0:17

Hey, and welcome to What Future. I'm

0:20

your host, josh Wa Tapolski, and I got

0:22

to say very excited about today's show.

0:24

Many many episodes ago, we had on a gentleman named

0:26

Felix Salmon who's a terrific

0:29

journalist. He is the chief financial

0:31

correspondent for Axios.

0:33

You may have heard of very hot website where you

0:35

can get all the news, and he wrote. We actually

0:37

touched on it last time we talked. He wrote a book which

0:39

was not yet out at the time of us

0:41

chatting. We were actual chatting about the bank

0:43

crisis that was happening. Anyhow, he

0:46

has written a book. It's called The Phoenix Economy, Work,

0:48

Life and Money in the New Not Normal,

0:51

And I got to say I have been reading it. It is

0:53

fascinating. It basically details

0:56

the strange directions the world

0:59

and money moved in as the pandemic

1:01

began and as our lives got kind of upended.

1:03

Anyhow, I don't need to tell you about it.

1:05

He should tell you about it. So let's not waste

1:08

any more time. Let's

1:10

get to this conversation. By

1:28

the way, I've been highlighting the book. I

1:30

actually hate when people write in books.

1:32

And Laura and my wife is a huge like

1:35

note taker in the margins of books,

1:37

and so there are a lot of times I'll pick up

1:39

a book of hers and I'm like, I can't read this because

1:42

you have too much even underlying

1:44

it's like fascinating, you know, page

1:47

seventy eight, you know, reference back to page seventy

1:49

eight. I'm like, great if I buy a used book

1:52

and it's got notations, and then I'm very

1:54

upset. But I've been I've been highlighting

1:56

and making notes in here, I guess partially

1:58

because it's a it's a galley, so fucking

2:02

I'm like, wow, this is so liberating, And

2:04

now i know what everybody's been freaking out about.

2:07

Anyhow, tell us what the book is about, assuming

2:10

that we have not already picked up and read it

2:12

cover to cover in a fevered night of

2:14

cocaine bis.

2:15

And most

2:17

of my jelessness will have done.

2:20

But for the two of you who haven't done that, it's

2:22

it's basically a book about

2:25

how COVID changed the world. It's a

2:27

book about how we had seventy

2:30

years of broadly speaking, you know,

2:33

peace, we had one hundred years without a

2:35

pandemic. We had this

2:37

post World War two international

2:40

order of countries cooperating,

2:43

of India and China being

2:46

brought into the global economic

2:49

system, of everyone trying to cooperate

2:51

and not go to war with each other, and

2:53

it kind of worked. And that

2:57

period of relative stability

2:59

in geopolitical terms was

3:01

extremely unusual in historical

3:04

terms, right Like, that's not how history

3:07

normally works. I call it the new

3:09

not normal because compared to everything

3:12

that we used to since since nineteen

3:14

forty six, it's not normal. But it's

3:17

actually a return to like the pre

3:19

nineteen forty six normal of you

3:21

know, crazy shit happening all

3:24

over the place, plagues and wars and

3:26

depressions, and you know, lots

3:28

of upside and lots of downside. You know, people forget

3:30

how amazing the twenties

3:33

and the thirties were for the global economy,

3:35

right Like, there are a lot of great things

3:37

that happened in between the terrible

3:39

things that happened, and that kind of

3:42

combination of the great and the terrible is

3:44

I think this era that we're entering right

3:46

now.

3:47

Right you're saying peace and prosperity

3:50

were an unusual netlast

3:52

it has been completely peaceful or prosperous

3:54

everywhere. But this kind of general

3:56

sense of at least in massive you know, industrialized

3:59

nations and things things like that, that

4:01

we didn't have huge world wars and pandemics

4:04

and things of that nature. That's the

4:06

abnormal part. And what

4:08

we are experiencing now is closer to what would

4:10

be historically considered normal.

4:12

Exactly that we had this very unusual

4:14

degree of international cooperation immediately

4:17

following the Second World what we all came together and said,

4:20

like, never again, and we

4:23

forgot that in twenty

4:25

sixteen, and I actually, I actually kind

4:27

of date the beginning of the new not normal more

4:29

to twenty sixteen into twenty twenty. Twenty

4:32

sixteen was the date at which Britain voted

4:34

to leave the European Union. It voted

4:37

to basically jettison all

4:39

of that kind of international cooperation that

4:42

the post war world was built on, and they were

4:44

like, you know, fuck this, We're going.

4:45

To go it alone.

4:46

Right then, you know, a little bit later

4:48

in the year, something very similar happened in

4:50

the US with the election of Donald Trump.

4:52

That's right, our own, our own Braxit.

4:55

And there's a case to be made that the

4:58

COVID pandemic would have been and much

5:01

milder and much more contained. Had

5:04

Trump not been elected president that

5:06

you know, a Clinton administration

5:08

would not have torn apart

5:11

the pandemic response teams that

5:13

the China US cooperation would have allowed

5:15

the CDC and NIH and

5:18

those people to go into Wuhan when it was

5:20

first discovered, and they could have reacted more quickly.

5:23

And yeah, we don't know, like these are counterfactuals,

5:26

but whatever happened, the

5:28

result was a

5:31

pandemic the likes of which had not been seen in

5:34

one hundred years. And in fact, the pandemic

5:36

that in terms of its societal impact

5:39

was orders of magnitude

5:41

greater than the one that we had in nineteen

5:44

eighteen. In nineteen eighteen, the pandemic, we

5:46

didn't really notice it very much, even

5:48

though it killed a lot of people like that, we

5:51

could notice it, could we Well, yeah,

5:53

it was hard to notice because you know, media

5:55

wasn't the same, and you know, people died

5:57

of infectious diseases all the time, and it

5:59

wasn't obvious that everyone was just dying

6:01

of the same disease at the same time to

6:03

the same degree. It wasn't in that p

6:06

one position, if like, the one thing everyone

6:08

cared about, mainly because the one thing that everyone

6:10

cared about was the First World War, which is like

6:12

a bigger deal.

6:13

Right.

6:13

And in fact, if you look at COVID, the only

6:16

thing that knocks COVID

6:18

out of that p one position that caused

6:21

COVID to no longer be the

6:23

one thing that everyone thought about and cared about,

6:26

was the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

6:28

Right. It was Putin felt his attention

6:31

waning, and he was like, how can

6:33

I get it back? I was actually going to ask you do

6:35

you think that happens in a in

6:38

a non COVID world? And

6:40

I know that's ridiculous, profrior, ridiculous question

6:42

to ask speculation to have you make, but yeah,

6:45

I'm curiously Yeah, so I know I've been speculating.

6:47

When you when you look at all these pieces on the on the map,

6:50

right, you look at all the pieces of the puzzle that

6:52

got kind of splintered apart, how much does

6:54

like how much does it is that

6:56

accelerated by or is it not

6:58

accelerated by this kind of you know, sort

7:01

of the new normal that we entered into during

7:03

COVID. It's a really

7:05

good question.

7:05

And yeah, look, if I can speculate about how

7:09

President Clinton would have reacted to COVID Like

7:11

I can speculate a little bit about this, and I do

7:13

a little bit in the book. What

7:15

I say is that pandemics

7:18

tend to strengthen authoritarians,

7:21

and they make societies more authoritarian,

7:24

and people in societies

7:27

want more authoritarian leaders when

7:29

there's a pandemic.

7:30

You can see the way that say.

7:32

Jacinda da And in New Zealand, who

7:35

is this kind of crunchy granola, punchy

7:37

granola hippie lefty prime minister

7:39

suddenly became this like super hard

7:42

you know, we are going to lock

7:44

down and we're going to implement a zero COVID

7:46

policy. And it was incredibly popular when

7:48

she did that.

7:49

Right, But isn't that just good leadership?

7:52

I mean, but no, there is. You

7:54

don't have to be like fascist to be like we should.

7:56

Absolutely not. And she's a good example, right, Like,

7:59

I don't criticize it at all, but what

8:02

you see in countries

8:04

that have had a lot of plagues

8:07

and pandemics tend to be less

8:10

amenable to sort of liberal freedoms

8:12

and tend to be more authoritarian. That's some interesting

8:14

research about that, which I put in the book, and

8:17

what we saw in, you know,

8:19

during the pandemic, was not only put

8:22

In doubling down on his

8:25

authoritarian tendencies by annexing

8:27

Ukraine or at least trying to, but

8:29

also an effective invasion

8:32

of Hong Kong by China. You

8:34

know, a lot of people were too worried about

8:36

COVID we even noticed, but the complete

8:39

loss of freedoms by everyone in Hong Kong

8:42

and flagrant violation of

8:44

the treaty that China

8:46

signed with the Brits in nineteen ninety

8:48

seven, and they just kind of said, fuck it,

8:51

you know, you know, we are just going to stomp on Hong

8:53

Kong and stamp out every bit

8:55

of freedom of speech on the island. And like

8:58

again, like would they have done that? Son's

9:01

COVID. Maybe it's hard to tell,

9:03

but it's definitely of a piece

9:05

with these other kind of events that were happening

9:07

elsewhere in the.

9:08

World, right. I Mean, it's

9:10

also easy, isn't it. I Mean, when you've got a

9:12

pandemic that nobody really knows anything about

9:14

and a disease that's killing people, and you're sort of

9:16

like don't leave the house

9:18

or don't get you know, businesses have to close or

9:20

whatever. You're doing at that moment, kind of easy

9:22

to say, well, also, we're going to do some other

9:25

you know, completely unilateral

9:27

shit because you know who's

9:29

going to stop us in this extreme emergency

9:32

state. Like, I feel like there are a lot of things

9:34

that happened that, even with Biden,

9:36

that seem completely out of sync

9:38

with all like what we know of American politics, for instance,

9:40

like giving people money repeatedly, don't

9:43

let a crisis go to wasting.

9:44

Absolutely, yeah, you get you get to use the

9:46

cover of the crisis to do something like,

9:48

you know, the Green New Deal that would never go through

9:51

otherwise.

9:52

Right, Like like like what a situation like

9:54

January sixth have happened in

9:56

a non wait

9:58

a second, that was twenty two wait a second.

10:01

Six, twenty twenty one, twenty

10:04

one during you're right, you're right.

10:05

It was during the pandemic, right.

10:07

And one of the crazy things about one

10:09

of the things about exactly the six was that

10:11

people were watching these TV pictures

10:15

if the rioters swarming across the

10:17

capitole and no one was wearing masks and know

10:19

these crowds,

10:21

and everyone in sort of blue

10:23

America was horrified not only by

10:26

the you know way the democracy

10:29

was falling apart, he eyes, but also

10:31

by the fact that, like it was,

10:34

they were so proud of their unmasked

10:37

right status.

10:38

Right. Not everywhere, but in a lot of

10:41

large countries you had a huge amount of

10:43

people who were like, I don't want to wear a mask,

10:45

I don't want to participate in whatever this. Maybe maybe

10:47

not quite as fervent as they were in

10:49

America. Canadians had some

10:52

truckers we forget,

10:54

perhaps the great truck, the

10:56

Brigador.

10:56

Canadian truckers were a big deal. But no,

10:59

even even in you know, mild

11:01

Man at New Zealand, which has thirty times as many

11:03

sheep as it does people. Even in New Zealand,

11:05

there were protesters camped

11:08

outside the New Zealand Parliament

11:11

waving Trump flags.

11:13

Yeah.

11:13

Yes, like shit got weird. And they weren't even

11:15

that right wing. They were a lot of them were just like yoga

11:18

teachers one thing, you know, who didn't believe in vaccines.

11:20

Yeah, there's we saw a lot of weird crossover

11:22

like that. I think during during the pandemic of

11:25

vaccine skeptics, medicine skeptics,

11:28

experts in a field skeptics, we

11:30

saw I think a kind of growth

11:32

of a whole new sort of school of thought,

11:34

which is like, if somebody who is a professional

11:36

who spent their life studying and learning about

11:38

something says this

11:41

is what's going on, you have to you just out

11:43

of pocket reject it and do the

11:45

opposite thing that they're telling you to do. You

11:47

know, a whole new well

11:49

of doubt for experts.

11:52

And this is related to

11:54

the crisis of trust in institutional

11:56

legitimacy, which I writes about, but it's

11:58

something that is particularly evident

12:02

in Germany. Weirdly,

12:06

the thing that you're, the thing that you're describing

12:09

of the sort of left

12:11

and the right making common cause in

12:14

vaccine skepticism and mistrusted

12:16

authority was probably

12:20

at least looking across the

12:22

world as I was writing this book, it was probably

12:25

most visible in Germany. And I don't

12:27

entirely understand why, and like I'm half

12:30

German, I feel like I understand Germany better

12:32

than most people. But yeah, it has

12:34

this kind of atavistic right

12:37

wing, which is scary but always a

12:39

relatively small minority. But it also

12:41

has a very strong

12:44

tradition of you know, faith

12:47

in nature and if it's natural, it's good, and if it's

12:49

unnatural. It's bad, right, And you know

12:51

they love fresh air and udity

12:53

and that kind of stuff, right, and all

12:55

of that starts coming out in

12:58

a way that means

13:01

that they fail to

13:03

rise to the occasion

13:06

of what I call the epistemic crisis, where

13:09

the main thing that happened, one

13:11

of the main things that happened in

13:13

twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, is that we

13:16

had to just keep on learning new shit all

13:18

the time that the scientists were

13:21

learning new things, and we were having

13:23

to update, up rise and say, oh, this is what I you

13:25

know, I used to think this, and now I've got

13:27

new information, and now I think that. And

13:30

you know, the Germans in particular, but like humans

13:33

in general, are bout at that. We like to

13:35

just have things that we believe and stick with

13:37

them. And at some point, you know, you

13:40

have described us very well as what happened in America,

13:42

people just decided, like you know,

13:45

there was a point in the early pandemic where you said

13:47

that we shouldn't wear masks. So I'm never going to

13:49

wear masks, right. You know, someone told me

13:51

that like mRNA vaccines

13:53

are dangerous. Therefore I'm just going to believe

13:55

that and I'm not going to take a vaccine, And

13:58

these are not really the positions

14:01

that they were argued into. It's hard to argue them

14:03

out of it, argue people out of it. But more to the point,

14:05

it's just psychologically

14:07

easier to have

14:10

certainty about this disease, right,

14:13

even though you know, Tony Fauci

14:15

and everyone else is on the television all the

14:17

time like, we don't have certainty about the

14:19

disease. There's a lot of things we don't know. We are going

14:21

to change our mind. You have to understand,

14:23

like this is brand new, are still doing the science,

14:26

and people just found it really

14:28

hard to deal with that level of ignorance,

14:31

right.

14:42

I mean, I think that generally speaking, when we hear experts

14:45

speak on a topic, if they change

14:48

their mind a few months later, we

14:50

find it extremely disconcerting and frankly

14:52

like it kind of hurts their credibility right

14:54

to say, I mean, you should it should

14:57

be something where that we can understand

14:59

that some and says I've learned something new and now I've changed

15:02

my opinion or I've changed my findings

15:04

on this thing, and you can listen to it because I'm an expert.

15:06

But I think generally speaking, when people change

15:08

their tune and we don't see you don't see all of the background

15:10

work that goes into someone to Fauci saying

15:13

oh, okay, we thought you didn't have to wear a mask, but now you

15:15

do, or whatever it is, it just feels like, oh,

15:17

he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, right, like

15:19

that?

15:19

Exactly, Yeah, I find I find

15:21

that like looking to when people

15:23

change their mind, looking to when I changed my mind, and

15:26

like the things that I was wrong about

15:28

in the pandemic is often the

15:30

most interesting and

15:32

profound sort of insights that you get

15:35

is going like, exactly

15:37

what was it that caused me to

15:39

be so sure about this, you know, on

15:41

day one? And and what

15:43

was it that I was so wrong about that caused

15:45

me to force my mind to be changed on day

15:47

two? You know, it's not really

15:50

an economics books. One of the main

15:52

things that I was wrong about

15:54

was the whole idea the

15:56

recession had been caused by the

15:59

virus, and therefore

16:01

we would need to get a grip on the virus

16:03

in order to get out of through a session. And

16:05

in fact, we got out of the recession and had this incredibly

16:08

fast and strong recovery without getting a grip

16:10

on the virus at all.

16:11

Right, I mean a lot of this conversation has been about

16:14

very dark moments during the pandemic and sort

16:16

of how society, you know, was

16:18

collapsing in on itself. But there's actually the

16:21

book has a lot of bits in it about

16:23

how kind of amazing the

16:26

resilience of the economy and of people

16:29

was around this virus

16:31

and around this kind of completely unexpected

16:34

moment. We just recently,

16:36

my wife and I, with my brother in law

16:38

and a sister in law, opened a bookstore.

16:41

And it's like, I've never done anything in retail.

16:43

I know nothing about retail. And you've

16:46

talked about the amount of new people starting

16:48

businesses during the pandemic

16:51

and sort of this attitude of like you

16:53

only and especially bookstores.

16:54

Have you seen how many independent bookstores that've

16:56

opened up in the post? He is that's true?

16:58

Is that is there a huge boom independent bookstores?

17:00

I mean that sounds right to me.

17:02

But yeah, I mean, like literally this morning

17:04

I was walking past Bradley Tusk's new bookstore

17:06

on Orchard Street.

17:07

Oh yeah, Bradley, task you.

17:10

It's like but I mean like it's you know, it's

17:12

it's improbable for Joshua Polski to

17:14

open the book, so it's equally improbable for Bradleey

17:16

test work. Right.

17:17

Well, it's one of these things, right, it makes sense, like

17:19

tons of retail space suddenly opened up everywhere,

17:22

right, I mean, think about how many retail

17:24

businesses. I mean, this is sort of depressing, but there

17:26

were a lot of retail businesses that did not

17:28

make it or did not make it in their in their

17:31

pre pandemic form through the pandemic,

17:34

right, Like obviously

17:36

restaurants had it, had difficulties, but there

17:38

were lots of other places.

17:40

But this is a really good

17:42

example, right, is that, yes,

17:44

we saw a bunch of restaurant closures,

17:46

but what we forget is

17:49

that restaurants are just a terrible business to be.

17:51

And then the kind of people.

17:51

Who opened ninety restaurants fail,

17:53

I think is that this is the this is the statistic

17:56

that people we allect. Yeah, and

17:58

and you know, it's partly because it's a bad

18:00

business to be, and then partly because the kind of people who

18:02

opened restaurants are good at making food and less

18:04

good at running businesses. If

18:06

you look at the number of restaurants that failed during the pandemic,

18:09

like it was high, but it's always high. It wasn't

18:11

so much higher than normal. And

18:14

amazingly, the thing that astonished me was

18:17

that I saw in New York

18:19

City, which had some of the strictest

18:22

anti indoor dining rules in

18:24

the country, just an astonishing

18:27

number of new restaurants opening up, right,

18:29

And You're like, who the hell would

18:32

open up a new restaurant in the face of

18:34

like basically just economics that

18:36

make no sense at all, and yet people did it

18:38

over and over again.

18:39

Right, Well, I mean this is That's one of the things that I think is

18:41

so interesting about about some of what

18:43

you talk about, not just the really

18:45

depressing dark shit that happened during the pandemic,

18:47

but so much of it that goes against

18:50

what our expectations would have been and has thrown

18:52

so many pieces of the economy into such

18:54

an unexplored or unknown state.

18:56

I think that's a I mean, people people

18:58

deciding to quit their jobs and open

19:00

businesses. This apparently was the thing, people quitting

19:03

their jobs because they just didn't like it

19:05

and going fuck it, I'm going to get another job. This was

19:07

right. This happened in huge numbers

19:10

during during the pandemic, correct, the Great

19:12

Resignation. Yeah,

19:14

and like that's an unusual that's not a

19:16

normal thing that people do. I mean, most people

19:18

stick with it. Most people are like, I need this job.

19:21

But this was this was the main theme

19:23

that runs through the book, or one of the main things. It's this idea

19:25

of yolo, right, right, and

19:28

that a mass mortality event,

19:31

you know, like COVID which killed six

19:33

million people and one million Americans,

19:36

Like that reminds you of how precious

19:38

life is, especially when it's so top

19:40

of mind for so long, and you're like, why

19:43

on earth would I spend my one

19:45

precious life working for some boss

19:48

that I hate, you know, And when

19:50

I have this one life and I'm going

19:52

to make the most of it and people, I'm going to follow my

19:55

dreams. And people did this over and over again

19:57

in America and around the world, but especially

20:00

in the US. They had this opportunity. There

20:02

was an eviction moratorium, right, which

20:04

was imposed by the Center for Disease Controls,

20:07

and like, you know, this is

20:09

kind of amazing that this was a public health.

20:11

Thing that they did.

20:12

They were like, we can't have people being

20:14

evicted out into the street when there's a pandemic

20:17

raging, but that eviction moratorium

20:20

wound up helping enormously

20:22

in terms of like new company formation. People

20:25

are like, I can actually take a risk now because I don't

20:27

need to worry about losing.

20:28

My house, right, I

20:30

mean, weirdly, it almost makes a great argument

20:33

for like the universal income,

20:35

universal basic income, or you know, socialism

20:38

on some grander scale. I mean, it does seem

20:40

to be like, with just a little bit of help from

20:42

the government, there's all sorts of understain

20:44

and good things that can happen to people.

20:47

Again, I'm not making the argument, but it

20:49

does seem to suggest that a little

20:51

bit more help, a top down

20:53

help, can be quite a tool

20:56

for humanity at large.

20:59

One of the chapters I have in

21:01

the book is basically an extended metaphor

21:03

about Steve Mnushin is

21:06

superhero. You know. Again,

21:08

people don't love to read that because

21:11

he was such a lickspittle

21:13

when it came to Trump, But in terms

21:15

of fiscal policy, he did really amazing things,

21:17

and we did really see that

21:21

taking you know, fourteen

21:24

hundred dollars checks and just depositing them into everyone's

21:26

bank account had astonishingly powerful

21:29

effects on the American

21:31

economy and on making people happier that we

21:34

just saw a new survey count come

21:36

out last week saying that never

21:39

in the history of polling have people been

21:41

happier in their jobs than they are right now.

21:44

I mean, that's interesting because you don't get you get the

21:46

impression that, well, at least you get the impression

21:49

from certain political parties that people are in just

21:51

like absolutely dire states right now or

21:54

dire strait. Rather, are we better

21:56

off or worse off in America right now than

21:58

we were pre pandemic. There's pieces of this that

22:00

would suggest that we're better off, but like, what is the

22:03

actual state of play? Because politically

22:06

you can't get a real read on it.

22:08

So I mean, there

22:10

are lots of ways to measure that, and there

22:13

is a very strong and important

22:17

school of thought that basically just says, I'm

22:20

sorry, what a million

22:22

people just died, some like large

22:25

multiple of that are suffering from

22:27

long COVID and will continue to do so for many

22:29

years. You know, We've had this extraordinarily

22:32

traumatic mass mortality

22:34

event. We've had a huge mental

22:37

health crisis, especially from children who weren't

22:39

able to socialize in the way that they need to be able

22:41

to do to develop and

22:43

so on and so forth, and like, how

22:45

can you even ask whether this was

22:48

good or bad because it was obviously

22:50

terrible.

22:50

Well, I mean, it's obviously bad. I mean, and there's

22:52

no person who wouldn't say, like, I would have rather

22:54

not done the pandemic. I mean.

22:56

But then, you know, you look at the

22:58

economy is incredibly strong. Unemployment

23:00

is at record lows. Black unemployment

23:03

is below five percent for the first time ever.

23:06

You have people happier in their jobs than

23:08

they've ever been. There was this great reset. People

23:10

got to rebuild and

23:12

rediscover what they wanted and

23:16

economically and psychologically,

23:20

there is a case to be made that we are

23:22

really actually in a better place

23:24

now that you know, those of

23:26

us who are capable of working from home

23:29

have much more flexibility, much more happiness.

23:31

That the pandemic has allowed us to

23:35

look at our lives and get rid of the things we didn't

23:37

like and double down on the things

23:39

we wanted to double down on. And

23:42

we have this increase in compassion,

23:44

and we have now a

23:47

proof of concept of the world

23:49

coming together to

23:51

act in unity to address

23:54

a major existential risk. You

23:56

know, in March twenty twenty, everyone

23:59

just stopped in order to bendicov and

24:01

buy us time to develop therapeutics

24:03

and vaccines and stuff. And right, the world

24:05

did that collectively and it worked.

24:08

And if we can do that, then maybe,

24:10

just maybe we can

24:13

come together to address climate change,

24:15

you know, which is something which I think twenty twenty,

24:17

like no one it wasn't even possible.

24:20

Now I'm not saying it's likely, but it's possible.

24:22

Right. Well, I mean you need a mortal

24:25

threat, direct mortal threat, I think, to get

24:27

people to come together. I mean did people First off,

24:29

did people come together? Because I mean my

24:31

recollection of yes, of course, there was this

24:34

moment where we all stopped. That definitely happened.

24:36

There was definitely a moment where we went from

24:39

this is going to blow over, This is just you

24:42

know, it's just gonna be a few weeks of weirdness and

24:44

then everythy's gonna be fine. I mean, I don't know who actually

24:46

thought that, but certainly there was some sense in the air.

24:49

I remember being in a meeting where

24:52

people were like, this is going to be over in a couple

24:54

of weeks. It's like one or two weeks before

24:56

lockdown. I was in a meeting with some people,

24:59

and they were like, I think this is just going to it's like a

25:01

week or two, people are going to feel better, they're

25:03

going to come back.

25:04

Well, it wasn't even that, it wasn't even a predictive

25:06

thing. It was just it was so anything

25:09

else was so inconceivable. Right of

25:11

if you remember, after after nine

25:13

to eleven, there was a

25:15

lot of physical devastation

25:18

in Lower Manhattan, which happened to

25:20

be also where the stock market was, and

25:23

it was so important for the stock

25:25

market for people to physically come

25:28

into work in the stock

25:30

market building that they

25:33

had to close the stock market for like three or

25:35

four days until they could, like you know, get

25:37

rid of all of the ash and allow people back

25:39

in. And that

25:41

was the world in two thousand and one.

25:44

The entire business

25:47

world basically couldn't work unless

25:49

people came back to the office. And so if people were

25:51

being told you need to stay out of the

25:53

office for like today and maybe

25:56

tomorrow, people are like, Okay, I'll stay out

25:58

today and maybe tomorrow. But obviously, you

26:00

know, this is not a world where we can do this

26:02

for more than a few days at a time, Like

26:05

just n nine to eleven, We're going to have to go back and

26:07

reopen. So the market's going to reopen. Except

26:10

that's not what happened. You know, all

26:12

of the banks found that they

26:14

could continue operating. Every bank in the

26:16

world basically continued operating without

26:18

people coming into the office. Right The markets,

26:21

you know, went down, but they were open,

26:23

and we almost immediately

26:26

in the early days of March twenty twenty, managed

26:28

to see the economy moving. I mean, you

26:30

and I are journalists. We were working more feverishly

26:33

than you know, anyone, and

26:35

we not on anyone. There were a lot of

26:37

people working hard. We're not working that

26:40

hard, but we we you

26:42

know, we were working, and we were working

26:44

hard, and we were working harder than normal,

26:46

and we were producing more normal and our

26:49

work was more important than normal. And

26:52

what we were doing was entirely

26:55

remote. And we discovered that we could on

26:57

the fly build this new system

26:59

of the means of production

27:02

could be distributed in the way that no one really understood

27:04

that it was possible before that.

27:06

I wrote a piece early on in the pandemic

27:08

called Thank God for the Internet, which was the

27:10

first time in a long time that I had been like,

27:13

I don't know, you probably have the same feeling where

27:15

you spend many years on the Internet.

27:18

Then you saw the worst of the Internet and sort of the Trump

27:20

era, Like, in my opinion, the Internet

27:23

that I loved, that I thought was so such a wonderful

27:25

playground became like a kind

27:27

of nightmare zone for the

27:29

Trump most of the Trump years, and

27:32

then the pandemic happened, and it was like, ah,

27:34

the culmination of all of the worst things. It's like,

27:36

now we're literally like dying. Now we're all going

27:38

to die. And there was a pretty

27:40

early period. I mean when I wrote about

27:42

it, it was Moe Williams, who

27:45

it writes kids books Don't Let the Pigeon

27:47

Drive the Bus. I don't know if you're familiar with the book

27:50

series or not, but he had was

27:52

doing these like live let's all draw

27:54

together workshops on YouTube and it was

27:56

like, you know, hundreds of thousands of kids like

27:59

watching and doing that, and she was doing

28:01

it, and I was like, holy fuck, you know, God,

28:03

what would life be like like?

28:05

Yeah, for as bad as the Internet has seen for the

28:08

last several years, you

28:10

know, it's impossible to imagine

28:12

imagine the pandemic with no Internet. I

28:15

mean, to your point about the nineteen eighteen

28:17

you know, flu People didn't have a

28:19

way to communicate really with each other about

28:21

what was going on or how they were doing, or techniques

28:24

to stay alive or any of those things.

28:26

Right, Yeah, you know after nine to eleven,

28:30

the logacy basically sprung up.

28:32

Nine eleven was this late big thing that everyone decided

28:35

to blog about and that you

28:37

like, have you heard of nine to eleven early blogs?

28:40

I remember this thing eleven very very

28:42

like nine to eleven eccentric. But

28:45

back then, you know, we had

28:48

this very open and free wheeling and

28:50

fabulous and fun Internet, but

28:52

it definitely didn't have

28:56

the kind of bandwidth to have live

28:58

videos streaming, right, and yeah,

29:01

almost everyone with Internet had

29:04

enough had enough bandwidth

29:06

to do live video streaming. Come twenty

29:09

twenty was enormous for

29:11

Moe Williams. YouTube's for you

29:13

know, allowing the zoom

29:16

calls and the facetimes

29:19

Dot Club kept us together.

29:21

There was the Clubhouse, which wasn't video,

29:23

but yeah, there was you know, I remember

29:27

in the twenty twenty election there was this crazy

29:30

fundraiser for the Democrats which is basically

29:32

the entire living cast of the

29:34

Princess Bride or getting together and just like

29:37

rereading the whole thing, and it was

29:39

just it felt like a very magical, remote

29:42

thing.

29:42

They did that imagine They had that Imagine video

29:44

with Galgado that I

29:46

said about that the better. Yeah.

29:48

But and then more, you know, prosaically

29:51

we had Slack and

29:53

Zoom, which you know, saved countless

29:56

companies. They came through in this

29:59

clutch time when they when needed most right,

30:01

and we managed to get through this

30:04

period of like, you know, shit, how

30:06

are we going to be able to cope

30:08

without offices? And mostly

30:11

we did too. I think everyone's surprised.

30:23

I mean, I remember having this realization on a

30:25

fairly regular basis, or this kind of thought that

30:28

in a popular fiction when the pandemic

30:31

is depicted or an apocalyptic sort

30:33

of world ending event, which is how COVID

30:36

felt at the beginning, you imagine

30:38

you're like fighting zombies or people are dying

30:40

like you know, their heads are exploding around you or whatever kind

30:42

of you know, total like apocalyptic insanity.

30:45

Nobody made a movie or wrote

30:47

a book about how like the apocalypse would

30:49

be you sitting at home like working like

30:52

you you'd be exactly like on

30:54

slack, like no think about the I mean I remember,

30:56

you know, at the time you

30:59

know, at that time, I was managing a bunch of different news

31:01

teams, and I would sit in slack with them and you'd

31:03

be like covering the news, you know, talking about

31:05

like oh, Fauci says, now you've got to wear a mask

31:07

or you're going to die, and like, oh, it's like

31:10

now it's definitely airborne and it's coming through the events

31:12

and whatever. You know, you were on slack.

31:14

You weren't like in a bunker, yeah right,

31:17

you were looking out the window and

31:19

not able to interact with humanity. But

31:21

other than that, everything seemed normal, right,

31:24

Like I mean normal with quotes around it.

31:26

But I had a pre existing

31:29

intellectual awareness that a global

31:32

pandemic could strike at any time. But

31:34

when I thought about what it

31:36

might be like to live through a pandemic, and

31:38

I didn't think about it very often. What

31:41

I thought about were, you know, people

31:43

getting sick, people dying, you

31:45

know, And then if you read about plagues,

31:47

that's what you read about, the boobos,

31:50

the deaths. That what I called in the book the moor Ryan

31:52

vectus, which for those of you who don't have digitens

31:55

to hand, just means rats. Yeah,

31:59

most of us, not sick, most of the

32:01

time, but we were distanced,

32:03

and so the experience of COVID was not one of the sick,

32:05

right, The experiences COVID was one

32:07

of of like, what the hell am

32:10

I going to do with my kids when they're not at

32:12

school?

32:12

Yeah, I mean most people didn't get really sick, sort of

32:14

one of the one of the problems with COVID

32:17

not and this is a good thing, it's a great thing, but like

32:19

one of the issues with educating people are making

32:21

people feel like it was real. I feel

32:24

like, was that it was

32:26

you didn't feel it if a family

32:28

member didn't die, right, or

32:31

if you didn't know a good friend who died or got

32:33

really sick and was you know, near death or whatever, you

32:35

didn't feel like that kind of palpable. There

32:37

wasn't a sense that it was happening at all.

32:39

And that's why I think a lot of people kind of went crazy,

32:41

right, Like a lot of people were like, why are we

32:43

still wearing masks? Why do we

32:46

have to stay home? I Mean a big part of what

32:48

happened there was like a little bit of people

32:51

are kind of like, well, if I don't see it, and if I don't feel

32:53

it, if I don't hear it, like is it even really happening,

32:55

Which is a kind of a deranged way to think about

32:57

it. But you know, I

33:00

mean you mentioned like this sort of Yolo mentality

33:02

which runs through everything that happened

33:05

or many things that happened with the economy and with the

33:07

way we work and the way we live, and that

33:09

so much what the book is about is the sense of like you

33:11

only live once, I mean literally right like that, you

33:14

know, suddenly your life feels much

33:16

more precious. And also

33:18

you start thinking about, well, if this is the if

33:21

it's the end times or whatever, maybe I had to do the

33:23

things that I wasn't going to do or try the things

33:25

I never tried. Obviously, the

33:27

Yolo mentality, a lot of that stems from

33:29

the use of that term, stems from what happened

33:31

with Wall Street bets and Meme

33:33

stocks and NFTs

33:36

as a companion and crypto as a companion

33:38

to that, Like if this moment of really

33:41

weird things like you're talking about, Like we've talked about

33:44

a lot like mass economic sort of things, but there

33:46

was this thing about how money started

33:48

to seem to people that I feel like is very unique

33:51

to this moment can you talk a little bit about like the

33:53

game stop, the sort of meme stock moment

33:56

and how that was juiced by or

33:58

if it was juiced by the pan.

34:00

Oh, I mean, it could never have happened without the pandemic.

34:03

You had a whole bunch of people sitting at

34:05

home. I guess I say, like they weren't worried about

34:07

getting evicted.

34:09

Like I'm good time to trade.

34:11

There was an eviction moratorium. They you know, they

34:13

had a lot of time on their hands, and they had

34:15

fourteen hundred stimulus checks, fourteen

34:18

hundred dollars stimulus checks sitting

34:20

in their bank account needing to be spent on something,

34:23

and they had for the first time the

34:26

opportunity to engage in in

34:29

genuinely social stock market

34:31

speculation that you know, Wall

34:33

Street bets was the most prominent

34:36

of the social vectors where

34:38

people would trade trading ideas. But

34:41

you know, for all that people had tried to do

34:44

like social trading in the past, it never

34:46

really took off in the way that it did in the

34:49

early months of twenty twenty one. And

34:51

at the same time, yeah, there was this

34:53

feeling that money had ceased

34:56

to have any real meaning, you know, it's not

34:58

something you know, we were spending it on crazy things

35:01

because what else were you going to do? Right, And

35:05

there was a lot of it sloshing around the economy

35:07

because of all of the fiscal stimulus, and

35:11

instead of investing being this like very

35:13

serious kind of like I should save

35:16

up carefully every month.

35:18

And write and put a little on the four oh one k or

35:21

whatever.

35:21

Yeah, you know, it just became it became

35:23

this game. It became a fun game,

35:26

and it became a way to get rich quick, right, And

35:28

you realized everyone realized on some level

35:30

they probably weren't going to get

35:32

rich quick, but like, at least it

35:34

would be a fun way to try right, right,

35:37

and investing for many people,

35:39

you know, even back in the fifties

35:42

and sixties, you know, it was always like an

35:44

enjoyable hobby that certain

35:46

type of like white men would trade stock

35:49

tips on the golf course, and you know it was social

35:52

in that sense. It just was turbo

35:54

judged. It was much faster, and it was much more aggressive,

35:56

and it was much more like you know, going

35:59

to the moon and swapping

36:01

between meme stocks and cryptocurrencies

36:04

and should we buy a you know, monkey

36:07

jpeg because that's going to make

36:09

us rich.

36:11

It's very easy to understand people going, hey,

36:13

we're all going to invest in this thing, or like, actually we

36:15

can, we can pump this stock up if we all

36:17

go in on it or whatever. You know, as

36:19

a group, a social kind of experiment that makes

36:21

a lot of sense. It makes a lot less sense when

36:24

it is the monkey jpeg when

36:26

it is this esoteric. I mean, as

36:28

soon as NFT's like that, just the hint

36:31

of it being an idea started,

36:34

it became like a multi

36:37

million billion dollar business, right, I mean,

36:39

it became a It was like, I mean, what's the timeline

36:41

from like NFTs. I mean, I remember. What I

36:43

do remember is that at the time there

36:45

was we had a website called input, which is and

36:48

rest and peace no longer exists, like many

36:50

of the things have begun during the pandemic. But

36:52

we did an article on NFTs in

36:55

I want to say, fall

36:57

of twenty nineteen, and by

36:59

the summer of twenty twenty, it

37:02

was like people, the people thing

37:04

was happening. I mean, when was his sophobes

37:07

with sophobes He had Christie's.

37:09

Yeah, there were these two, these

37:11

two like crypto whales, started bidding

37:14

against each other. To try and and

37:16

I think it was almost coordinated that

37:19

they both wanted the

37:21

biggest possible number for that peace,

37:25

not because they thought

37:27

it was worth it, but because

37:30

and they were quite right about this that like if

37:32

they could get it to be worth more

37:34

than like you know, Jess John's

37:37

or a Picasso or Velaskaz, then

37:39

at that point that would ratify

37:42

NFTs as an asset

37:44

class and everyone would just start buying all

37:46

manner about NFTs.

37:48

And that's exactly what happened. I'd be so it.

37:50

Really really kicked off the NFT frenzy.

37:53

And you know, people forget that

37:56

NFTs were really invented by

38:00

and Neil Dash and Kevin McCoy

38:02

back in like twenty fourteen, but no

38:04

one really noticed, no one really cared, and

38:07

then they just kind of sat there

38:09

hibernating for a while until until

38:12

the pandemic just came along to make

38:16

the whole thing explode.

38:17

Well, people are just like, Okay, maybe there's something we can

38:19

there's an idea we can pull off the shelf. We're running

38:21

low on ideas right now, so I mean

38:23

it's interesting. And also a Neil wrote a piece I

38:26

believe like at the peak of NFT. What

38:29

is the what is the word for when people are buying

38:31

things blindly like maniacs. There's

38:33

some word for this that I can't think of, but tulipmania.

38:36

Yeah, tulip mania.

38:38

I do I do in the book when I my

38:40

my copy editor was very

38:44

buy the book in terms of like, whenever I used an

38:46

acronym, I'd always do it to spell out what it

38:48

stood for, right, But when it came to NFTs,

38:50

I insisted that we just said

38:52

that what this stands for is newfangled tulips.

38:57

Is that in the book? Cause it's in the book? Okay?

38:59

I bought it over that, But I was reading the NFT

39:01

part. Actually I highlighted a bit from the NFT part.

39:03

You say, connoisseurship in the NFT world

39:06

was worthless. Art was valued not on

39:08

its intrinsic qualities, but rather on its status

39:10

as a meme. Then I put a question mark next

39:12

to it, because is that not just

39:15

what art is? You say intrinsic,

39:17

but what is intrinsic about? And by the way, I'm not

39:19

defending NFT art, much of which is astonishingly

39:22

bad. Like I mean, I've said

39:25

this before. I might have even said it on the last podcast

39:27

that I considered the NFT Boom to be the Olympics

39:29

of bad art. And I will take

39:32

that one, you know, I will stand by that one until I die.

39:34

But isn't art really just

39:36

about what is valuable? I mean, yes, I understand

39:38

there's critics, and I understand there's a classical definition

39:41

of what is great art, and

39:43

there's a market built around that. But

39:45

is it not really just the same

39:47

idea? Yep?

39:48

I read about this in the book A bit right, that we

39:51

are seeing the

39:54

meme ification of the world, Like

39:57

the uh the people are buying

39:59

is younger and younger and less

40:02

and less sport because it's particularly important

40:04

or particularly good, right, you know. The

40:06

classic example would be someone like Couse,

40:09

who sells for millions even though his art

40:11

is objectively terrible, and I think most of the people

40:13

who buy it understand his arts I

40:15

mean objectively terrible.

40:17

But I've actually been in context when

40:19

if you look at cause the cause

40:21

art in context of what it is, where it comes

40:23

from, and how was initially expressed,

40:26

has some historical context

40:29

and also legitimately was kind

40:31

of a new form at the beginning

40:34

of its sort of well.

40:35

I mean Okay, so it does come

40:37

out of a tradition in the street

40:40

art that is real and interesting,

40:42

and there are real and interesting street artists. I

40:44

don't know if he was ever like he

40:47

was briefly a street artist, but he came much later,

40:49

like there were much more important and much

40:51

better street artists.

40:52

Again, I'm not making a case for causes

40:55

like a great but I can understand that I can

40:57

understand the market for cause.

40:58

The second coming of like John Michelle Baska

41:00

or even Keith Herring. He is not right,

41:03

right, but put that to one side,

41:05

Like, you're absolutely right that

41:08

the level of connoisseurship needed

41:11

to understand the art

41:13

that people get really excited about has

41:16

been declining steadily for

41:18

decades, and that

41:21

trend accelerated during the pandemic.

41:24

And the art that sells to millions is

41:26

getting dumber and dumber, and

41:28

the art that requires a large

41:30

amount of connoisseurship. You know, if you are

41:33

trying to sell some beautiful seventeenth

41:36

century Dutch still life or something, you

41:38

know, the number of people who are interested in that

41:41

is getting smaller and smaller, right,

41:43

because they're all too busy chasing some

41:46

you know, twenty five year old African

41:48

Bundakin, who is going to be you know, here today

41:50

and gone tomorrow.

41:52

I think NFTs, the whole thing is kind

41:54

of breaks down on a fundamental level. I was going to say.

41:56

I was saying that Nil and Neil Dash

41:58

wrote a piece basically saying that underlying

42:00

technology of whatever everybody's using

42:02

right now is not it. It is not the

42:05

thing that would create an NFT in

42:07

the way that I think he and envisioned, or

42:09

that would make sense for the actual like sort of collectibility

42:13

of it, if you want, or the preciousness

42:16

of the singular versus the you

42:18

know, the copies, right, And.

42:20

Just to be clear, like what happened in the NFT

42:22

boom was super interesting that this thing that was

42:24

designed to be a way of

42:27

allowing people to own and

42:30

sell digital art very

42:33

rapidly, like that whole concept of digital

42:36

arn't And like the people thing, which was like how

42:38

what I think of NFT one point zero kind

42:40

of fell by the wayside to be replaced

42:42

by the social thing of the monkey JPEGs

42:45

and the rocks and the squiggles and the penguins

42:47

and all of the other things slurp juices

42:49

where they where they like sell ten thousand

42:52

similar things, and everyone wants to join the

42:54

club, and it's really the metaphor

42:56

there is not the art world anymore, the metaphor

42:59

that is now just the

43:01

limited membership club where everyone

43:04

wants to get a membership

43:06

card. Right.

43:07

But of course, broken down, it breaks down

43:09

to the fundamental level, which is that the thing that

43:11

is so valuable and collectible and only the special

43:14

members can have it was actually just

43:16

an actual jpeg or whatever a

43:18

ping. I mean, they are just it is just

43:21

a copyable image, right, I mean, I think

43:23

that's the But I think all of this it

43:25

kind of brings me like in talking about the NFTs,

43:28

because it's such a it's such a bizarre

43:31

the offshoot of crypto, right, it's an offshoot

43:33

of this kind of state of being, certainly

43:35

of the Wall Street bet stuff of like community sort

43:38

of building around like investing, and

43:40

sort of club membership in these things that

43:42

are centered around money and money making.

43:45

But the things that people did during

43:47

the pandemic and maybe all of the kind of side

43:50

effects of it now that we're experiencing, is

43:52

it a bit that it

43:54

felt like for the first time, maybe ever

43:57

for a lot of people, maybe for everybody

44:00

that whatever the structure of

44:02

reality that we've been living inside of,

44:04

like this thing that we all consider to be a shared

44:07

reality, where there's people who

44:10

know what's happening, and people who don't know what's happening,

44:12

people who are in control, and people who are not in control.

44:15

That to some extent, once you force everybody

44:19

inside their house and once everybody is online,

44:21

and once Fauci one day is saying

44:23

wear a mask and the next day saying don't wear a mask,

44:26

there's a bit of all of this that is like

44:29

stemming from a sense

44:31

that suddenly people had

44:34

an autonomy and lack of control that

44:37

previously had never seemed accessible to

44:39

them. Like on a kind of fundamental philosophical

44:42

basis, Am I crazy for thinking this? Does it even

44:44

make any sense? Or do I sound?

44:46

It totally makes sense? And that's what really undergoded

44:49

great resignation. You know, the phenomenon

44:52

that was incredibly visible in the economic

44:54

statistics about there's this wonderful survey

44:56

called JOLTS, the Job

44:59

Openings and Labor Turnover Survey,

45:01

and it shows you, like how many people quit their job

45:03

that month, and it just went through the roof.

45:05

It was like levels that were just completely

45:08

unprecedented and unthinkable, and

45:10

people left the

45:13

service industry in particular because

45:15

those jobs tend to be quite miserable.

45:17

Right, They paid poorly and they suck well.

45:19

And then what happened is they wound

45:22

up paying much better because the only way that anyone

45:24

could attract people back into those

45:26

jobs was by effectively doubling the amount.

45:28

Of pay they made.

45:29

Right, And so if you were, you know,

45:32

back of House Kirk in a New York City restaurant,

45:34

suddenly you're paid double. Basically, you used

45:36

to be earning eight dollars now, and now you're running

45:38

sixteen dollars an hour. You know, still not making

45:41

millions, but you're doing a lot better than you were, right,

45:43

and you can take that put it right into an NFT.

45:46

We had this.

45:49

Radical reshaking of supply demand.

45:51

I have a chapter called Shaking the extra sketch

45:53

that we had this world that was

45:56

very clearly delineated and made sense,

45:58

and then someone just picked up the whole thing and shook

46:00

it, and we had to rebuild and

46:03

reconstruct something new and different

46:05

and better. And it wasn't necessarily

46:09

going to be bad, but in many many ways it

46:11

really was better and is better and

46:14

that is the phoenix. You know, that is

46:16

the phoenix of the title. That is the Phoenix economy.

46:19

Right, Okay, let me ask you one

46:21

final question, which is does the phoenix

46:23

keep rising? Does the phoenix burn out?

46:25

What happens? Does this keep going? Are

46:28

we is the Phoenix economy now a permanent

46:30

state of like kind of a

46:33

Yolo state of economics

46:35

and then end of society where where anything goes

46:37

or does this settle down into something that looks

46:39

more familiar over time?

46:41

So the legend of the phoenix is one

46:44

of death and ashes

46:47

and then rebirth and then you're

46:49

right that the phoenix kind of just slides

46:52

around for a few hundred years and then

46:54

it is that what it does, and then and then and then

46:56

it dies again, it gets reborn again, and like

46:58

the periods of death and rebirth are

47:01

definitely much less common than

47:03

the normal periods of nothing much

47:05

happening. So, yeah,

47:08

like this current world that

47:10

we have built on the fly in

47:12

response to the pandemic is the world

47:14

that we are going to be in for the next ten

47:17

twenty thirty, I don't know how many years,

47:19

where I doubt we're going to have another major

47:22

conflagration.

47:23

Yeah, I mean, it's decades of this that

47:25

we're going to be living on. Yeah, Okay.

47:28

The reason I wrote this book and not

47:30

you know, various other things that I thought about

47:32

writing about over the years, is that

47:35

I have very strong belief that if you're going to

47:37

write a book, it has to remain relevant

47:39

for you know, five or ten years people at least,

47:42

you know, people should be able to take it down from

47:44

a library book, you know, a library shehelf in ten

47:47

years or fifteen years and read it and learn

47:49

something and have it be relevant and important. And

47:51

I really think this book does that.

47:54

You know, it's trying to explain

47:56

a world where it's going to be with us for a while.

47:59

This isn't like history

48:01

of what happened in much twenty twenty that is interesting

48:04

only to historians. This is an attempt

48:06

to explain and give people the tools

48:08

to understand this

48:11

world that we are now going to be living in, you

48:13

know, especially for you know, gen x is like

48:15

you and me basically for the rest of our lives.

48:18

Yeah, I mean, listen, I think it's a fascinating book.

48:20

I have to say, like I do think it's like an amazing sort

48:22

of capture of a moment

48:25

in culture that is so unlike. I

48:27

mean, I think about this all the time, just so unlike

48:29

anything that has happened and at least of course in

48:31

my lifetime and in your lifetime in terms of like

48:34

just a shift on so many levels.

48:36

And I thought, I think it's I think

48:38

it's fantastic, and I obviously, like you know, want

48:40

to have you on to talk about it because I think everybody should go and read

48:43

it. So Felix, thank you for taking

48:45

the time once again to come on and

48:47

chat with me. And you got to come back and do

48:49

it again sometime. I would love to, Well,

48:57

that is our show, our show.

48:59

Unlike the phoenix, instead of rising

49:01

from the ashes, has now died down back

49:04

into the back into the fire, back into

49:06

the I don't really know. Felix didn't really

49:08

explain what happens to the phoenix exactly. He

49:11

did say there was a cycle, though, which

49:13

is I gotta read. I gotta look into that. Anyhow, I

49:15

thought it was fantastic. I love talking to Felix.

49:18

I think he's just so

49:21

entertaining to listen to and also so smart,

49:24

and he definitely will have him back

49:26

on the next time. There is a terrible

49:29

financial crisis. That's

49:31

the first call I'm making. Anyhow,

49:35

that is our show. We'll be back next week with

49:37

more what future, and as always,

49:39

I wish you and your family the very best.