Hello, good humans. I have Frank here. Frank say hello. We're doing a frankly and you're going to

start out of my lap, but now you better get down because dad is going to talk about some adult stuff.

Okay. Today we're going to talk about finance and just as we are energy blind, we swim in a sea of finance since I've been alive.

And basically, modern society has financialized the human experience.

We've done this in three ways.

Number one is we've parsed all of the rich fabric of our ancestral lives into one metric, dollars, or

euros, or yen or Renbingbee, or pound sterling.

We measure our self-worth by our net worth.

Maybe not everyone listening to this, but generally in society,

we ascribe success and value to people that have money. Money is power. We've financialized

our cultural scorecard. The second way is we've also financialized growth and our expectations and

institutional rules around money. And money is what lubricates the system and changes our

expectations for the future because we always think we will have more or the whole pie will

grow and we measure the pie or our success by money, digital electrons and linen paper in

our pockets. It's this third way that we financialize the experience, which is going to be the subject

to this podcast, which is that we are using finance to solve or kick the can of the problems

that finance created. So it's kind of like a slow boiling frog

that we're in a pot of hot water economically,

but we don't feel it because we're using financial responses,

too big to fail, artificially low interest rates, quantitative easing,

guarantees, rule changes, expansion of debt, et cetera, in order to avoid facing the problems

of previous installations of those efforts.

...