Welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is May 9, 2023. Real sense of

deja vu sprinkled on our PTSD. Trump expanding his lead over his Republican rivals through

the largest margin yet, leading around to Santa's by 40 points. This of course comes

the day after we had that Washington Post poll, which may be an outlier showing that Donald

Trump would actually beat Joe Biden. This comes as the E. Jean Carroll trial has rested

and gone to the jury and as the United States passes 200 mass shootings this year. And we

are supposedly going to be negotiating how to avoid a massive debt crisis. So things are

going well, I guess. Joining us today is Felix Sam and the Chief Financial Correspondent

of Axios and host of the Slate Money Podcast. And more importantly for today is the author

of the just released book, The Phoenix Economy, Work Life and Money in the New Not Normal.

Felix, how are you? I'm very well. And yeah, I think you nailed it. This is normal. None

of the things you're talking about are normal, but we have to get used to that because this

is just expected now that we had five impossible things are going to happen before breakfast.

Well, this is one of the things that I really took away from your book is that we come out

of the pandemic. And there are reasons to be somewhat optimistic. Civilization has bounced

back from worse things in the past with a sense of renewed optimism and energy. And yet

there is this sense of dislocation. So let's talk about this because the title of your book,

The Phoenix Economy, implies a certain level of optimism that I want you to describe that we're

going to come out of the ashes. So when you say that we are the new not normal, what is the new

not normal? If you remember your first year calculus class, whatever, and the idea of a

normal distribution and probability, I should say, not calculus, where you have thin tails and

the bell curve and that kind of stuff, the not normal is where you have much fair to tails and

...