325
00:22:16,860 --> 00:22:16,940
Yeah.

326
00:22:17,460 --> 00:22:20,820
In this speech that we're talking about with Alvarado, there's another part that's really good.

327
00:22:21,160 --> 00:22:28,500
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.

328
00:22:29,060 --> 00:22:31,480
But it was gold seizure in the sense of turn over your gold.

329
00:22:31,480 --> 00:22:33,060
Wait, Nixon ordered gold seizure?

330
00:22:33,160 --> 00:22:34,340
No, no, no. Roosevelt.

331
00:22:34,340 --> 00:22:35,280
Delano Roosevelt, right.

332
00:22:35,600 --> 00:22:36,000
Yeah, yeah.

333
00:22:36,120 --> 00:22:36,700
6102.

334
00:22:36,780 --> 00:22:39,000
Yeah, and he'll talk about Roosevelt in here.

335
00:22:39,100 --> 00:22:40,760
This is a portion I'm going to read.

336
00:22:41,080 --> 00:22:45,800
But that gold seizure order was not – it was kind of like just turn over your gold, right?

337
00:22:46,280 --> 00:22:48,460
Here's Alvarado talking about it here.

338
00:22:48,540 --> 00:22:49,080
This is good.

339
00:22:49,560 --> 00:22:51,700
Using – and this is something we may hear.

340
00:22:52,320 --> 00:22:58,140
This could be, again, a predictor could be telling the truth about the summer of 2026, 627, whatever.

341
00:22:58,140 --> 00:23:08,120
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.

342
00:23:08,260 --> 00:23:13,740
Gold mining operations within our borders will be required to sell ore exclusively to the United States Treasury.

343
00:23:13,920 --> 00:23:18,460
Gold stocks, ETFs, and bullion will likewise be transferred to the Treasury.

344
00:23:18,460 --> 00:23:31,880
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.

345
00:23:32,420 --> 00:23:42,320
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.

346
00:23:42,600 --> 00:23:44,720
Emergency hoarding will not be tolerated.

347
00:23:45,160 --> 00:23:46,740
Punitive fines, et cetera, et cetera.

348
00:23:46,740 --> 00:23:52,380
And we see later on they go door to door and ransack houses searching for private gold stores.

349
00:23:53,240 --> 00:24:02,840
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.

350
00:24:04,020 --> 00:24:11,440
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.

351
00:24:11,440 --> 00:24:39,460
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.

352
00:24:40,460 --> 00:24:43,040
Well, yeah, because, I mean, you have nothing, right?

353
00:24:43,040 --> 00:24:43,180
You have nothing.

354
00:24:43,480 --> 00:24:44,240
You have a paper claim.

355
00:24:44,240 --> 00:24:44,880
You have a claim.

356
00:24:44,980 --> 00:24:45,200
Yeah.

357
00:24:45,840 --> 00:24:49,580
The first ETF was launched in Canada in 1990.

358
00:24:49,960 --> 00:24:51,160
Oh, yeah, so definitely not.

359
00:24:51,160 --> 00:24:52,440
So, yeah, they're not old at all.

360
00:24:52,520 --> 00:24:54,560
Some equivalent, though, of DTFs that I'm talking about.

361
00:24:54,560 --> 00:24:58,020
Do people have paper claims to gold in the 30s?

362
00:24:58,080 --> 00:24:58,720
Was there a similar?

363
00:24:59,200 --> 00:25:04,940
I suppose they may have been custodied in some sort of banking situation sometimes, but I don't know.

364
00:25:04,940 --> 00:25:09,560
I suppose when he sort of paper claims to gold.

365
00:25:12,340 --> 00:25:15,560
In the 30s.

366
00:25:16,240 --> 00:25:16,640
I don't know.

367
00:25:16,800 --> 00:25:18,380
We're asking Grok as we go.

368
00:25:20,020 --> 00:25:21,780
And it's going to tell us.

369
00:25:23,880 --> 00:25:25,380
Yes, actually.

370
00:25:26,120 --> 00:25:28,980
Well, so, I mean, yeah.

371
00:25:29,380 --> 00:25:30,400
Grok wasn't alive in the 30s.

372
00:25:30,440 --> 00:25:31,120
It don't know shit.

373
00:25:31,600 --> 00:25:33,020
Gold certificates, right?

374
00:25:33,020 --> 00:25:33,360
Okay.

375
00:25:33,360 --> 00:25:34,480
So, like, we have gold certificates.

376
00:25:34,940 --> 00:25:41,580
Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, that's what so like gold certificates are just like that's what every fiat currency begins as.

377
00:25:41,680 --> 00:25:50,040
Right. Right. Like every fiat currency begins as a claim on the precious metal or whatever that's backing it.

378
00:25:50,040 --> 00:25:52,680
I was thinking about this last night, too, is like that.

379
00:25:52,680 --> 00:26:05,680
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.

380
00:26:05,680 --> 00:26:10,120
It's that any physical commodity is doomed to be centralized.

381
00:26:10,900 --> 00:26:24,160
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.

382
00:26:24,480 --> 00:26:34,060
But if it's something that's very heavy and very small, then you have to carry too much of it, basically.

383
00:26:34,060 --> 00:27:01,520
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.

384
00:27:01,520 --> 00:27:25,960
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.

385
00:27:25,960 --> 00:27:32,540
and uh now what's going to happen well now now we've we've reached this downward mobility kind

386
00:27:32,540 --> 00:27:40,620
of stage where basically everything's just sort of going to hell um you get one shower a week um

387
00:27:40,620 --> 00:27:44,820
and and that's if you're lucky right if you're lucky enough to have a house which which they

388
00:27:44,820 --> 00:27:52,320
you know like uh florence has a house and avery had a house um but uh things don't work out so

389
00:27:52,320 --> 00:27:56,960
well for them because they end up selling their house to the Chinese. They end up moving in with

390
00:27:56,960 --> 00:28:05,040
Florence. And this is like the cruel and essential part of the book is that this is a hundred or

391
00:28:05,040 --> 00:28:11,740
hundreds of pages, this kind of slow decline where there's the great renunciation, there's this radio

392
00:28:11,740 --> 00:28:17,120
address or TV address, and it's kind of met by Florence with maybe a sense of curiosity. Oh,

393
00:28:17,120 --> 00:28:22,480
hears politicians doing another thing. Her son, Willing, we learn, is much more prescient, much

394
00:28:22,480 --> 00:28:27,980
more, he understands something real is happening. You can sense that as a child. But she's like,

395
00:28:28,060 --> 00:28:32,900
okay, another thing is happening. Lowell, the Keynesian, he's not worried again. It's a fire

396
00:28:32,900 --> 00:28:38,320
sale on assets, right? Time to hold or whatever. But then over these hundreds of pages, we see the

397
00:28:38,320 --> 00:28:46,800
deterioration of society in an inflationary, highly inflationary environment, in an environment

398
00:28:46,800 --> 00:28:50,080
where the U.S. currency is crashing relative to the bank

399
00:28:50,080 --> 00:28:53,780
or this currency held by brick-style nations, other nations.

400
00:28:54,600 --> 00:28:58,680
And that, it's a part that's almost difficult to read

401
00:28:58,680 --> 00:29:00,500
because of how plausible it is.

402
00:29:00,580 --> 00:29:02,980
And because if you've traveled abroad,

403
00:29:03,440 --> 00:29:05,160
you've seen this from the other side.

404
00:29:05,520 --> 00:29:07,060
Like, I haven't traveled a lot.

405
00:29:07,340 --> 00:29:10,060
But having been in Colombia, I go there,

406
00:29:10,240 --> 00:29:12,400
and I even think back to some of the things I would say.

407
00:29:12,520 --> 00:29:14,700
They're like, oh, this is so cheap here.

408
00:29:14,700 --> 00:29:19,520
I would say that almost as a compliment to people that like how great it is to live where things are cheap.

409
00:29:19,640 --> 00:29:26,780
But now I wonder how grating that must have sounded because, of course, it was not as cheap to the people in Colombia.

410
00:29:27,640 --> 00:29:35,060
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.

411
00:29:35,060 --> 00:29:46,060
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.

412
00:29:46,300 --> 00:29:49,840
And it's tough because of how close to home it is, right?

413
00:29:49,900 --> 00:29:51,900
I mean, we see it would be so easy.

414
00:29:51,980 --> 00:29:59,640
I'm looking over my meager liquor store of a couple bottles of wine and, you know, my meager vices.

415
00:29:59,640 --> 00:30:10,980
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.

416
00:30:11,200 --> 00:30:12,060
All that's gone.

417
00:30:12,940 --> 00:30:13,020
Yeah.

418
00:30:13,500 --> 00:30:13,720
Yeah.

419
00:30:13,720 --> 00:30:31,300
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.

420
00:30:31,300 --> 00:30:38,300
Imagine you're in your 60s, retired, and then your 90-year-old grandfather comes with his gold-dicking...

421
00:30:38,300 --> 00:30:39,080
Your age wife.

422
00:30:39,160 --> 00:30:51,660
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

423
00:30:51,660 --> 00:30:57,600
this is this is real yes you know this is this is real like what are you going to do you you

424
00:30:57,600 --> 00:31:05,400
obviously can't pay to put her into a care facility um and yet you you have enough humanity

425
00:31:05,400 --> 00:31:09,440
that you don't just kick her out into the street and let her dive.

426
00:31:09,960 --> 00:31:10,080
Yeah.

427
00:31:10,260 --> 00:31:13,060
Not only is this real, it's normal.

428
00:31:13,060 --> 00:31:15,180
And we don't see it as normal in the United States

429
00:31:15,180 --> 00:31:17,660
because we're so used to different generations

430
00:31:17,660 --> 00:31:20,060
living in strictly different dwellings

431
00:31:20,720 --> 00:31:22,900
after the childhood period is done,

432
00:31:23,040 --> 00:31:25,940
where around the world you see multi-generational dwellings.

433
00:31:26,000 --> 00:31:29,060
You see people caring for their own.

434
00:31:30,080 --> 00:31:31,780
And you just don't see that in the United States.

435
00:31:33,180 --> 00:31:35,140
We're very individualistic as part of it,

436
00:31:35,140 --> 00:31:40,360
But also it's just like there is the wealth where everybody has their own abode and they're cared for by caretakers.

437
00:31:41,260 --> 00:31:41,340
Yeah.

438
00:31:41,800 --> 00:31:42,200
Yeah.

439
00:31:42,200 --> 00:31:46,520
When I was in Germany, my host family had four generations under the same roof.

440
00:31:46,620 --> 00:31:48,020
And it was just that was common.

441
00:31:48,140 --> 00:31:48,280
Yeah.

442
00:31:48,320 --> 00:31:49,180
That was normal.

443
00:31:50,240 --> 00:31:56,740
And every, you know, every morning they ate together and every night they ate together and they talked and they shared.

444
00:31:56,740 --> 00:31:57,340
Yeah.

445
00:31:57,340 --> 00:32:05,740
Yeah, there is something to be said for like the closeness and the tightness of the family because of that.

446
00:32:05,740 --> 00:32:14,340
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.

447
00:32:14,680 --> 00:32:20,500
And I don't get to see half of my family, but once every two years.

448
00:32:20,500 --> 00:32:30,020
and um i miss them so much you know like to to feel to feel that that might be permanent you know

449
00:32:30,020 --> 00:32:34,240
like to like you read about this stuff in books and you see stuff in movies like oh you know

450
00:32:34,240 --> 00:32:39,080
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

451
00:32:39,080 --> 00:32:43,880
other for 20 years it's like that could happen like that could that could happen in in my life

452
00:32:43,880 --> 00:32:56,680
And that seems very sad. But yeah, so the grandfather and Luella, what's his name? The grandfather?

453
00:32:56,840 --> 00:32:57,040
Douglas.

454
00:32:57,560 --> 00:33:06,420
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?

455
00:33:06,620 --> 00:33:07,520
Savannah, yep.

456
00:33:07,520 --> 00:33:14,700
Savannah and Goog, named after Google, and Bing, named after Bing, named after search engines.

457
00:33:14,900 --> 00:33:15,720
They move in.

458
00:33:17,720 --> 00:33:18,580
Bing's cool.

459
00:33:18,780 --> 00:33:20,260
Goog is kind of a douchebag.

460
00:33:20,440 --> 00:33:24,820
And Savannah is this, like, gorgeous girl that was going to go to the Rhode Island School of Design.

461
00:33:25,240 --> 00:33:30,400
But she decides they can't or her parents tell her they can't afford to send her there.

462
00:33:30,400 --> 00:33:37,980
And so she starts smoking cigarettes and turns herself at the age of 18 into a high-end prostitute.

463
00:33:38,520 --> 00:33:38,820
Yeah.

464
00:33:38,920 --> 00:33:39,560
Which is –

465
00:33:39,560 --> 00:33:41,160
This is very sad.

466
00:33:41,760 --> 00:33:50,100
Which is a recession – like, interestingly enough, we find out later in the book, it's a fairly recession-proof industry to get into.

467
00:33:50,180 --> 00:33:50,480
Yeah.

468
00:33:50,800 --> 00:33:55,360
And it's sad how normal that is around the world, too.

469
00:33:55,360 --> 00:34:04,540
Like, it's very impactful to read this as an American because you know that Lowell is a professor at Georgetown University.

470
00:34:04,920 --> 00:34:22,180
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.

471
00:34:22,380 --> 00:34:22,820
So they're like—

472
00:34:22,820 --> 00:34:23,420
It's luxury.

473
00:34:23,420 --> 00:34:24,900
Luxury therapies, right.

474
00:34:24,900 --> 00:34:36,140
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.

475
00:34:36,140 --> 00:34:50,740
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.

476
00:34:50,740 --> 00:34:58,600
And again, it's impactful because we can feel what it's like when members of our social classes do that.

477
00:34:58,840 --> 00:35:01,640
And yet this is happening around the world.

478
00:35:01,720 --> 00:35:03,120
It happens in the United States, too.

479
00:35:03,200 --> 00:35:09,380
It happens kind of to people in hard times because, as you know, like sex is recession proof.

480
00:35:10,520 --> 00:35:10,580
Yeah.

481
00:35:10,980 --> 00:35:11,480
Yeah.

482
00:35:11,560 --> 00:35:17,300
And it starts to get at this point is when it really starts to get dark, I guess.

483
00:35:17,300 --> 00:35:20,300
So so willing, willing.

484
00:35:20,740 --> 00:35:30,040
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.

485
00:35:30,220 --> 00:35:32,260
Yeah, like 15 year old or so, I think.

486
00:35:32,260 --> 00:35:33,240
15 years old.

487
00:35:33,320 --> 00:35:34,960
Yeah, he's turning 16.

488
00:35:36,140 --> 00:35:38,740
He's not going to school anymore.

489
00:35:39,320 --> 00:35:50,680
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.

490
00:35:50,740 --> 00:35:55,000
It's a medium of exchange and it's a store of value and it's a unit of account, et cetera.

491
00:35:55,600 --> 00:36:09,580
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.

492
00:36:09,680 --> 00:36:17,260
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.

493
00:36:17,260 --> 00:36:24,340
But when he's 16, he's walking around with a sock full of coins, beating up other kids and stealing stuff from them.

494
00:36:24,820 --> 00:36:24,880
Yeah.

495
00:36:25,000 --> 00:36:27,040
And they have his birthday.

496
00:36:27,200 --> 00:36:28,800
His birthday, he has a cake.

497
00:36:29,100 --> 00:36:30,920
His cake is painted cardboard.

498
00:36:31,120 --> 00:36:31,300
Yeah.

499
00:36:31,400 --> 00:36:32,860
It's not even real cake.

500
00:36:33,000 --> 00:36:36,580
And it's around this time that he announces that they need a gun.

501
00:36:36,940 --> 00:36:41,280
And the reason they need a gun is to protect them from people like him.

502
00:36:41,440 --> 00:36:41,740
Yeah.

503
00:36:42,220 --> 00:36:46,260
So, you know, he's realizing that it's a dog eat dog out there.

504
00:36:46,260 --> 00:36:46,340
Yeah.

505
00:36:46,340 --> 00:36:53,240
Yeah, and he is really, he is, you know, he is the moral compass in a sense of this book.

506
00:36:53,620 --> 00:36:59,540
And when he says it's doggy dog, it's because the moral compass changes in a state of nature, which they're entering.

507
00:36:59,640 --> 00:37:00,780
And he realizes that.

508
00:37:01,440 --> 00:37:03,280
And you look, again, this is a work of literary fiction.

509
00:37:03,380 --> 00:37:04,800
We look at his name, Willing.

510
00:37:05,240 --> 00:37:09,140
I mean, he's like the person who has agency when this is happening.

511
00:37:09,140 --> 00:37:12,060
Everybody else is kind of buffeted about by what is happening.

512
00:37:12,600 --> 00:37:15,720
And he's the one who understands this is a new climb.

513
00:37:15,720 --> 00:37:19,460
We need to adjust to it and act accordingly.

514
00:37:20,240 --> 00:37:21,260
And so he does.

515
00:37:21,340 --> 00:37:21,840
And it's funny.

516
00:37:22,060 --> 00:37:24,060
It's interesting or whatever.

517
00:37:24,200 --> 00:37:27,360
His last name that he evidently takes from his father is Darkly.

518
00:37:27,460 --> 00:37:29,000
So his name was Willing Darkly.

519
00:37:29,420 --> 00:37:40,000
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.

520
00:37:40,000 --> 00:37:52,160
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.

521
00:37:52,580 --> 00:38:01,540
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.

522
00:38:01,680 --> 00:38:01,820
Right.

523
00:38:02,260 --> 00:38:02,400
Yeah.

524
00:38:02,840 --> 00:38:03,060
Yeah.

525
00:38:03,200 --> 00:38:04,980
And this is where so we can tie this.

526
00:38:04,980 --> 00:38:11,920
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.

527
00:38:12,280 --> 00:38:15,820
So hyperinflation, it's always given us child criminals.

528
00:38:16,000 --> 00:38:21,940
It's always given us the youth going out there and engaging in violence and engaging in criminality.

529
00:38:22,800 --> 00:38:31,140
Weimar, the Weimar Republic in Germany in 1923, they had 10-year-olds that were fences for gold and Deutschmarks.

530
00:38:31,140 --> 00:38:41,980
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.

531
00:38:42,220 --> 00:38:43,820
They're native. They're native to struggle.

532
00:38:43,960 --> 00:38:50,760
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.

533
00:38:50,760 --> 00:39:17,720
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.

534
00:39:17,720 --> 00:39:18,740
His back pay.

535
00:39:19,340 --> 00:39:20,540
Yeah, his back pay.

536
00:39:20,860 --> 00:39:23,000
And he's all excited about this.

537
00:39:23,920 --> 00:39:27,440
He finally volunteers to go get groceries.

538
00:39:27,660 --> 00:39:29,800
He hasn't helped get groceries at all.

539
00:39:29,880 --> 00:39:31,280
He hasn't helped do anything, really.

540
00:39:32,340 --> 00:39:35,640
He is sat in the basement working on his treaties on Keynesian economics.

541
00:39:36,300 --> 00:39:36,580
Exactly.

542
00:39:37,100 --> 00:39:40,180
Yeah, he's solving the world's problems from a typewriter.

543
00:39:40,220 --> 00:39:41,120
As professors do.

544
00:39:41,500 --> 00:39:41,660
Yeah.

545
00:39:42,140 --> 00:39:44,440
And so he's got his paycheck.

546
00:39:44,440 --> 00:39:47,200
He gets dressed up as he does.

547
00:39:47,820 --> 00:39:48,820
He's fashionable.

548
00:39:49,220 --> 00:39:50,900
He's got his pink loafers.

549
00:39:52,140 --> 00:39:54,180
He's got his fancy jacket.

550
00:39:54,680 --> 00:40:00,480
He fills up the tank completely on the car, full of gas, goes to the grocery store,

551
00:40:00,580 --> 00:40:03,760
loads two carts full of groceries, gets his favorite wine or whatever,

552
00:40:04,420 --> 00:40:09,520
gets there to the checkout counter and realizes he doesn't have enough money to pay for anything.

553
00:40:09,860 --> 00:40:11,280
Three months of back pay, yeah.

554
00:40:11,460 --> 00:40:13,140
He doesn't pay for the groceries.

555
00:40:13,140 --> 00:40:14,800
Like two loaves of bread or something like that.

556
00:40:14,900 --> 00:40:16,540
He puts it, he's just too ashamed.

557
00:40:16,660 --> 00:40:19,960
He just leaves it, leaves it, puts it all, you know, just walks out.

558
00:40:21,880 --> 00:40:23,840
Ashamed in the way that a professor is ashamed.

559
00:40:23,980 --> 00:40:26,480
He affects indignation and leaves.

560
00:40:27,320 --> 00:40:28,080
Yes, exactly.

561
00:40:28,560 --> 00:40:28,940
Yes.

562
00:40:28,940 --> 00:40:36,160
And then as he's walking, he gets mugged by two Wall Street bros with a paring knife.

563
00:40:36,300 --> 00:40:36,480
Yeah.

564
00:40:36,920 --> 00:40:38,760
And he ends up walking away.

565
00:40:38,880 --> 00:40:41,420
No money, no shoes, no car, nothing.

566
00:40:41,640 --> 00:40:41,860
Yeah.

567
00:40:41,900 --> 00:40:42,520
Loses it all.

568
00:40:42,520 --> 00:41:06,900
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.

569
00:41:06,900 --> 00:41:26,420
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.

570
00:41:26,420 --> 00:41:34,440
yeah yeah there's they're professors right strongest the strongest force in the world

571
00:41:34,440 --> 00:41:39,460
is the need to say consistent with your beliefs yeah and so changing your beliefs you know in

572
00:41:39,460 --> 00:41:46,060
bitcoin like humility is the first step towards accepting bitcoin into your life right like that

573
00:41:46,060 --> 00:41:52,300
everybody who was not hal finning essentially has to have a measure of humility because they

574
00:41:52,300 --> 00:41:57,580
weren't on the ground floor. And, you know, all of us have to have that humility moment where we

575
00:41:57,580 --> 00:42:02,240
say, OK, I was wrong for the last X number of years. I'm not going to let that hold me back.

576
00:42:02,300 --> 00:42:08,340
I'm going to, you know, suck it up and begin. Yeah. So in and amongst this, by the way,

577
00:42:08,680 --> 00:42:15,320
something we forgot to mention, while while this is all happening, Jared has has moved out. He's

578
00:42:15,320 --> 00:42:20,220
bought a little farm in upstate New York and he's moved up there. He's become kind of like a

579
00:42:20,220 --> 00:42:24,900
sort of like a libertarian, sort of a sovereign citizen type of guy.

580
00:42:26,400 --> 00:42:27,420
Calls his farm the citadel.

581
00:42:28,140 --> 00:42:28,420
Yeah.

582
00:42:28,700 --> 00:42:29,020
Yeah.

583
00:42:29,180 --> 00:42:32,020
Thinks, you know, thinks kind of the end is coming sort of deal.

584
00:42:32,020 --> 00:42:36,080
And of course, as we find out, turns out he's exactly right.

585
00:42:37,400 --> 00:42:42,700
And but one thing that I had in my notes before, like I forgot to mention that I thought this

586
00:42:42,700 --> 00:42:43,140
was funny.

587
00:42:43,860 --> 00:42:47,360
So the Dante Alvarado guy, he becomes president.

588
00:42:47,360 --> 00:42:58,860
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.

589
00:42:59,420 --> 00:43:05,420
So Judge Judy is on the – and this is what we're seeing in the United States, right?

590
00:43:05,460 --> 00:43:09,360
This is the rise of the celebrity politician, the rise of the celebrity everything.

591
00:43:11,740 --> 00:43:13,280
Politicians become celebrities.

592
00:43:13,520 --> 00:43:14,900
Celebrities become politicians.

593
00:43:14,900 --> 00:43:24,520
um you can't tell a difference between the two uh and so uh you end up with uh yeah it just seems

594
00:43:24,520 --> 00:43:34,420
like uh seems like the craziest reality tv show uh that could could exist um yeah yeah let's see

595
00:43:34,420 --> 00:43:39,180
what else do we have where are we at a lot of the a lot of the interesting parts of this book

596
00:43:39,180 --> 00:43:48,640
are so lionel shriver is a very good writer so what a really good writer does is not just just

597
00:43:48,640 --> 00:43:54,820
not just kind of recount a good tale they also explore the psychology of their characters and

598
00:43:54,820 --> 00:44:00,860
a lot of this this book is rife with the psychology of money how people see value in relation to

599
00:44:00,860 --> 00:44:09,800
their other values, essentially, and how a person experiences inflation from a first-person

600
00:44:09,800 --> 00:44:16,320
perspective. You can talk about inflation with charts and talk about what it's going to mean

601
00:44:16,320 --> 00:44:24,100
in terms of purchasing power, but to see it from a lived perspective, there's a lot of value in this.

602
00:44:24,280 --> 00:44:29,300
And it reminds me, like Sal Pinedo, when we talked about with him, he's talking about structural

603
00:44:29,300 --> 00:44:35,040
violence, right? The way that inflation actually affects real people. That's incredibly important.

604
00:44:35,040 --> 00:44:39,940
He does a really good job of talking about this and Shriver does an excellent job of depicting

605
00:44:39,940 --> 00:44:45,240
that violence from a first-person perspective. And people kind of reflect on this. And there's

606
00:44:45,240 --> 00:44:51,520
some dialogue here I'll read. So I'll just read the dialogue and we'll extract something from this.

607
00:44:52,080 --> 00:44:55,400
Do you feel less valuable as a person because the dollar is less valuable?

608
00:44:55,400 --> 00:45:03,020
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.

609
00:45:03,220 --> 00:45:07,520
It may also have to do with how we feel like smaller.

610
00:45:07,940 --> 00:45:09,400
Maybe I feel smaller.

611
00:45:09,780 --> 00:45:13,000
You might not realize it, but maybe you feel smaller, too.

612
00:45:13,960 --> 00:45:18,720
Part of this narrative is about the diminishment of the United States on the world stage.

613
00:45:19,020 --> 00:45:20,860
And the dollar is king, right?

614
00:45:20,880 --> 00:45:21,980
The dollar is almighty.

615
00:45:22,440 --> 00:45:24,900
And these people are dealing with that, too.

616
00:45:24,900 --> 00:45:32,760
losing not just purchasing power individually, but the precipitous decline of U.S. power relative

617
00:45:32,760 --> 00:45:38,320
to the world's status, right? And people feel that in their bones, right? I mean, we feel the pride.

618
00:45:38,320 --> 00:45:41,180
Sal brings this up absolutely. He talks about the shame.

619
00:45:41,640 --> 00:45:46,380
Shame. Yeah, they feel the shame on a national level. It's in your DNA to be proud of being an

620
00:45:46,380 --> 00:45:52,760
American. There's a bigness and a swagger to it. And as the currency dies, we see how much of that

621
00:45:52,760 --> 00:45:59,800
is tied to the strength of the currency and not pride in the nation as such, not pride in the

622
00:45:59,800 --> 00:46:05,360
founder's vision, not pride in our national monuments, simply pride in being able to buy

623
00:46:05,360 --> 00:46:10,540
whatever we want in relation to other nations. And so when the dollar declines, people feel,

624
00:46:10,540 --> 00:46:16,620
as the characters kind of parse it out here, smaller, like diminished. It's interesting to

625
00:46:16,620 --> 00:46:24,960
think how we would feel personally when if i say when if perhaps this could happen someday right

626
00:46:24,960 --> 00:46:35,360
yeah it does it makes you um i felt it when i was in colombia three years ago um

627
00:46:35,360 --> 00:46:41,260
because just in the three months that i was there the exchange rate

628
00:46:41,260 --> 00:46:49,660
stiffened up. And so I was getting fewer pesos for my dollar just after 90 days. And

629
00:46:49,660 --> 00:47:01,780
there is much less reverence and concern for Americans than previously and much more for

630
00:47:01,780 --> 00:47:09,440
Chinese. And so, yeah, it does really put you back because you are, you're used to walking around

631
00:47:09,440 --> 00:47:12,260
being born into being better.

632
00:47:12,500 --> 00:47:12,780
Yeah.

633
00:47:12,900 --> 00:47:20,080
And not knowing what it's like to be humble from the start, from the jump.

634
00:47:21,140 --> 00:47:21,400
Oh.

635
00:47:22,320 --> 00:47:22,840
Yeah.

636
00:47:23,100 --> 00:47:26,760
So, yeah, it's been tough, right?

637
00:47:27,060 --> 00:47:27,360
Yeah.

638
00:47:27,840 --> 00:47:31,700
It's tough, but also there is a readjusting of value.

639
00:47:31,700 --> 00:47:34,460
So maybe it's not good to always feel big.

640
00:47:34,460 --> 00:47:49,960
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.

641
00:47:49,960 --> 00:48:11,620
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.

642
00:48:11,620 --> 00:48:16,160
deprived of his mighty financial cudgel

643
00:48:16,160 --> 00:48:19,300
Douglas Mandible was just a very old man

644
00:48:19,300 --> 00:48:21,320
with a host of heartbreaking vanities

645
00:48:21,320 --> 00:48:24,060
no influence and scads of dead friends

646
00:48:24,060 --> 00:48:28,020
Carter felt he could see his father clearly for the first time

647
00:48:28,020 --> 00:48:31,000
there was no colossal edifice to rage against

648
00:48:31,000 --> 00:48:33,820
just a half-broken man who needed his help

649
00:48:33,820 --> 00:48:36,880
obliviously Douglas could still be exasperating

650
00:48:36,880 --> 00:48:40,780
and the practical consequences of Pop's insolvency were cataclysmic

651
00:48:40,780 --> 00:48:54,840
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.

652
00:48:55,060 --> 00:48:57,880
Perversely, the divestiture bestowed a gift.

653
00:48:58,260 --> 00:49:01,440
He'd woken one morning to discover that he was not a monster.

654
00:49:01,920 --> 00:49:04,180
He hadn't even realized that he'd felt like a monster.

655
00:49:04,480 --> 00:49:06,240
That's how monstrous he had become.

656
00:49:06,240 --> 00:49:32,820
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.

657
00:49:32,820 --> 00:49:58,300
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.

658
00:49:58,740 --> 00:50:00,220
In my better days, sometimes.

659
00:50:00,220 --> 00:50:22,720
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.

660
00:50:22,720 --> 00:50:42,920
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?

661
00:50:42,920 --> 00:50:52,460
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.

662
00:50:53,280 --> 00:51:02,020
But man, are they hot when it comes to like writing infractions and citations and taking advantage of civil forfeiture.

663
00:51:02,020 --> 00:51:17,000
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.

664
00:51:17,000 --> 00:51:31,720
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.

665
00:51:32,720 --> 00:51:38,400
It's a civil process. So essentially, yeah, the burden is different and it's, yeah, it's different.

666
00:51:39,540 --> 00:51:45,100
Unfortunate. Unfortunate. Okay. So let's see. Now what do we got here?

667
00:51:45,100 --> 00:52:05,780
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.

668
00:52:05,780 --> 00:52:10,680
So we see the extrapolation of certain trends and what they maybe will signify and mean.

669
00:52:11,180 --> 00:52:19,440
And one of the things is that the boomers, the older people, they refuse to accept the nobility of aging.

670
00:52:19,740 --> 00:52:21,440
And instead, they dress like children.

671
00:52:22,100 --> 00:52:34,240
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.

672
00:52:34,240 --> 00:52:42,220
And the grandchildren willing, like he kind of reflects that he has like this, he respects them less for that.

673
00:52:43,040 --> 00:52:45,280
And it's, there's a, here's a passage.

674
00:52:45,860 --> 00:52:48,540
Grand Mimi, so this was Douglas's first wife.

675
00:52:49,000 --> 00:52:53,840
Grand Mimi wore silk brocades, stockings, and tasteful pumps for trips to the post office.

676
00:52:54,100 --> 00:53:01,160
But the following generation dressed badly, first as a political statement, later out of indolence and laterally from delusion.

677
00:53:01,800 --> 00:53:06,880
Boomers considered old age one more conspiracy to expose, like the Pentagon Papers.

678
00:53:07,980 --> 00:53:08,320
Yeah.

679
00:53:09,320 --> 00:53:11,020
You see that as well, don't you?

680
00:53:11,100 --> 00:53:11,460
We do.

681
00:53:11,460 --> 00:53:20,340
I mean, yeah, today's 60-year-old kind of dresses like yesterday's 30-year-old, I suppose.

682
00:53:20,420 --> 00:53:26,220
And they dress like they're always going to the sporting event or like we're going to sleep.

683
00:53:26,220 --> 00:53:30,100
You know, we got pajamas on or like sports paraphernalia.

684
00:53:30,980 --> 00:53:35,780
You don't see many dapper gents and ladies, right, going to the store that way.

685
00:53:35,900 --> 00:53:39,400
That's not, you know, if they're doing that, somebody died or somebody's getting married.

686
00:53:40,100 --> 00:53:40,580
Yeah.

687
00:53:41,100 --> 00:53:41,540
Yeah.

688
00:53:43,380 --> 00:53:44,300
I don't know.

689
00:53:44,400 --> 00:53:54,220
You know, do you think that that is something that is due to economic downturn?

690
00:53:54,220 --> 00:54:01,440
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.

691
00:54:01,560 --> 00:54:04,220
It's a refusal to die. It's a refusal to accept mortality.

692
00:54:04,780 --> 00:54:13,440
It's a refusal to accept aging, which is something that happens as religious sentiment declines and people cling to this life.

693
00:54:13,740 --> 00:54:17,600
And I'm not saying this to that. I'm better than that. I'm obviously not. I'm dressed like shit.

694
00:54:17,600 --> 00:54:21,400
My hair is shit, according to you. So I, you know, I have no presentation.

695
00:54:21,400 --> 00:54:35,240
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.

696
00:54:35,380 --> 00:54:39,680
Everybody's dressed to the nines, it seems like, with jackets and stuff like that.

697
00:54:39,900 --> 00:54:45,600
And you see a photo now with people walking around in T-shirts and all, you know, with logos and stuff like that.

698
00:54:45,600 --> 00:55:11,380
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.

699
00:55:11,380 --> 00:55:37,700
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.

700
00:55:37,700 --> 00:55:43,380
that you can actually plot that side by side with an increase in materialism.

701
00:55:43,380 --> 00:55:43,560
Yeah.

702
00:55:44,460 --> 00:55:48,460
In that, you know, like if you go outside, you just feel good.

703
00:55:48,520 --> 00:55:53,040
Like you just feel good being in sunlight and you don't need as much.

704
00:55:53,280 --> 00:55:57,040
And then if you're out of sunlight, if you're inside the house

705
00:55:57,040 --> 00:56:02,900
and you're constantly being bombarded by blue light, then you need, you need something.

706
00:56:02,900 --> 00:56:15,720
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.

707
00:56:16,660 --> 00:56:29,940
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.

708
00:56:29,940 --> 00:56:36,940
like that was not technology we had everything was handmade it was you know it was sewn um

709
00:56:36,940 --> 00:56:43,220
it was uh it was not you know not machine stitched more if it was it was hand stitched you know

710
00:56:43,220 --> 00:56:49,180
and and so you know all your shoes were handmade everything basically was was handmade and so

711
00:56:49,180 --> 00:56:56,440
um that was the low end right the low end of clothing was that is what we would call the high

712
00:56:56,440 --> 00:57:06,280
end today and i don't think that we went to this low-end clothing simply as a desire to be

713
00:57:06,280 --> 00:57:14,920
to appear to not age i think we you know like when did the white t-shirt and blue jeans become

714
00:57:14,920 --> 00:57:20,640
the thing in america it was right after world war ii when we started to experience a lot of inflation

715
00:57:20,640 --> 00:57:27,880
yeah um so i yeah i don't know it's many societal trends always always yeah it's always both so the

716
00:57:27,880 --> 00:57:31,680
creation of the consumer citizen who needs to express themselves through their clothing it

717
00:57:31,680 --> 00:57:36,700
becomes your identity and so the logos that you wear what you represent becomes a very important

718
00:57:36,700 --> 00:57:44,340
thing and so yeah i don't know a lot of different things come into yeah around about this time

719
00:57:44,340 --> 00:57:49,360
luella burns the house down carter and jane uh they uh they no longer have a place to live and

720
00:57:49,360 --> 00:57:57,680
Now everybody's got to move in with Florence and Willing and Ernesto and Avery and Lowell, the whole gang.

721
00:57:57,680 --> 00:58:00,980
So now they're all living in this house together.

722
00:58:01,060 --> 00:58:02,800
And Enola has moved back from France.

723
00:58:02,880 --> 00:58:03,480
She's there too.

724
00:58:03,960 --> 00:58:04,140
Yeah.

725
00:58:04,280 --> 00:58:04,720
The aunt.

726
00:58:05,300 --> 00:58:13,200
So the entire family has now collapsed into this house, this black hole that's drawing them together.

727
00:58:14,820 --> 00:58:17,560
Douglas remarks, by the way, in the fire.

728
00:58:17,560 --> 00:58:23,520
He remarks that, you know, you didn't have to save Luella, that you could have just let her burn.

729
00:58:23,520 --> 00:58:25,460
This will be a recurring theme, which will come to a point.

730
00:58:25,560 --> 00:58:25,800
Yes.

731
00:58:26,060 --> 00:58:26,240
Yeah.

732
00:58:26,520 --> 00:58:26,960
Yes.

733
00:58:27,360 --> 00:58:35,420
But this is also relevant, this entire loss of the possessions of Carter, Jane, Douglas, and I guess Luella too or whatever.

734
00:58:35,660 --> 00:58:35,680
Yeah.

735
00:58:35,680 --> 00:58:37,560
So we've lost everything, right?

736
00:58:37,560 --> 00:58:37,700
Yeah.

737
00:58:37,700 --> 00:58:39,100
Like we now have nothing.

738
00:58:39,220 --> 00:58:41,240
Like the family fortune is gone.

739
00:58:41,320 --> 00:58:41,540
Yeah.

740
00:58:41,540 --> 00:58:50,960
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.

741
00:58:51,160 --> 00:58:54,320
And then Avery and Avery and Douglas, they have they have nothing.

742
00:58:54,320 --> 00:58:55,060
Avery and Lowell.

743
00:58:55,080 --> 00:58:55,860
Sorry, Avery and Lowell.

744
00:58:56,040 --> 00:59:00,120
What they leave under foreclosure, they sign over the contents of their house as part of the deal.

745
00:59:00,380 --> 00:59:02,000
And there's a passage here where she reflects.

746
00:59:03,860 --> 00:59:06,460
So they've lost a lot of possessions, a lot of material things.

747
00:59:06,460 --> 00:59:10,240
We were just talking about this, like material possessions, what that means.

748
00:59:10,240 --> 00:59:18,600
yet once she accepted the inevitability of near total divestiture Avery felt surprisingly powerful

749
00:59:18,600 --> 00:59:24,380
not only lighter and less encumbered but strong as if she were flinging desks and bed frames off

750
00:59:24,380 --> 00:59:29,500
her shoulders like an adrenalized survivor of an earthquake she was moved to consider the dual

751
00:59:29,500 --> 00:59:36,680
meaning of the word possession an object of which you take custody but also a wraith taking custody

752
00:59:36,680 --> 00:59:42,760
of you had she ever owned those mango wood side tables or had they laid claim to her

753
00:59:42,760 --> 00:59:50,720
yeah i i thought about this when i quit my job and i moved out of my house and sold my house and

754
00:59:50,720 --> 00:59:58,460
i gave away a lot of my stuff i'd come to the conclusion that anything that you own also owns

755
00:59:58,460 --> 01:00:06,960
you. Um, and, and it's only by being a master of that thing that you own it. Like even, you know,

756
01:00:07,000 --> 01:00:13,140
playing a guitar, like if you, if you, if you don't know how to play that guitar, then it's

757
01:00:13,140 --> 01:00:17,960
something that just hangs over you. It's just taking up space and it's looking at you and it's

758
01:00:17,960 --> 01:00:24,760
calling you names and it's telling you that you're not worthy, um, that you're not capable and, uh,

759
01:00:24,760 --> 01:00:29,520
and you're, you're a loser, you know, you just aren't, aren't succeeding. And everything,

760
01:00:29,840 --> 01:00:34,600
everything in our lives are like that. Unless you master the thing, or at least learn how to use it

761
01:00:34,600 --> 01:00:43,400
with, um, some amount of, some amount of, of, uh, expertise, um, then it owns you just as much as

762
01:00:43,400 --> 01:00:50,560
you own it. Think about the older people that struggle to use their smart TV, um, or they,

763
01:00:50,560 --> 01:00:56,680
They struggle to use the navigation system on a fancy car.

764
01:00:57,780 --> 01:01:08,340
You know, that thing is exerting its power over you and you're unable to stand above it, I guess.

765
01:01:08,340 --> 01:01:11,740
Yeah. And you're responsible to shepherd these objects.

766
01:01:12,140 --> 01:01:14,540
If you move, you're encumbered with them.

767
01:01:14,680 --> 01:01:17,640
You can't take up and go to another place easily.

768
01:01:17,640 --> 01:01:20,740
You have to keep the lights on, keep things going.

769
01:01:22,620 --> 01:01:40,500
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

770
01:01:40,500 --> 01:01:45,620
healthy attitudes as well. Like the scalpel takes away the unnecessary, and here we have emerging

771
01:01:45,620 --> 01:01:50,380
maybe a healthier relation to objects that only the truly vital is what you will take.

772
01:01:50,380 --> 01:01:54,460
and you'll be happy with a simple table, a couple of chairs,

773
01:01:54,460 --> 01:01:56,680
and you don't need the mango wood side table.

774
01:01:56,840 --> 01:02:00,360
You don't need all that stuff that you can, you know,

775
01:02:00,360 --> 01:02:03,000
sweep into Ikea and get the latest of this or that.

776
01:02:03,080 --> 01:02:04,300
You just need the truly functional.

777
01:02:05,680 --> 01:02:09,280
Yeah, it makes me, I mean, like I've lived this, right?

778
01:02:09,280 --> 01:02:13,740
You know, I went to college and I remember being in my dorm room

779
01:02:13,740 --> 01:02:20,840
and I remember feeling so accomplished, I guess,

780
01:02:21,020 --> 01:02:25,620
and so like I had all my needs met

781
01:02:25,620 --> 01:02:31,340
because I got a screwdriver and some screws

782
01:02:31,340 --> 01:02:36,520
and I screwed some empty soup cans to my loft,

783
01:02:36,760 --> 01:02:38,060
to the two by fours,

784
01:02:38,120 --> 01:02:40,180
so that I could have a place to put a drink

785
01:02:40,180 --> 01:02:44,360
and I could have a place to put my, you know, my pencils or whatever.

786
01:02:44,520 --> 01:02:46,500
Like everything was taken care of, you know.

787
01:02:47,520 --> 01:02:51,360
And then you fast forward to that 20 years later and you've got a house

788
01:02:51,360 --> 01:02:57,100
and that house has, you know, it's got a water heater and it's got a dishwasher

789
01:02:57,100 --> 01:03:00,700
and it's got an air conditioner.

790
01:03:00,900 --> 01:03:05,940
It's got all these things and all these things that need constant upkeep

791
01:03:05,940 --> 01:03:07,280
and they need constant attention.

792
01:03:07,620 --> 01:03:08,060
Yeah.

793
01:03:08,060 --> 01:03:20,580
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.

794
01:03:21,480 --> 01:03:32,560
But when you start from nothing or you just, yeah, you get used to nothing, then you find that beautiful simplicity in not having.

795
01:03:32,560 --> 01:03:50,060
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.

796
01:03:50,420 --> 01:03:52,500
Like this is just what you're expected to have.

797
01:03:52,720 --> 01:03:56,620
And people are like, oh, shit, I need to have that because the TV says this is the baseline.

798
01:03:56,620 --> 01:04:06,280
And so you go out and everybody strives to meet that baseline, which is, of course, incredibly unreal that people live as we live.

799
01:04:06,280 --> 01:04:16,000
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.

800
01:04:16,000 --> 01:04:31,100
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?

801
01:04:31,940 --> 01:04:34,780
There's that type of style of furniture that everybody's after.

802
01:04:35,020 --> 01:04:36,540
What do they call something modern?

803
01:04:37,360 --> 01:04:38,220
Oh, goodness.

804
01:04:38,560 --> 01:04:39,780
Everybody wants these types.

805
01:04:39,920 --> 01:04:43,040
There's different styles that are always coming to fashion and out of fashion.

806
01:04:43,040 --> 01:05:02,040
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.

807
01:05:02,040 --> 01:05:08,340
yeah i don't even know what to reflect on now i'm just sitting here thinking about

808
01:05:08,340 --> 01:05:15,320
yeah you just think about all the things that we have and um

809
01:05:15,320 --> 01:05:22,620
what little thing what little they give to us in return yeah you know especially coming out of this

810
01:05:22,620 --> 01:05:27,620
season right of coming out of the christmas season that's become so um so materialistic

811
01:05:27,620 --> 01:05:34,520
and so focused on, you know, although I will say the last couple of years, it seems a little

812
01:05:34,520 --> 01:05:38,720
less that way just because like you look around and people just don't have, people just don't

813
01:05:38,720 --> 01:05:43,160
have the money and they just can't afford. That and also people, there's that feeling

814
01:05:43,160 --> 01:05:48,200
simultaneously beside the feeling of everybody already has what they want because they've

815
01:05:48,200 --> 01:05:52,180
already got it on Amazon. And so they've got everything. The thought that you're going to

816
01:05:52,180 --> 01:05:57,160
find something that somebody else needs that they don't already have, like they've already

817
01:05:57,160 --> 01:06:01,880
found the thing that they want and anything you do will be a lesser iteration of that or something.

818
01:06:02,580 --> 01:06:10,860
So shopping is difficult. Yeah. So stuff starts to get wild here. So the house burns down. Carter

819
01:06:10,860 --> 01:06:16,520
and Jane and Douglas and Luella, they move in. They don't get any insurance money for the house

820
01:06:16,520 --> 01:06:22,640
because, of course, the insurance company has gone bankrupt. And it's around this time that

821
01:06:22,640 --> 01:06:32,920
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.

822
01:06:33,580 --> 01:06:36,320
All those paper claims mean nothing in this environment.

823
01:06:37,260 --> 01:06:37,420
Yep.

824
01:06:37,860 --> 01:06:38,700
Absolutely nothing.

825
01:06:38,700 --> 01:06:43,020
And it's been proven time and again in the real world.

826
01:06:43,140 --> 01:06:44,940
And we're seeing it in this book here.

827
01:06:45,580 --> 01:06:48,600
It's about this time that the neighbors show up and they've got a sick kid.

828
01:06:49,460 --> 01:06:51,820
They're asking for some help.

829
01:06:51,820 --> 01:06:59,540
And they let him in only to find out that they're there to point a gun at him and take everything they have.

830
01:06:59,640 --> 01:07:04,080
And they give him 10 minutes or 15 minutes to get out of there.

831
01:07:06,500 --> 01:07:11,340
And Willing asks if he can take his bike.

832
01:07:11,680 --> 01:07:16,540
And the child, their kid says, no, I want his bike.

833
01:07:16,540 --> 01:07:21,980
Well, it turns out this is one of the kids that Willing has robbed with his sock of coins.

834
01:07:23,320 --> 01:07:29,240
But Noli, she, interestingly enough, she refuses to give up.

835
01:07:30,100 --> 01:07:32,860
So the winter before, they burnt all her books.

836
01:07:32,980 --> 01:07:36,620
She's this author, and they had all these books that she never sold.

837
01:07:37,740 --> 01:07:41,380
And they burnt her books for firewood the year before.

838
01:07:41,380 --> 01:07:46,020
But she refuses to give up her unpublished manuscripts.

839
01:07:46,020 --> 01:07:51,640
Yes. Which, of course, nobody wants. Nobody cares. The foul matter is what it's called.

840
01:07:51,640 --> 01:07:55,780
Surely she will sell them to some university archive in the future. Right.

841
01:07:56,640 --> 01:08:03,340
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.

842
01:08:05,220 --> 01:08:09,700
Yeah. She's published like a few novels and yet she's independently wealthy mysteriously.

843
01:08:09,700 --> 01:08:13,380
Yeah. Yeah. So she's she's always been helpful. Yeah.

844
01:08:13,380 --> 01:08:17,300
And we know from Chekhov, the gun is always fired in the third act.

845
01:08:17,400 --> 01:08:22,640
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.

846
01:08:23,100 --> 01:08:28,320
The box that she's mysteriously attached to, maybe this will be an object of concern to the plot later on.

847
01:08:28,360 --> 01:08:28,720
We will see.

848
01:08:29,200 --> 01:08:32,660
Well, the gun is about to get fired because now they're kicked out.

849
01:08:32,660 --> 01:08:33,440
Well, there's a good quote.

850
01:08:34,100 --> 01:08:35,940
It's a fun quote I want to read.

851
01:08:35,940 --> 01:08:40,560
So Douglas, they call him Grandman, the grandfather Grandman.

852
01:08:40,660 --> 01:08:41,440
They call him Grandman.

853
01:08:41,600 --> 01:08:42,120
Great Grandman.

854
01:08:42,120 --> 01:08:47,120
Here's a quote from Douglas, which is also a little bit more foreshadowing, but also just kind of objectively hilarious.

855
01:08:47,760 --> 01:08:50,140
So this guy, of course, busts in with the gun.

856
01:08:50,500 --> 01:08:51,360
You got a sick kid.

857
01:08:51,420 --> 01:08:52,140
He wants the house.

858
01:08:52,260 --> 01:08:53,960
I'm just taking care of my family, guys.

859
01:08:54,080 --> 01:08:55,140
You know, don't blame me.

860
01:08:55,200 --> 01:08:56,060
It's the circumstances.

861
01:08:56,340 --> 01:08:57,020
Get out of your house.

862
01:08:57,100 --> 01:08:59,080
I'm doing this for my family like anybody would do.

863
01:08:59,740 --> 01:09:08,540
Grand Man says, in my day, Grand Man piped up, any reputable American man facing ruin would shoot his own family and then himself.

864
01:09:08,960 --> 01:09:11,700
Tradition was efficient, like the self-cleaning oven.

865
01:09:12,120 --> 01:09:17,380
I mean, like, what a thing that an older person would say.

866
01:09:20,280 --> 01:09:22,400
Why don't you shoot your own family?

867
01:09:22,940 --> 01:09:25,240
Come on, have some sense of honor here.

868
01:09:25,800 --> 01:09:27,400
That's what we would do in my day.

869
01:09:27,760 --> 01:09:29,080
Where's your samurai ethic?

870
01:09:29,720 --> 01:09:33,620
So I just thought that was like, I mean, we do see this relevant to the plot later on.

871
01:09:33,660 --> 01:09:36,780
But in the moment, I was just like, what an old person thing to say.

872
01:09:40,140 --> 01:09:40,960
I love it.

873
01:09:40,960 --> 01:09:41,140
Yeah.

874
01:09:41,140 --> 01:09:52,260
Is there any character that you felt like somewhat drawn to or that you felt like brought more color than anything else?

875
01:09:52,400 --> 01:09:59,180
Or do you feel that it was – I just – gosh, I felt like – I think you said like Lowell.

876
01:09:59,440 --> 01:10:01,960
Lowell's really one of the more interesting characters and willing.

877
01:10:02,120 --> 01:10:03,180
They're kind of like opposite.

878
01:10:03,320 --> 01:10:04,220
They're kind of like opposed.

879
01:10:04,380 --> 01:10:04,560
Yeah.

880
01:10:04,560 --> 01:10:10,840
Like you've got this like 13-year-old kid that's stoic and quoting Austrian economics.

881
01:10:11,140 --> 01:10:17,680
And he's going up against his, you know, Ph.D. hoity-toity uncle.

882
01:10:17,860 --> 01:10:20,240
Georgetown professor of Keynesian economics.

883
01:10:20,740 --> 01:10:20,920
Yeah.

884
01:10:21,060 --> 01:10:21,380
Yeah.

885
01:10:21,760 --> 01:10:22,000
Yeah.

886
01:10:22,100 --> 01:10:23,600
Real bad man.

887
01:10:23,680 --> 01:10:23,940
Yeah.

888
01:10:24,060 --> 01:10:25,740
Real bad man with his pink loafers.

889
01:10:25,800 --> 01:10:30,100
I've only been in the, like, the Twitter perimeter of people like that.

890
01:10:30,180 --> 01:10:34,820
And I'm already like, oh, this person must be insufferable in real life.

891
01:10:35,280 --> 01:10:35,820
He exists.

892
01:10:35,820 --> 01:10:36,260
And yeah.

893
01:10:36,440 --> 01:10:37,740
And Lowell is that person.

894
01:10:37,740 --> 01:10:41,420
And you mentioned it with the pink boots and the pompousness.

895
01:10:41,840 --> 01:10:48,000
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?

896
01:10:48,260 --> 01:10:51,100
And that's kind of the pompousness is palpable.

897
01:10:52,320 --> 01:10:52,520
Yeah.

898
01:10:53,160 --> 01:10:53,440
Yeah.

899
01:10:53,880 --> 01:10:57,280
So now things have really taken a turn.

900
01:10:57,620 --> 01:10:59,360
Like, they got no house.

901
01:10:59,900 --> 01:11:00,700
They're homeless.

902
01:11:00,700 --> 01:11:07,020
They're going to walk to the park and it's time to put up in the homeless encampment.

903
01:11:07,020 --> 01:11:08,280
That's pretty shit.

904
01:11:08,860 --> 01:11:13,500
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.

905
01:11:13,840 --> 01:11:15,900
And probably not going to make it.

906
01:11:17,060 --> 01:11:24,600
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.

907
01:11:24,880 --> 01:11:30,480
He asks Willing if he can borrow the gun to make sure that it's loaded properly, cleaned and everything.

908
01:11:31,180 --> 01:11:33,880
He promptly shoots Luella and then himself.

909
01:11:33,960 --> 01:11:34,180
Yeah.

910
01:11:34,180 --> 01:11:37,640
and lightens the burden for everybody else.

911
01:11:37,780 --> 01:11:39,680
So he lives true to what he was talking about.

912
01:11:39,680 --> 01:11:39,720
It's a very selfless act.

913
01:11:40,000 --> 01:11:40,680
Yeah, it's a very selfless.

914
01:11:40,680 --> 01:11:41,000
Yeah, very.

915
01:11:41,300 --> 01:11:43,480
And it's selfless in a way.

916
01:11:43,760 --> 01:11:45,720
You weigh the humanity of that act.

917
01:11:46,020 --> 01:11:51,820
And, you know, Douglas vocalizes to Willing.

918
01:11:51,940 --> 01:11:53,600
So Willing, this 15-year-old,

919
01:11:53,680 --> 01:11:56,800
is kind of guiding this expedition north to the Citadel.

920
01:11:56,940 --> 01:11:59,840
It's like they're going to have to walk like 190 miles,

921
01:12:00,620 --> 01:12:02,580
this tattered family with all their possessions.

922
01:12:02,580 --> 01:12:23,600
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.

923
01:12:23,600 --> 01:12:29,520
Like willing, as much as he lives close to a state of nature, he is not going to kill his own grandfather.

924
01:12:31,240 --> 01:12:37,180
And so he does, I guess, what you have to do when the ship is sinking, which is sacrifice yourself.

925
01:12:38,300 --> 01:12:39,780
It's a selfless act.

926
01:12:39,900 --> 01:12:40,840
It's a brutal act.

927
01:12:41,080 --> 01:12:49,440
But in the context of the story and in these times, such acts are acts of compassion, I guess, and moral, maybe.

928
01:12:50,640 --> 01:12:53,220
Yeah, we really are just animals, you know.

929
01:12:53,600 --> 01:13:04,760
Like animals, but animals with a conscience, animals who, you know, self-sacrifice is an interesting thing among humans.

930
01:13:04,940 --> 01:13:05,460
Yeah.

931
01:13:05,980 --> 01:13:13,520
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.

932
01:13:13,520 --> 01:13:25,500
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.

933
01:13:26,220 --> 01:13:34,060
Boris Carter, you know, in his 90s, his generation, a little bit, you know, having gone through tougher times.

934
01:13:34,420 --> 01:13:35,820
You can see that maybe.

935
01:13:36,800 --> 01:13:37,940
There's a quote here.

936
01:13:38,040 --> 01:13:40,360
I think this is relevant, kind of what we're talking about.

937
01:13:40,360 --> 01:13:49,460
willing has a view toward the state that is kind of uncolored with emotion a lot of people are

938
01:13:49,460 --> 01:13:55,720
angry at what's happening a lot of people react emotionally they feel aggrieved willing says

939
01:13:55,720 --> 01:14:01,520
the state a cyclone that sucked up houses trailers pets and children in its wake it was better he

940
01:14:01,520 --> 01:14:07,460
would remain calmer if he thought of it as weather so just look at the state and all of its violence

941
01:14:07,460 --> 01:14:12,280
and machinations and thievery, not as a thing, not as a person who was doing that.

942
01:14:12,760 --> 01:14:17,400
Look at it as the weather, as something impersonal that simply does what it does.

943
01:14:17,940 --> 01:14:20,880
You know, that's maybe a much healthier way to see the state.

944
01:14:20,980 --> 01:14:25,240
People become so aggrieved, so angry, but it's like, no, that's what the state does.

945
01:14:25,320 --> 01:14:27,500
Be honest, just nakedly observe it.

946
01:14:27,500 --> 01:14:34,200
And then you'll be much more able to react and predict it once you see it as the weather,

947
01:14:34,320 --> 01:14:35,960
as something that simply is.

948
01:14:35,960 --> 01:14:44,960
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.

949
01:14:44,960 --> 01:14:47,860
He just adopts this stoic approach.

950
01:14:48,260 --> 01:14:53,620
You know, he even says, you know, when the neighbors come, he says it's a good thing, right?

951
01:14:54,420 --> 01:15:00,460
Because it's, you know, like at least they were nice about it.

952
01:15:00,520 --> 01:15:01,420
They let him leave.

953
01:15:01,600 --> 01:15:07,860
Obviously, it was time to get out of the neighborhood because he talks about complexity theory.

954
01:15:07,860 --> 01:15:15,420
and complexity theory that complex systems work until they don't.

955
01:15:15,620 --> 01:15:18,220
And when they don't, then they fail catastrophically.

956
01:15:18,340 --> 01:15:19,580
The straw that breaks the camel's back.

957
01:15:19,880 --> 01:15:20,020
Yeah.

958
01:15:20,660 --> 01:15:21,140
Exactly.

959
01:15:21,400 --> 01:15:21,580
Yeah.

960
01:15:21,700 --> 01:15:25,740
So everything is fine until it's not.

961
01:15:25,820 --> 01:15:29,480
And when it's not, then it is not in a way that can never be fixed.

962
01:15:29,500 --> 01:15:29,760
Yeah.

963
01:15:30,660 --> 01:15:32,000
So, yeah.

964
01:15:32,380 --> 01:15:32,980
Cataclysmic.

965
01:15:33,940 --> 01:15:34,460
Yeah.

966
01:15:34,980 --> 01:15:36,460
Tears it all down.

967
01:15:37,080 --> 01:15:37,320
Yeah.

968
01:15:37,320 --> 01:15:39,540
So, yeah, they move on.

969
01:15:39,800 --> 01:15:41,380
They go to the farm.

970
01:15:41,520 --> 01:15:42,440
They're there for a while.

971
01:15:43,700 --> 01:15:47,480
And then we advance quite a bit in time, right?

972
01:15:47,720 --> 01:15:49,380
We move forward quite a bit.

973
01:15:49,580 --> 01:15:50,580
And let's see.

974
01:15:51,160 --> 01:15:52,720
Let me see if I get this right.

975
01:15:53,100 --> 01:16:01,320
So Carter and Jane, I'm not quite sure what they're doing.

976
01:16:01,960 --> 01:16:03,160
Are they alive still?

977
01:16:03,260 --> 01:16:04,780
They remain alive, yes.

978
01:16:04,780 --> 01:16:06,440
Yeah, they remain alive.

979
01:16:07,320 --> 01:16:08,860
And Avery and Lowell.

980
01:16:10,400 --> 01:16:15,680
I think what's important at this stage is that now Willing at some point leaves the Citadel, the farm.

981
01:16:15,820 --> 01:16:16,840
All the people are there working.

982
01:16:17,400 --> 01:16:19,960
Willing decides after a point.

983
01:16:20,100 --> 01:16:22,400
He respects Uncle Jared's project there.

984
01:16:22,400 --> 01:16:24,420
But it's kind of Uncle Jared's project.

985
01:16:24,820 --> 01:16:25,900
And Uncle Jared is a temper.

986
01:16:26,380 --> 01:16:29,980
And Willing decides to go back and reclaim the family house.

987
01:16:31,260 --> 01:16:32,760
And so he does.

988
01:16:33,180 --> 01:16:36,960
And he ends up there with a girlfriend named FIFA.

989
01:16:37,320 --> 01:16:42,460
and he accepts, this is kind of the plot development at this point,

990
01:16:42,560 --> 01:16:43,800
he accepts being chipped.

991
01:16:44,640 --> 01:16:48,300
So what chipped is, is at some point,

992
01:16:48,780 --> 01:16:51,960
this is like the CBDC directly in your skull.

993
01:16:52,100 --> 01:16:56,440
People have a chip implanted so that money can be instantly debited

994
01:16:56,440 --> 01:16:58,240
when you go to do transactions.

995
01:16:58,740 --> 01:17:01,680
And it can also be, if you save money too long,

996
01:17:01,680 --> 01:17:03,520
they can impose a penalty on you.

997
01:17:03,620 --> 01:17:04,920
So you need to spend your money.

998
01:17:04,920 --> 01:17:09,860
and if you don't you know that is deducted from your account everybody has one account that's tied

999
01:17:09,860 --> 01:17:15,640
to their dna and planted their skull to their spinal cord to their spinal cord which they could

1000
01:17:15,640 --> 01:17:19,120
have put it anywhere but they choose to put it there so that people can't so they don't dig it

1001
01:17:19,120 --> 01:17:25,460
out of them you paralyze like yeah so people get willing this person willing darkly somebody so

1002
01:17:25,460 --> 01:17:31,360
close to human nature who has seen so presciently he decides to get chipped in a moment of kind of

1003
01:17:31,360 --> 01:17:37,400
like kind of i don't know assimilation resignation or like it's what's the only way he's going to get

1004
01:17:37,400 --> 01:17:42,240
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

1005
01:17:42,240 --> 01:17:48,760
field that anybody gets jobs in now is caring for the elderly at this point um and he mentions it

1006
01:17:48,760 --> 01:17:53,360
almost as an aside that he has not been chipped since he's been at the citadel um and they but

1007
01:17:53,360 --> 01:17:58,100
he's aghast and they say you need to get chipped and he finally does it and this is a dark part of

1008
01:17:58,100 --> 01:18:03,100
the novel because i didn't understand what was happening at first it just kind of driver just

1009
01:18:03,100 --> 01:18:09,160
says that he was raped and i was like what happened was this like a revelation from his

1010
01:18:09,160 --> 01:18:13,980
childhood was he sexually abused like he was raped like no she goes on to describe it that

1011
01:18:13,980 --> 01:18:20,200
having the implant being chipped was a rape it was and it's like he feels different afterwards

1012
01:18:20,200 --> 01:18:26,360
he feels violated his name willing now takes on a second a second significance as somebody who was

1013
01:18:26,360 --> 01:18:32,320
willing to comply and he loses his agency as a result of this violation to his personhood

1014
01:18:32,320 --> 01:18:38,880
and so like a different willing begins to live kind of under state surveillance with the rest

1015
01:18:38,880 --> 01:18:43,840
of them at this point and they kind of settle into the house him and fifa yeah and it really

1016
01:18:43,840 --> 01:18:50,180
does it starts to get really dark like the only jobs that are available are like like fifa builds

1017
01:18:50,180 --> 01:18:55,360
like handicap railings access ways and railings and stuff like that.

1018
01:18:55,460 --> 01:18:58,140
And you can go care for old people or you can.

1019
01:18:59,380 --> 01:19:04,080
One of the jobs is to go take care of I think they're they called the slumberers or the napper.

1020
01:19:04,180 --> 01:19:05,440
I don't know. Something like that.

1021
01:19:05,440 --> 01:19:15,980
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.

1022
01:19:16,200 --> 01:19:18,160
And this is it's an interesting because it's cheaper.

1023
01:19:18,160 --> 01:19:35,520
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.

1024
01:19:35,520 --> 01:19:44,140
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.

1025
01:19:44,200 --> 01:19:48,920
So they have a dream filled sleep and pass their life as such.

1026
01:19:50,420 --> 01:19:50,500
Yeah.

1027
01:19:51,120 --> 01:19:58,920
And for that to be an option, like I said, this is where this where the book gets kind of like gut riching.

1028
01:19:59,160 --> 01:20:02,640
It's like, oh, God, Savannah is still a prostitute.

1029
01:20:02,640 --> 01:20:08,340
And you know that she's a really good one because there's robot prostitutes now.

1030
01:20:08,860 --> 01:20:14,520
And she's one of the few humans that's good enough to maintain her job.

1031
01:20:14,740 --> 01:20:16,580
And she even has a degree in it.

1032
01:20:17,040 --> 01:20:18,360
She's gotten a certificate.

1033
01:20:18,980 --> 01:20:21,080
By the way, this is a joke I heard one time.

1034
01:20:21,560 --> 01:20:24,920
I guess there is like an actual school of prostitution somewhere in Europe.

1035
01:20:25,280 --> 01:20:25,520
Okay.

1036
01:20:25,520 --> 01:20:33,160
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?

1037
01:20:33,320 --> 01:20:36,200
Would you rather hear that she flunked out or that she's on the honor roll?

1038
01:20:36,200 --> 01:20:42,880
Yeah. And that's kind of what happens here is, like you mentioned, she gets a certification, goes to a school.

1039
01:20:43,040 --> 01:20:45,100
It's formalized. It's regularized.

1040
01:20:45,400 --> 01:20:49,740
Prostitution is part of the economy because it's just so prevalent, I guess.

1041
01:20:49,740 --> 01:20:55,920
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.

1042
01:20:56,780 --> 01:21:03,740
And it's kind of sadly, strangely, we see that now, right, with OnlyFans.

1043
01:21:04,100 --> 01:21:10,180
I mean, we see the regularization of a type of prostitution and incorporation into the economy.

1044
01:21:11,640 --> 01:21:13,880
Yep. And extremely legitimized.

1045
01:21:14,160 --> 01:21:18,040
By the way, apparently only, I don't know, I shouldn't say this without.

1046
01:21:18,040 --> 01:21:25,740
a rare moment of restraint yeah i shouldn't say this that's not like you lucas

1047
01:21:25,740 --> 01:21:34,940
uh a you uh consulting the oracle there grok should i say this crock will i be fired from

1048
01:21:34,940 --> 01:21:41,160
my podcast if i say this will i be unemployed from podcasting i'm gonna i think we're just

1049
01:21:41,160 --> 01:21:47,860
gonna pass on what i was gonna say wise decision probably wise yeah certainly wise um anyway

1050
01:21:47,860 --> 01:21:50,840
So, yeah, they get together for a party.

1051
01:21:52,060 --> 01:21:52,960
A gathering.

1052
01:21:53,300 --> 01:21:53,600
A loose.

1053
01:21:53,960 --> 01:21:54,740
Yeah, a gathering.

1054
01:21:55,080 --> 01:21:55,200
Yeah.

1055
01:21:55,720 --> 01:21:58,200
FIFA and Savannah and Noli.

1056
01:21:59,040 --> 01:22:00,940
Yeah, the cousins plus Noli.

1057
01:22:00,960 --> 01:22:01,420
Plus Noli.

1058
01:22:01,720 --> 01:22:02,400
The aging ads.

1059
01:22:02,600 --> 01:22:02,700
Yeah.

1060
01:22:03,480 --> 01:22:05,980
Goog, by the way, is now working for the government.

1061
01:22:06,260 --> 01:22:07,540
Is he working for the IRS?

1062
01:22:07,720 --> 01:22:13,820
The IRS renamed as the Bureau of Social Contribution, and they're kind of colloquially referred to as scabs.

1063
01:22:14,780 --> 01:22:15,720
Yeah, the scabs.

1064
01:22:15,720 --> 01:22:25,460
um yeah anyways uh yeah yeah well okay i mean i am gonna not say what i was gonna say

1065
01:22:25,460 --> 01:22:32,340
i'm still lurking back really want to say yeah uh anyways and so then the discussion kind of

1066
01:22:32,340 --> 01:22:41,120
turns to like there apparently is in is it uh is it new mexico it is nevada um nevada it's nevada

1067
01:22:41,120 --> 01:22:42,020
that is like,

1068
01:22:42,240 --> 01:22:42,640
uh,

1069
01:22:42,640 --> 01:22:44,180
the United States of Nevada,

1070
01:22:44,340 --> 01:22:45,940
like Nevada has become its own,

1071
01:22:45,940 --> 01:22:47,900
like free separate country.

1072
01:22:48,600 --> 01:22:49,040
Um,

1073
01:22:49,040 --> 01:22:50,740
and there's all these rumors about it,

1074
01:22:50,780 --> 01:22:51,080
you know,

1075
01:22:51,080 --> 01:22:51,820
like if you,

1076
01:22:52,220 --> 01:22:53,960
if you go there that,

1077
01:22:54,040 --> 01:22:54,220
uh,

1078
01:22:54,220 --> 01:22:56,080
like your chip will blow your head off or,

1079
01:22:56,700 --> 01:22:57,080
um,

1080
01:22:57,260 --> 01:22:59,460
that sniper's going to get you when you cross the border.

1081
01:22:59,720 --> 01:22:59,840
Yeah.

1082
01:23:00,220 --> 01:23:00,580
Yeah.

1083
01:23:00,760 --> 01:23:01,040
Yeah.

1084
01:23:01,100 --> 01:23:01,320
Yeah.

1085
01:23:01,720 --> 01:23:02,040
And,

1086
01:23:02,160 --> 01:23:02,600
uh,

1087
01:23:03,340 --> 01:23:03,700
yet,

1088
01:23:03,880 --> 01:23:05,100
yet they finally decide,

1089
01:23:05,280 --> 01:23:05,540
uh,

1090
01:23:06,120 --> 01:23:06,700
um,

1091
01:23:08,140 --> 01:23:09,800
finally decided it's worth it.

1092
01:23:09,800 --> 01:23:09,820
So,

1093
01:23:09,900 --> 01:23:10,180
yeah,

1094
01:23:10,180 --> 01:23:10,720
you know,

1095
01:23:10,720 --> 01:23:12,740
I'm going to take a run for it.

1096
01:23:12,780 --> 01:23:14,300
Him and Nolio are like, we're going to do this.

1097
01:23:14,300 --> 01:23:17,720
Lucas, I got to read this because this is one of the best parts of the book.

1098
01:23:17,860 --> 01:23:29,080
I think this chapter is just like utter perfection as far as the grotesqueness of this social novel, what it achieves.

1099
01:23:29,500 --> 01:23:30,900
I want to read the title of this chapter.

1100
01:23:30,900 --> 01:23:31,220
Okay.

1101
01:23:31,700 --> 01:23:35,720
Chapter three, part one, ever two or eight or who knows.

1102
01:23:35,720 --> 01:23:43,520
their chapter is return of the somethingness shooting somebody going somewhere else or both

1103
01:23:43,520 --> 01:23:49,260
and the idea is that the only way things change for anybody the only excitement that there is

1104
01:23:49,260 --> 01:23:54,380
is if you shoot somebody or you go somewhere that him and uh willing and noly kind of have this

1105
01:23:54,380 --> 01:24:00,340
discussion and what happens is willing by habit has gone he's carried the gun around still that he

1106
01:24:00,340 --> 01:24:02,700
had from back in the day, although it's illegal.

1107
01:24:03,000 --> 01:24:04,600
He's working at a healthcare facility.

1108
01:24:05,240 --> 01:24:09,460
It turns out there's a spate of mass shootings in these healthcare facilities,

1109
01:24:09,460 --> 01:24:15,280
like the oppressed younger Zoomer generation caring for the elderly

1110
01:24:15,280 --> 01:24:18,520
while the elderly just squanders all the wealth.

1111
01:24:18,780 --> 01:24:21,840
Some of them just snap and go shoot a bunch of geriatrics,

1112
01:24:22,060 --> 01:24:25,480
shribs as they're called, in these care facilities.

1113
01:24:26,200 --> 01:24:27,800
So that happens where Willing is working.

1114
01:24:27,800 --> 01:24:37,880
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?

1115
01:24:38,400 --> 01:24:40,760
And then he gets back, tells Noly what he's done.

1116
01:24:41,160 --> 01:24:44,120
And he – the thing is, remember, Willing has been raped.

1117
01:24:44,300 --> 01:24:45,100
Willing has been chipped.

1118
01:24:45,240 --> 01:24:46,560
Willing has lost his agency.

1119
01:24:47,040 --> 01:24:49,700
Suddenly, he's flush with agency.

1120
01:24:49,920 --> 01:24:52,440
He's excited again because he shot somebody.

1121
01:24:52,680 --> 01:24:55,280
It's an incredibly American phenomenon.

1122
01:24:55,460 --> 01:24:56,120
We should all try it.

1123
01:24:56,120 --> 01:24:57,760
That's almost the implication.

1124
01:24:58,320 --> 01:25:03,940
It's like, it's the implication of, do you want to live forever or do you want to die with glory?

1125
01:25:04,120 --> 01:25:04,860
Something like that.

1126
01:25:04,920 --> 01:25:06,860
They've reached a point where everybody's terrified.

1127
01:25:07,020 --> 01:25:09,720
Everybody has a chip in their brain that's tracking their every transaction.

1128
01:25:10,160 --> 01:25:14,940
And they only permit that because they fear that something worse will happen.

1129
01:25:14,940 --> 01:25:20,480
But once you lose the fear that something worse is going to happen and you just fucking pull the trigger, right?

1130
01:25:20,480 --> 01:25:26,800
Which is the point that Willing gets to, although as a hero, kind of nominally, then he feels something again.

1131
01:25:26,880 --> 01:25:27,700
He feels alive.

1132
01:25:27,980 --> 01:25:36,880
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.

1133
01:25:37,540 --> 01:25:43,900
And a firearm, I mean, that's agency and a piece of metal in kind of maybe a terrible sense.

1134
01:25:43,920 --> 01:25:45,960
But it's life and death that you hold in your hand.

1135
01:25:46,060 --> 01:25:49,680
It's the ability to adjudicate that ultimate matter in the instant.

1136
01:25:49,680 --> 01:25:56,400
it's it's everything right i mean it's the ability to protect yourself your family your value um

1137
01:25:56,400 --> 01:26:04,560
but shoot yourself not yourself shoot somebody or go somewhere so willing shoot somebody he's

1138
01:26:04,560 --> 01:26:10,700
flush with excitement and agency for having done something finally for himself and then noly's like

1139
01:26:10,700 --> 01:26:16,620
look at you look how you feel in this moment like the grayness is gone you're a human being again

1140
01:26:16,620 --> 01:26:18,880
And then she's like, let's go to Nevada.

1141
01:26:19,280 --> 01:26:21,100
You know, who cares about the rumors?

1142
01:26:21,580 --> 01:26:23,440
I'm going to go buy a car right now.

1143
01:26:23,660 --> 01:26:24,500
Let's go to Nevada.

1144
01:26:25,520 --> 01:26:27,460
And, yeah, they decide to do that.

1145
01:26:27,760 --> 01:26:31,660
Turns out the box of loose manuscripts was loaded with gold.

1146
01:26:31,680 --> 01:26:32,640
Turns out that it was.

1147
01:26:32,820 --> 01:26:32,920
Yeah.

1148
01:26:33,580 --> 01:26:33,740
Yeah.

1149
01:26:34,300 --> 01:26:36,880
And so she goes and buys herself a car.

1150
01:26:37,080 --> 01:26:37,960
And they're getting ready.

1151
01:26:38,000 --> 01:26:38,880
They're getting ready to leave.

1152
01:26:38,960 --> 01:26:40,860
And all of a sudden, Goog shows up.

1153
01:26:40,880 --> 01:26:43,060
Yeah, the IRS agent, Scab.

1154
01:26:43,420 --> 01:26:44,800
The Scab is there.

1155
01:26:44,980 --> 01:26:46,520
So they kidnap his ass.

1156
01:26:46,620 --> 01:27:16,200
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?

1157
01:27:16,200 --> 01:27:23,780
aunt's relation to a nephew yeah he's a nephew um second cousin yeah so they take him to they

1158
01:27:23,780 --> 01:27:28,480
head to the united states of nevada they it's a road trip and they the thing is too like these

1159
01:27:28,480 --> 01:27:33,660
kids these people poverty is set in people don't travel anymore they hit the open road

1160
01:27:33,660 --> 01:27:40,400
noly begins playing like the kind of the music from the 60s and the 70s 80s maybe and the kids

1161
01:27:40,400 --> 01:27:47,200
feel freedom even goog the the irs agent they all begin to like feel rock and roll entering their

1162
01:27:47,200 --> 01:27:51,740
veins as they scoot across the prairie right towards nevada and it's kind of a liberating

1163
01:27:51,740 --> 01:27:57,320
moment after the grayness of the novel like the greatness of the country is how it makes you feel

1164
01:27:57,320 --> 01:28:04,020
as you move with freedom across it and that's like the sense of like after so much suffocation

1165
01:28:04,020 --> 01:28:10,180
and claustrophobia in the novel when they finally get out of freaking new york and begin to go

1166
01:28:10,180 --> 01:28:15,540
across the wide country that they've forgotten, there is a sense of freedom. And so, you know,

1167
01:28:15,580 --> 01:28:19,340
shoot somebody else or go somewhere and they're going somewhere and they're feeling that excitement.

1168
01:28:20,900 --> 01:28:28,520
Yeah. As they're going, they're going through Nebraska and they come upon a nuclear missile

1169
01:28:28,520 --> 01:28:34,000
silo that's been turned into a fallout shelter, like what we see. I've been, I've actually been

1170
01:28:34,000 --> 01:28:39,040
I was thinking about you. You mentioned that. Yeah. I've been in one of these that it was a,

1171
01:28:39,040 --> 01:28:45,800
you know, a nuclear missile silo that somebody turned into a luxury home. And I remember, by

1172
01:28:45,800 --> 01:28:50,500
the way, I remember the, there's a quote from the guy, he was like a social studies teacher,

1173
01:28:50,580 --> 01:28:54,300
like a high school social studies teacher. And he bought this decommissioned nuclear missile silo.

1174
01:28:54,300 --> 01:28:59,860
And they asked him why. And he said, you know, like, look, this is a modern day castle. Like,

1175
01:28:59,940 --> 01:29:05,600
this is the thing that is in, you know, like this will withstand a nuclear blast. You know,

1176
01:29:05,600 --> 01:29:08,760
it's a cave and a castle all in one and it's self-sufficient.

1177
01:29:10,120 --> 01:29:12,820
I can live like no human has ever lived.

1178
01:29:14,820 --> 01:29:19,660
But anyways, they go to this, they stop there and they're like looking for water

1179
01:29:19,660 --> 01:29:21,080
and looking for shelter and stuff.

1180
01:29:21,680 --> 01:29:25,600
They end up kind of going through the facility and they come to the realization that,

1181
01:29:26,240 --> 01:29:32,620
you know, they had gone through this suffering thinking that part of the reason

1182
01:29:32,620 --> 01:29:37,520
why they were suffering was that the rich had taken everything and that there was nothing left

1183
01:29:37,520 --> 01:29:44,060
for them. And then they go through and they find, you know, here's the freezer that's stocked with

1184
01:29:44,060 --> 01:29:52,120
all this, you know, prime rib and salmon and all the magnums of champagne and the home gym and

1185
01:29:52,120 --> 01:30:01,260
everything. Yet their corpses and their suffering evident and they realize that,

1186
01:30:01,260 --> 01:30:09,660
that it was everyone who suffered the same fate, that even being wealthy did not save you.

1187
01:30:10,660 --> 01:30:14,440
And so that's kind of like this revelation for him.

1188
01:30:14,480 --> 01:30:14,760
Yeah.

1189
01:30:15,680 --> 01:30:18,300
And they continue on, on to Nevada.

1190
01:30:18,300 --> 01:30:28,360
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.

1191
01:30:28,480 --> 01:30:30,360
There's a quote here that I think is relevant.

1192
01:30:30,360 --> 01:30:36,160
in the fields at citadel i forget who's talking there in the fields at citadel he went on we had

1193
01:30:36,160 --> 01:30:40,620
plenty of time to talk avery told me about how hard it was for cancer patients when they got

1194
01:30:40,620 --> 01:30:47,400
better she said when you were um bigging sick making it the next day was a victory when you're

1195
01:30:47,400 --> 01:30:54,000
well again being alive isn't a triumph anymore she said patients often got depressed not during

1196
01:30:54,000 --> 01:31:01,560
chemo, but after it had worked. And the idea is that the problem is not staying alive. It's

1197
01:31:01,560 --> 01:31:07,380
finding a reason to stay alive. Like that's the hard thing to do. The hard work is meaning itself.

1198
01:31:07,720 --> 01:31:15,380
And we obfuscate that problem by trying to stay alive, by confusing ourselves with so many creature

1199
01:31:15,380 --> 01:31:21,080
comforts. But those aren't the solution because the problem is not how, it's not like staying

1200
01:31:21,080 --> 01:31:27,720
alive as long as you can it's like why am i staying alive what even is the purpose and what

1201
01:31:27,720 --> 01:31:33,660
is a purpose so great that i would cease to want to stay alive if i had to sacrifice that purpose

1202
01:31:33,660 --> 01:31:38,660
and that's kind of what they're realizing as they as they fly across the the countryside too

1203
01:31:38,660 --> 01:31:41,740
yeah um

1204
01:31:41,740 --> 01:31:49,160
yeah i don't know i'm just like reading through my notes and thinking about like it's just taking

1205
01:31:49,160 --> 01:31:55,960
me back to reading it and feeling this yes there's like this excitement of adventure and there's also

1206
01:31:55,960 --> 01:32:03,400
kind of the sadness of what they're leaving behind um they they make it to the border um

1207
01:32:03,400 --> 01:32:10,240
they they make it across and their heads do not explode yeah yep their heads do not explode they

1208
01:32:10,240 --> 01:32:27,860
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

1209
01:32:28,560 --> 01:32:30,200
But, you know, things are scarce.

1210
01:32:30,380 --> 01:32:35,960
And the only way that you can survive is to contribute.

1211
01:32:36,080 --> 01:32:37,360
Yeah, you might say.

1212
01:32:37,740 --> 01:32:39,160
There's no leeching off society.

1213
01:32:39,160 --> 01:32:40,100
People are free.

1214
01:32:40,100 --> 01:32:45,160
things are not in the other society objects we tried to make them free we had to make people

1215
01:32:45,160 --> 01:32:53,100
slaves in order to make you know goods services quote-unquote free to other people but here you

1216
01:32:53,100 --> 01:32:58,560
pay for everything and so you have to find a person willing to confer that value to you

1217
01:32:58,560 --> 01:33:04,980
contract with them because the state's not going to make somebody give you that thing and so yeah

1218
01:33:04,980 --> 01:33:24,380
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.

1219
01:33:25,600 --> 01:33:29,980
But they find their way there, and Jared's there.

1220
01:33:31,520 --> 01:33:33,740
He's got a little house.

1221
01:33:33,740 --> 01:33:35,140
He's getting by.

1222
01:33:35,260 --> 01:33:35,980
He's not doing great.

1223
01:33:35,980 --> 01:33:38,180
Jared is living how I want to live.

1224
01:33:38,280 --> 01:33:42,260
A simple table, a naked bulb suspended by a wire.

1225
01:33:42,600 --> 01:33:45,140
Like, that's my friend's apartment I've always dreamed about.

1226
01:33:45,240 --> 01:33:54,580
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.

1227
01:33:54,740 --> 01:33:58,240
But, like, that's the monastic space that is, like, the true dream.

1228
01:33:59,640 --> 01:34:01,020
Oh, interesting.

1229
01:34:01,400 --> 01:34:02,480
But surrounded by books.

1230
01:34:02,480 --> 01:34:02,960
Oh, yeah.

1231
01:34:02,980 --> 01:34:03,620
You need your books.

1232
01:34:03,740 --> 01:34:11,440
Although Wittgenstein, he slept on a simple cot, famous philosopher, and he had like one or two books on his bedside.

1233
01:34:11,560 --> 01:34:13,200
And there's something to say for that, too.

1234
01:34:13,240 --> 01:34:14,020
I haven't decided.

1235
01:34:14,480 --> 01:34:17,520
You either have to have all the books or two books.

1236
01:34:18,140 --> 01:34:20,140
And so you kind of – and I've gone between that.

1237
01:34:20,280 --> 01:34:21,160
I've divested.

1238
01:34:21,700 --> 01:34:23,140
I mean, you've seen my bookshelves, Lucas.

1239
01:34:23,340 --> 01:34:24,340
There's many books.

1240
01:34:24,740 --> 01:34:26,320
And yet this is the third iteration.

1241
01:34:26,320 --> 01:34:30,640
I've gone through periods where I gave them all away because I'm like, I don't need all these books.

1242
01:34:30,760 --> 01:34:31,620
I need two books.

1243
01:34:31,620 --> 01:34:34,100
and then I built it back up when I've given it away.

1244
01:34:34,240 --> 01:34:35,420
And this is the third iteration.

1245
01:34:36,480 --> 01:34:37,940
What were those two books?

1246
01:34:38,520 --> 01:34:41,560
Well, not literally two books, but the idea is like many less, right?

1247
01:34:41,560 --> 01:34:42,740
I cut.

1248
01:34:43,020 --> 01:34:45,600
And so I still had a healthy shelf.

1249
01:34:45,900 --> 01:34:48,640
It wasn't as romantic as I'm making a scene probably,

1250
01:34:48,860 --> 01:34:49,960
but I did get rid of a lot.

1251
01:34:50,960 --> 01:34:53,380
There's a lesson I learned when I sold guitars,

1252
01:34:53,560 --> 01:34:55,320
and that lesson is never sell guitars.

1253
01:34:55,520 --> 01:34:58,240
And I would assume that the lesson you learn when you give away books

1254
01:34:58,240 --> 01:34:59,500
is never give away books.

1255
01:35:00,040 --> 01:35:00,780
But I don't know.

1256
01:35:00,900 --> 01:35:00,980
Yeah.

1257
01:35:00,980 --> 01:35:06,440
Now, you always do think like you do and you're like, I need to reference that book.

1258
01:35:06,800 --> 01:35:08,340
I need to read something in it.

1259
01:35:08,720 --> 01:35:12,500
And I had an underline that was pertinent to this moment I'm living.

1260
01:35:12,860 --> 01:35:13,920
But yeah.

1261
01:35:14,120 --> 01:35:16,480
So they're in the United States of Nevada.

1262
01:35:16,940 --> 01:35:20,260
There's no one of the interesting things is there's no social safety net.

1263
01:35:20,260 --> 01:35:29,440
So they go from a society that is pretty much engineered as a social safety net and which has become so inverted.

1264
01:35:29,440 --> 01:35:32,520
where all of these aging elderly people

1265
01:35:32,520 --> 01:35:34,340
are essentially, you know,

1266
01:35:34,760 --> 01:35:38,180
the slave masters de facto of the younger generation

1267
01:35:38,180 --> 01:35:39,860
because they own all the wealth

1268
01:35:39,860 --> 01:35:41,800
and all of it's being used

1269
01:35:41,800 --> 01:35:44,820
so that the young will care for them in a way.

1270
01:35:45,420 --> 01:35:47,480
And yet there's no social safety net

1271
01:35:47,480 --> 01:35:49,540
in the USN, the United States of Nevada.

1272
01:35:50,180 --> 01:35:52,500
The guy, the first person who addresses them

1273
01:35:52,500 --> 01:35:53,520
after they enter says,

1274
01:35:53,860 --> 01:35:55,480
you bring in, he sees Noly there,

1275
01:35:55,580 --> 01:35:56,620
who's an aging person.

1276
01:35:56,840 --> 01:35:58,260
He says, you bring in old people,

1277
01:35:58,260 --> 01:36:21,580
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?

1278
01:36:21,580 --> 01:36:29,000
hey it's tough isn't it because you want like you when you're young you think that that's the way

1279
01:36:29,000 --> 01:36:34,020
like when you're young you think oh yeah well everybody should stand on their own but then

1280
01:36:34,020 --> 01:36:38,140
when you get to the point where you're looking at parents that are struggling and

1281
01:36:38,140 --> 01:36:43,740
um maybe not able to do the things that they were before and you realize that

1282
01:36:44,400 --> 01:36:51,100
their only option may be for for you to go take care of them um that

1283
01:36:51,100 --> 01:36:57,300
it's either that or they suffer because you can't afford to pay for something.

1284
01:36:58,320 --> 01:36:59,780
And at that point, you do.

1285
01:36:59,780 --> 01:37:03,420
You do kind of wish for some sort of social safety net that comes in.

1286
01:37:03,500 --> 01:37:05,360
Because we don't want to be the social safety net.

1287
01:37:05,500 --> 01:37:09,800
We're so greedy and selfish, and we don't live that way anymore.

1288
01:37:09,940 --> 01:37:12,180
It's not American to care for your parents.

1289
01:37:12,180 --> 01:37:14,040
It's not American to take them into your house.

1290
01:37:14,040 --> 01:37:24,540
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.

1291
01:37:24,760 --> 01:37:28,960
Let the dead bury themselves or something like that.

1292
01:37:29,340 --> 01:37:29,860
It's not American.

1293
01:37:29,880 --> 01:37:33,260
I know there's people that have good experiences with it.

1294
01:37:33,460 --> 01:37:38,960
But my grandma, she's in an assisted living facility and it's been hell.

1295
01:37:39,360 --> 01:37:40,460
Like it's just been hell.

1296
01:37:40,460 --> 01:37:42,420
She hates every second of it.

1297
01:37:42,420 --> 01:37:47,420
And she's lucid sometimes and not lucid other times.

1298
01:37:47,540 --> 01:37:49,540
And when she's lucid, she hates it out loud.

1299
01:37:49,620 --> 01:37:53,560
And when she's not lucid, she hates it louder, basically.

1300
01:37:54,860 --> 01:37:57,400
You know, and so it's hard on everybody.

1301
01:37:57,520 --> 01:37:58,760
It tears the family apart.

1302
01:37:59,700 --> 01:38:01,320
They use it against each other.

1303
01:38:02,000 --> 01:38:02,480
Yeah.

1304
01:38:04,880 --> 01:38:06,120
So the interesting thing.

1305
01:38:06,300 --> 01:38:07,040
It's the circle of life.

1306
01:38:07,040 --> 01:38:20,160
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.

1307
01:38:20,520 --> 01:38:30,120
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.

1308
01:38:30,120 --> 01:38:56,320
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.

1309
01:38:56,320 --> 01:39:18,520
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.

1310
01:39:18,520 --> 01:39:21,160
and so there's a moral way to saying

1311
01:39:21,160 --> 01:39:23,320
you know maybe that's

1312
01:39:23,320 --> 01:39:25,300
not worth having a social safety

1313
01:39:25,300 --> 01:39:27,620
net that devours 85%

1314
01:39:27,620 --> 01:39:29,380
of our income if we have

1315
01:39:29,380 --> 01:39:31,160
to do that maybe it is better if

1316
01:39:31,160 --> 01:39:33,320
we have stronger social bonds

1317
01:39:33,320 --> 01:39:34,720
maybe individualism

1318
01:39:34,720 --> 01:39:37,280
is allowed if

1319
01:39:37,280 --> 01:39:39,280
individuals by

1320
01:39:39,280 --> 01:39:40,860
personal choice act

1321
01:39:40,860 --> 01:39:43,620
in like the good for the good of others

1322
01:39:43,620 --> 01:39:45,140
yeah

1323
01:39:45,140 --> 01:39:47,720
and I think this

1324
01:39:48,520 --> 01:39:53,640
One thing you could say is, oh, maybe we wouldn't have to give 85% of everything if there wasn't so much corruption.

1325
01:39:53,780 --> 01:39:57,580
But the problem is we don't really know how to get rid of the corruption.

1326
01:39:58,280 --> 01:40:01,060
We just know how to let somebody else be trusted.

1327
01:40:01,060 --> 01:40:04,220
Man, and the thing is policing the corruption leads to more surveillance.

1328
01:40:04,620 --> 01:40:05,260
That's the thing.

1329
01:40:07,020 --> 01:40:11,120
Maybe there's a way to do it where it doesn't lead to surveillance, but it's always used.

1330
01:40:11,120 --> 01:40:16,540
And that's the thing that kind of freaks me out about all of the, quote unquote, like the Somali daycare fraud, right?

1331
01:40:16,540 --> 01:40:19,640
is maybe it'll be dealt with correctly

1332
01:40:19,640 --> 01:40:22,620
or maybe it's just going to be used as an excuse

1333
01:40:22,620 --> 01:40:26,680
to tighten the financial surveillance on everybody, right?

1334
01:40:27,360 --> 01:40:30,100
And that's why, I mean, I don't know.

1335
01:40:30,940 --> 01:40:35,420
Fraud is often a justification for more documentation,

1336
01:40:36,080 --> 01:40:37,820
more paperwork, more red tape,

1337
01:40:37,940 --> 01:40:41,120
and the burden oftentimes doesn't fall on those

1338
01:40:41,120 --> 01:40:42,400
who aren't going to do it anyways.

1339
01:40:42,400 --> 01:41:06,400
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.

1340
01:41:06,400 --> 01:41:07,140
Yeah, incredible.

1341
01:41:07,640 --> 01:41:16,420
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?

1342
01:41:16,520 --> 01:41:17,380
Like, what's her net worth?

1343
01:41:18,740 --> 01:41:21,300
Yeah, it was like, we'll say it out.

1344
01:41:21,320 --> 01:41:22,000
How do you spell that?

1345
01:41:22,140 --> 01:41:24,440
I-L-I-L-N-O-M-A-R.

1346
01:41:24,540 --> 01:41:25,000
I don't know.

1347
01:41:25,160 --> 01:41:27,760
I thought it was like negative $46,000 to $30 million.

1348
01:41:27,760 --> 01:41:30,360
That's the graphic I saw where she had a negative net worth.

1349
01:41:30,540 --> 01:41:31,540
I don't know if this is true.

1350
01:41:31,640 --> 01:41:32,260
It's a Twitter thing.

1351
01:41:32,320 --> 01:41:32,860
It's an X thing.

1352
01:41:32,860 --> 01:41:37,780
I'm just reporting a random thing I read that she had a negative net worth when she began her political career.

1353
01:41:37,920 --> 01:41:40,600
And now she has like 38 million or something like that.

1354
01:41:40,680 --> 01:41:44,300
I mean, like Nancy Pelosi levels of sudden wealth accumulation.

1355
01:41:45,900 --> 01:41:54,000
And yeah, she she in 2019, she disclosed an S she disclosed negative forty five thousand dollars.

1356
01:41:54,600 --> 01:41:58,400
So six years ago, 2019, six ish.

1357
01:41:58,400 --> 01:42:00,180
Yeah. So seven tech technically.

1358
01:42:00,500 --> 01:42:01,940
Yes. Going on seven.

1359
01:42:02,860 --> 01:42:14,380
And as of the latest disclosure in 2024, filed in 2025, reported in broad ranges, six million.

1360
01:42:14,440 --> 01:42:21,020
So they report a range, I guess, which is the range is six to 30 million.

1361
01:42:21,120 --> 01:42:24,060
So it could be, yeah.

1362
01:42:24,440 --> 01:42:26,440
Being generous, she's only a six millionaire.

1363
01:42:26,440 --> 01:42:27,040
Yeah.

1364
01:42:27,040 --> 01:42:34,840
Yeah, there's a winery that's $1 to $5 million, and there's a venture capital LLC that's $5 to $25 million.

1365
01:42:34,840 --> 01:42:40,400
And what I don't get is, obviously, she has her salary, I guess, as a politician.

1366
01:42:41,060 --> 01:42:45,000
Like, what other justification can there be for any of that?

1367
01:42:45,120 --> 01:42:48,940
I mean, that's just me being ignorant as to how people get money, I guess.

1368
01:42:49,940 --> 01:42:50,080
Yeah.

1369
01:42:50,820 --> 01:42:53,120
I don't know.

1370
01:42:53,120 --> 01:43:01,600
Jason Lowry talks about how as a military individual, he had to report his sudden wealth due to his Bitcoin accumulating drastically over time.

1371
01:43:02,260 --> 01:43:04,800
And, you know, they kept track of that.

1372
01:43:04,900 --> 01:43:06,180
Maybe, yes, they should for a public servant.

1373
01:43:06,680 --> 01:43:09,320
Is there not anything like that for politicians?

1374
01:43:10,840 --> 01:43:13,300
They are public servants.

1375
01:43:13,880 --> 01:43:15,640
The servant phrase is, yeah.

1376
01:43:15,920 --> 01:43:17,780
They're the definition of public servants.

1377
01:43:17,840 --> 01:43:18,080
Right.

1378
01:43:18,080 --> 01:43:24,100
So maybe that's a detour a bit into a little bit of indignation due to the social, the news of the time.

1379
01:43:24,100 --> 01:43:26,640
But it's relevant.

1380
01:43:27,120 --> 01:43:31,100
Like the social safety net is something that sounds beautiful.

1381
01:43:31,900 --> 01:43:41,120
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.

1382
01:43:41,980 --> 01:43:44,220
And I mean, that's just endless and immense.

1383
01:43:44,220 --> 01:43:53,700
Even Nick Shirley, the guy who valiantly exposes all the wealth, did he not issue a meme coin?

1384
01:43:53,800 --> 01:43:54,600
That's what I'm hearing.

1385
01:43:55,000 --> 01:43:55,660
Like everybody.

1386
01:43:56,300 --> 01:43:56,580
Really?

1387
01:43:56,840 --> 01:43:57,880
That's what I heard.

1388
01:43:58,280 --> 01:43:59,820
I don't think he did.

1389
01:43:59,920 --> 01:44:02,540
I think maybe somebody did for him.

1390
01:44:02,540 --> 01:44:02,920
So I won't say.

1391
01:44:03,100 --> 01:44:03,740
Yeah, I'm not going to.

1392
01:44:03,740 --> 01:44:04,540
I think.

1393
01:44:04,660 --> 01:44:05,500
I'm not sure.

1394
01:44:06,400 --> 01:44:11,460
My point is simply that any human being, this is human nature again.

1395
01:44:11,460 --> 01:44:24,520
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.

1396
01:44:24,860 --> 01:44:26,400
And let's take account of them.

1397
01:44:26,400 --> 01:44:34,800
We know that when humans are given any sort of power, any sort of ability to divert value to themselves, they will do that.

1398
01:44:34,800 --> 01:44:53,580
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.

1399
01:44:53,580 --> 01:45:01,720
yeah uh i checked you are actually correct nick surely did issue a meme coin and so it's uh

1400
01:45:01,720 --> 01:45:08,820
on on the zora platform which uh that's i i know bology uh has one on there so it might be it might

1401
01:45:08,820 --> 01:45:14,100
be controversial to say that a meme coin is de facto fraud i think kind of is that like you know

1402
01:45:14,100 --> 01:45:18,960
he's a young kid i'm not gonna blame him whatever who knows this but just the thought that you know

1403
01:45:18,960 --> 01:45:26,300
anybody can cash in wants to have a modicum of fame and take money from other people who are also

1404
01:45:26,300 --> 01:45:31,800
scrabbling to cash in by being the first people to recognize that somebody else is cashing in

1405
01:45:31,800 --> 01:45:38,340
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

1406
01:45:38,340 --> 01:45:48,580
other way to look at it is that um like you should be able to put yourself on the open market

1407
01:45:48,580 --> 01:45:53,060
and take advantage of interest in your talents

1408
01:45:53,060 --> 01:45:59,760
without having to go through everything that it takes

1409
01:45:59,760 --> 01:46:01,740
to become a publicly traded company.

1410
01:46:02,960 --> 01:46:06,120
You know, like being a publicly traded company

1411
01:46:06,120 --> 01:46:11,500
is prohibitive for nearly all companies.

1412
01:46:11,760 --> 01:46:12,620
But this is not...

1413
01:46:12,620 --> 01:46:13,680
About 99...

1414
01:46:13,680 --> 01:46:16,680
I mean, Mean Coins are not selling stock in an individual, though.

1415
01:46:16,680 --> 01:46:20,100
They like explicitly say they're not that because they're not securitized.

1416
01:46:20,260 --> 01:46:21,320
They don't fall within that framework.

1417
01:46:21,320 --> 01:46:21,600
Right.

1418
01:46:21,620 --> 01:46:24,880
And you're trying to say that they're a form of like selling stock in an individual.

1419
01:46:25,080 --> 01:46:25,920
I just think they're not that.

1420
01:46:26,180 --> 01:46:30,760
This is called a it's called a creator coin, whatever a creator coin is.

1421
01:46:31,020 --> 01:46:38,460
So a creator coin is meant to monetize attention, surely earns royalties from the trading volume.

1422
01:46:39,580 --> 01:46:40,760
These are these are.

1423
01:46:40,760 --> 01:46:46,560
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.

1424
01:46:46,680 --> 01:46:49,180
is that they are a measure of public consciousness.

1425
01:46:49,400 --> 01:46:49,620
They're not.

1426
01:46:50,020 --> 01:46:51,980
And there is utility in that.

1427
01:46:51,980 --> 01:46:53,680
The only thing they're measuring is who could rug who.

1428
01:46:56,440 --> 01:47:01,240
But it's what people are interested in.

1429
01:47:01,260 --> 01:47:01,700
I mean, the people are-

1430
01:47:01,700 --> 01:47:04,760
And they are, I'm not saying everybody's doing this

1431
01:47:04,760 --> 01:47:06,160
like with perfect knowledge,

1432
01:47:06,360 --> 01:47:11,780
but it's people buying something that they think has value.

1433
01:47:11,920 --> 01:47:13,880
And because they think it has value, it has value.

1434
01:47:13,880 --> 01:47:18,240
The same way that people think a spin at a roulette table has value, it's gambling.

1435
01:47:18,500 --> 01:47:19,160
And that's fine.

1436
01:47:19,280 --> 01:47:21,220
Like, I'm not saying it should be illegal.

1437
01:47:21,400 --> 01:47:25,240
I'm just saying it should be in the same social category as prostitution.

1438
01:47:25,400 --> 01:47:26,400
That's how I feel about it.

1439
01:47:26,480 --> 01:47:27,020
And OnlyFans.

1440
01:47:27,180 --> 01:47:31,560
Like, MemeCoins is OnlyFans for dudes, is what they are.

1441
01:47:32,480 --> 01:47:36,020
A spin on a roulette table is just a gradient.

1442
01:47:36,020 --> 01:47:46,700
a, it's just a different version of gambling as a medical degree. You're just gambling that that

1443
01:47:46,700 --> 01:47:52,560
knowledge is going to be useful. And you're going to invest X amount in time. Like you're, yeah,

1444
01:47:52,620 --> 01:47:55,680
you're, you're always taking risk. You're always, you're always giving up something.

1445
01:47:55,680 --> 01:47:59,440
And again, I don't think it should be illegal, but I think pure forms of risk taking should be

1446
01:47:59,440 --> 01:48:04,120
scorned socially. And I, you know, we should look down on them. That's all I'm saying. I'm just,

1447
01:48:04,120 --> 01:48:05,060
I'm a fan of shame.

1448
01:48:05,160 --> 01:48:06,220
I think shame is a good thing.

1449
01:48:06,320 --> 01:48:07,540
Certain things should be shamed.

1450
01:48:07,640 --> 01:48:09,520
Maybe OnlyFans, maybe meme coins.

1451
01:48:12,100 --> 01:48:13,320
How very Catholic are you?

1452
01:48:13,320 --> 01:48:13,580
Yeah, I know.

1453
01:48:14,700 --> 01:48:14,880
Yeah.

1454
01:48:15,620 --> 01:48:18,560
A thing struck me also from our Adam Sinek conversation

1455
01:48:18,560 --> 01:48:21,720
that I think bared more exfoliation.

1456
01:48:21,860 --> 01:48:22,540
That's not the right word.

1457
01:48:22,540 --> 01:48:25,760
I think you said something like,

1458
01:48:26,480 --> 01:48:30,500
man, I'm glad that OnlyFans wasn't around in my day

1459
01:48:30,500 --> 01:48:32,480
and I wasn't female or something like that.

1460
01:48:32,560 --> 01:48:33,620
You had a comment like that.

1461
01:48:33,620 --> 01:48:36,200
That's like, that's a very honest thing to say.

1462
01:48:36,280 --> 01:48:38,660
That's a very genuine and open comment.

1463
01:48:38,800 --> 01:48:39,860
I appreciate that.

1464
01:48:41,020 --> 01:48:45,060
I mean, when you see all these people going and they're like, you know, this changed my life.

1465
01:48:45,060 --> 01:48:52,440
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.

1466
01:48:52,500 --> 01:48:53,740
It's like, I don't know.

1467
01:48:53,840 --> 01:48:55,620
I could probably stand a little.

1468
01:48:55,640 --> 01:48:56,960
You want to make a deal, a deal with the devil?

1469
01:48:58,300 --> 01:48:59,120
That's it.

1470
01:48:59,280 --> 01:49:03,100
Let's say I think nobody knows that they make a deal with the devil until the deal is done.

1471
01:49:03,100 --> 01:49:04,760
I don't think they realized it at the time.

1472
01:49:04,760 --> 01:49:12,520
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.

1473
01:49:12,880 --> 01:49:14,180
And, you know, we all have.

1474
01:49:14,260 --> 01:49:15,720
We all live in a fiat economy.

1475
01:49:15,900 --> 01:49:18,740
This is all a terrible roulette system we live in.

1476
01:49:18,820 --> 01:49:20,840
And so nobody judges anybody.

1477
01:49:20,940 --> 01:49:25,160
Nobody should be the ultimate judge of the thing that happens.

1478
01:49:26,420 --> 01:49:32,720
There's an incredible song by Shane Smith and the Saints, and it's called Right Side of the Ground.

1479
01:49:32,720 --> 01:49:38,320
And he's singing about how he's thankful to be on the right side of the ground after the age of 40.

1480
01:49:39,060 --> 01:49:49,380
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.

1481
01:49:50,220 --> 01:49:51,240
I pray by 40.

1482
01:49:53,340 --> 01:49:57,220
I pray by 40 is the stories make you question me.

1483
01:49:57,400 --> 01:49:59,580
I hope by 40 I'm on the right side of the ground.

1484
01:49:59,580 --> 01:50:00,320
Yeah, it's good.

1485
01:50:00,320 --> 01:50:04,060
And yeah, I mean, you know, everybody's made their own deal.

1486
01:50:04,440 --> 01:50:11,340
And everybody, I guess, is probably equally worthy of accepting and understanding.

1487
01:50:12,240 --> 01:50:12,720
Yeah.

1488
01:50:12,900 --> 01:50:19,000
And Willing, in this novel, he robs, you know, he robs a kid with this sock filled with coins.

1489
01:50:19,620 --> 01:50:23,820
He permits himself to get chipped at a situation that he regards with shame.

1490
01:50:24,140 --> 01:50:26,020
But none of that dominates his life.

1491
01:50:26,020 --> 01:50:30,740
the things that he had to do during moments of dire extremity,

1492
01:50:31,120 --> 01:50:35,240
the things that he permitted to be done to him out of ignorance or acquiescence,

1493
01:50:35,600 --> 01:50:38,060
none of that defined the course of his life.

1494
01:50:38,280 --> 01:50:41,280
And so if a person had done OnlyFans or launched a meme coin,

1495
01:50:41,560 --> 01:50:44,480
that doesn't define that person henceforth.

1496
01:50:44,640 --> 01:50:49,460
It's always like tomorrow is defined by the decision you make tomorrow.

1497
01:50:49,780 --> 01:50:51,360
And, you know, there's always a new start.

1498
01:50:51,480 --> 01:50:53,780
And Willing does that in the USN.

1499
01:50:53,780 --> 01:50:57,800
He does something, you know, he goes back to school, gets a degree in hydrology.

1500
01:50:57,880 --> 01:50:58,780
He looks toward the future.

1501
01:50:59,960 --> 01:51:05,560
Yeah, he's trying to raise some lemons, turn lemons into lemon juice, lemonade.

1502
01:51:07,060 --> 01:51:09,720
You know, we usually talk about Bitcoin in this podcast.

1503
01:51:09,720 --> 01:51:11,100
What's this podcast even called?

1504
01:51:11,360 --> 01:51:11,820
I forget.

1505
01:51:11,920 --> 01:51:12,380
What's the title?

1506
01:51:13,400 --> 01:51:13,800
There is.

1507
01:51:13,980 --> 01:51:17,020
And it's literally mentioned one time in the entire book.

1508
01:51:17,020 --> 01:51:17,280
I got the passage.

1509
01:51:17,280 --> 01:51:19,640
And it's just this passing reference.

1510
01:51:19,640 --> 01:51:20,260
We got to read it.

1511
01:51:20,280 --> 01:51:22,820
We got to read it because this is a Bitcoin podcast.

1512
01:51:23,780 --> 01:51:31,200
So, I have the page, but you're literally right.

1513
01:51:31,260 --> 01:51:32,180
It's a passing reference.

1514
01:51:32,300 --> 01:51:33,520
And what do they say, Lucas?

1515
01:51:33,620 --> 01:51:35,380
What's the point of the passing reference?

1516
01:51:36,300 --> 01:51:40,000
The point of the passing reference is that it's just this vague mention.

1517
01:51:40,560 --> 01:51:41,380
So, here's the question.

1518
01:51:41,480 --> 01:51:43,800
Are you worried about what – no, that's not it.

1519
01:51:43,880 --> 01:51:44,240
Never mind.

1520
01:51:44,320 --> 01:51:44,600
Go ahead.

1521
01:51:44,640 --> 01:51:45,220
I'm sorry I interrupted.

1522
01:51:45,760 --> 01:51:46,420
I thought I had it.

1523
01:51:48,020 --> 01:51:48,940
You lost it.

1524
01:51:48,940 --> 01:51:49,600
I lost it.

1525
01:51:50,720 --> 01:51:51,240
Let's see.

1526
01:51:51,260 --> 01:51:51,680
I'll find it.

1527
01:51:51,680 --> 01:51:53,620
It's just this vague reference.

1528
01:51:53,780 --> 01:52:00,400
And it's just it's just saying, you know, like, I hope that or like things go the way of Bitcoin.

1529
01:52:00,700 --> 01:52:08,580
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.

1530
01:52:08,720 --> 01:52:09,640
But we don't know why.

1531
01:52:09,840 --> 01:52:10,820
We're not in on this.

1532
01:52:10,820 --> 01:52:12,140
Two years, his cousin senior.

1533
01:52:12,400 --> 01:52:13,720
Goog wasn't giving ground.

1534
01:52:13,720 --> 01:52:16,180
So here Goog is arguing with the other cousins.

1535
01:52:16,400 --> 01:52:18,320
Goog always does this.

1536
01:52:18,420 --> 01:52:19,020
He argues with them.

1537
01:52:19,360 --> 01:52:23,660
The dollar is a history currency that stabilized the international economy for over a century.

1538
01:52:23,780 --> 01:52:26,000
Wilbur, which is what he calls willing to annoy him.

1539
01:52:26,460 --> 01:52:31,420
The Bancor is an upstart pretender whose constraints are unworkably strict.

1540
01:52:32,040 --> 01:52:33,580
We just have to hold our nerve.

1541
01:52:34,120 --> 01:52:35,640
I think this is Lowell, actually, not Gook.

1542
01:52:36,240 --> 01:52:38,580
After all, look what happened to Bitcoin.

1543
01:52:39,040 --> 01:52:39,940
And that's the only reference.

1544
01:52:40,180 --> 01:52:40,800
And so it's...

1545
01:52:40,800 --> 01:52:40,860
Boom.

1546
01:52:41,200 --> 01:52:42,340
That's literally all we know.

1547
01:52:42,460 --> 01:52:44,580
And so the implication, look what happened to Bitcoin.

1548
01:52:44,820 --> 01:52:45,520
And that what?

1549
01:52:45,640 --> 01:52:47,520
It must have failed or that it didn't get...

1550
01:52:47,520 --> 01:52:48,320
That it was too strict.

1551
01:52:48,320 --> 01:52:48,500
Yeah.

1552
01:52:49,040 --> 01:52:50,320
But, you know, it doesn't...

1553
01:52:50,840 --> 01:52:51,560
And people have...

1554
01:52:51,560 --> 01:52:53,640
I listened to some other podcasts, but I was talking about this.

1555
01:52:53,780 --> 01:52:57,700
everybody kind of assumes that it means that it failed or something but it doesn't say that i mean

1556
01:52:57,700 --> 01:53:06,320
look what happened to bitcoin maybe something good happened i don't know i don't think anything

1557
01:53:06,320 --> 01:53:11,160
good happened i don't think anything this is written also this is but it was written in 16

1558
01:53:11,160 --> 01:53:18,900
back when like the idea like we nobody like brady swinson had yet to i believe coin the term

1559
01:53:18,900 --> 01:53:23,120
tick-to-neck block. I don't think that that came about until 17 or even later.

1560
01:53:23,140 --> 01:53:26,220
I wasn't even born in Bitcoin terms in 2016, man.

1561
01:53:26,720 --> 01:53:33,420
Exactly. And so it was back in the time when there was a lot of uncertainty.

1562
01:53:34,180 --> 01:53:43,560
And I would say that we're probably past that point now, that the FUD, the fear, uncertainty,

1563
01:53:43,560 --> 01:53:49,880
a doubt has shifted from, you know, they're going to say that it's illegal to only criminals

1564
01:53:49,880 --> 01:53:55,820
use it to environmental stuff to it uses too much energy to now it's quantum, et cetera.

1565
01:53:55,820 --> 01:53:58,400
Oh, the quantum is a good, that's a critique that's valid.

1566
01:53:58,880 --> 01:54:00,160
You think it's a good one.

1567
01:54:00,460 --> 01:54:03,420
I'm not going to say it's a critique that's valid in that like quantum is going to wreck

1568
01:54:03,420 --> 01:54:03,920
Bitcoin.

1569
01:54:04,220 --> 01:54:10,700
It's a critique that's valid in that in some X number of years, it's a concern we need

1570
01:54:10,700 --> 01:54:11,880
to take into account.

1571
01:54:11,880 --> 01:54:22,780
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.

1572
01:54:22,780 --> 01:54:30,540
sure yeah i i mean yeah i think so i think the risk is not as great um for like hacking because

1573
01:54:30,540 --> 01:54:37,320
if you have the quantum computer and you hack bitcoin then you instantly render it valueless

1574
01:54:37,320 --> 01:54:45,580
and so by doing so you are out whatever you've done like your only your only thing would be if

1575
01:54:45,580 --> 01:54:52,320
you would be the person who would benefit from the reset you would be much more advantageous

1576
01:54:52,780 --> 01:54:57,040
to just use that to mine Bitcoin and get paid with it and win every block.

1577
01:54:57,040 --> 01:54:57,680
Two responses.

1578
01:54:58,120 --> 01:55:01,320
The question I have about that, though, is like,

1579
01:55:02,320 --> 01:55:05,520
so what if you do have the quantum computer and it solves the block

1580
01:55:05,520 --> 01:55:08,160
instead of in 10 minutes, it solves it in a millisecond.

1581
01:55:08,360 --> 01:55:09,160
The thing is...

1582
01:55:09,160 --> 01:55:12,060
And then it just keeps solving blocks in a millisecond.

1583
01:55:12,060 --> 01:55:17,740
Does that mean that it's going to eat the entire supply to the end

1584
01:55:17,740 --> 01:55:20,640
before we hit the next two-week adjustment?

1585
01:55:20,920 --> 01:55:22,240
This is...

1586
01:55:22,780 --> 01:55:35,800
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.

1587
01:55:35,800 --> 01:55:36,380
The FUD.

1588
01:55:38,140 --> 01:55:40,900
Well, I mean, it's fear, it's uncertainty, and it's doubt.

1589
01:55:40,980 --> 01:55:41,740
And these are bad things.

1590
01:55:41,800 --> 01:55:45,840
We need to deal with these things to get rid of uncertainty and doubt so that we don't have them.

1591
01:55:45,940 --> 01:55:54,720
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.

1592
01:55:54,780 --> 01:55:56,820
That's something that quantum computing can do.

1593
01:55:56,820 --> 01:56:26,320
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.

1594
01:56:26,820 --> 01:56:33,900
But again, to go back to something else you said earlier, it's not that it's going to render Bitcoin instantly valueless.

1595
01:56:34,040 --> 01:56:36,080
It's like the poaching would be slow.

1596
01:56:36,360 --> 01:56:44,960
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.

1597
01:56:45,000 --> 01:56:48,680
So they're going to get some of the old outputs that are Satoshi coins.

1598
01:56:48,960 --> 01:56:50,540
So maybe it's not going to be a flip.

1599
01:56:50,640 --> 01:56:52,300
Yeah, but we'll know it instantly, right?

1600
01:56:52,300 --> 01:56:53,340
I think we're going to see Satoshi.

1601
01:56:53,340 --> 01:56:58,360
The blockchain is monitored at all times until you would instantly know it.

1602
01:56:58,360 --> 01:57:21,960
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?

1603
01:57:21,960 --> 01:57:24,640
China is the second largest holder of Bitcoin in the world.

1604
01:57:24,820 --> 01:57:27,440
But just say that they're also like a huge holder of gold.

1605
01:57:27,580 --> 01:57:28,760
Maybe they divest them.

1606
01:57:28,820 --> 01:57:30,900
Maybe they get the ability to quantum compute.

1607
01:57:31,020 --> 01:57:33,240
They sell their Bitcoin to the United States.

1608
01:57:33,700 --> 01:57:35,220
You know, these are all just speculative scenarios.

1609
01:57:35,260 --> 01:57:36,480
And I'm saying it is a threat.

1610
01:57:36,620 --> 01:57:37,840
Somebody would do it.

1611
01:57:38,920 --> 01:57:40,960
And so it needs to be taken care of.

1612
01:57:40,960 --> 01:57:41,540
That's all I'm saying.

1613
01:57:41,640 --> 01:57:43,780
I mean, I know nothing about quantum computing.

1614
01:57:43,860 --> 01:57:47,260
The word quantum, I mean, it seems like something out of a Marvel movie.

1615
01:57:47,280 --> 01:57:48,080
So I have no idea.

1616
01:57:49,360 --> 01:57:49,640
It does.

1617
01:57:49,980 --> 01:57:50,400
It does.

1618
01:57:50,400 --> 01:57:54,520
well we'll learn something about it maybe no i do read something on it there's some good stuff

1619
01:57:54,520 --> 01:57:58,780
out there and i don't want to hand wave it away because it's it's an interesting topic um and i

1620
01:57:58,780 --> 01:58:06,060
hope to learn more about it yeah i agree i agree uh as for this topic do we have anything else on

1621
01:58:06,060 --> 01:58:12,060
um i mean there's a lot of things to say i got a lot more quotes but we're kind of

1622
01:58:12,060 --> 01:58:17,420
and we're getting to two hours here so um i thought it was a good i thought it was a good

1623
01:58:17,420 --> 01:58:24,200
book very well written um i i wonder if lionel shriver is a bitcoiner at this point past 2016

1624
01:58:24,200 --> 01:58:30,180
i would really i'd like to know that fact um she's a contrarian thinker in all of her works

1625
01:58:30,180 --> 01:58:36,740
um she writes big social novels that tackle big themes to write a novel about the financial system

1626
01:58:36,740 --> 01:58:41,440
with keynesian economists spouting keynesian talking points and to make it readable that's

1627
01:58:41,440 --> 01:58:47,220
a feat and this is something i gave to a friend who is not a bitcoiner to read and he's reading

1628
01:58:47,220 --> 01:58:51,980
it and enjoying it. And so this might be a good entry point to introduce themes of

1629
01:58:51,980 --> 01:58:55,340
Bitcoin's viability to people who are not Bitcoiners.

1630
01:58:56,820 --> 01:59:03,100
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a great, even though it doesn't talk about Bitcoin as being like the

1631
01:59:03,100 --> 01:59:08,800
great savior, what it does talk about is the reality of what happens when a nation hyper

1632
01:59:08,800 --> 01:59:17,420
inflates its currency, when there's no longer demand for the debt and the suffering that ensues.

1633
01:59:17,420 --> 01:59:26,540
And this is something that's a reality every single year in countries around the world. And

1634
01:59:26,540 --> 01:59:33,140
eventually, it will be a reality for the U.S. dollar. It may not be a reality for the United

1635
01:59:33,140 --> 01:59:44,060
States. Hopefully we've done something to secure our future. But just like every other fiat currency,

1636
01:59:44,440 --> 01:59:53,620
it will go the way of the dodo bird. So yeah, it's something that it's kind of scary to think about,

1637
01:59:53,800 --> 01:59:56,240
but also very enjoyable to read about and understand.

1638
01:59:56,240 --> 01:59:57,840
Cariness is so important.

1639
01:59:58,200 --> 02:00:04,100
Like this first personalizes all of the more abstract talk of what inflation even means.

1640
02:00:04,140 --> 02:00:07,600
You say inflation and most people, their eyes just glaze over.

1641
02:00:08,160 --> 02:00:11,920
But then you start talking about $25 for a head of cabbage.

1642
02:00:12,200 --> 02:00:16,260
You know, your daughter who was going to go to some ritzy art school having to be a prostitute.

1643
02:00:16,840 --> 02:00:18,660
People understand what that means.

1644
02:00:18,660 --> 02:00:25,320
And so this is a good introduction into what are otherwise very dry topics for kind of your uninitiated person.

1645
02:00:26,240 --> 02:00:39,000
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.

1646
02:00:39,000 --> 02:00:58,040
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.

1647
02:00:58,040 --> 02:01:06,660
so it's a reality that's not in the future it's a reality that we're living every day and so

1648
02:01:06,660 --> 02:01:13,740
this is this is why people talk about moving to other countries going to live in Portugal going

1649
02:01:13,740 --> 02:01:21,120
to live in Colombia going to live in El Salvador Malaysia etc etc so you know it funny like I saw

1650
02:01:21,120 --> 02:01:42,160
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.

1651
02:01:43,600 --> 02:01:48,040
Yet, you know, everything costs one tenth as much over there.

1652
02:01:48,040 --> 02:01:58,200
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.

1653
02:01:59,040 --> 02:02:01,400
That's really going to show what you can do.

1654
02:02:01,400 --> 02:02:08,840
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.

1655
02:02:08,840 --> 02:02:11,220
And so that's another valuable thing about this book.

1656
02:02:11,220 --> 02:02:25,820
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.

1657
02:02:26,160 --> 02:02:32,780
And so, you know, let's have a healthy relationship to our things, to our objects.

1658
02:02:32,900 --> 02:02:34,380
Let's possess them and not vice versa.

1659
02:02:35,660 --> 02:02:36,260
Yep.

1660
02:02:36,740 --> 02:02:38,260
And that's a great way to go out.

1661
02:02:38,260 --> 02:02:39,860
for everybody

1662
02:02:39,860 --> 02:02:41,500
for myself

1663
02:02:41,500 --> 02:02:42,160
for Grant

1664
02:02:42,160 --> 02:02:43,940
for the 13 of you

1665
02:02:43,940 --> 02:02:44,380
that listen

1666
02:02:44,380 --> 02:02:45,840
we really appreciate

1667
02:02:45,840 --> 02:02:46,760
you tuning in

1668
02:02:46,760 --> 02:02:47,400
to your favorite

1669
02:02:47,400 --> 02:02:48,320
fourth tier podcast

1670
02:02:48,320 --> 02:02:49,560
with third tier jokes

1671
02:02:49,560 --> 02:02:51,060
and eighth tier haircuts

1672
02:02:51,060 --> 02:02:52,140
haircuts

1673
02:02:52,140 --> 02:02:53,020
yeah

1674
02:02:53,020 --> 02:02:55,500
thanks again guys

1675
02:02:55,500 --> 02:02:56,700
Merry Christmas

1676
02:02:56,700 --> 02:02:57,420
Happy New Year

1677
02:02:57,420 --> 02:02:58,660
and we'll be back

1678
02:02:58,660 --> 02:02:59,520
with a new book soon

1679
02:02:59,520 --> 02:03:00,280
Happy New Year