May 25, 2023 • 49 mins
The pandemic made the global economy weird. Very weird. So weird, in fact, that you could write a book about how many things have gotten upended, turned around, and totally blown up during the peak COVID years. And that's exactly what Felix Salmon has done. Salmon, the chief financial correspondent for Axios and host of Slate's Money podcast, joins Josh to opine on the mystical nature of the "Phoenix Economy" and what it means for the world. Discussed: Granola, ape JPEGs, Canadian truckers.
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Speaker 1 (00:17):
Hey, and welcome to What Future. I'm your host, josh
Wa Tapolski, and I got to say very excited about
today's show. Many many episodes ago, we had on a
gentleman named Felix Salmon who's a terrific journalist. He is
the chief financial correspondent for Axios. You may have heard
of very hot website where you can get all the news,
and he wrote. We actually touched on it last time
(00:38):
we talked. He wrote a book which was not yet
out at the time of us chatting. We were actual
chatting about the bank crisis that was happening. Anyhow, he
has written a book. It's called The Phoenix Economy, Work,
Life and Money in the New Not Normal, And I
got to say I have been reading it. It is fascinating.
It basically details the strange directions the world and money
(00:59):
moved in as the pandemic began and as our lives
got kind of upended. Anyhow, I don't need to tell
you about it. He should tell you about it. So
let's not waste any more time. Let's get to this conversation.
(01:28):
By the way, I've been highlighting the book. I actually
hate when people write in books. And Laura and my
wife is a huge like note taker in the margins
of books, and so there are a lot of times
I'll pick up a book of hers and I'm like,
I can't read this because you have too much even
underlying it's like fascinating, you know, page seventy eight, you know,
(01:48):
reference back to page seventy eight. I'm like, great if
I buy a used book and it's got notations, and
then I'm very upset. But I've been I've been highlighting
and making notes in here, I guess partially because it's
a it's a galley, so fucking I'm like, wow, this
is so liberating, And now i know what everybody's been
freaking out about. Anyhow, tell us what the book is about,
(02:09):
assuming that we have not already picked up and read
it cover to cover in a fevered night of cocaine bis.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
And most of my jelessness will have done. But for
the two of you who haven't done that, it's it's
basically a book about how COVID changed the world. It's
a book about how we had seventy years of broadly speaking,
you know, peace, we had one hundred years without a pandemic.
(02:36):
We had this post World War two international order of
countries cooperating, of India and China being brought into the
global economic system, of everyone trying to cooperate and not
go to war with each other, and it kind of worked.
And that period of relative stability in geopolitical terms was
(03:01):
extremely unusual in historical terms, right Like, that's not how
history normally works. I call it the new not normal
because compared to everything that we used to since since
nineteen forty six, it's not normal. But it's actually a
return to like the pre nineteen forty six normal of
you know, crazy shit happening all over the place, plagues
(03:25):
and wars and depressions, and you know, lots of upside
and lots of downside. You know, people forget how amazing
the twenties and the thirties were for the global economy,
right Like, there are a lot of great things that
happened in between the terrible things that happened, and that
kind of combination of the great and the terrible is
I think this era that we're entering right now.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Right you're saying peace and prosperity were an unusual netlast
it has been completely peaceful or prosperous everywhere. But this
kind of general sense of at least in massive you know,
industrialized nations and things things like that, that we didn't
have huge world wars and pandemics and things of that nature.
That's the abnormal part. And what we are experiencing now
(04:09):
is closer to what would be historically considered normal.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Exactly that we had this very unusual degree of international
cooperation immediately following the Second World what we all came
together and said, like, never again, and we forgot that
in twenty sixteen, and I actually, I actually kind of
date the beginning of the new not normal more to
twenty sixteen into twenty twenty. Twenty sixteen was the date
(04:33):
at which Britain voted to leave the European Union. It
voted to basically jettison all of that kind of international
cooperation that the post war world was built on, and
they were like, you know, fuck this, We're going.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
To go it alone.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Right then, you know, a little bit later in the year,
something very similar happened in the US with the election
of Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
That's right, our own, our own Braxit.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
And there's a case to be made that the COVID
pandemic would have been and much milder and much more contained.
Had Trump not been elected president that you know, a
Clinton administration would not have torn apart the pandemic response
teams that the China US cooperation would have allowed the
(05:15):
CDC and NIH and those people to go into Wuhan
when it was first discovered, and they could have reacted
more quickly. And yeah, we don't know, like these are counterfactuals,
but whatever happened, the result was a pandemic the likes
of which had not been seen in one hundred years.
And in fact, the pandemic that in terms of its
(05:37):
societal impact was orders of magnitude greater than the one
that we had in nineteen eighteen. In nineteen eighteen, the pandemic,
we didn't really notice it very much, even though it
killed a lot of people like that, we could notice it,
could we Well, yeah, it was hard to notice because
you know, media wasn't the same, and you know, people
died of infectious diseases all the time, and it wasn't
(05:59):
obvious that everyone was just dying of the same disease
at the same time to the same degree. It wasn't
in that p one position, if like, the one thing
everyone cared about, mainly because the one thing that everyone
cared about was the First World War, which is like
a bigger deal.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
And in fact, if you look at COVID, the only
thing that knocks COVID out of that p one position
that caused COVID to no longer be the one thing
that everyone thought about and cared about, was the invasion
of Ukraine by Russia.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Right. It was Putin felt his attention waning, and he
was like, how can I get it back? I was
actually going to ask you do you think that happens
in a in a non COVID world? And I know
that's ridiculous, profrior, ridiculous question to ask speculation to have
you make, but yeah, I'm curiously Yeah, so I know
I've been speculating. When you when you look at all
(06:48):
these pieces on the on the map, right, you look
at all the pieces of the puzzle that got kind
of splintered apart, how much does like how much does
it is that accelerated by or is it not accelerated
by this kind of you know, sort of the new
normal that we entered into during COVID. It's a really
good question.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And yeah, look, if I can speculate about how President
Clinton would have reacted to COVID Like I can speculate
a little bit about this, and I do a little
bit in the book. What I say is that pandemics
tend to strengthen authoritarians, and they make societies more authoritarian,
and people in societies want more authoritarian leaders when there's
(07:29):
a pandemic.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
You can see the way that say.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Jacinda da And in New Zealand, who is this kind
of crunchy granola, punchy granola hippie lefty prime minister suddenly
became this like super hard you know, we are going
to lock down and we're going to implement a zero
COVID policy. And it was incredibly popular when she did that.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Right, But isn't that just good leadership? I mean, but no,
there is. You don't have to be like fascist to
be like we should.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Absolutely not. And she's a good example, right, Like, I
don't criticize it at all, but what you see in
countries that have had a lot of plagues and pandemics
tend to be less amenable to sort of liberal freedoms
and tend to be more authoritarian. That's some interesting research
about that, which I put in the book, and what
(08:17):
we saw in, you know, during the pandemic, was not
only put In doubling down on his authoritarian tendencies by
annexing Ukraine or at least trying to, but also an
effective invasion of Hong Kong by China. You know, a
lot of people were too worried about COVID we even noticed,
(08:38):
but the complete loss of freedoms by everyone in Hong
Kong and flagrant violation of the treaty that China signed
with the Brits in nineteen ninety seven, and they just
kind of said, fuck it, you know, you know, we
are just going to stomp on Hong Kong and stamp
out every bit of freedom of speech on the island.
And like again, like would they have done that? Son's COVID.
(09:01):
Maybe it's hard to tell, but it's definitely of a
piece with these other kind of events that were happening
elsewhere in the.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
World, right. I Mean, it's also easy, isn't it. I Mean,
when you've got a pandemic that nobody really knows anything
about and a disease that's killing people, and you're sort
of like don't leave the house or don't get you know,
businesses have to close or whatever. You're doing at that moment,
kind of easy to say, well, also, we're going to
do some other you know, completely unilateral shit because you
(09:28):
know who's going to stop us in this extreme emergency state. Like,
I feel like there are a lot of things that
happened that, even with Biden, that seem completely out of
sync with all like what we know of American politics,
for instance, like giving people money repeatedly, don't let a
crisis go to wasting.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Absolutely, yeah, you get you get to use the cover
of the crisis to do something like, you know, the
Green New Deal that would never go through otherwise.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Right, Like like like what a situation like January sixth
have happened in a non wait a second, that was
twenty two wait a second.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Six, twenty twenty one, twenty one during you're right, you're right.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
It was during the pandemic, right.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
And one of the crazy things about one of the
things about exactly the six was that people were watching
these TV pictures if the rioters swarming across the capitole
and no one was wearing masks and know these crowds,
and everyone in sort of blue America was horrified not
only by the you know way the democracy was falling apart,
(10:30):
he eyes, but also by the fact that, like it was,
they were so proud of their unmasked right status.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Right. Not everywhere, but in a lot of large countries
you had a huge amount of people who were like,
I don't want to wear a mask, I don't want
to participate in whatever this. Maybe maybe not quite as
fervent as they were in America. Canadians had some truckers
we forget, perhaps the great truck, the Brigador.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Canadian truckers were a big deal. But no, even even
in you know, mild Man at New Zealand, which has
thirty times as many sheep as it does people. Even
in New Zealand, there were protesters camped outside the New
Zealand Parliament waving Trump flags.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yes, like shit got weird. And they weren't even that
right wing. They were a lot of them were just
like yoga teachers one thing, you know, who didn't believe
in vaccines.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Yeah, there's we saw a lot of weird crossover like that.
I think during during the pandemic of vaccine skeptics, medicine skeptics,
experts in a field skeptics, we saw I think a
kind of growth of a whole new sort of school
of thought, which is like, if somebody who is a
professional who spent their life studying and learning about something
says this is what's going on, you have to you
(11:42):
just out of pocket reject it and do the opposite
thing that they're telling you to do. You know, a
whole new well of doubt for experts.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
And this is related to the crisis of trust in
institutional legitimacy, which I writes about, but it's something that
is particularly evident in Germany. Weirdly, the thing that you're,
the thing that you're describing of the sort of left
and the right making common cause in vaccine skepticism and
(12:16):
mistrusted authority was probably at least looking across the world
as I was writing this book, it was probably most
visible in Germany. And I don't entirely understand why, and
like I'm half German, I feel like I understand Germany
better than most people. But yeah, it has this kind
of atavistic right wing, which is scary but always a
(12:39):
relatively small minority. But it also has a very strong
tradition of you know, faith in nature and if it's natural,
it's good, and if it's unnatural. It's bad, right, And
you know they love fresh air and udity and that
kind of stuff, right, and all of that starts coming
out in a way that means that they fail to
(13:03):
rise to the occasion of what I call the epistemic crisis,
where the main thing that happened, one of the main
things that happened in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one,
is that we had to just keep on learning new
shit all the time that the scientists were learning new things,
and we were having to update, up rise and say, oh,
(13:24):
this is what I you know, I used to think this,
and now I've got new information, and now I think that.
And you know, the Germans in particular, but like humans
in general, are bout at that. We like to just
have things that we believe and stick with them. And
at some point, you know, you have described us very
well as what happened in America, people just decided, like
you know, there was a point in the early pandemic
(13:46):
where you said that we shouldn't wear masks. So I'm
never going to wear masks, right. You know, someone told
me that like mRNA vaccines are dangerous. Therefore I'm just
going to believe that and I'm not going to take
a vaccine, And these are not really the positions that
they were argued into. It's hard to argue them out
of it, argue people out of it. But more to
the point, it's just psychologically easier to have certainty about
(14:11):
this disease, right, even though you know, Tony Fauci and
everyone else is on the television all the time like,
we don't have certainty about the disease. There's a lot
of things we don't know. We are going to change
our mind. You have to understand, like this is brand new,
are still doing the science, and people just found it
really hard to deal with that level of ignorance, right.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
I mean, I think that generally speaking, when we hear
experts speak on a topic, if they change their mind
a few months later, we find it extremely disconcerting and
frankly like it kind of hurts their credibility right to say,
I mean, you should it should be something where that
we can understand that some and says I've learned something
new and now I've changed my opinion or I've changed
(15:03):
my findings on this thing, and you can listen to
it because I'm an expert. But I think generally speaking,
when people change their tune and we don't see you
don't see all of the background work that goes into
someone to Fauci saying oh, okay, we thought you didn't
have to wear a mask, but now you do, or
whatever it is, it just feels like, oh, he doesn't
know what the fuck he's talking about, right, like that?
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Exactly, Yeah, I find I find that like looking to
when people change their mind, looking to when I changed
my mind, and like the things that I was wrong
about in the pandemic is often the most interesting and
profound sort of insights that you get is going like,
exactly what was it that caused me to be so
(15:39):
sure about this, you know, on day one? And and
what was it that I was so wrong about that
caused me to force my mind to be changed on
day two? You know, it's not really an economics books.
One of the main things that I was wrong about
was the whole idea the recession had been caused by
the virus, and therefore we would need to get a
(16:02):
grip on the virus in order to get out of
through a session. And in fact, we got out of
the recession and had this incredibly fast and strong recovery
without getting a grip on the virus at all.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Right, I mean a lot of this conversation has been
about very dark moments during the pandemic and sort of
how society, you know, was collapsing in on itself. But
there's actually the book has a lot of bits in
it about how kind of amazing the resilience of the
economy and of people was around this virus and around
(16:32):
this kind of completely unexpected moment. We just recently, my
wife and I, with my brother in law and a
sister in law, opened a bookstore. And it's like, I've
never done anything in retail. I know nothing about retail.
And you've talked about the amount of new people starting
businesses during the pandemic and sort of this attitude of
(16:52):
like you only and especially bookstores.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Have you seen how many independent bookstores that've opened up
in the post? He is that's true?
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Is that is there a huge boom independent bookstores? I
mean that sounds right to me.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
But yeah, I mean, like literally this morning I was
walking past Bradley Tusk's new bookstore on Orchard Street.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Oh yeah, Bradley, task you.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
It's like but I mean like it's you know, it's
it's improbable for Joshua Polski to open the book, so
it's equally improbable for Bradleey test work. Right.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Well, it's one of these things, right, it makes sense,
like tons of retail space suddenly opened up everywhere, right,
I mean, think about how many retail businesses. I mean,
this is sort of depressing, but there were a lot
of retail businesses that did not make it or did
not make it in their in their pre pandemic form
through the pandemic, right, Like obviously restaurants had it, had difficulties,
(17:38):
but there were lots of other places.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
But this is a really good example, right, is that, yes,
we saw a bunch of restaurant closures, but what we
forget is that restaurants are just a terrible business to be.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
And then the kind of people.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Who opened ninety restaurants fail, I think is that this
is the this is the statistic that people we allect. Yeah,
and and you know, it's partly because it's a bad
business to be, and then partly because the kind of
people who opened restaurants are good at making food and
less good at running businesses. If you look at the
number of restaurants that failed during the pandemic, like it
was high, but it's always high. It wasn't so much
(18:12):
higher than normal. And amazingly, the thing that astonished me
was that I saw in New York City, which had
some of the strictest anti indoor dining rules in the country,
just an astonishing number of new restaurants opening up, right,
And You're like, who the hell would open up a
(18:32):
new restaurant in the face of like basically just economics
that make no sense at all, and yet people did
it over and over again.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Right, Well, I mean this is That's one of the
things that I think is so interesting about about some
of what you talk about, not just the really depressing
dark shit that happened during the pandemic, but so much
of it that goes against what our expectations would have
been and has thrown so many pieces of the economy
into such an unexplored or unknown state. I think that's
a I mean, people people deciding to quit their jobs
(19:00):
and open businesses. This apparently was the thing, people quitting
their jobs because they just didn't like it and going
fuck it, I'm going to get another job. This was right.
This happened in huge numbers during during the pandemic, correct,
the Great Resignation. Yeah, and like that's an unusual that's
not a normal thing that people do. I mean, most
people stick with it. Most people are like, I need
this job.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
But this was this was the main theme that runs
through the book, or one of the main things. It's
this idea of yolo, right, right, and that a mass
mortality event, you know, like COVID which killed six million
people and one million Americans, Like that reminds you of
how precious life is, especially when it's so top of
mind for so long, and you're like, why on earth
(19:44):
would I spend my one precious life working for some
boss that I hate, you know, And when I have
this one life and I'm going to make the most
of it and people, I'm going to follow my dreams.
And people did this over and over again in America
and around the world, but especially in the US. They
had this opportunity. There was an eviction moratorium, right, which
(20:04):
was imposed by the Center for Disease Controls, and like,
you know, this is kind of amazing that this was
a public health.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Thing that they did.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
They were like, we can't have people being evicted out
into the street when there's a pandemic raging, but that
eviction moratorium wound up helping enormously in terms of like
new company formation. People are like, I can actually take
a risk now because I don't need to worry about losing.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
My house, right, I mean, weirdly, it almost makes a
great argument for like the universal income, universal basic income,
or you know, socialism on some grander scale. I mean,
it does seem to be like, with just a little
bit of help from the government, there's all sorts of
understain and good things that can happen to people. Again,
I'm not making the argument, but it does seem to
(20:50):
suggest that a little bit more help, a top down help,
can be quite a tool for humanity at large.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
One of the chapters I have in the book is
basically an extended metaphor about Steve Mnushin is superhero. You know. Again,
people don't love to read that because he was such
a lickspittle when it came to Trump, But in terms
of fiscal policy, he did really amazing things, and we
did really see that taking you know, fourteen hundred dollars
(21:24):
checks and just depositing them into everyone's bank account had
astonishingly powerful effects on the American economy and on making
people happier that we just saw a new survey count
come out last week saying that never in the history
of polling have people been happier in their jobs than
they are right now.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
I mean, that's interesting because you don't get you get
the impression that, well, at least you get the impression
from certain political parties that people are in just like
absolutely dire states right now or dire strait. Rather, are
we better off or worse off in America right now
than we were pre pandemic. There's pieces of this that
would suggest that we're better off, but like, what is
the actual state of play? Because politically you can't get
(22:06):
a real read on it.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
So I mean, there are lots of ways to measure that,
and there is a very strong and important school of
thought that basically just says, I'm sorry, what a million
people just died, some like large multiple of that are
suffering from long COVID and will continue to do so
(22:28):
for many years. You know, We've had this extraordinarily traumatic
mass mortality event. We've had a huge mental health crisis,
especially from children who weren't able to socialize in the
way that they need to be able to do to
develop and so on and so forth, and like, how
can you even ask whether this was good or bad
because it was obviously terrible.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Well, I mean, it's obviously bad. I mean, and there's
no person who wouldn't say, like, I would have rather
not done the pandemic. I mean.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
But then, you know, you look at the economy is
incredibly strong. Unemployment is at record lows. Black unemployment is
below five percent for the first time ever. You have
people happier in their jobs than they've ever been. There
was this great reset. People got to rebuild and rediscover
what they wanted and economically and psychologically, there is a
(23:20):
case to be made that we are really actually in
a better place now that you know, those of us
who are capable of working from home have much more flexibility,
much more happiness. That the pandemic has allowed us to
look at our lives and get rid of the things
we didn't like and double down on the things we
wanted to double down on. And we have this increase
(23:43):
in compassion, and we have now a proof of concept
of the world coming together to act in unity to
address a major existential risk. You know, in March twenty twenty,
everyone just stopped in order to bendicov and buy us
time to develop therapeutics and vaccines and stuff. And right,
(24:05):
the world did that collectively and it worked. And if
we can do that, then maybe, just maybe we can
come together to address climate change, you know, which is
something which I think twenty twenty, like no one it
wasn't even possible. Now I'm not saying it's likely, but
it's possible.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Right. Well, I mean you need a mortal threat, direct
mortal threat, I think, to get people to come together.
I mean did people First off, did people come together?
Because I mean my recollection of yes, of course, there
was this moment where we all stopped. That definitely happened.
There was definitely a moment where we went from this
is going to blow over, This is just you 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 thought that, but certainly there was some sense
in the air. I remember being in a meeting where
people were like, this is going to be over in
a couple of weeks. It's like one or two weeks
before lockdown. I was in a meeting with some people,
and they were like, I think this is just going
to it's like a week or two, people are going
to feel better, they're going to come back.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Well, it wasn't even that, it wasn't even a predictive thing.
It was just it was so anything else was so inconceivable.
Right of if you remember, after after nine to eleven,
there was a lot of physical devastation in Lower Manhattan,
which happened to be also where the stock market was,
and it was so important for the stock market for
(25:26):
people to physically come into work in the stock market
building that they had to close the stock market for
like three or four days until they could, like you know,
get rid of all of the ash and allow people
back in. And that was the world in two thousand
and one. The entire business world basically couldn't work unless
(25:49):
people came back to the office. And so if people
were being told you need to stay out of the
office for like today and maybe tomorrow, people are like, Okay,
I'll stay out today and maybe tomorrow. But obviously, you know,
this is not a world where we can do this
for more than a few days at a time, Like
just n nine to eleven, We're going to have to
go back and reopen. So the market's going to reopen.
(26:09):
Except that's not what happened. You know, all of the
banks found that they could continue operating. Every bank in
the world basically continued operating without people coming into the office.
Right The markets, you know, went down, but they were open,
and we almost immediately in the early days of March
twenty twenty, managed to see the economy moving. I mean,
(26:30):
you and I are journalists. We were working more feverishly
than you know, anyone, and we not on anyone. There
were a lot of people working hard. We're not working
that hard, but we we you know, we were working,
and we were working hard, and we were working harder
than normal, and we were producing more normal and our
work was more important than normal. And what we were
(26:52):
doing was entirely remote. And we discovered that we could
on the fly build this new system of the means
of production could be distributed in the way that no
one really understood that it was possible before that.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
I wrote a piece early on in the pandemic called
Thank God for the Internet, which was the first time
in a long time that I had been like, I
don't know, you probably have the same feeling where you
spend many years on the Internet. Then you saw the
worst of the Internet and sort of the Trump era, Like,
in my opinion, the Internet that I loved, that I
thought was so such a wonderful playground became like a
(27:27):
kind of nightmare zone for the Trump most of the
Trump years, and then the pandemic happened, and it was like, ah,
the culmination of all of the worst things. It's like,
now we're literally like dying. Now we're all going to die.
And there was a pretty early period. I mean when
I wrote about it, it was Moe Williams, who it
writes kids books Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.
(27:48):
I don't know if you're familiar with the book series
or not, but he had was doing these like live
let's all draw together workshops on YouTube and it was like,
you know, hundreds of thousands of kids like watching and
doing that, and she was doing it, and I was like,
holy fuck, you know, God, what would life be like like? Yeah,
for as bad as the Internet has seen for the
last several years, you know, it's impossible to imagine imagine
(28:13):
the pandemic with no Internet. I mean, to your point
about the nineteen eighteen you know, flu People didn't have
a way to communicate really with each other about what
was going on or how they were doing, or techniques
to stay alive or any of those things.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Right, Yeah, you know after nine to eleven, the logacy
basically sprung up. Nine eleven was this late big thing
that everyone decided to blog about and that you like,
have you heard of nine to eleven early blogs? I
remember this thing eleven very very like nine to eleven eccentric.
But back then, you know, we had this very open
(28:49):
and free wheeling and fabulous and fun Internet, but it
definitely didn't have the kind of bandwidth to have live
videos streaming, right, and yeah, almost everyone with Internet had
enough had enough bandwidth to do live video streaming. Come
twenty twenty was enormous for Moe Williams. YouTube's for you know,
(29:14):
allowing the zoom calls and the facetimes Dot Club kept
us together. There was the Clubhouse, which wasn't video, but yeah,
there was you know, I remember in the twenty twenty
election there was this crazy fundraiser for the Democrats which
is basically the entire living cast of the Princess Bride
(29:35):
or getting together and just like rereading the whole thing,
and it was just it felt like a very magical,
remote thing.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
They did that imagine They had that Imagine video with
Galgado that I said about that the better. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
But and then more, you know, prosaically we had Slack
and Zoom, which you know, saved countless companies. They came
through in this clutch time when they when needed most right,
and we managed to get through this period of like,
you know, shit, how are we going to be able
to cope without offices? And mostly we did too. I
(30:12):
think everyone's surprised.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
I mean, I remember having this realization on a fairly
regular basis, or this kind of thought that in a
popular fiction when the pandemic is depicted or an apocalyptic
sort of world ending event, which is how COVID felt
at the beginning, you imagine you're like fighting zombies or
people are dying like you know, their heads are exploding
around you or whatever kind of you know, total like
(30:44):
apocalyptic insanity. Nobody made a movie or wrote a book
about how like the apocalypse would be you sitting at
home like working like you you'd be exactly like on slack,
like no think about the I mean I remember, you know,
at the time you know, at that time, I was
managing a bunch of different news teams, and I would
sit in slack with them and you'd be like covering
(31:04):
the news, you know, talking about like oh, Fauci says,
now you've got to wear a mask or you're going
to die, and like, oh, it's like now it's definitely
airborne and it's coming through the events and whatever. You know,
you were on slack. You weren't like in a bunker,
yeah right, you were looking out the window and not
able to interact with humanity. But other than that, everything
seemed normal, right, Like I mean normal with quotes around it.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
But I had a pre existing intellectual awareness that a
global pandemic could strike at any time. But when I
thought about what it might be like to live through
a pandemic, and I didn't think about it very often.
What I thought about were, you know, people getting sick,
people dying, you know, And then if you read about plagues,
(31:47):
that's what you read about, the boobos, the deaths. That
what I called in the book the moor Ryan vectus,
which for those of you who don't have digitens to hand,
just means rats. Yeah, most of us, not sick, most
of the time, but we were distanced, and so the
experience of COVID was not one of the sick, right,
The experiences COVID was one of of like, what the
(32:09):
hell am I going to do with my kids when
they're not at school?
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Yeah, I mean most people didn't get really sick, sort
of one of the one of the problems with COVID
not and this is a good thing, it's a great thing,
but like one of the issues with educating people are
making people feel like it was real. I feel like,
was that it was you didn't feel it if a
family member didn't die, right, or if you didn't know
a good friend who died or got really sick and
(32:33):
was you know, near death or whatever, you didn't feel
like that kind of palpable. There wasn't a sense that
it was happening at all. And that's why I think
a lot of people kind of went crazy, right, Like
a lot of people were like, why are we still
wearing masks? Why do we have to stay home? I
Mean a big part of what happened there was like
a little bit of people are kind of like, well,
if I don't see it, and if I don't feel 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 it. But you know, I mean you mentioned like
this sort of Yolo mentality which runs through everything that
happened or many things that happened with the economy and
with the way we work and the way we live,
and that so much what the book is about is
the sense of like you only live once, I mean
literally right like that, you know, suddenly your life feels
(33:16):
much more precious. And also you start thinking about, well,
if this is the if it's the end times or whatever,
maybe I had to do the things that I wasn't
going to do or try the things I never tried. Obviously,
the Yolo mentality, a lot of that stems from the
use of that term, stems from what happened with Wall
Street bets and Meme stocks and NFTs as a companion
(33:37):
and crypto as a companion to that, Like if this
moment of really weird things like you're talking about, Like
we've talked about a lot like mass economic sort of things,
but there was this thing about how money started to
seem to people that I feel like is very unique
to this moment can you talk a little bit about
like the game stop, the sort of meme stock moment
and how that was juiced by or if it was
(33:58):
juiced by the pan.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Oh, I mean, it could never have happened without the pandemic.
You had a whole bunch of people sitting at home.
I guess I say, like they weren't worried about getting evicted.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Like I'm good time to trade.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
There was an eviction moratorium. They you know, they had
a lot of time on their hands, and they had
fourteen hundred stimulus checks, fourteen hundred dollars stimulus checks sitting
in their bank account needing to be spent on something,
and they had for the first time the opportunity to
engage in in genuinely social stock market speculation that you know,
(34:33):
Wall Street bets was the most prominent of the social
vectors where people would trade trading ideas. But you know,
for all that people had tried to do like social
trading in the past, it never really took off in
the way that it did in the early months of
twenty twenty one. And at the same time, yeah, there
was this feeling that money had ceased to have any
(34:56):
real meaning, you know, it's not something you know, we
were spending it on crazy things because what else were
you going to do? Right, And there was a lot
of it sloshing around the economy because of all of
the fiscal stimulus, and instead of investing being this like
very serious kind of like I should save up carefully
(35:17):
every month.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
And write and put a little on the four oh
one k or whatever.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Yeah, you know, it just became it became this game.
It became a fun game, and it became a way
to get rich quick, right, And you realized everyone realized
on some level they probably weren't going to get rich quick,
but like, at least it would be a fun way
to try right, right, and investing for many people, you know,
even back in the fifties and sixties, you know, it
(35:43):
was always like an enjoyable hobby that certain type of
like white men would trade stock tips on the golf course,
and you know it was social in that sense. It
just was turbo judged. It was much faster, and it
was much more aggressive, and it was much more like
you know, going to the moon and swapping between meme
stocks and cryptocurrencies and should we buy a you know,
(36:06):
monkey jpeg because that's going to make us rich.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
It's very easy to understand people going, hey, we're all
going to invest in this thing, or like, actually we can,
we can pump this stock up if we all go
in on it or whatever. You know, as a group,
a social kind of experiment that makes a lot of sense.
It makes a lot less sense when it is the
monkey jpeg when it is this esoteric. I mean, as
soon as NFT's like that, just the hint of it
(36:31):
being an idea started, it became like a multi million
billion dollar business, right, I mean, it became a It
was like, I mean, what's the timeline from like NFTs.
I mean, I remember. What I do remember is that
at the time there was we had a website called input,
which is and rest and peace no longer exists, like
many of the things have begun during the pandemic. But
(36:52):
we did an article on NFTs in I want to say,
fall of twenty nineteen, and by the summer of twenty twenty,
it was like people, the people thing was happening. I mean,
when was his sophobes with sophobes He had Christie's.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Yeah, there were these two, these two like crypto whales,
started bidding against each other. To try and and I
think it was almost coordinated that they both wanted the
biggest possible number for that peace, not because they thought
it was worth it, but because and they were quite
(37:31):
right about this that like if they could get it
to be worth more than like you know, Jess John's
or a Picasso or Velaskaz, then at that point that
would ratify NFTs as an asset class and everyone would
just start buying all manner about NFTs.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
And that's exactly what happened. I'd be so it.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Really really kicked off the NFT frenzy. And you know,
people forget that NFTs were really invented by and Neil
Dash and Kevin McCoy back in like twenty fourteen, but
no one really noticed, no one really cared, and then
they just kind of sat there hibernating for a while
(38:11):
until until the pandemic just came along to make the
whole thing explode.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Well, people are just like, Okay, maybe there's something we
can there's an idea we can pull off the shelf.
We're running low on ideas right now, so I mean
it's interesting. And also a Neil wrote a piece I
believe like at the peak of NFT. What is the
what is the word for when people are buying things
blindly like maniacs. There's some word for this that I
can't think of, but tulipmania. Yeah, tulip mania.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
I do I do in the book when I my
my copy editor was very buy the book in terms
of like, whenever I used an acronym, I'd always do
it to spell out what it stood for, right, But
when it came to NFTs, I insisted that we just
said that what this stands for is newfangled tulips.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Is that in the book? Cause it's in the book? Okay?
I bought it over that, But I was reading the
NFT part. Actually I highlighted a bit from the NFT part.
You say, connoisseurship in the NFT world was worthless. Art
was valued not on its intrinsic qualities, but rather on
its status as a meme. Then I put a question
mark next to it, because is that not just what
art is? You say intrinsic, but what is intrinsic about?
(39:19):
And by the way, I'm not defending NFT art, much
of which is astonishingly bad. Like I mean, I've said
this before. I might have even said it on the
last podcast that I considered the NFT Boom to be
the Olympics of bad art. And I will take that one,
you know, I will stand by that one until I die.
But isn't art really just about what is valuable? I mean, yes,
I understand there's critics, and I understand there's a classical
(39:40):
definition of what is great art, and there's a market
built around that. But is it not really just the
same idea? Yep?
Speaker 2 (39:48):
I read about this in the book A bit right,
that we are seeing the meme ification of the world,
Like the uh the people are buying is younger and
younger and less and less sport because it's particularly important
or particularly good, right, you know. The classic example would
be someone like Couse, who sells for millions even though
(40:11):
his art is objectively terrible, and I think most of
the people who buy it understand his arts I mean
objectively terrible.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
But I've actually been in context when if you look
at cause the cause art in context of what it is,
where it comes from, and how was initially expressed, has
some historical context and also legitimately was kind of a
new form at the beginning of its sort of well.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
I mean Okay, so it does come out of a
tradition in the street art that is real and interesting,
and there are real and interesting street artists. I don't
know if he was ever like he was briefly a
street artist, but he came much later, like there were
much more important and much better street artists.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Again, I'm not making a case for causes like a
great but I can understand that I can understand the
market for cause.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
The second coming of like John Michelle Baska or even
Keith Herring. He is not right, right, but put that
to one side, Like, you're absolutely right that the level
of connoisseurship needed to understand the art that people get
really excited about has been declining steadily for decades, and
(41:20):
that trend accelerated during the pandemic. And the art that
sells to millions is getting dumber and dumber, and the
art that requires a large amount of connoisseurship. You know,
if you are trying to sell some beautiful seventeenth century
Dutch still life or something, you know, the number of
people who are interested in that is getting smaller and smaller, right,
(41:43):
because they're all too busy chasing some you know, twenty
five year old African Bundakin, who is going to be
you know, here today and gone tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
I think NFTs, the whole thing is kind of breaks
down on a fundamental level. I was going to say.
I was saying that Nil and Neil Dash wrote a
piece basically saying that underlying technology of whatever everybody's using
right now is not it. It is not the thing
that would create an NFT in the way that I
think he and envisioned, or that would make sense for
the actual like sort of collectibility of it, if you want,
(42:14):
or the preciousness of the singular versus the you know,
the copies, right, And.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Just to be clear, like what happened in the NFT
boom was super interesting that this thing that was designed
to be a way of allowing people to own and
sell digital art very rapidly, like that whole concept of
digital arn't And like the people thing, which was like
how what I think of NFT one point zero kind
(42:40):
of fell by the wayside to be replaced by the
social thing of the monkey JPEGs and the rocks and
the squiggles and the penguins and all of the other
things slurp juices where they where they like sell ten
thousand similar things, and everyone wants to join the club,
and it's really the metaphor there is not the art
world anymore, the metaphor that is now just the limited
(43:02):
membership club where everyone wants to get a membership card. Right.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
But of course, broken down, it breaks down to the
fundamental level, which is that the thing that is so
valuable and collectible and only the special members can have
it was actually just an actual jpeg or whatever a ping.
I mean, they are just it is just a copyable image, right,
I mean, I think that's the But I think all
of this it kind of brings me like in talking
about the NFTs, because it's such a it's such a
(43:30):
bizarre the offshoot of crypto, right, it's an offshoot of
this kind of state of being, certainly of the Wall
Street bet stuff of like community sort of building around
like investing, and sort of club membership in these things
that are centered around money and money making. But the
things that people did during the pandemic and maybe all
of the kind of side effects of it now that
(43:51):
we're experiencing, is it a bit that it felt like
for the first time, maybe ever for a lot of people,
maybe for everybody that whatever the structure of reality that
we've been living inside of, like this thing that we
all consider to be a shared reality, where there's people
who 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. That to some extent, once you force everybody
inside their house and once everybody is online, and once
Fauci one day is saying wear a mask and the
next day saying don't wear a mask, there's a bit
of all of this that is like stemming from a
sense that suddenly people had an autonomy and lack of
(44:36):
control that previously had never seemed accessible to them. Like
on a kind of fundamental philosophical basis, Am I crazy
for thinking this? Does it even make any sense? Or
do I sound?
Speaker 2 (44:46):
It totally makes sense? And that's what really undergoded great resignation.
You know, the phenomenon that was incredibly visible in the
economic statistics about there's this wonderful survey called JOLTS, the
Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, and it shows you,
like how many people quit their job that month, and
it just went through the roof. It was like levels
(45:06):
that were just completely unprecedented and unthinkable, and people left
the service industry in particular because those jobs tend to
be quite miserable.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Right, They paid poorly and they suck well.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
And then what happened is they wound up paying much
better because the only way that anyone could attract people
back into those jobs was by effectively doubling the amount.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
Of pay they made.
Speaker 2 (45:29):
Right, And so if you were, you know, back of
House Kirk in a New York City restaurant, suddenly you're
paid double. Basically, you used to be earning eight dollars now,
and now you're running sixteen dollars an hour. You know,
still not making millions, but you're doing a lot better
than you were, right, and you can take that put
it right into an NFT.
Speaker 1 (45:46):
We had this.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Radical reshaking of supply demand. I have a chapter called
Shaking the extra sketch that we had this world that
was very clearly delineated and made sense, and then someone
just picked up the whole thing and shook it, and
we had to rebuild and reconstruct something new and different
and better. And it wasn't necessarily going to be bad,
(46:09):
but in many many ways it really was better and
is better and that is the phoenix. You know, that
is the phoenix of the title. That is the Phoenix economy.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Right, Okay, let me ask you one final question, which
is does the phoenix keep rising? Does the phoenix burn out?
What happens? Does this keep going? Are we is the
Phoenix economy now a permanent state of like kind of
a Yolo state of economics and then end of society
where where anything goes or does this settle down into
something that looks more familiar over time?
Speaker 2 (46:41):
So the legend of the phoenix is one of death
and ashes and then rebirth and then you're right that
the phoenix kind of just slides around for a few
hundred years and then it is that what it does,
and then and then and then it dies again, it
gets reborn again, and like the periods of death and
rebirth are definitely much less common than the normal periods
(47:04):
of nothing much happening. So, yeah, like this current world
that we have built on the fly in response to
the pandemic is the world that we are going to
be in for the next ten twenty thirty, I don't
know how many years, where I doubt we're going to
have another major conflagration.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
Yeah, I mean, it's decades of this that we're going
to be living on. Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
The reason I wrote this book and not you know,
various other things that I thought about writing about over
the years, is that I have very strong belief that
if you're going to write a book, it has to
remain relevant for you know, five or ten years people
at least, you know, people should be able to take
it down from a library book, you know, a library
shehelf in ten years or fifteen years and read it
(47:49):
and learn something and have it be relevant and important.
And I really think this book does that. You know,
it's trying to explain a world where it's going to
be with us for a while. This isn't like history
of what happened in much twenty twenty that is interesting
only to historians. This is an attempt to explain and
give people the tools to understand this world that we
(48:11):
are now going to be living in, you know, especially
for you know, gen x is like you and me
basically for the rest of our lives.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
Yeah, I mean, listen, I think it's a fascinating book.
I have to say, like I do think it's like
an amazing sort of capture of a moment in culture
that is so unlike. I mean, I think about this
all the time, just so unlike anything that has happened
and at least of course in my lifetime and in
your lifetime in terms of like just a shift on
so many levels. And I thought, I think it's I
think 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 it. So Felix, thank
you for taking the time once again to come on
and chat with me. And you got to come back
and do it again sometime. I would love to, Well,
that is our show, our show. Unlike the phoenix, instead
(49:01):
of rising from the ashes, has now died down back
into the back into the fire, back into the I
don't really know. Felix didn't really explain what happens to
the phoenix exactly. He did say there was a cycle, though,
which is I gotta read. I gotta look into that. Anyhow,
I thought it was fantastic. I love talking to Felix.
I think he's just so entertaining to listen to and
(49:22):
also so smart, and he definitely will have him back
on the next time. There is a terrible financial crisis.
That's the first call I'm making. Anyhow, that is our show.
We'll be back next week with more what future, and
as always, I wish you and your family the very best.
Hey, and welcome to What Future. I'm your host, josh
Wa Tapolski, and I got to say very excited about
today's show. Many many episodes ago, we had on a
gentleman named Felix Salmon who's a terrific journalist. He is
the chief financial correspondent for Axios. You may have heard
of very hot website where you can get all the news,
and he wrote. We actually touched on it last time
(00:38):
we talked. He wrote a book which was not yet
out at the time of us chatting. We were actual
chatting about the bank crisis that was happening. Anyhow, he
has written a book. It's called The Phoenix Economy, Work,
Life and Money in the New Not Normal, And I
got to say I have been reading it. It is fascinating.
It basically details the strange directions the world and money
(00:59):
moved in as the pandemic began and as our lives
got kind of upended. Anyhow, I don't need to tell
you about it. He should tell you about it. So
let's not waste any more time. Let's get to this conversation.
(01:28):
By the way, I've been highlighting the book. I actually
hate when people write in books. And Laura and my
wife is a huge like note taker in the margins
of books, and so there are a lot of times
I'll pick up a book of hers and I'm like,
I can't read this because you have too much even
underlying it's like fascinating, you know, page seventy eight, you know,
(01:48):
reference back to page seventy eight. I'm like, great if
I buy a used book and it's got notations, and
then I'm very upset. But I've been I've been highlighting
and making notes in here, I guess partially because it's
a it's a galley, so fucking I'm like, wow, this
is so liberating, And now i know what everybody's been
freaking out about. Anyhow, tell us what the book is about,
(02:09):
assuming that we have not already picked up and read
it cover to cover in a fevered night of cocaine bis.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
And most of my jelessness will have done. But for
the two of you who haven't done that, it's it's
basically a book about how COVID changed the world. It's
a book about how we had seventy years of broadly speaking,
you know, peace, we had one hundred years without a pandemic.
(02:36):
We had this post World War two international order of
countries cooperating, of India and China being brought into the
global economic system, of everyone trying to cooperate and not
go to war with each other, and it kind of worked.
And that period of relative stability in geopolitical terms was
(03:01):
extremely unusual in historical terms, right Like, that's not how
history normally works. I call it the new not normal
because compared to everything that we used to since since
nineteen forty six, it's not normal. But it's actually a
return to like the pre nineteen forty six normal of
you know, crazy shit happening all over the place, plagues
(03:25):
and wars and depressions, and you know, lots of upside
and lots of downside. You know, people forget how amazing
the twenties and the thirties were for the global economy,
right Like, there are a lot of great things that
happened in between the terrible things that happened, and that
kind of combination of the great and the terrible is
I think this era that we're entering right now.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Right you're saying peace and prosperity were an unusual netlast
it has been completely peaceful or prosperous everywhere. But this
kind of general sense of at least in massive you know,
industrialized nations and things things like that, that we didn't
have huge world wars and pandemics and things of that nature.
That's the abnormal part. And what we are experiencing now
(04:09):
is closer to what would be historically considered normal.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Exactly that we had this very unusual degree of international
cooperation immediately following the Second World what we all came
together and said, like, never again, and we forgot that
in twenty sixteen, and I actually, I actually kind of
date the beginning of the new not normal more to
twenty sixteen into twenty twenty. Twenty sixteen was the date
(04:33):
at which Britain voted to leave the European Union. It
voted to basically jettison all of that kind of international
cooperation that the post war world was built on, and
they were like, you know, fuck this, We're going.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
To go it alone.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Right then, you know, a little bit later in the year,
something very similar happened in the US with the election
of Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
That's right, our own, our own Braxit.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
And there's a case to be made that the COVID
pandemic would have been and much milder and much more contained.
Had Trump not been elected president that you know, a
Clinton administration would not have torn apart the pandemic response
teams that the China US cooperation would have allowed the
(05:15):
CDC and NIH and those people to go into Wuhan
when it was first discovered, and they could have reacted
more quickly. And yeah, we don't know, like these are counterfactuals,
but whatever happened, the result was a pandemic the likes
of which had not been seen in one hundred years.
And in fact, the pandemic that in terms of its
(05:37):
societal impact was orders of magnitude greater than the one
that we had in nineteen eighteen. In nineteen eighteen, the pandemic,
we didn't really notice it very much, even though it
killed a lot of people like that, we could notice it,
could we Well, yeah, it was hard to notice because
you know, media wasn't the same, and you know, people
died of infectious diseases all the time, and it wasn't
(05:59):
obvious that everyone was just dying of the same disease
at the same time to the same degree. It wasn't
in that p one position, if like, the one thing
everyone cared about, mainly because the one thing that everyone
cared about was the First World War, which is like
a bigger deal.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Right.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
And in fact, if you look at COVID, the only
thing that knocks COVID out of that p one position
that caused COVID to no longer be the one thing
that everyone thought about and cared about, was the invasion
of Ukraine by Russia.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Right. It was Putin felt his attention waning, and he
was like, how can I get it back? I was
actually going to ask you do you think that happens
in a in a non COVID world? And I know
that's ridiculous, profrior, ridiculous question to ask speculation to have
you make, but yeah, I'm curiously Yeah, so I know
I've been speculating. When you when you look at all
(06:48):
these pieces on the on the map, right, you look
at all the pieces of the puzzle that got kind
of splintered apart, how much does like how much does
it is that accelerated by or is it not accelerated
by this kind of you know, sort of the new
normal that we entered into during COVID. It's a really
good question.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And yeah, look, if I can speculate about how President
Clinton would have reacted to COVID Like I can speculate
a little bit about this, and I do a little
bit in the book. What I say is that pandemics
tend to strengthen authoritarians, and they make societies more authoritarian,
and people in societies want more authoritarian leaders when there's
(07:29):
a pandemic.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
You can see the way that say.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Jacinda da And in New Zealand, who is this kind
of crunchy granola, punchy granola hippie lefty prime minister suddenly
became this like super hard you know, we are going
to lock down and we're going to implement a zero
COVID policy. And it was incredibly popular when she did that.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Right, But isn't that just good leadership? I mean, but no,
there is. You don't have to be like fascist to
be like we should.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
Absolutely not. And she's a good example, right, Like, I
don't criticize it at all, but what you see in
countries that have had a lot of plagues and pandemics
tend to be less amenable to sort of liberal freedoms
and tend to be more authoritarian. That's some interesting research
about that, which I put in the book, and what
(08:17):
we saw in, you know, during the pandemic, was not
only put In doubling down on his authoritarian tendencies by
annexing Ukraine or at least trying to, but also an
effective invasion of Hong Kong by China. You know, a
lot of people were too worried about COVID we even noticed,
(08:38):
but the complete loss of freedoms by everyone in Hong
Kong and flagrant violation of the treaty that China signed
with the Brits in nineteen ninety seven, and they just
kind of said, fuck it, you know, you know, we
are just going to stomp on Hong Kong and stamp
out every bit of freedom of speech on the island.
And like again, like would they have done that? Son's COVID.
(09:01):
Maybe it's hard to tell, but it's definitely of a
piece with these other kind of events that were happening
elsewhere in the.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
World, right. I Mean, it's also easy, isn't it. I Mean,
when you've got a pandemic that nobody really knows anything
about and a disease that's killing people, and you're sort
of like don't leave the house or don't get you know,
businesses have to close or whatever. You're doing at that moment,
kind of easy to say, well, also, we're going to
do some other you know, completely unilateral shit because you
(09:28):
know who's going to stop us in this extreme emergency state. Like,
I feel like there are a lot of things that
happened that, even with Biden, that seem completely out of
sync with all like what we know of American politics,
for instance, like giving people money repeatedly, don't let a
crisis go to wasting.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Absolutely, yeah, you get you get to use the cover
of the crisis to do something like, you know, the
Green New Deal that would never go through otherwise.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Right, Like like like what a situation like January sixth
have happened in a non wait a second, that was
twenty two wait a second.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
Six, twenty twenty one, twenty one during you're right, you're right.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
It was during the pandemic, right.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
And one of the crazy things about one of the
things about exactly the six was that people were watching
these TV pictures if the rioters swarming across the capitole
and no one was wearing masks and know these crowds,
and everyone in sort of blue America was horrified not
only by the you know way the democracy was falling apart,
(10:30):
he eyes, but also by the fact that, like it was,
they were so proud of their unmasked right status.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
Right. Not everywhere, but in a lot of large countries
you had a huge amount of people who were like,
I don't want to wear a mask, I don't want
to participate in whatever this. Maybe maybe not quite as
fervent as they were in America. Canadians had some truckers
we forget, perhaps the great truck, the Brigador.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Canadian truckers were a big deal. But no, even even
in you know, mild Man at New Zealand, which has
thirty times as many sheep as it does people. Even
in New Zealand, there were protesters camped outside the New
Zealand Parliament waving Trump flags.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yes, like shit got weird. And they weren't even that
right wing. They were a lot of them were just
like yoga teachers one thing, you know, who didn't believe
in vaccines.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Yeah, there's we saw a lot of weird crossover like that.
I think during during the pandemic of vaccine skeptics, medicine skeptics,
experts in a field skeptics, we saw I think a
kind of growth of a whole new sort of school
of thought, which is like, if somebody who is a
professional who spent their life studying and learning about something
says this is what's going on, you have to you
(11:42):
just out of pocket reject it and do the opposite
thing that they're telling you to do. You know, a
whole new well of doubt for experts.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
And this is related to the crisis of trust in
institutional legitimacy, which I writes about, but it's something that
is particularly evident in Germany. Weirdly, the thing that you're,
the thing that you're describing of the sort of left
and the right making common cause in vaccine skepticism and
(12:16):
mistrusted authority was probably at least looking across the world
as I was writing this book, it was probably most
visible in Germany. And I don't entirely understand why, and
like I'm half German, I feel like I understand Germany
better than most people. But yeah, it has this kind
of atavistic right wing, which is scary but always a
(12:39):
relatively small minority. But it also has a very strong
tradition of you know, faith in nature and if it's natural,
it's good, and if it's unnatural. It's bad, right, And
you know they love fresh air and udity and that
kind of stuff, right, and all of that starts coming
out in a way that means that they fail to
(13:03):
rise to the occasion of what I call the epistemic crisis,
where the main thing that happened, one of the main
things that happened in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one,
is that we had to just keep on learning new
shit all the time that the scientists were learning new things,
and we were having to update, up rise and say, oh,
(13:24):
this is what I you know, I used to think this,
and now I've got new information, and now I think that.
And you know, the Germans in particular, but like humans
in general, are bout at that. We like to just
have things that we believe and stick with them. And
at some point, you know, you have described us very
well as what happened in America, people just decided, like
you know, there was a point in the early pandemic
(13:46):
where you said that we shouldn't wear masks. So I'm
never going to wear masks, right. You know, someone told
me that like mRNA vaccines are dangerous. Therefore I'm just
going to believe that and I'm not going to take
a vaccine, And these are not really the positions that
they were argued into. It's hard to argue them out
of it, argue people out of it. But more to
the point, it's just psychologically easier to have certainty about
(14:11):
this disease, right, even though you know, Tony Fauci and
everyone else is on the television all the time like,
we don't have certainty about the disease. There's a lot
of things we don't know. We are going to change
our mind. You have to understand, like this is brand new,
are still doing the science, and people just found it
really hard to deal with that level of ignorance, right.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
I mean, I think that generally speaking, when we hear
experts speak on a topic, if they change their mind
a few months later, we find it extremely disconcerting and
frankly like it kind of hurts their credibility right to say,
I mean, you should it should be something where that
we can understand that some and says I've learned something
new and now I've changed my opinion or I've changed
(15:03):
my findings on this thing, and you can listen to
it because I'm an expert. But I think generally speaking,
when people change their tune and we don't see you
don't see all of the background work that goes into
someone to Fauci saying oh, okay, we thought you didn't
have to wear a mask, but now you do, or
whatever it is, it just feels like, oh, he doesn't
know what the fuck he's talking about, right, like that?
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Exactly, Yeah, I find I find that like looking to
when people change their mind, looking to when I changed
my mind, and like the things that I was wrong
about in the pandemic is often the most interesting and
profound sort of insights that you get is going like,
exactly what was it that caused me to be so
(15:39):
sure about this, you know, on day one? And and
what was it that I was so wrong about that
caused me to force my mind to be changed on
day two? You know, it's not really an economics books.
One of the main things that I was wrong about
was the whole idea the recession had been caused by
the virus, and therefore we would need to get a
(16:02):
grip on the virus in order to get out of
through a session. And in fact, we got out of
the recession and had this incredibly fast and strong recovery
without getting a grip on the virus at all.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Right, I mean a lot of this conversation has been
about very dark moments during the pandemic and sort of
how society, you know, was collapsing in on itself. But
there's actually the book has a lot of bits in
it about how kind of amazing the resilience of the
economy and of people was around this virus and around
(16:32):
this kind of completely unexpected moment. We just recently, my
wife and I, with my brother in law and a
sister in law, opened a bookstore. And it's like, I've
never done anything in retail. I know nothing about retail.
And you've talked about the amount of new people starting
businesses during the pandemic and sort of this attitude of
(16:52):
like you only and especially bookstores.
Speaker 2 (16:54):
Have you seen how many independent bookstores that've opened up
in the post? He is that's true?
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Is that is there a huge boom independent bookstores? I
mean that sounds right to me.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
But yeah, I mean, like literally this morning I was
walking past Bradley Tusk's new bookstore on Orchard Street.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Oh yeah, Bradley, task you.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
It's like but I mean like it's you know, it's
it's improbable for Joshua Polski to open the book, so
it's equally improbable for Bradleey test work. Right.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Well, it's one of these things, right, it makes sense,
like tons of retail space suddenly opened up everywhere, right,
I mean, think about how many retail businesses. I mean,
this is sort of depressing, but there were a lot
of retail businesses that did not make it or did
not make it in their in their pre pandemic form
through the pandemic, right, Like obviously restaurants had it, had difficulties,
(17:38):
but there were lots of other places.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
But this is a really good example, right, is that, yes,
we saw a bunch of restaurant closures, but what we
forget is that restaurants are just a terrible business to be.
Speaker 1 (17:51):
And then the kind of people.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Who opened ninety restaurants fail, I think is that this
is the this is the statistic that people we allect. Yeah,
and and you know, it's partly because it's a bad
business to be, and then partly because the kind of
people who opened restaurants are good at making food and
less good at running businesses. If you look at the
number of restaurants that failed during the pandemic, like it
was high, but it's always high. It wasn't so much
(18:12):
higher than normal. And amazingly, the thing that astonished me
was that I saw in New York City, which had
some of the strictest anti indoor dining rules in the country,
just an astonishing number of new restaurants opening up, right,
And You're like, who the hell would open up a
(18:32):
new restaurant in the face of like basically just economics
that make no sense at all, and yet people did
it over and over again.
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Right, Well, I mean this is That's one of the
things that I think is so interesting about about some
of what you talk about, not just the really depressing
dark shit that happened during the pandemic, but so much
of it that goes against what our expectations would have
been and has thrown so many pieces of the economy
into such an unexplored or unknown state. I think that's
a I mean, people people deciding to quit their jobs
(19:00):
and open businesses. This apparently was the thing, people quitting
their jobs because they just didn't like it and going
fuck it, I'm going to get another job. This was right.
This happened in huge numbers during during the pandemic, correct,
the Great Resignation. Yeah, and like that's an unusual that's
not a normal thing that people do. I mean, most
people stick with it. Most people are like, I need
this job.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
But this was this was the main theme that runs
through the book, or one of the main things. It's
this idea of yolo, right, right, and that a mass
mortality event, you know, like COVID which killed six million
people and one million Americans, Like that reminds you of
how precious life is, especially when it's so top of
mind for so long, and you're like, why on earth
(19:44):
would I spend my one precious life working for some
boss that I hate, you know, And when I have
this one life and I'm going to make the most
of it and people, I'm going to follow my dreams.
And people did this over and over again in America
and around the world, but especially in the US. They
had this opportunity. There was an eviction moratorium, right, which
(20:04):
was imposed by the Center for Disease Controls, and like,
you know, this is kind of amazing that this was
a public health.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Thing that they did.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
They were like, we can't have people being evicted out
into the street when there's a pandemic raging, but that
eviction moratorium wound up helping enormously in terms of like
new company formation. People are like, I can actually take
a risk now because I don't need to worry about losing.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
My house, right, I mean, weirdly, it almost makes a
great argument for like the universal income, universal basic income,
or you know, socialism on some grander scale. I mean,
it does seem to be like, with just a little
bit of help from the government, there's all sorts of
understain and good things that can happen to people. Again,
I'm not making the argument, but it does seem to
(20:50):
suggest that a little bit more help, a top down help,
can be quite a tool for humanity at large.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
One of the chapters I have in the book is
basically an extended metaphor about Steve Mnushin is superhero. You know. Again,
people don't love to read that because he was such
a lickspittle when it came to Trump, But in terms
of fiscal policy, he did really amazing things, and we
did really see that taking you know, fourteen hundred dollars
(21:24):
checks and just depositing them into everyone's bank account had
astonishingly powerful effects on the American economy and on making
people happier that we just saw a new survey count
come out last week saying that never in the history
of polling have people been happier in their jobs than
they are right now.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
I mean, that's interesting because you don't get you get
the impression that, well, at least you get the impression
from certain political parties that people are in just like
absolutely dire states right now or dire strait. Rather, are
we better off or worse off in America right now
than we were pre pandemic. There's pieces of this that
would suggest that we're better off, but like, what is
the actual state of play? Because politically you can't get
(22:06):
a real read on it.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
So I mean, there are lots of ways to measure that,
and there is a very strong and important school of
thought that basically just says, I'm sorry, what a million
people just died, some like large multiple of that are
suffering from long COVID and will continue to do so
(22:28):
for many years. You know, We've had this extraordinarily traumatic
mass mortality event. We've had a huge mental health crisis,
especially from children who weren't able to socialize in the
way that they need to be able to do to
develop and so on and so forth, and like, how
can you even ask whether this was good or bad
because it was obviously terrible.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
Well, I mean, it's obviously bad. I mean, and there's
no person who wouldn't say, like, I would have rather
not done the pandemic. I mean.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
But then, you know, you look at the economy is
incredibly strong. Unemployment is at record lows. Black unemployment is
below five percent for the first time ever. You have
people happier in their jobs than they've ever been. There
was this great reset. People got to rebuild and rediscover
what they wanted and economically and psychologically, there is a
(23:20):
case to be made that we are really actually in
a better place now that you know, those of us
who are capable of working from home have much more flexibility,
much more happiness. That the pandemic has allowed us to
look at our lives and get rid of the things
we didn't like and double down on the things we
wanted to double down on. And we have this increase
(23:43):
in compassion, and we have now a proof of concept
of the world coming together to act in unity to
address a major existential risk. You know, in March twenty twenty,
everyone just stopped in order to bendicov and buy us
time to develop therapeutics and vaccines and stuff. And right,
(24:05):
the world did that collectively and it worked. And if
we can do that, then maybe, just maybe we can
come together to address climate change, you know, which is
something which I think twenty twenty, like no one it
wasn't even possible. Now I'm not saying it's likely, but
it's possible.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Right. Well, I mean you need a mortal threat, direct
mortal threat, I think, to get people to come together.
I mean did people First off, did people come together?
Because I mean my recollection of yes, of course, there
was this moment where we all stopped. That definitely happened.
There was definitely a moment where we went from this
is going to blow over, This is just you 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 thought that, but certainly there was some sense
in the air. I remember being in a meeting where
people were like, this is going to be over in
a couple of weeks. It's like one or two weeks
before lockdown. I was in a meeting with some people,
and they were like, I think this is just going
to it's like a week or two, people are going
to feel better, they're going to come back.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Well, it wasn't even that, it wasn't even a predictive thing.
It was just it was so anything else was so inconceivable.
Right of if you remember, after after nine to eleven,
there was a lot of physical devastation in Lower Manhattan,
which happened to be also where the stock market was,
and it was so important for the stock market for
(25:26):
people to physically come into work in the stock market
building that they had to close the stock market for
like three or four days until they could, like you know,
get rid of all of the ash and allow people
back in. And that was the world in two thousand
and one. The entire business world basically couldn't work unless
(25:49):
people came back to the office. And so if people
were being told you need to stay out of the
office for like today and maybe tomorrow, people are like, Okay,
I'll stay out today and maybe tomorrow. But obviously, you know,
this is not a world where we can do this
for more than a few days at a time, Like
just n nine to eleven, We're going to have to
go back and reopen. So the market's going to reopen.
(26:09):
Except that's not what happened. You know, all of the
banks found that they could continue operating. Every bank in
the world basically continued operating without people coming into the office.
Right The markets, you know, went down, but they were open,
and we almost immediately in the early days of March
twenty twenty, managed to see the economy moving. I mean,
(26:30):
you and I are journalists. We were working more feverishly
than you know, anyone, and we not on anyone. There
were a lot of people working hard. We're not working
that hard, but we we you know, we were working,
and we were working hard, and we were working harder
than normal, and we were producing more normal and our
work was more important than normal. And what we were
(26:52):
doing was entirely remote. And we discovered that we could
on the fly build this new system of the means
of production could be distributed in the way that no
one really understood that it was possible before that.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
I wrote a piece early on in the pandemic called
Thank God for the Internet, which was the first time
in a long time that I had been like, I
don't know, you probably have the same feeling where you
spend many years on the Internet. Then you saw the
worst of the Internet and sort of the Trump era, Like,
in my opinion, the Internet that I loved, that I
thought was so such a wonderful playground became like a
(27:27):
kind of nightmare zone for the Trump most of the
Trump years, and then the pandemic happened, and it was like, ah,
the culmination of all of the worst things. It's like,
now we're literally like dying. Now we're all going to die.
And there was a pretty early period. I mean when
I wrote about it, it was Moe Williams, who it
writes kids books Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.
(27:48):
I don't know if you're familiar with the book series
or not, but he had was doing these like live
let's all draw together workshops on YouTube and it was like,
you know, hundreds of thousands of kids like watching and
doing that, and she was doing it, and I was like,
holy fuck, you know, God, what would life be like like? Yeah,
for as bad as the Internet has seen for the
last several years, you know, it's impossible to imagine imagine
(28:13):
the pandemic with no Internet. I mean, to your point
about the nineteen eighteen you know, flu People didn't have
a way to communicate really with each other about what
was going on or how they were doing, or techniques
to stay alive or any of those things.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Right, Yeah, you know after nine to eleven, the logacy
basically sprung up. Nine eleven was this late big thing
that everyone decided to blog about and that you like,
have you heard of nine to eleven early blogs? I
remember this thing eleven very very like nine to eleven eccentric.
But back then, you know, we had this very open
(28:49):
and free wheeling and fabulous and fun Internet, but it
definitely didn't have the kind of bandwidth to have live
videos streaming, right, and yeah, almost everyone with Internet had
enough had enough bandwidth to do live video streaming. Come
twenty twenty was enormous for Moe Williams. YouTube's for you know,
(29:14):
allowing the zoom calls and the facetimes Dot Club kept
us together. There was the Clubhouse, which wasn't video, but yeah,
there was you know, I remember in the twenty twenty
election there was this crazy fundraiser for the Democrats which
is basically the entire living cast of the Princess Bride
(29:35):
or getting together and just like rereading the whole thing,
and it was just it felt like a very magical,
remote thing.
Speaker 1 (29:42):
They did that imagine They had that Imagine video with
Galgado that I said about that the better. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
But and then more, you know, prosaically we had Slack
and Zoom, which you know, saved countless companies. They came
through in this clutch time when they when needed most right,
and we managed to get through this period of like,
you know, shit, how are we going to be able
to cope without offices? And mostly we did too. I
(30:12):
think everyone's surprised.
Speaker 1 (30:23):
I mean, I remember having this realization on a fairly
regular basis, or this kind of thought that in a
popular fiction when the pandemic is depicted or an apocalyptic
sort of world ending event, which is how COVID felt
at the beginning, you imagine you're like fighting zombies or
people are dying like you know, their heads are exploding
around you or whatever kind of you know, total like
(30:44):
apocalyptic insanity. Nobody made a movie or wrote a book
about how like the apocalypse would be you sitting at
home like working like you you'd be exactly like on slack,
like no think about the I mean I remember, you know,
at the time you know, at that time, I was
managing a bunch of different news teams, and I would
sit in slack with them and you'd be like covering
(31:04):
the news, you know, talking about like oh, Fauci says,
now you've got to wear a mask or you're going
to die, and like, oh, it's like now it's definitely
airborne and it's coming through the events and whatever. You know,
you were on slack. You weren't like in a bunker,
yeah right, you were looking out the window and not
able to interact with humanity. But other than that, everything
seemed normal, right, Like I mean normal with quotes around it.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
But I had a pre existing intellectual awareness that a
global pandemic could strike at any time. But when I
thought about what it might be like to live through
a pandemic, and I didn't think about it very often.
What I thought about were, you know, people getting sick,
people dying, you know, And then if you read about plagues,
(31:47):
that's what you read about, the boobos, the deaths. That
what I called in the book the moor Ryan vectus,
which for those of you who don't have digitens to hand,
just means rats. Yeah, most of us, not sick, most
of the time, but we were distanced, and so the
experience of COVID was not one of the sick, right,
The experiences COVID was one of of like, what the
(32:09):
hell am I going to do with my kids when
they're not at school?
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Yeah, I mean most people didn't get really sick, sort
of one of the one of the problems with COVID
not and this is a good thing, it's a great thing,
but like one of the issues with educating people are
making people feel like it was real. I feel like,
was that it was you didn't feel it if a
family member didn't die, right, or if you didn't know
a good friend who died or got really sick and
(32:33):
was you know, near death or whatever, you didn't feel
like that kind of palpable. There wasn't a sense that
it was happening at all. And that's why I think
a lot of people kind of went crazy, right, Like
a lot of people were like, why are we still
wearing masks? Why do we have to stay home? I
Mean a big part of what happened there was like
a little bit of people are kind of like, well,
if I don't see it, and if I don't feel 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 it. But you know, I mean you mentioned like
this sort of Yolo mentality which runs through everything that
happened or many things that happened with the economy and
with the way we work and the way we live,
and that so much what the book is about is
the sense of like you only live once, I mean
literally right like that, you know, suddenly your life feels
(33:16):
much more precious. And also you start thinking about, well,
if this is the if it's the end times or whatever,
maybe I had to do the things that I wasn't
going to do or try the things I never tried. Obviously,
the Yolo mentality, a lot of that stems from the
use of that term, stems from what happened with Wall
Street bets and Meme stocks and NFTs as a companion
(33:37):
and crypto as a companion to that, Like if this
moment of really weird things like you're talking about, Like
we've talked about a lot like mass economic sort of things,
but there was this thing about how money started to
seem to people that I feel like is very unique
to this moment can you talk a little bit about
like the game stop, the sort of meme stock moment
and how that was juiced by or if it was
(33:58):
juiced by the pan.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Oh, I mean, it could never have happened without the pandemic.
You had a whole bunch of people sitting at home.
I guess I say, like they weren't worried about getting evicted.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
Like I'm good time to trade.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
There was an eviction moratorium. They you know, they had
a lot of time on their hands, and they had
fourteen hundred stimulus checks, fourteen hundred dollars stimulus checks sitting
in their bank account needing to be spent on something,
and they had for the first time the opportunity to
engage in in genuinely social stock market speculation that you know,
(34:33):
Wall Street bets was the most prominent of the social
vectors where people would trade trading ideas. But you know,
for all that people had tried to do like social
trading in the past, it never really took off in
the way that it did in the early months of
twenty twenty one. And at the same time, yeah, there
was this feeling that money had ceased to have any
(34:56):
real meaning, you know, it's not something you know, we
were spending it on crazy things because what else were
you going to do? Right, And there was a lot
of it sloshing around the economy because of all of
the fiscal stimulus, and instead of investing being this like
very serious kind of like I should save up carefully
(35:17):
every month.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
And write and put a little on the four oh
one k or whatever.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Yeah, you know, it just became it became this game.
It became a fun game, and it became a way
to get rich quick, right, And you realized everyone realized
on some level they probably weren't going to get rich quick,
but like, at least it would be a fun way
to try right, right, and investing for many people, you know,
even back in the fifties and sixties, you know, it
(35:43):
was always like an enjoyable hobby that certain type of
like white men would trade stock tips on the golf course,
and you know it was social in that sense. It
just was turbo judged. It was much faster, and it
was much more aggressive, and it was much more like
you know, going to the moon and swapping between meme
stocks and cryptocurrencies and should we buy a you know,
(36:06):
monkey jpeg because that's going to make us rich.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
It's very easy to understand people going, hey, we're all
going to invest in this thing, or like, actually we can,
we can pump this stock up if we all go
in on it or whatever. You know, as a group,
a social kind of experiment that makes a lot of sense.
It makes a lot less sense when it is the
monkey jpeg when it is this esoteric. I mean, as
soon as NFT's like that, just the hint of it
(36:31):
being an idea started, it became like a multi million
billion dollar business, right, I mean, it became a It
was like, I mean, what's the timeline from like NFTs.
I mean, I remember. What I do remember is that
at the time there was we had a website called input,
which is and rest and peace no longer exists, like
many of the things have begun during the pandemic. But
(36:52):
we did an article on NFTs in I want to say,
fall of twenty nineteen, and by the summer of twenty twenty,
it was like people, the people thing was happening. I mean,
when was his sophobes with sophobes He had Christie's.
Speaker 2 (37:09):
Yeah, there were these two, these two like crypto whales,
started bidding against each other. To try and and I
think it was almost coordinated that they both wanted the
biggest possible number for that peace, not because they thought
it was worth it, but because and they were quite
(37:31):
right about this that like if they could get it
to be worth more than like you know, Jess John's
or a Picasso or Velaskaz, then at that point that
would ratify NFTs as an asset class and everyone would
just start buying all manner about NFTs.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
And that's exactly what happened. I'd be so it.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Really really kicked off the NFT frenzy. And you know,
people forget that NFTs were really invented by and Neil
Dash and Kevin McCoy back in like twenty fourteen, but
no one really noticed, no one really cared, and then
they just kind of sat there hibernating for a while
(38:11):
until until the pandemic just came along to make the
whole thing explode.
Speaker 1 (38:17):
Well, people are just like, Okay, maybe there's something we
can there's an idea we can pull off the shelf.
We're running low on ideas right now, so I mean
it's interesting. And also a Neil wrote a piece I
believe like at the peak of NFT. What is the
what is the word for when people are buying things
blindly like maniacs. There's some word for this that I
can't think of, but tulipmania. Yeah, tulip mania.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
I do I do in the book when I my
my copy editor was very buy the book in terms
of like, whenever I used an acronym, I'd always do
it to spell out what it stood for, right, But
when it came to NFTs, I insisted that we just
said that what this stands for is newfangled tulips.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Is that in the book? Cause it's in the book? Okay?
I bought it over that, But I was reading the
NFT part. Actually I highlighted a bit from the NFT part.
You say, connoisseurship in the NFT world was worthless. Art
was valued not on its intrinsic qualities, but rather on
its status as a meme. Then I put a question
mark next to it, because is that not just what
art is? You say intrinsic, but what is intrinsic about?
(39:19):
And by the way, I'm not defending NFT art, much
of which is astonishingly bad. Like I mean, I've said
this before. I might have even said it on the
last podcast that I considered the NFT Boom to be
the Olympics of bad art. And I will take that one,
you know, I will stand by that one until I die.
But isn't art really just about what is valuable? I mean, yes,
I understand there's critics, and I understand there's a classical
(39:40):
definition of what is great art, and there's a market
built around that. But is it not really just the
same idea? Yep?
Speaker 2 (39:48):
I read about this in the book A bit right,
that we are seeing the meme ification of the world,
Like the uh the people are buying is younger and
younger and less and less sport because it's particularly important
or particularly good, right, you know. The classic example would
be someone like Couse, who sells for millions even though
(40:11):
his art is objectively terrible, and I think most of
the people who buy it understand his arts I mean
objectively terrible.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
But I've actually been in context when if you look
at cause the cause art in context of what it is,
where it comes from, and how was initially expressed, has
some historical context and also legitimately was kind of a
new form at the beginning of its sort of well.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
I mean Okay, so it does come out of a
tradition in the street art that is real and interesting,
and there are real and interesting street artists. I don't
know if he was ever like he was briefly a
street artist, but he came much later, like there were
much more important and much better street artists.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Again, I'm not making a case for causes like a
great but I can understand that I can understand the
market for cause.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
The second coming of like John Michelle Baska or even
Keith Herring. He is not right, right, but put that
to one side, Like, you're absolutely right that the level
of connoisseurship needed to understand the art that people get
really excited about has been declining steadily for decades, and
(41:20):
that trend accelerated during the pandemic. And the art that
sells to millions is getting dumber and dumber, and the
art that requires a large amount of connoisseurship. You know,
if you are trying to sell some beautiful seventeenth century
Dutch still life or something, you know, the number of
people who are interested in that is getting smaller and smaller, right,
(41:43):
because they're all too busy chasing some you know, twenty
five year old African Bundakin, who is going to be
you know, here today and gone tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
I think NFTs, the whole thing is kind of breaks
down on a fundamental level. I was going to say.
I was saying that Nil and Neil Dash wrote a
piece basically saying that underlying technology of whatever everybody's using
right now is not it. It is not the thing
that would create an NFT in the way that I
think he and envisioned, or that would make sense for
the actual like sort of collectibility of it, if you want,
(42:14):
or the preciousness of the singular versus the you know,
the copies, right, And.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Just to be clear, like what happened in the NFT
boom was super interesting that this thing that was designed
to be a way of allowing people to own and
sell digital art very rapidly, like that whole concept of
digital arn't And like the people thing, which was like
how what I think of NFT one point zero kind
(42:40):
of fell by the wayside to be replaced by the
social thing of the monkey JPEGs and the rocks and
the squiggles and the penguins and all of the other
things slurp juices where they where they like sell ten
thousand similar things, and everyone wants to join the club,
and it's really the metaphor there is not the art
world anymore, the metaphor that is now just the limited
(43:02):
membership club where everyone wants to get a membership card. Right.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
But of course, broken down, it breaks down to the
fundamental level, which is that the thing that is so
valuable and collectible and only the special members can have
it was actually just an actual jpeg or whatever a ping.
I mean, they are just it is just a copyable image, right,
I mean, I think that's the But I think all
of this it kind of brings me like in talking
about the NFTs, because it's such a it's such a
(43:30):
bizarre the offshoot of crypto, right, it's an offshoot of
this kind of state of being, certainly of the Wall
Street bet stuff of like community sort of building around
like investing, and sort of club membership in these things
that are centered around money and money making. But the
things that people did during the pandemic and maybe all
of the kind of side effects of it now that
(43:51):
we're experiencing, is it a bit that it felt like
for the first time, maybe ever for a lot of people,
maybe for everybody that whatever the structure of reality that
we've been living inside of, like this thing that we
all consider to be a shared reality, where there's people
who 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. That to some extent, once you force everybody
inside their house and once everybody is online, and once
Fauci one day is saying wear a mask and the
next day saying don't wear a mask, there's a bit
of all of this that is like stemming from a
sense that suddenly people had an autonomy and lack of
(44:36):
control that previously had never seemed accessible to them. Like
on a kind of fundamental philosophical basis, Am I crazy
for thinking this? Does it even make any sense? Or
do I sound?
Speaker 2 (44:46):
It totally makes sense? And that's what really undergoded great resignation.
You know, the phenomenon that was incredibly visible in the
economic statistics about there's this wonderful survey called JOLTS, the
Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, and it shows you,
like how many people quit their job that month, and
it just went through the roof. It was like levels
(45:06):
that were just completely unprecedented and unthinkable, and people left
the service industry in particular because those jobs tend to
be quite miserable.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Right, They paid poorly and they suck well.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
And then what happened is they wound up paying much
better because the only way that anyone could attract people
back into those jobs was by effectively doubling the amount.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
Of pay they made.
Speaker 2 (45:29):
Right, And so if you were, you know, back of
House Kirk in a New York City restaurant, suddenly you're
paid double. Basically, you used to be earning eight dollars now,
and now you're running sixteen dollars an hour. You know,
still not making millions, but you're doing a lot better
than you were, right, and you can take that put
it right into an NFT.
Speaker 1 (45:46):
We had this.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
Radical reshaking of supply demand. I have a chapter called
Shaking the extra sketch that we had this world that
was very clearly delineated and made sense, and then someone
just picked up the whole thing and shook it, and
we had to rebuild and reconstruct something new and different
and better. And it wasn't necessarily going to be bad,
(46:09):
but in many many ways it really was better and
is better and that is the phoenix. You know, that
is the phoenix of the title. That is the Phoenix economy.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
Right, Okay, let me ask you one final question, which
is does the phoenix keep rising? Does the phoenix burn out?
What happens? Does this keep going? Are we is the
Phoenix economy now a permanent state of like kind of
a Yolo state of economics and then end of society
where where anything goes or does this settle down into
something that looks more familiar over time?
Speaker 2 (46:41):
So the legend of the phoenix is one of death
and ashes and then rebirth and then you're right that
the phoenix kind of just slides around for a few
hundred years and then it is that what it does,
and then and then and then it dies again, it
gets reborn again, and like the periods of death and
rebirth are definitely much less common than the normal periods
(47:04):
of nothing much happening. So, yeah, like this current world
that we have built on the fly in response to
the pandemic is the world that we are going to
be in for the next ten twenty thirty, I don't
know how many years, where I doubt we're going to
have another major conflagration.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
Yeah, I mean, it's decades of this that we're going
to be living on. Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 2 (47:28):
The reason I wrote this book and not you know,
various other things that I thought about writing about over
the years, is that I have very strong belief that
if you're going to write a book, it has to
remain relevant for you know, five or ten years people
at least, you know, people should be able to take
it down from a library book, you know, a library
shehelf in ten years or fifteen years and read it
(47:49):
and learn something and have it be relevant and important.
And I really think this book does that. You know,
it's trying to explain a world where it's going to
be with us for a while. This isn't like history
of what happened in much twenty twenty that is interesting
only to historians. This is an attempt to explain and
give people the tools to understand this world that we
(48:11):
are now going to be living in, you know, especially
for you know, gen x is like you and me
basically for the rest of our lives.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
Yeah, I mean, listen, I think it's a fascinating book.
I have to say, like I do think it's like
an amazing sort of capture of a moment in culture
that is so unlike. I mean, I think about this
all the time, just so unlike anything that has happened
and at least of course in my lifetime and in
your lifetime in terms of like just a shift on
so many levels. And I thought, I think it's I
think 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 it. So Felix, thank
you for taking the time once again to come on
and chat with me. And you got to come back
and do it again sometime. I would love to, Well,
that is our show, our show. Unlike the phoenix, instead
(49:01):
of rising from the ashes, has now died down back
into the back into the fire, back into the I
don't really know. Felix didn't really explain what happens to
the phoenix exactly. He did say there was a cycle, though,
which is I gotta read. I gotta look into that. Anyhow,
I thought it was fantastic. I love talking to Felix.
I think he's just so entertaining to listen to and
(49:22):
also so smart, and he definitely will have him back
on the next time. There is a terrible financial crisis.
That's the first call I'm making. Anyhow, that is our show.
We'll be back next week with more what future, and
as always, I wish you and your family the very best.
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