Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to What Future. I'm your host, josh
Speaker 1: Wa Tapolski, and I got to say very excited about
Speaker 1: today's show. Many many episodes ago, we had on a
Speaker 1: gentleman named Felix Salmon who's a terrific journalist. He is
Speaker 1: the chief financial correspondent for Axios. You may have heard
Speaker 1: of very hot website where you can get all the news,
Speaker 1: and he wrote. We actually touched on it last time
Speaker 1: we talked. He wrote a book which was not yet
Speaker 1: out at the time of us chatting. We were actual
Speaker 1: chatting about the bank crisis that was happening. Anyhow, he
Speaker 1: has written a book. It's called The Phoenix Economy, Work,
Speaker 1: Life and Money in the New Not Normal, And I
Speaker 1: got to say I have been reading it. It is fascinating.
Speaker 1: It basically details the strange directions the world and money
Speaker 1: moved in as the pandemic began and as our lives
Speaker 1: got kind of upended. Anyhow, I don't need to tell
Speaker 1: you about it. He should tell you about it. So
Speaker 1: let's not waste any more time. Let's get to this conversation.
Speaker 1: By the way, I've been highlighting the book. I actually
Speaker 1: hate when people write in books. And Laura and my
Speaker 1: wife is a huge like note taker in the margins
Speaker 1: of books, and so there are a lot of times
Speaker 1: I'll pick up a book of hers and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I can't read this because you have too much even
Speaker 1: underlying it's like fascinating, you know, page seventy eight, you know,
Speaker 1: reference back to page seventy eight. I'm like, great if
Speaker 1: I buy a used book and it's got notations, and
Speaker 1: then I'm very upset. But I've been I've been highlighting
Speaker 1: and making notes in here, I guess partially because it's
Speaker 1: a it's a galley, so fucking I'm like, wow, this
Speaker 1: is so liberating, And now i know what everybody's been
Speaker 1: freaking out about. Anyhow, tell us what the book is about,
Speaker 1: assuming that we have not already picked up and read
Speaker 1: it cover to cover in a fevered night of cocaine bis.
Speaker 2: And most of my jelessness will have done. But for
Speaker 2: the two of you who haven't done that, it's it's
Speaker 2: basically a book about how COVID changed the world. It's
Speaker 2: a book about how we had seventy years of broadly speaking,
Speaker 2: you know, peace, we had one hundred years without a pandemic.
Speaker 2: We had this post World War two international order of
Speaker 2: countries cooperating, of India and China being brought into the
Speaker 2: global economic system, of everyone trying to cooperate and not
Speaker 2: go to war with each other, and it kind of worked.
Speaker 2: And that period of relative stability in geopolitical terms was
Speaker 2: extremely unusual in historical terms, right Like, that's not how
Speaker 2: history normally works. I call it the new not normal
Speaker 2: because compared to everything that we used to since since
Speaker 2: nineteen forty six, it's not normal. But it's actually a
Speaker 2: return to like the pre nineteen forty six normal of
Speaker 2: you know, crazy shit happening all over the place, plagues
Speaker 2: and wars and depressions, and you know, lots of upside
Speaker 2: and lots of downside. You know, people forget how amazing
Speaker 2: the twenties and the thirties were for the global economy,
Speaker 2: right Like, there are a lot of great things that
Speaker 2: happened in between the terrible things that happened, and that
Speaker 2: kind of combination of the great and the terrible is
Speaker 2: I think this era that we're entering right now.
Speaker 1: Right you're saying peace and prosperity were an unusual netlast
Speaker 1: it has been completely peaceful or prosperous everywhere. But this
Speaker 1: kind of general sense of at least in massive you know,
Speaker 1: industrialized nations and things things like that, that we didn't
Speaker 1: have huge world wars and pandemics and things of that nature.
Speaker 1: That's the abnormal part. And what we are experiencing now
Speaker 1: is closer to what would be historically considered normal.
Speaker 2: Exactly that we had this very unusual degree of international
Speaker 2: cooperation immediately following the Second World what we all came
Speaker 2: together and said, like, never again, and we forgot that
Speaker 2: in twenty sixteen, and I actually, I actually kind of
Speaker 2: date the beginning of the new not normal more to
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen into twenty twenty. Twenty sixteen was the date
Speaker 2: at which Britain voted to leave the European Union. It
Speaker 2: voted to basically jettison all of that kind of international
Speaker 2: cooperation that the post war world was built on, and
Speaker 2: they were like, you know, fuck this, We're going.
Speaker 1: To go it alone.
Speaker 2: Right then, you know, a little bit later in the year,
Speaker 2: something very similar happened in the US with the election
Speaker 2: of Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: That's right, our own, our own Braxit.
Speaker 2: And there's a case to be made that the COVID
Speaker 2: pandemic would have been and much milder and much more contained.
Speaker 2: Had Trump not been elected president that you know, a
Speaker 2: Clinton administration would not have torn apart the pandemic response
Speaker 2: teams that the China US cooperation would have allowed the
Speaker 2: CDC and NIH and those people to go into Wuhan
Speaker 2: when it was first discovered, and they could have reacted
Speaker 2: more quickly. And yeah, we don't know, like these are counterfactuals,
Speaker 2: but whatever happened, the result was a pandemic the likes
Speaker 2: of which had not been seen in one hundred years.
Speaker 2: And in fact, the pandemic that in terms of its
Speaker 2: societal impact was orders of magnitude greater than the one
Speaker 2: that we had in nineteen eighteen. In nineteen eighteen, the pandemic,
Speaker 2: we didn't really notice it very much, even though it
Speaker 2: killed a lot of people like that, we could notice it,
Speaker 2: could we Well, yeah, it was hard to notice because
Speaker 2: you know, media wasn't the same, and you know, people
Speaker 2: died of infectious diseases all the time, and it wasn't
Speaker 2: obvious that everyone was just dying of the same disease
Speaker 2: at the same time to the same degree. It wasn't
Speaker 2: in that p one position, if like, the one thing
Speaker 2: everyone cared about, mainly because the one thing that everyone
Speaker 2: cared about was the First World War, which is like
Speaker 2: a bigger deal.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: And in fact, if you look at COVID, the only
Speaker 2: thing that knocks COVID out of that p one position
Speaker 2: that caused COVID to no longer be the one thing
Speaker 2: that everyone thought about and cared about, was the invasion
Speaker 2: of Ukraine by Russia.
Speaker 1: Right. It was Putin felt his attention waning, and he
Speaker 1: was like, how can I get it back? I was
Speaker 1: actually going to ask you do you think that happens
Speaker 1: in a in a non COVID world? And I know
Speaker 1: that's ridiculous, profrior, ridiculous question to ask speculation to have
Speaker 1: you make, but yeah, I'm curiously Yeah, so I know
Speaker 1: I've been speculating. When you when you look at all
Speaker 1: these pieces on the on the map, right, you look
Speaker 1: at all the pieces of the puzzle that got kind
Speaker 1: of splintered apart, how much does like how much does
Speaker 1: it is that accelerated by or is it not accelerated
Speaker 1: by this kind of you know, sort of the new
Speaker 1: normal that we entered into during COVID. It's a really
Speaker 1: good question.
Speaker 2: And yeah, look, if I can speculate about how President
Speaker 2: Clinton would have reacted to COVID Like I can speculate
Speaker 2: a little bit about this, and I do a little
Speaker 2: bit in the book. What I say is that pandemics
Speaker 2: tend to strengthen authoritarians, and they make societies more authoritarian,
Speaker 2: and people in societies want more authoritarian leaders when there's
Speaker 2: a pandemic.
Speaker 1: You can see the way that say.
Speaker 2: Jacinda da And in New Zealand, who is this kind
Speaker 2: of crunchy granola, punchy granola hippie lefty prime minister suddenly
Speaker 2: became this like super hard you know, we are going
Speaker 2: to lock down and we're going to implement a zero
Speaker 2: COVID policy. And it was incredibly popular when she did that.
Speaker 1: Right, But isn't that just good leadership? I mean, but no,
Speaker 1: there is. You don't have to be like fascist to
Speaker 1: be like we should.
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. And she's a good example, right, Like, I
Speaker 2: don't criticize it at all, but what you see in
Speaker 2: countries that have had a lot of plagues and pandemics
Speaker 2: tend to be less amenable to sort of liberal freedoms
Speaker 2: and tend to be more authoritarian. That's some interesting research
Speaker 2: about that, which I put in the book, and what
Speaker 2: we saw in, you know, during the pandemic, was not
Speaker 2: only put In doubling down on his authoritarian tendencies by
Speaker 2: annexing Ukraine or at least trying to, but also an
Speaker 2: effective invasion of Hong Kong by China. You know, a
Speaker 2: lot of people were too worried about COVID we even noticed,
Speaker 2: but the complete loss of freedoms by everyone in Hong
Speaker 2: Kong and flagrant violation of the treaty that China signed
Speaker 2: with the Brits in nineteen ninety seven, and they just
Speaker 2: kind of said, fuck it, you know, you know, we
Speaker 2: are just going to stomp on Hong Kong and stamp
Speaker 2: out every bit of freedom of speech on the island.
Speaker 2: And like again, like would they have done that? Son's COVID.
Speaker 2: Maybe it's hard to tell, but it's definitely of a
Speaker 2: piece with these other kind of events that were happening
Speaker 2: elsewhere in the.
Speaker 1: World, right. I Mean, it's also easy, isn't it. I Mean,
Speaker 1: when you've got a pandemic that nobody really knows anything
Speaker 1: about and a disease that's killing people, and you're sort
Speaker 1: of like don't leave the house or don't get you know,
Speaker 1: businesses have to close or whatever. You're doing at that moment,
Speaker 1: kind of easy to say, well, also, we're going to
Speaker 1: do some other you know, completely unilateral shit because you
Speaker 1: know who's going to stop us in this extreme emergency state. Like,
Speaker 1: I feel like there are a lot of things that
Speaker 1: happened that, even with Biden, that seem completely out of
Speaker 1: sync with all like what we know of American politics,
Speaker 1: for instance, like giving people money repeatedly, don't let a
Speaker 1: crisis go to wasting.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, you get you get to use the cover
Speaker 2: of the crisis to do something like, you know, the
Speaker 2: Green New Deal that would never go through otherwise.
Speaker 1: Right, Like like like what a situation like January sixth
Speaker 1: have happened in a non wait a second, that was
Speaker 1: twenty two wait a second.
Speaker 2: Six, twenty twenty one, twenty one during you're right, you're right.
Speaker 1: It was during the pandemic, right.
Speaker 2: And one of the crazy things about one of the
Speaker 2: things about exactly the six was that people were watching
Speaker 2: these TV pictures if the rioters swarming across the capitole
Speaker 2: and no one was wearing masks and know these crowds,
Speaker 2: and everyone in sort of blue America was horrified not
Speaker 2: only by the you know way the democracy was falling apart,
Speaker 2: he eyes, but also by the fact that, like it was,
Speaker 2: they were so proud of their unmasked right status.
Speaker 1: Right. Not everywhere, but in a lot of large countries
Speaker 1: you had a huge amount of people who were like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to wear a mask, I don't want
Speaker 1: to participate in whatever this. Maybe maybe not quite as
Speaker 1: fervent as they were in America. Canadians had some truckers
Speaker 1: we forget, perhaps the great truck, the Brigador.
Speaker 2: Canadian truckers were a big deal. But no, even even
Speaker 2: in you know, mild Man at New Zealand, which has
Speaker 2: thirty times as many sheep as it does people. Even
Speaker 2: in New Zealand, there were protesters camped outside the New
Speaker 2: Zealand Parliament waving Trump flags.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes, like shit got weird. And they weren't even that
Speaker 2: right wing. They were a lot of them were just
Speaker 2: like yoga teachers one thing, you know, who didn't believe
Speaker 2: in vaccines.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's we saw a lot of weird crossover like that.
Speaker 1: I think during during the pandemic of vaccine skeptics, medicine skeptics,
Speaker 1: experts in a field skeptics, we saw I think a
Speaker 1: kind of growth of a whole new sort of school
Speaker 1: of thought, which is like, if somebody who is a
Speaker 1: professional who spent their life studying and learning about something
Speaker 1: says this is what's going on, you have to you
Speaker 1: just out of pocket reject it and do the opposite
Speaker 1: thing that they're telling you to do. You know, a
Speaker 1: whole new well of doubt for experts.
Speaker 2: And this is related to the crisis of trust in
Speaker 2: institutional legitimacy, which I writes about, but it's something that
Speaker 2: is particularly evident in Germany. Weirdly, the thing that you're,
Speaker 2: the thing that you're describing of the sort of left
Speaker 2: and the right making common cause in vaccine skepticism and
Speaker 2: mistrusted authority was probably at least looking across the world
Speaker 2: as I was writing this book, it was probably most
Speaker 2: visible in Germany. And I don't entirely understand why, and
Speaker 2: like I'm half German, I feel like I understand Germany
Speaker 2: better than most people. But yeah, it has this kind
Speaker 2: of atavistic right wing, which is scary but always a
Speaker 2: relatively small minority. But it also has a very strong
Speaker 2: tradition of you know, faith in nature and if it's natural,
Speaker 2: it's good, and if it's unnatural. It's bad, right, And
Speaker 2: you know they love fresh air and udity and that
Speaker 2: kind of stuff, right, and all of that starts coming
Speaker 2: out in a way that means that they fail to
Speaker 2: rise to the occasion of what I call the epistemic crisis,
Speaker 2: where the main thing that happened, one of the main
Speaker 2: things that happened in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one,
Speaker 2: is that we had to just keep on learning new
Speaker 2: shit all the time that the scientists were learning new things,
Speaker 2: and we were having to update, up rise and say, oh,
Speaker 2: this is what I you know, I used to think this,
Speaker 2: and now I've got new information, and now I think that.
Speaker 2: And you know, the Germans in particular, but like humans
Speaker 2: in general, are bout at that. We like to just
Speaker 2: have things that we believe and stick with them. And
Speaker 2: at some point, you know, you have described us very
Speaker 2: well as what happened in America, people just decided, like
Speaker 2: you know, there was a point in the early pandemic
Speaker 2: where you said that we shouldn't wear masks. So I'm
Speaker 2: never going to wear masks, right. You know, someone told
Speaker 2: me that like mRNA vaccines are dangerous. Therefore I'm just
Speaker 2: going to believe that and I'm not going to take
Speaker 2: a vaccine, And these are not really the positions that
Speaker 2: they were argued into. It's hard to argue them out
Speaker 2: of it, argue people out of it. But more to
Speaker 2: the point, it's just psychologically easier to have certainty about
Speaker 2: this disease, right, even though you know, Tony Fauci and
Speaker 2: everyone else is on the television all the time like,
Speaker 2: we don't have certainty about the disease. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of things we don't know. We are going to change
Speaker 2: our mind. You have to understand, like this is brand new,
Speaker 2: are still doing the science, and people just found it
Speaker 2: really hard to deal with that level of ignorance, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that generally speaking, when we hear
Speaker 1: experts speak on a topic, if they change their mind
Speaker 1: a few months later, we find it extremely disconcerting and
Speaker 1: frankly like it kind of hurts their credibility right to say,
Speaker 1: I mean, you should it should be something where that
Speaker 1: we can understand that some and says I've learned something
Speaker 1: new and now I've changed my opinion or I've changed
Speaker 1: my findings on this thing, and you can listen to
Speaker 1: it because I'm an expert. But I think generally speaking,
Speaker 1: when people change their tune and we don't see you
Speaker 1: don't see all of the background work that goes into
Speaker 1: someone to Fauci saying oh, okay, we thought you didn't
Speaker 1: have to wear a mask, but now you do, or
Speaker 1: whatever it is, it just feels like, oh, he doesn't
Speaker 1: know what the fuck he's talking about, right, like that?
Speaker 2: Exactly, Yeah, I find I find that like looking to
Speaker 2: when people change their mind, looking to when I changed
Speaker 2: my mind, and like the things that I was wrong
Speaker 2: about in the pandemic is often the most interesting and
Speaker 2: profound sort of insights that you get is going like,
Speaker 2: exactly what was it that caused me to be so
Speaker 2: sure about this, you know, on day one? And and
Speaker 2: what was it that I was so wrong about that
Speaker 2: caused me to force my mind to be changed on
Speaker 2: day two? You know, it's not really an economics books.
Speaker 2: One of the main things that I was wrong about
Speaker 2: was the whole idea the recession had been caused by
Speaker 2: the virus, and therefore we would need to get a
Speaker 2: grip on the virus in order to get out of
Speaker 2: through a session. And in fact, we got out of
Speaker 2: the recession and had this incredibly fast and strong recovery
Speaker 2: without getting a grip on the virus at all.
Speaker 1: Right, I mean a lot of this conversation has been
Speaker 1: about very dark moments during the pandemic and sort of
Speaker 1: how society, you know, was collapsing in on itself. But
Speaker 1: there's actually the book has a lot of bits in
Speaker 1: it about how kind of amazing the resilience of the
Speaker 1: economy and of people was around this virus and around
Speaker 1: this kind of completely unexpected moment. We just recently, my
Speaker 1: wife and I, with my brother in law and a
Speaker 1: sister in law, opened a bookstore. And it's like, I've
Speaker 1: never done anything in retail. I know nothing about retail.
Speaker 1: And you've talked about the amount of new people starting
Speaker 1: businesses during the pandemic and sort of this attitude of
Speaker 1: like you only and especially bookstores.
Speaker 2: Have you seen how many independent bookstores that've opened up
Speaker 2: in the post? He is that's true?
Speaker 1: Is that is there a huge boom independent bookstores? I
Speaker 1: mean that sounds right to me.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I mean, like literally this morning I was
Speaker 2: walking past Bradley Tusk's new bookstore on Orchard Street.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Bradley, task you.
Speaker 2: It's like but I mean like it's you know, it's
Speaker 2: it's improbable for Joshua Polski to open the book, so
Speaker 2: it's equally improbable for Bradleey test work. Right.
Speaker 1: Well, it's one of these things, right, it makes sense,
Speaker 1: like tons of retail space suddenly opened up everywhere, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, think about how many retail businesses. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is sort of depressing, but there were a lot
Speaker 1: of retail businesses that did not make it or did
Speaker 1: not make it in their in their pre pandemic form
Speaker 1: through the pandemic, right, Like obviously restaurants had it, had difficulties,
Speaker 1: but there were lots of other places.
Speaker 2: But this is a really good example, right, is that, yes,
Speaker 2: we saw a bunch of restaurant closures, but what we
Speaker 2: forget is that restaurants are just a terrible business to be.
Speaker 1: And then the kind of people.
Speaker 2: Who opened ninety restaurants fail, I think is that this
Speaker 2: is the this is the statistic that people we allect. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and and you know, it's partly because it's a bad
Speaker 2: business to be, and then partly because the kind of
Speaker 2: people who opened restaurants are good at making food and
Speaker 2: less good at running businesses. If you look at the
Speaker 2: number of restaurants that failed during the pandemic, like it
Speaker 2: was high, but it's always high. It wasn't so much
Speaker 2: higher than normal. And amazingly, the thing that astonished me
Speaker 2: was that I saw in New York City, which had
Speaker 2: some of the strictest anti indoor dining rules in the country,
Speaker 2: just an astonishing number of new restaurants opening up, right,
Speaker 2: And You're like, who the hell would open up a
Speaker 2: new restaurant in the face of like basically just economics
Speaker 2: that make no sense at all, and yet people did
Speaker 2: it over and over again.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, I mean this is That's one of the
Speaker 1: things that I think is so interesting about about some
Speaker 1: of what you talk about, not just the really depressing
Speaker 1: dark shit that happened during the pandemic, but so much
Speaker 1: of it that goes against what our expectations would have
Speaker 1: been and has thrown so many pieces of the economy
Speaker 1: into such an unexplored or unknown state. I think that's
Speaker 1: a I mean, people people deciding to quit their jobs
Speaker 1: and open businesses. This apparently was the thing, people quitting
Speaker 1: their jobs because they just didn't like it and going
Speaker 1: fuck it, I'm going to get another job. This was right.
Speaker 1: This happened in huge numbers during during the pandemic, correct,
Speaker 1: the Great Resignation. Yeah, and like that's an unusual that's
Speaker 1: not a normal thing that people do. I mean, most
Speaker 1: people stick with it. Most people are like, I need
Speaker 1: this job.
Speaker 2: But this was this was the main theme that runs
Speaker 2: through the book, or one of the main things. It's
Speaker 2: this idea of yolo, right, right, and that a mass
Speaker 2: mortality event, you know, like COVID which killed six million
Speaker 2: people and one million Americans, Like that reminds you of
Speaker 2: how precious life is, especially when it's so top of
Speaker 2: mind for so long, and you're like, why on earth
Speaker 2: would I spend my one precious life working for some
Speaker 2: boss that I hate, you know, And when I have
Speaker 2: this one life and I'm going to make the most
Speaker 2: of it and people, I'm going to follow my dreams.
Speaker 2: And people did this over and over again in America
Speaker 2: and around the world, but especially in the US. They
Speaker 2: had this opportunity. There was an eviction moratorium, right, which
Speaker 2: was imposed by the Center for Disease Controls, and like,
Speaker 2: you know, this is kind of amazing that this was
Speaker 2: a public health.
Speaker 1: Thing that they did.
Speaker 2: They were like, we can't have people being evicted out
Speaker 2: into the street when there's a pandemic raging, but that
Speaker 2: eviction moratorium wound up helping enormously in terms of like
Speaker 2: new company formation. People are like, I can actually take
Speaker 2: a risk now because I don't need to worry about losing.
Speaker 1: My house, right, I mean, weirdly, it almost makes a
Speaker 1: great argument for like the universal income, universal basic income,
Speaker 1: or you know, socialism on some grander scale. I mean,
Speaker 1: it does seem to be like, with just a little
Speaker 1: bit of help from the government, there's all sorts of
Speaker 1: understain and good things that can happen to people. Again,
Speaker 1: I'm not making the argument, but it does seem to
Speaker 1: suggest that a little bit more help, a top down help,
Speaker 1: can be quite a tool for humanity at large.
Speaker 2: One of the chapters I have in the book is
Speaker 2: basically an extended metaphor about Steve Mnushin is superhero. You know. Again,
Speaker 2: people don't love to read that because he was such
Speaker 2: a lickspittle when it came to Trump, But in terms
Speaker 2: of fiscal policy, he did really amazing things, and we
Speaker 2: did really see that taking you know, fourteen hundred dollars
Speaker 2: checks and just depositing them into everyone's bank account had
Speaker 2: astonishingly powerful effects on the American economy and on making
Speaker 2: people happier that we just saw a new survey count
Speaker 2: come out last week saying that never in the history
Speaker 2: of polling have people been happier in their jobs than
Speaker 2: they are right now.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's interesting because you don't get you get
Speaker 1: the impression that, well, at least you get the impression
Speaker 1: from certain political parties that people are in just like
Speaker 1: absolutely dire states right now or dire strait. Rather, are
Speaker 1: we better off or worse off in America right now
Speaker 1: than we were pre pandemic. There's pieces of this that
Speaker 1: would suggest that we're better off, but like, what is
Speaker 1: the actual state of play? Because politically you can't get
Speaker 1: a real read on it.
Speaker 2: So I mean, there are lots of ways to measure that,
Speaker 2: and there is a very strong and important school of
Speaker 2: thought that basically just says, I'm sorry, what a million
Speaker 2: people just died, some like large multiple of that are
Speaker 2: suffering from long COVID and will continue to do so
Speaker 2: for many years. You know, We've had this extraordinarily traumatic
Speaker 2: mass mortality event. We've had a huge mental health crisis,
Speaker 2: especially from children who weren't able to socialize in the
Speaker 2: way that they need to be able to do to
Speaker 2: develop and so on and so forth, and like, how
Speaker 2: can you even ask whether this was good or bad
Speaker 2: because it was obviously terrible.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, it's obviously bad. I mean, and there's
Speaker 1: no person who wouldn't say, like, I would have rather
Speaker 1: not done the pandemic. I mean.
Speaker 2: But then, you know, you look at the economy is
Speaker 2: incredibly strong. Unemployment is at record lows. Black unemployment is
Speaker 2: below five percent for the first time ever. You have
Speaker 2: people happier in their jobs than they've ever been. There
Speaker 2: was this great reset. People got to rebuild and rediscover
Speaker 2: what they wanted and economically and psychologically, there is a
Speaker 2: case to be made that we are really actually in
Speaker 2: a better place now that you know, those of us
Speaker 2: who are capable of working from home have much more flexibility,
Speaker 2: much more happiness. That the pandemic has allowed us to
Speaker 2: look at our lives and get rid of the things
Speaker 2: we didn't like and double down on the things we
Speaker 2: wanted to double down on. And we have this increase
Speaker 2: in compassion, and we have now a proof of concept
Speaker 2: of the world coming together to act in unity to
Speaker 2: address a major existential risk. You know, in March twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: everyone just stopped in order to bendicov and buy us
Speaker 2: time to develop therapeutics and vaccines and stuff. And right,
Speaker 2: the world did that collectively and it worked. And if
Speaker 2: we can do that, then maybe, just maybe we can
Speaker 2: come together to address climate change, you know, which is
Speaker 2: something which I think twenty twenty, like no one it
Speaker 2: wasn't even possible. Now I'm not saying it's likely, but
Speaker 2: it's possible.
Speaker 1: Right. Well, I mean you need a mortal threat, direct
Speaker 1: mortal threat, I think, to get people to come together.
Speaker 1: I mean did people First off, did people come together?
Speaker 1: Because I mean my recollection of yes, of course, there
Speaker 1: was this moment where we all stopped. That definitely happened.
Speaker 1: There was definitely a moment where we went from this
Speaker 1: is going to blow over, This is just you know,
Speaker 1: it's just gonna be a few weeks of weirdness and
Speaker 1: then everythy's gonna be fine. I mean, I don't know
Speaker 1: who actually thought that, but certainly there was some sense
Speaker 1: in the air. I remember being in a meeting where
Speaker 1: people were like, this is going to be over in
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks. It's like one or two weeks
Speaker 1: before lockdown. I was in a meeting with some people,
Speaker 1: and they were like, I think this is just going
Speaker 1: to it's like a week or two, people are going
Speaker 1: to feel better, they're going to come back.
Speaker 2: Well, it wasn't even that, it wasn't even a predictive thing.
Speaker 2: It was just it was so anything else was so inconceivable.
Speaker 2: Right of if you remember, after after nine to eleven,
Speaker 2: there was a lot of physical devastation in Lower Manhattan,
Speaker 2: which happened to be also where the stock market was,
Speaker 2: and it was so important for the stock market for
Speaker 2: people to physically come into work in the stock market
Speaker 2: building that they had to close the stock market for
Speaker 2: like three or four days until they could, like you know,
Speaker 2: get rid of all of the ash and allow people
Speaker 2: back in. And that was the world in two thousand
Speaker 2: and one. The entire business world basically couldn't work unless
Speaker 2: people came back to the office. And so if people
Speaker 2: were being told you need to stay out of the
Speaker 2: office for like today and maybe tomorrow, people are like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I'll stay out today and maybe tomorrow. But obviously, you know,
Speaker 2: this is not a world where we can do this
Speaker 2: for more than a few days at a time, Like
Speaker 2: just n nine to eleven, We're going to have to
Speaker 2: go back and reopen. So the market's going to reopen.
Speaker 2: Except that's not what happened. You know, all of the
Speaker 2: banks found that they could continue operating. Every bank in
Speaker 2: the world basically continued operating without people coming into the office.
Speaker 2: Right The markets, you know, went down, but they were open,
Speaker 2: and we almost immediately in the early days of March
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, managed to see the economy moving. I mean,
Speaker 2: you and I are journalists. We were working more feverishly
Speaker 2: than you know, anyone, and we not on anyone. There
Speaker 2: were a lot of people working hard. We're not working
Speaker 2: that hard, but we we you know, we were working,
Speaker 2: and we were working hard, and we were working harder
Speaker 2: than normal, and we were producing more normal and our
Speaker 2: work was more important than normal. And what we were
Speaker 2: doing was entirely remote. And we discovered that we could
Speaker 2: on the fly build this new system of the means
Speaker 2: of production could be distributed in the way that no
Speaker 2: one really understood that it was possible before that.
Speaker 1: I wrote a piece early on in the pandemic called
Speaker 1: Thank God for the Internet, which was the first time
Speaker 1: in a long time that I had been like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, you probably have the same feeling where you
Speaker 1: spend many years on the Internet. Then you saw the
Speaker 1: worst of the Internet and sort of the Trump era, Like,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, the Internet that I loved, that I
Speaker 1: thought was so such a wonderful playground became like a
Speaker 1: kind of nightmare zone for the Trump most of the
Speaker 1: Trump years, and then the pandemic happened, and it was like, ah,
Speaker 1: the culmination of all of the worst things. It's like,
Speaker 1: now we're literally like dying. Now we're all going to die.
Speaker 1: And there was a pretty early period. I mean when
Speaker 1: I wrote about it, it was Moe Williams, who it
Speaker 1: writes kids books Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you're familiar with the book series
Speaker 1: or not, but he had was doing these like live
Speaker 1: let's all draw together workshops on YouTube and it was like,
Speaker 1: you know, hundreds of thousands of kids like watching and
Speaker 1: doing that, and she was doing it, and I was like,
Speaker 1: holy fuck, you know, God, what would life be like like? Yeah,
Speaker 1: for as bad as the Internet has seen for the
Speaker 1: last several years, you know, it's impossible to imagine imagine
Speaker 1: the pandemic with no Internet. I mean, to your point
Speaker 1: about the nineteen eighteen you know, flu People didn't have
Speaker 1: a way to communicate really with each other about what
Speaker 1: was going on or how they were doing, or techniques
Speaker 1: to stay alive or any of those things.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, you know after nine to eleven, the logacy
Speaker 2: basically sprung up. Nine eleven was this late big thing
Speaker 2: that everyone decided to blog about and that you like,
Speaker 2: have you heard of nine to eleven early blogs? I
Speaker 2: remember this thing eleven very very like nine to eleven eccentric.
Speaker 2: But back then, you know, we had this very open
Speaker 2: and free wheeling and fabulous and fun Internet, but it
Speaker 2: definitely didn't have the kind of bandwidth to have live
Speaker 2: videos streaming, right, and yeah, almost everyone with Internet had
Speaker 2: enough had enough bandwidth to do live video streaming. Come
Speaker 2: twenty twenty was enormous for Moe Williams. YouTube's for you know,
Speaker 2: allowing the zoom calls and the facetimes Dot Club kept
Speaker 2: us together. There was the Clubhouse, which wasn't video, but yeah,
Speaker 2: there was you know, I remember in the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: election there was this crazy fundraiser for the Democrats which
Speaker 2: is basically the entire living cast of the Princess Bride
Speaker 2: or getting together and just like rereading the whole thing,
Speaker 2: and it was just it felt like a very magical,
Speaker 2: remote thing.
Speaker 1: They did that imagine They had that Imagine video with
Speaker 1: Galgado that I said about that the better. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But and then more, you know, prosaically we had Slack
Speaker 2: and Zoom, which you know, saved countless companies. They came
Speaker 2: through in this clutch time when they when needed most right,
Speaker 2: and we managed to get through this period of like,
Speaker 2: you know, shit, how are we going to be able
Speaker 2: to cope without offices? And mostly we did too. I
Speaker 2: think everyone's surprised.
Speaker 1: I mean, I remember having this realization on a fairly
Speaker 1: regular basis, or this kind of thought that in a
Speaker 1: popular fiction when the pandemic is depicted or an apocalyptic
Speaker 1: sort of world ending event, which is how COVID felt
Speaker 1: at the beginning, you imagine you're like fighting zombies or
Speaker 1: people are dying like you know, their heads are exploding
Speaker 1: around you or whatever kind of you know, total like
Speaker 1: apocalyptic insanity. Nobody made a movie or wrote a book
Speaker 1: about how like the apocalypse would be you sitting at
Speaker 1: home like working like you you'd be exactly like on slack,
Speaker 1: like no think about the I mean I remember, you know,
Speaker 1: at the time you know, at that time, I was
Speaker 1: managing a bunch of different news teams, and I would
Speaker 1: sit in slack with them and you'd be like covering
Speaker 1: the news, you know, talking about like oh, Fauci says,
Speaker 1: now you've got to wear a mask or you're going
Speaker 1: to die, and like, oh, it's like now it's definitely
Speaker 1: airborne and it's coming through the events and whatever. You know,
Speaker 1: you were on slack. You weren't like in a bunker,
Speaker 1: yeah right, you were looking out the window and not
Speaker 1: able to interact with humanity. But other than that, everything
Speaker 1: seemed normal, right, Like I mean normal with quotes around it.
Speaker 2: But I had a pre existing intellectual awareness that a
Speaker 2: global pandemic could strike at any time. But when I
Speaker 2: thought about what it might be like to live through
Speaker 2: a pandemic, and I didn't think about it very often.
Speaker 2: What I thought about were, you know, people getting sick,
Speaker 2: people dying, you know, And then if you read about plagues,
Speaker 2: that's what you read about, the boobos, the deaths. That
Speaker 2: what I called in the book the moor Ryan vectus,
Speaker 2: which for those of you who don't have digitens to hand,
Speaker 2: just means rats. Yeah, most of us, not sick, most
Speaker 2: of the time, but we were distanced, and so the
Speaker 2: experience of COVID was not one of the sick, right,
Speaker 2: The experiences COVID was one of of like, what the
Speaker 2: hell am I going to do with my kids when
Speaker 2: they're not at school?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean most people didn't get really sick, sort
Speaker 1: of one of the one of the problems with COVID
Speaker 1: not and this is a good thing, it's a great thing,
Speaker 1: but like one of the issues with educating people are
Speaker 1: making people feel like it was real. I feel like,
Speaker 1: was that it was you didn't feel it if a
Speaker 1: family member didn't die, right, or if you didn't know
Speaker 1: a good friend who died or got really sick and
Speaker 1: was you know, near death or whatever, you didn't feel
Speaker 1: like that kind of palpable. There wasn't a sense that
Speaker 1: it was happening at all. And that's why I think
Speaker 1: a lot of people kind of went crazy, right, Like
Speaker 1: a lot of people were like, why are we still
Speaker 1: wearing masks? Why do we have to stay home? I
Speaker 1: Mean a big part of what happened there was like
Speaker 1: a little bit of people are kind of like, well,
Speaker 1: if I don't see it, and if I don't feel it,
Speaker 1: if I don't hear it, like is it even really happening,
Speaker 1: Which is a kind of a deranged way to think
Speaker 1: about it. But you know, I mean you mentioned like
Speaker 1: this sort of Yolo mentality which runs through everything that
Speaker 1: happened or many things that happened with the economy and
Speaker 1: with the way we work and the way we live,
Speaker 1: and that so much what the book is about is
Speaker 1: the sense of like you only live once, I mean
Speaker 1: literally right like that, you know, suddenly your life feels
Speaker 1: much more precious. And also you start thinking about, well,
Speaker 1: if this is the if it's the end times or whatever,
Speaker 1: maybe I had to do the things that I wasn't
Speaker 1: going to do or try the things I never tried. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the Yolo mentality, a lot of that stems from the
Speaker 1: use of that term, stems from what happened with Wall
Speaker 1: Street bets and Meme stocks and NFTs as a companion
Speaker 1: and crypto as a companion to that, Like if this
Speaker 1: moment of really weird things like you're talking about, Like
Speaker 1: we've talked about a lot like mass economic sort of things,
Speaker 1: but there was this thing about how money started to
Speaker 1: seem to people that I feel like is very unique
Speaker 1: to this moment can you talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: like the game stop, the sort of meme stock moment
Speaker 1: and how that was juiced by or if it was
Speaker 1: juiced by the pan.
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean, it could never have happened without the pandemic.
Speaker 2: You had a whole bunch of people sitting at home.
Speaker 2: I guess I say, like they weren't worried about getting evicted.
Speaker 1: Like I'm good time to trade.
Speaker 2: There was an eviction moratorium. They you know, they had
Speaker 2: a lot of time on their hands, and they had
Speaker 2: fourteen hundred stimulus checks, fourteen hundred dollars stimulus checks sitting
Speaker 2: in their bank account needing to be spent on something,
Speaker 2: and they had for the first time the opportunity to
Speaker 2: engage in in genuinely social stock market speculation that you know,
Speaker 2: Wall Street bets was the most prominent of the social
Speaker 2: vectors where people would trade trading ideas. But you know,
Speaker 2: for all that people had tried to do like social
Speaker 2: trading in the past, it never really took off in
Speaker 2: the way that it did in the early months of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty one. And at the same time, yeah, there
Speaker 2: was this feeling that money had ceased to have any
Speaker 2: real meaning, you know, it's not something you know, we
Speaker 2: were spending it on crazy things because what else were
Speaker 2: you going to do? Right, And there was a lot
Speaker 2: of it sloshing around the economy because of all of
Speaker 2: the fiscal stimulus, and instead of investing being this like
Speaker 2: very serious kind of like I should save up carefully
Speaker 2: every month.
Speaker 1: And write and put a little on the four oh
Speaker 1: one k or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it just became it became this game.
Speaker 2: It became a fun game, and it became a way
Speaker 2: to get rich quick, right, And you realized everyone realized
Speaker 2: on some level they probably weren't going to get rich quick,
Speaker 2: but like, at least it would be a fun way
Speaker 2: to try right, right, and investing for many people, you know,
Speaker 2: even back in the fifties and sixties, you know, it
Speaker 2: was always like an enjoyable hobby that certain type of
Speaker 2: like white men would trade stock tips on the golf course,
Speaker 2: and you know it was social in that sense. It
Speaker 2: just was turbo judged. It was much faster, and it
Speaker 2: was much more aggressive, and it was much more like
Speaker 2: you know, going to the moon and swapping between meme
Speaker 2: stocks and cryptocurrencies and should we buy a you know,
Speaker 2: monkey jpeg because that's going to make us rich.
Speaker 1: It's very easy to understand people going, hey, we're all
Speaker 1: going to invest in this thing, or like, actually we can,
Speaker 1: we can pump this stock up if we all go
Speaker 1: in on it or whatever. You know, as a group,
Speaker 1: a social kind of experiment that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: It makes a lot less sense when it is the
Speaker 1: monkey jpeg when it is this esoteric. I mean, as
Speaker 1: soon as NFT's like that, just the hint of it
Speaker 1: being an idea started, it became like a multi million
Speaker 1: billion dollar business, right, I mean, it became a It
Speaker 1: was like, I mean, what's the timeline from like NFTs.
Speaker 1: I mean, I remember. What I do remember is that
Speaker 1: at the time there was we had a website called input,
Speaker 1: which is and rest and peace no longer exists, like
Speaker 1: many of the things have begun during the pandemic. But
Speaker 1: we did an article on NFTs in I want to say,
Speaker 1: fall of twenty nineteen, and by the summer of twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: it was like people, the people thing was happening. I mean,
Speaker 1: when was his sophobes with sophobes He had Christie's.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there were these two, these two like crypto whales,
Speaker 2: started bidding against each other. To try and and I
Speaker 2: think it was almost coordinated that they both wanted the
Speaker 2: biggest possible number for that peace, not because they thought
Speaker 2: it was worth it, but because and they were quite
Speaker 2: right about this that like if they could get it
Speaker 2: to be worth more than like you know, Jess John's
Speaker 2: or a Picasso or Velaskaz, then at that point that
Speaker 2: would ratify NFTs as an asset class and everyone would
Speaker 2: just start buying all manner about NFTs.
Speaker 1: And that's exactly what happened. I'd be so it.
Speaker 2: Really really kicked off the NFT frenzy. And you know,
Speaker 2: people forget that NFTs were really invented by and Neil
Speaker 2: Dash and Kevin McCoy back in like twenty fourteen, but
Speaker 2: no one really noticed, no one really cared, and then
Speaker 2: they just kind of sat there hibernating for a while
Speaker 2: until until the pandemic just came along to make the
Speaker 2: whole thing explode.
Speaker 1: Well, people are just like, Okay, maybe there's something we
Speaker 1: can there's an idea we can pull off the shelf.
Speaker 1: We're running low on ideas right now, so I mean
Speaker 1: it's interesting. And also a Neil wrote a piece I
Speaker 1: believe like at the peak of NFT. What is the
Speaker 1: what is the word for when people are buying things
Speaker 1: blindly like maniacs. There's some word for this that I
Speaker 1: can't think of, but tulipmania. Yeah, tulip mania.
Speaker 2: I do I do in the book when I my
Speaker 2: my copy editor was very buy the book in terms
Speaker 2: of like, whenever I used an acronym, I'd always do
Speaker 2: it to spell out what it stood for, right, But
Speaker 2: when it came to NFTs, I insisted that we just
Speaker 2: said that what this stands for is newfangled tulips.
Speaker 1: Is that in the book? Cause it's in the book? Okay?
Speaker 1: I bought it over that, But I was reading the
Speaker 1: NFT part. Actually I highlighted a bit from the NFT part.
Speaker 1: You say, connoisseurship in the NFT world was worthless. Art
Speaker 1: was valued not on its intrinsic qualities, but rather on
Speaker 1: its status as a meme. Then I put a question
Speaker 1: mark next to it, because is that not just what
Speaker 1: art is? You say intrinsic, but what is intrinsic about?
Speaker 1: And by the way, I'm not defending NFT art, much
Speaker 1: of which is astonishingly bad. Like I mean, I've said
Speaker 1: this before. I might have even said it on the
Speaker 1: last podcast that I considered the NFT Boom to be
Speaker 1: the Olympics of bad art. And I will take that one,
Speaker 1: you know, I will stand by that one until I die.
Speaker 1: But isn't art really just about what is valuable? I mean, yes,
Speaker 1: I understand there's critics, and I understand there's a classical
Speaker 1: definition of what is great art, and there's a market
Speaker 1: built around that. But is it not really just the
Speaker 1: same idea? Yep?
Speaker 2: I read about this in the book A bit right,
Speaker 2: that we are seeing the meme ification of the world,
Speaker 2: Like the uh the people are buying is younger and
Speaker 2: younger and less and less sport because it's particularly important
Speaker 2: or particularly good, right, you know. The classic example would
Speaker 2: be someone like Couse, who sells for millions even though
Speaker 2: his art is objectively terrible, and I think most of
Speaker 2: the people who buy it understand his arts I mean
Speaker 2: objectively terrible.
Speaker 1: But I've actually been in context when if you look
Speaker 1: at cause the cause art in context of what it is,
Speaker 1: where it comes from, and how was initially expressed, has
Speaker 1: some historical context and also legitimately was kind of a
Speaker 1: new form at the beginning of its sort of well.
Speaker 2: I mean Okay, so it does come out of a
Speaker 2: tradition in the street art that is real and interesting,
Speaker 2: and there are real and interesting street artists. I don't
Speaker 2: know if he was ever like he was briefly a
Speaker 2: street artist, but he came much later, like there were
Speaker 2: much more important and much better street artists.
Speaker 1: Again, I'm not making a case for causes like a
Speaker 1: great but I can understand that I can understand the
Speaker 1: market for cause.
Speaker 2: The second coming of like John Michelle Baska or even
Speaker 2: Keith Herring. He is not right, right, but put that
Speaker 2: to one side, Like, you're absolutely right that the level
Speaker 2: of connoisseurship needed to understand the art that people get
Speaker 2: really excited about has been declining steadily for decades, and
Speaker 2: that trend accelerated during the pandemic. And the art that
Speaker 2: sells to millions is getting dumber and dumber, and the
Speaker 2: art that requires a large amount of connoisseurship. You know,
Speaker 2: if you are trying to sell some beautiful seventeenth century
Speaker 2: Dutch still life or something, you know, the number of
Speaker 2: people who are interested in that is getting smaller and smaller, right,
Speaker 2: because they're all too busy chasing some you know, twenty
Speaker 2: five year old African Bundakin, who is going to be
Speaker 2: you know, here today and gone tomorrow.
Speaker 1: I think NFTs, the whole thing is kind of breaks
Speaker 1: down on a fundamental level. I was going to say.
Speaker 1: I was saying that Nil and Neil Dash wrote a
Speaker 1: piece basically saying that underlying technology of whatever everybody's using
Speaker 1: right now is not it. It is not the thing
Speaker 1: that would create an NFT in the way that I
Speaker 1: think he and envisioned, or that would make sense for
Speaker 1: the actual like sort of collectibility of it, if you want,
Speaker 1: or the preciousness of the singular versus the you know,
Speaker 1: the copies, right, And.
Speaker 2: Just to be clear, like what happened in the NFT
Speaker 2: boom was super interesting that this thing that was designed
Speaker 2: to be a way of allowing people to own and
Speaker 2: sell digital art very rapidly, like that whole concept of
Speaker 2: digital arn't And like the people thing, which was like
Speaker 2: how what I think of NFT one point zero kind
Speaker 2: of fell by the wayside to be replaced by the
Speaker 2: social thing of the monkey JPEGs and the rocks and
Speaker 2: the squiggles and the penguins and all of the other
Speaker 2: things slurp juices where they where they like sell ten
Speaker 2: thousand similar things, and everyone wants to join the club,
Speaker 2: and it's really the metaphor there is not the art
Speaker 2: world anymore, the metaphor that is now just the limited
Speaker 2: membership club where everyone wants to get a membership card. Right.
Speaker 1: But of course, broken down, it breaks down to the
Speaker 1: fundamental level, which is that the thing that is so
Speaker 1: valuable and collectible and only the special members can have
Speaker 1: it was actually just an actual jpeg or whatever a ping.
Speaker 1: I mean, they are just it is just a copyable image, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that's the But I think all
Speaker 1: of this it kind of brings me like in talking
Speaker 1: about the NFTs, because it's such a it's such a
Speaker 1: bizarre the offshoot of crypto, right, it's an offshoot of
Speaker 1: this kind of state of being, certainly of the Wall
Speaker 1: Street bet stuff of like community sort of building around
Speaker 1: like investing, and sort of club membership in these things
Speaker 1: that are centered around money and money making. But the
Speaker 1: things that people did during the pandemic and maybe all
Speaker 1: of the kind of side effects of it now that
Speaker 1: we're experiencing, is it a bit that it felt like
Speaker 1: for the first time, maybe ever for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: maybe for everybody that whatever the structure of reality that
Speaker 1: we've been living inside of, like this thing that we
Speaker 1: all consider to be a shared reality, where there's people
Speaker 1: who know what's happening, and people who don't know what's happening,
Speaker 1: people who are in control, and people who are not
Speaker 1: in control. That to some extent, once you force everybody
Speaker 1: inside their house and once everybody is online, and once
Speaker 1: Fauci one day is saying wear a mask and the
Speaker 1: next day saying don't wear a mask, there's a bit
Speaker 1: of all of this that is like stemming from a
Speaker 1: sense that suddenly people had an autonomy and lack of
Speaker 1: control that previously had never seemed accessible to them. Like
Speaker 1: on a kind of fundamental philosophical basis, Am I crazy
Speaker 1: for thinking this? Does it even make any sense? Or
Speaker 1: do I sound?
Speaker 2: It totally makes sense? And that's what really undergoded great resignation.
Speaker 2: You know, the phenomenon that was incredibly visible in the
Speaker 2: economic statistics about there's this wonderful survey called JOLTS, the
Speaker 2: Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, and it shows you,
Speaker 2: like how many people quit their job that month, and
Speaker 2: it just went through the roof. It was like levels
Speaker 2: that were just completely unprecedented and unthinkable, and people left
Speaker 2: the service industry in particular because those jobs tend to
Speaker 2: be quite miserable.
Speaker 1: Right, They paid poorly and they suck well.
Speaker 2: And then what happened is they wound up paying much
Speaker 2: better because the only way that anyone could attract people
Speaker 2: back into those jobs was by effectively doubling the amount.
Speaker 1: Of pay they made.
Speaker 2: Right, And so if you were, you know, back of
Speaker 2: House Kirk in a New York City restaurant, suddenly you're
Speaker 2: paid double. Basically, you used to be earning eight dollars now,
Speaker 2: and now you're running sixteen dollars an hour. You know,
Speaker 2: still not making millions, but you're doing a lot better
Speaker 2: than you were, right, and you can take that put
Speaker 2: it right into an NFT.
Speaker 1: We had this.
Speaker 2: Radical reshaking of supply demand. I have a chapter called
Speaker 2: Shaking the extra sketch that we had this world that
Speaker 2: was very clearly delineated and made sense, and then someone
Speaker 2: just picked up the whole thing and shook it, and
Speaker 2: we had to rebuild and reconstruct something new and different
Speaker 2: and better. And it wasn't necessarily going to be bad,
Speaker 2: but in many many ways it really was better and
Speaker 2: is better and that is the phoenix. You know, that
Speaker 2: is the phoenix of the title. That is the Phoenix economy.
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, let me ask you one final question, which
Speaker 1: is does the phoenix keep rising? Does the phoenix burn out?
Speaker 1: What happens? Does this keep going? Are we is the
Speaker 1: Phoenix economy now a permanent state of like kind of
Speaker 1: a Yolo state of economics and then end of society
Speaker 1: where where anything goes or does this settle down into
Speaker 1: something that looks more familiar over time?
Speaker 2: So the legend of the phoenix is one of death
Speaker 2: and ashes and then rebirth and then you're right that
Speaker 2: the phoenix kind of just slides around for a few
Speaker 2: hundred years and then it is that what it does,
Speaker 2: and then and then and then it dies again, it
Speaker 2: gets reborn again, and like the periods of death and
Speaker 2: rebirth are definitely much less common than the normal periods
Speaker 2: of nothing much happening. So, yeah, like this current world
Speaker 2: that we have built on the fly in response to
Speaker 2: the pandemic is the world that we are going to
Speaker 2: be in for the next ten twenty thirty, I don't
Speaker 2: know how many years, where I doubt we're going to
Speaker 2: have another major conflagration.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's decades of this that we're going
Speaker 1: to be living on. Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 2: The reason I wrote this book and not you know,
Speaker 2: various other things that I thought about writing about over
Speaker 2: the years, is that I have very strong belief that
Speaker 2: if you're going to write a book, it has to
Speaker 2: remain relevant for you know, five or ten years people
Speaker 2: at least, you know, people should be able to take
Speaker 2: it down from a library book, you know, a library
Speaker 2: shehelf in ten years or fifteen years and read it
Speaker 2: and learn something and have it be relevant and important.
Speaker 2: And I really think this book does that. You know,
Speaker 2: it's trying to explain a world where it's going to
Speaker 2: be with us for a while. This isn't like history
Speaker 2: of what happened in much twenty twenty that is interesting
Speaker 2: only to historians. This is an attempt to explain and
Speaker 2: give people the tools to understand this world that we
Speaker 2: are now going to be living in, you know, especially
Speaker 2: for you know, gen x is like you and me
Speaker 2: basically for the rest of our lives.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, listen, I think it's a fascinating book.
Speaker 1: I have to say, like I do think it's like
Speaker 1: an amazing sort of capture of a moment in culture
Speaker 1: that is so unlike. I mean, I think about this
Speaker 1: all the time, just so unlike anything that has happened
Speaker 1: and at least of course in my lifetime and in
Speaker 1: your lifetime in terms of like just a shift on
Speaker 1: so many levels. And I thought, I think it's I
Speaker 1: think it's fantastic, and I obviously, like you know, want
Speaker 1: to have you on to talk about it because I
Speaker 1: think everybody should go and read it. So Felix, thank
Speaker 1: you for taking the time once again to come on
Speaker 1: and chat with me. And you got to come back
Speaker 1: and do it again sometime. I would love to, Well,
Speaker 1: that is our show, our show. Unlike the phoenix, instead
Speaker 1: of rising from the ashes, has now died down back
Speaker 1: into the back into the fire, back into the I
Speaker 1: don't really know. Felix didn't really explain what happens to
Speaker 1: the phoenix exactly. He did say there was a cycle, though,
Speaker 1: which is I gotta read. I gotta look into that. Anyhow,
Speaker 1: I thought it was fantastic. I love talking to Felix.
Speaker 1: I think he's just so entertaining to listen to and
Speaker 1: also so smart, and he definitely will have him back
Speaker 1: on the next time. There is a terrible financial crisis.
Speaker 1: That's the first call I'm making. Anyhow, that is our show.
Speaker 1: We'll be back next week with more what future, and
Speaker 1: as always, I wish you and your family the very best.