CJ FOLLINI: Welcome back to the NOYACK Expert Series, where financial education meets real world expertise. I’m CJ Follini, founder and CEO of NOYACK Wealth Club, a 501-C3 registered nonprofit with the mission of financial literacy for young adults. And today we are joined by Paul.
Long term financial journalist and author of The Almighty Dollar: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin. Paul spent 25 years at the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, writing for the Wall Street Journal’s Money Beat blog and covering everything from equities to Bitcoin to the blockchain. He’s also co-author of The Age of Cryptocurrency and The Truth Machine. Paul, we’ve known each other for a while. Welcome and thank you for doing this on this hectic, insane book tour that you’re on.
PAUL: It’s very crazy. It was very difficult for me to make the time for you, CJ, but of course I would make the time for you. So thank you for having me on.
CJ FOLLINI: Thank you. I found this book very interesting. I read it recently and when I first heard about it, I made assumptions by the title. But when I read it, it was very different from what I expected. The synthesis of religion and the replacement of religion struck me. Paul, you’re speaking to someone who went to Jesuit high school and 12 years of parochial Catholic all boys school. I have a very challenging relationship with formal religion—not spirituality, but formal religion, specifically the Catholic Church. When I started reading your book and understanding your thesis about how money, billionaire idolatry, and the interplay of debt becoming the new religion, I found it very interesting.
PAUL: I will say that I also have a challenging relationship with the Catholic Church. I was raised Roman Catholic. I went to public schools, but I went to CCD for years. I made my communion, my confirmation, everything. I was raised in the Church. I think we’re probably from the same region. I went to Fairfield for undergrad. I went to Fordham Prep in the Bronx.
CJ FOLLINI: Of course.
PAUL: So I also have that same relationship with religion and with money. My approach to the book was very specific and very conscious. I could have written this book much more incendiary with a much sharper axe to grind. I could have written this book really trying to guilt people about their feelings and emotions over money, but that would have been the wrong approach.
What I wanted to show was that it’s one thing to say money’s a religion. Everyone hears that often. But what I wanted to do was one, show how that is not a figurative statement but a literal statement, and trace the history to prove that. Two, show how it’s not just terrible, greedy Wall Street types and purported entrepreneurs who are just out for themselves. Those are the bad people we should condemn. What I wanted to show was that our attitudes about money are very deeply embedded in our collective consciousness, and they are very broadly spread. We are all part of what I’m talking about. I’m not holding myself out as somebody who came across some crazy truth about the world and is better than you because I know it.
I could have written everything online and given it away for free. But I found a publisher, signed a commercial contract, and we are selling the book at a profit. I’m not going to get rich off it. You don’t get rich off selling books, but I turned this into a commercial project because I wanted to make money because money is important to me also.
The point I was trying to make with this book was that there is a culture of money that is deeply embedded in our society. I wanted to show how that happened and trace it all the way back to its very beginnings. I had to go all the way back to Mesopotamia, basically the beginnings of recorded history because it is that deeply embedded in our culture.
CJ FOLLINI: One thing that struck me in the book was about how terms start to bleed into a pan understanding and they’re so overused because they’re in everyday life. You point that out. They’re so overused that they start to lose their meaning and take on other meanings that bring baggage to the concept of wealth and money. What is rich? Rich in life, rich in friends, rich in meaning, rich in money accumulation.
You mentioned history—one of the other things I love besides financial topics is history. You go back to the Medici and the Medici workarounds for Sharia law about interest taking. But I want to focus on something more current and topical. We both have the same background. How do young people feel now, the next generation? You get out of school, you do everything right. You go to a great school, you pay a ton of money for that school, you put in all your time. You’re not listening to Peter Thiel and ditching university. You’re going for the traditional American Dream. But you’re saying something different is happening beneath the surface. What do you actually think is happening to this generation as they try and pursue the traditional American Dream with the conventions we’ve all known?
PAUL: There’s a real friction there. I think a lot of younger people recognize that the things you and I were raised with and the pursuit of wealth, the pursuit of the American Dream is largely a myth. A lot of people have achieved that American dream, but because of the nature of debt, that dream has become harder and harder. Kids are starting out today further and further behind than where we started, and that’s where the friction is. On one hand, they recognize that there is a problem in the very structure of society, the way we have set this up, the way the entire culture revolves around money and debt, and the way debt has become an incredible burden to our society. They realize that they are starting out at a place where they are already much further behind where you and I started and certainly where our parents started. I know for a fact my parents bought their house in 1972 for around $29,000. My father had a job, my mother stayed at home and raised myself and my sister. They were able to live on my father’s salary and have the American dream, have the house, have the car in the driveway, have the kids, we could take vacations. Everything we really needed you could support on one man’s hard work.
I think people realize that that isn’t really possible for most people now. If you are a couple, you’re almost certainly both of you are working one, if not two or three jobs. Young people realize that they are starting off from a worse position. The problem is they can realize that, but there’s nothing they can do about it. This is the system you are in, and you can either try to live in it within its conventions or go off the grid and buy a shack in Montana and fish and hunt. But most people aren’t going to do that. So there is a real problem there that is certainly not solvable on an individual level, and I think that creates a lot of discontent among the younger generations.
CJ FOLLINI: I have a very love-hate relationship with that as both a former real estate and family office CIO. Debt is integral to returns. Anyone who says they do zero-leverage investing is an idiot frankly. However, I distinguish between personal debt and corporate debt and investment, and that’s where the nuance comes. I think what you referred to is personal debt, specifically student debt, in order to believe that a great education is your key to the American Dream. You have to do whatever it takes to get that education, and the inflation of the cost of that education, even at a state school when you’re in state—well, you have to live somewhere. Real estate inflation, expenses. It’s mostly not possible for a lot of people to just go to a good state school.
I think student debt has created the cycle of inflation. The system is inflated and the inflation comes from debt. If you increase the money supply, it has to go somewhere and a lot of times that’s through the banking system in the form of debt.
PAUL: One of the issues with the younger population is they feel the motivation is not happenstance. They feel that it’s an intentional motivation to keep them as indentured servants.
CJ FOLLINI: That is a really nefarious feeling and point of view that the system is grinding them into financial slavery through debt. They think that debt is purposeful, right, the purpose of keeping them in the workforce, keeping them doing what the older generations and the system want them to do.
PAUL: I think they are correctly seeing the problem. The problem is that they are forced to take on really unwieldy amounts of personal debt just to have a normal life. I live in New Jersey and home prices are insane. I don’t know how anybody could even bother buying a home today. College costs are through the roof to the point where there is a real question about whether a college education is worth the money you invest. That is now a legitimate question because the cost is so high.
CJ FOLLINI: That wasn’t even a possible question when we were going to college.
PAUL: No, to say it was worth it would have been ludicrous to even consider. I went to college in the ’80s, graduated in 1990. I had a debate with one of my friends about the cost of our Fairfield University education. I think it cost $9,000 my freshman year and it went up about $1,000 every year. I remember having a debate about whether the cost would get to $20,000, and I said it never would because it’s too much. Nobody can afford it. Well, obviously I was wrong. I lost the bet.
The problem is that just to pursue that American dream, you have to basically put yourself deeply into debt to the point where you’ll spend most of your life in debt. The problem is that people think there’s some little cabal of people making that situation happen. What I’m arguing in the book is that there is not some little cabal of mustache-twirling villains making this system happen. This system has developed on its own over the course of hundreds and thousands of years and most people don’t see it clearly the way I finally figured it out. So I wrote the entire book.
I want people to see that the system we have now was created by us and has been grown by us. There is nothing about it that is dark, evil, nefarious. It just is. Because it is something that we have created, it is within our power to change it. I think there are a lot of people today that want to change the system but can’t because they don’t actually understand the system.
CJ FOLLINI: Very good point. Speaks to financial literacy. I think you can make a good start with the education system. I have two sons who go to private school. They’re four and five. I’m not even going to disclose what I pay, but I feel like an idiot every day paying it. You’re just in that hamster wheel. They have to have a good education in a very dense urban environment. There’s a wide disparity between good and terrible. So we have to strive for that anyway.
I actually think things gravitate more towards incompetence than they do to evil. I think people are just more incompetent, which makes it look like there’s an evil intention. I don’t think there’s puppetry, I think it’s incompetence. However, the culture of greed you bring up—I actually think that in the abstract, a lot of it is our decentralized emotions and idolatry of greed.
PAUL: Well, if you haven’t seen Wall Street, you’ve probably seen a meme or a clip of Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko saying greed is good.
CJ FOLLINI: I think a lot of this hustle culture is in essence a guilt trip of you have to do more, you have to earn more, you have to make more. You have to be wealthy for a good education, to provide for your family, to get a good home. Of course you do. But do you have to be wealthy for wealth’s sake? If you’re single, do you need to optimize everything right? How is this showing up clearly in the younger generation’s lives?
PAUL: The real bottom line reality is I wrote a book about the history of money and how it relates to religion. The bottom line reality is if you live in this world, you need money. You need money for utility. If you don’t have it, your life is going to be very unpleasant. That is the reality of the culture we have built. So people are forced to desire money and it’s not just more than you need or just what you need to live pleasantly.
Do you need a Lamborghini in your driveway? No. Do you need a mansion? No. Does your self-worth need it versus your physical needs? No.
CJ FOLLINI: Most people have come to be conditioned to think that from movies and media.
PAUL: You referenced the Gordon Gekko greed is good line, which is the famous line in the movie Wall Street. Gordon Gekko gets up at the shareholder meeting and his plan to save the paper company is we’re going to be greedy. It’s funny because in that movie, Gordon Gekko is the bad guy, the villain. But that line is actually not a bad guy line. That line is our culture. I would push back and say has it become our culture or has it always been our culture? What I argue in the book is that the ’80s did not change everything. You can trace that line, that exact idea back 600 years to Florence, Italy, to the early days of what we called the Renaissance, to a group of merchants and thinkers in Florence who had that idea and for the first time really had a full-throated defense of greed as a societal beneficial thing.
That was different, radically different. It was Cosimo de Medici and a group of people around him and they started saying that greed is good. I talk a lot in the book about a guy named Poggio Bracciolini. In the 1420s, he wrote a dialogue. And in the dialogue he says avarice sometimes is beneficial. It is literally the Gordon Gekko line. In the dialogue it’s a dialogue between different people arguing whether avarice was good or bad. One of the characters says it is good. That idea reflected what was happening in Florence, Italy, and what people like Cosimo de Medici were doing. The idea was that you make a lot of money, you use that money for the benefit of the city.
CJ FOLLINI: That’s an interesting point. I’m going to bring it back to today. Billie Eilish, why are you a billionaire? You see that reference? Zuckerberg’s in the room. Why are you a billionaire? I have to say that is one of the most insightful things of saying, of decoding is greed good. So I actually think her question speaks right to your book.
PAUL: It is. Can you defend it with philanthropy? Can you defend your greed, Mark Zuckerberg, with philanthropy? Poggio Bracciolini made this case that if you bolt on philanthropy or for the greater good, then the individual avarice becomes good. That was something that had never been uttered before. He comes out and says it. He says we should actually welcome the wealthy. We should revere the wealthy. The wealthy are the ones that make this city great. We should encourage them to make as much money as they can because they are going to use it for the good of the city. Cosimo de Medici exemplified that ethos. He made a ton of money. He was the most powerful man in Europe and he spent money liberally on art, artists, architects, construction workers. He was almost like a one-man stimulus program for the city. Today a lot of what he funded is still here in museums and monasteries.
The even more important part is that Cosimo de Medici was a commoner. He wasn’t a noble, he wasn’t a king, he wasn’t from royalty. The Medici were a commoner family and what he showed was that for the first time, it was OK for commoners to want more for themselves. It was good to want more for yourself. That was 600 years ago and that idea has been growing and growing and growing across our culture to where we are today. You saw the New York mayoral candidate, Eric Adams, come out and say we shouldn’t have billionaires and all the rich people freak out. The very thought that we would put any collar on the pursuit of wealth just was abhorrent to them. They couldn’t even conceive of it. That’s where this culture has come. But it didn’t start two years ago or 40 years ago. It started 600 years ago and I don’t think people understand that.
That idea that greed is good reflected what was happening in Florence, Italy. Cosimo de Medici was a commoner and what he showed was that for commoners, it was OK to want more for yourself. It was good to want more for yourself. That’s what I was trying to show people. This is a very, very deeply rooted idea in our culture. It’s not just greedy Wall Streeters, it’s not just people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. It is culture-wide.
I’ll tell you where I got the original idea for the entire book. In the early days of the pandemic after they sent everybody home, it was March 2020 when everything was utter panic. I was in a grocery store trying to buy things and all the shelves are empty and the place is packed. We didn’t even know if we needed to wear masks or have any protections. I was checking out and I thanked the woman behind the counter for just being there. I said if you weren’t here, if I couldn’t buy these things, I don’t know if I’d starve to death or what would happen to me. We started talking and she made it very clear that she didn’t really want to be there. She feared for her life. She feared that she was going to get sick and bring it home to her family. At that time in New Jersey, an entire family had gotten wiped out. So that was a very real fear. She was a breadwinner. She needed money. She was supposed to make money for her family. She felt that responsibility very deeply. This was not a woman who was an entrepreneur. She was not a woman who was a Wall Street trader. She was not making a million dollars a year. She was a checkout clerk.
Yet she felt and understood in her own way that making money was a virtue and that virtue was worth risking her life. I walked out of there and I said there’s something wrong there. There’s something wrong there where somebody values money over their own life. That made me think I have got to figure out what that thing is. I think I did figure out what that thing is and I figured out how deeply rooted it is. That’s important. It is deeply rooted in our collective consciousness, this extolling of money and the pursuit of wealth as a virtue.
CJ FOLLINI: I often put a distinction and a dividing line between the accumulation of money and the use of money for necessity. So the person you described obviously will risk their life to get what they need. Need being the operative word. Versus I want more and more and more way beyond need. That’s the distinction of the pursuit of money and greed. That I wouldn’t say someone risking their life to get what they need is greedy. There is nothing greedy about it. Actually, if I look at the definitions I want to go back and find out what Rome or what your research shows that Rome was thinking given that there’s a commandment that says just the opposite. If they’re the descendants of that commandment in the Old Testament, how did the Church, which is a political animal just as much as it is a spiritual animal, how did their power go up against the power of Cosimo de Medici? That actually I find very interesting as historical.
PAUL: That’s where the whole thing about religion comes into play in our modern world. Part of that influential circle of thinkers and merchants that I was talking about with Cosimo de Medici, Poggio Bracciolini was a cardinal who would become a Pope. He was part of their group. He absorbed that idea. He became Nicholas the Fifth, Pope Nicholas the Fifth. Nicholas took this ethos of beneficial greed in the book, and he fused it into the Church.
Forget what Saint Paul says about money being the root of all evil. Yes, that’s in the Bible, but that’s not what the Church was doing in the 1400s. The Church embraced this idea that greed is good, that you can make a lot of money and then use it and spend it liberally. Nicholas’s idea was that I’m going to make a ton of money for the Church and we are going to rebuild Vatican City, which at the time was in shambles. Rome itself was a shambles. The city had fallen into disrepair. It had ceased to be an important city. It was basically just ruins and goats. Nicholas thought I’m going to use the Church infrastructure to make a lot of money and rebuild the Church. He started that process and it was so successful that a century later, Cosimo’s great, great grandson Leo becomes Pope Leo the Tenth. The Medici become popes and they are so greedy and so decadent and so abhorrent that it sparks the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther rebels against them and they reject everything the Catholic Church is doing and believing.
But interestingly enough, Protestantism ends up absorbing this idea. John Calvin, theologian, was a big proponent of the fact that everything that happens in this world happens because God wills it. Everything. Every single thing that happens, God wants it to happen. Somebody gets murdered, God wanted them murdered. Somebody does something saintly, God wanted that. Somebody has money, God wanted that. If you have money, it’s because God wanted you to have money. So what you should do is work as hard as you can to make as much money as you can because that’s what God wants.
Now there was a very moralistic element to that and John Calvin said you were then supposed to take that money and use it for the benefit of your fellow man. We’re back to Bracciolini, right? That idea kind of gets lost along the way. But to start out, it was there. The idea was that God wants you to work hard, make money, and then use that money to help your fellow man. That becomes a core tenant of Protestantism that comes across here, comes across to the Americas with the Pilgrims, and that becomes eventually what is called the Protestant work ethic.
That is the foundation. The idea that if you, that God wants you to work, God wants you to have money, and whatever job you’re doing, God wants you to do that job, whatever it is. If you have a small job, a big job, you’re rich, you’re poor, whatever you are, you’re exactly where God wants you. So you should just keep working at that job. That’s also the foundation of midnight televangelism.
CJ FOLLINI: It sounds like a lot of Sunday morning early Sunday morning shows. I had early on envisioned doing an entire chapter about that. Prosperity gospel and Joel Osteen part two of this or a follow up. I thought about doing it but rejected it for a couple of reasons.
PAUL: It completely plays into God wants you to have this. You need God. God wants you to make this. This church absolutely.
CJ FOLLINI: I want to do that for a second. Huge theme in your book—the idea of the jubilee, which is obviously another very current echo in President Biden’s administration regarding student debt. What would a modern jubilee feel like to young earners? How possible is it really in a widespread way that resets an entire generation?
PAUL: Let me back up a little bit and explain what I’m talking about. Money was invented about 5,500 years ago or at least it shows up in historical record 5,100 years ago. I’ll try to be very brief. So money shows up about 5,500 years ago. Interest instruments show up after that. What they discover is that debt has this extremely persistent habit of growing, growing and growing because of compound interest. They come up with loans, they come up with compound interest, and what they realize is these loans grow and grow and grow until the people who took them out can no longer pay them. What ended up happening normally is you’d be sold into indentured servitude. Your farm would be taken away or your freedom and wealth would be taken away or you’d go to prison, the old debtors prison.
Eventually on a large enough scale that became destabilizing to society. So they came up with a relief valve. The relief valve was basically blanket debt forgiveness. It was called an amargi. A king would come to power or either the king would die and the new king would come to power or he would take over a city or something. Some sort of big change would happen and the king would declare an amargi. He would wipe out personal debts. He would figuratively and literally wipe the slate clean. That allowed society to start over. It was a relief valve for the unsolvable problem of growing debt. That was a thing that happened 3,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago. And it didn’t hurt their approval ratings either.
CJ FOLLINI: But the creditor class hated it.
PAUL: They absolutely hated it. So for more than 1,000 years you have this long back and forth between kings, temple officials, creditors over these amargi. The king declares one. The creditors try to find a way around it. They find a loophole. The king closes the loophole. The creditors find another loophole. Eventually the creditor class actually just start killing kings and the amargi disappear.
I think what has happened today is that idea that debt is not permanent has been lost. We see debt as permanent now. Eventually it destabilizes societies. You look at the national debt, $37 trillion, it’s never going to be paid off. You look at student loan debt, it becomes just unbearable. Eventually debt becomes unbearable until something happens—either we go to war or you inflate it away and destroy your society by printing money or you have a financial crisis. There’s no good solution to the problem.
I think all the South American banana republics, I’m not calling Argentina one of them, but the reason they have runaway inflation is because they tried to inflate away their debt and started. All of their boom-bust cycles started with that.
There’s today no relief valve for the problem of growing debt. The solutions we have are all bad. They just are.
What the Biden administration did, and I’m not trying to get political, I don’t care which side of the aisle, they tried in a very small way to sort of enact an amargi just for student loans. It was debt relief for student loans. The amargi gets translated as the Jubilee in English. So that’s what we’re talking about. A jubilee year was a year where debts were forgiven. When people talk about a debt jubilee, that’s what they’re talking about. It is a very old concept.
CJ FOLLINI: Surfing off that idea, do you think a national Mondani could come to power based on that one issue pillar alone? If that wasn’t a question I didn’t prepare. I just thought of it. I mean, look, I think if you had a candidate who came out and said I’m going to run for president and if I’m elected I am going to have a national jubilee, I don’t think he could look, I think that would be a very popular thing to say, let’s put it that way. I think that would be a very, very popular thing to say.
PAUL: And in the book I actually argue for this. I argue that we should have basically a global jubilee. We should completely reset the debt clock. I don’t think that would be a very popular platform to run on. I don’t know if anybody could win on it. The resistance would be outrageous. I mean, look at what Eric Adams wanted to do, right? He wanted free buses, daycare and a couple of grocery stores. Basically a societal jubilee. The inflation cloth, he doesn’t even want to reset it. He just wants to make the city more affordable for people. He’s not even talking about wiping out debt. But it has the same effect.
CJ FOLLINI: It has the same effect, sure.
PAUL: So I think if somebody ran on that platform, it would get a lot of attention, the blowback from the creditor class would be outrageous. A lot of money would be spent on his opponent or her opponent or your opponent. But what’s the alternative? That’s the way to look at it, CJ. And now it’s down, talking about a very large level. What’s the alternative? If nothing is done about the US federal debt, we are going to have a crisis. We don’t know exactly when, but the math is just incontrovertible and eventually we will not be able to pay those debts and we are going to have a financial crisis. And that crisis is not at a time of our choosing.
Like if you had someone advocating the Jubilee, you could say we’re controlling the time of this. We were having a mini crisis to alleviate the need for a major crisis, a cataclysmic crisis. So maybe it’s almost like a preemptive or like a lancing of a boil.
CJ FOLLINI: It is, it is, it could be much worse if you let it go, right.
PAUL: So we’re going to take a little bit of a little bit. That’s exactly what it is. And I think what you do is you allow society to reset. You allow people to reset. Um, imagine and look the logistics of this would be incredibly complicated. OK, so we could probably spend three hours just trying to like game it out. I don’t want to do that right now, but let’s assume somebody ran on that platform from a major party who could get elected and had the support of the party and had the support of the party in Congress. And by the way, this could actually be this idea could actually work in either party. Yeah, it really could. You might think that it sounds more democratic because the Democrats are for the people and the Republicans are for business. But whatever, the Republican party now it’s all populism right exactly. So this idea actually could come from either party.
So you have a candidate who runs on it. The party is behind him, the party’s members in Congress are behind him, he could actually do this you. I don’t think what you could do is cancel those debts because who are your creditors? You’d sell them for three years, five years? Well, no, no, I don’t even think that. Yeah, your creditors are pension funds, insurance funds, mutual funds, governments, right. You can’t wipe those people out.
So what I argue in the book is what we should actually do is and I’ve heard this idea, you know the Odd Lots podcast, the guy Joe Weisenthal, he’s always talking about the trillion dollar coin. It’s basically that idea. What I argue is we should basically print $37 trillion or even more to wipe out all the debt and pay off all the creditors in the United States. Print the money and pay off the creditors, which is wildly like I know the ramifications of that are huge right. People scream inflation. How do you control inflation? How do you control price? I understand all of that.
CJ FOLLINI: Well, that yeah, I could go on. But then assets become you talk about an affordability crisis as it pertains to assets. No one will be able to afford any assets.
PAUL: Well, what I would do, what I would do is I would print up all that money, pay off all the creditors so that you’re not bankrupting them, right? I don’t want to bankrupt banks. I don’t want to bankrupt pension funds. You pay them off. So they had debt sitting on their books. Now they’ll have cash sitting on their books. What I would then do is I would put in price caps for a couple of years until things normalize. We do it in wartime, they do it in wartime. You can do it in times of national crisis. The government can absolutely put in price caps. I would put in price caps on everything but for a period of a year or two years, whatever, something like that.
CJ FOLLINI: You referred to the prior step. You are basically as a government saying you know raising the white flag of failure and saying we have a national crisis and I’m doing this. I’m not saying and we do great. Like our current administration, we’re doing great. Everything’s wonderful, everything’s wonderful but I’m going to put in price caps. Well, obviously those two things don’t comport but we do. I mean, what were we talking about probably half an hour ago, um, people today realize that the system is broken and they want to fix it but they don’t know how to fix it.
PAUL: You know what we’re talking. We have a national crisis of it though. Everyone wants to talk about and complain but the medicine of what it takes for what you’re saying is a national crisis. Frankly, I would if you were to think that the body politic is like a body, I would say the body politic is very sick. The only way back to lancing the boil is we have to kill the infection with serious medicine like an antibiotic that wrecks your body. I agree with you. I don’t know if we’re ready as a society to accept that medicine.
PAUL: We’re not. We’re not. In fact, I would say the sacrifice of the Greatest Generation, the World War Two generation, my grandparents, the wonderful generation. It comes from a culture of sacrifice. Yeah, that’s it. It was just the sacrifice. And the reason everyone harkens back to that nostalgia is because there is no other generation that’s willing to accept even a modicum of sacrifice since then. Yeah.
So you almost have to make this this crisis a war. The war on debt, the war on a sick cultural economy.
CJ FOLLINI: Yes, you do. And I think it is. Look, it’s not going to happen now. It’s frankly it’s probably not going to ever happen.
PAUL: I think because people, the concepts I’m talking about, I’m quite sure most of our viewers right now are hearing this for the first time. These are not things that get talked about normally. These are not things that get talked about frequently, if ever. These are really alien unless at the university economics department. Yeah, these are very alien concepts to most people. These are not mainstream ideas. You would have to do a lot of education just to get people up on the ideas and to have a sort of public debate about it before you could even talk about whether or not it could really happen. So we’re a very long time away from that.
CJ FOLLINI: I don’t think so. Guess what? I think New York and Mondani is a test as well. You’re right. It could be. It could be. Yeah, I think it’s and and being in the center of that storm since I live in New York City, as you can see. I can see. I really think we’re going to be four, maybe eight-four year guinea pigs. Yeah, I think you’re right.
PAUL: And and the fact that it’s the largest city in the country, well I guess one of the most important and largest cities in the country, I think makes it work. Meaning that it’s going to be an experiment or a test. Might as well happen in New York and it’s the financial capital of the world. All right.
CJ FOLLINI: I’m going to quickly go back to religion and bring it back to the younger generation. And this talks about influencers and financial influence online—wow, what an industry right? What a crazy. And I think that speaks to not just the idolatry of wealth, which I’m going to separate from greed. The idolatry of wealth. You know, I idolize that billionaire versus I just want more. I think that the younger generation have replaced religious and spiritual terms with this ideology. Financial influencers are part of that. Do they realize the feeling of money as religion? Do you think that anyone as a younger generation understands these constitutions of money or the pursuit of wealth as a substitute because listen, religion has been declined. You look at all the churches and their attendance records. It’s there’s no tuition right.
PAUL: Anytime you’re trying to explain what an entire generation of people or an entire society thinks or believes, it’s impossible right? But I would say that I think if I had to guess, I would say most people implicitly understand it. They may not recognize it consciously but they do sort of they implicitly get it and some people probably explicitly understand it and reject it. I think if you look, I worked for ten years at the Journal. Look at Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a religion. Yeah, Bitcoin is a religion and I’ve never understood. I’ve never understood that. I don’t think I’m a money as religion guy but I’ve never understood how there’s zealots. All currency early adopters are true zealots. Everything I’m talking about you can see in the Bitcoin world. They believe in it. They think it is the center of the universe. They think it is the only money that can ever exist. They will believe in it implicitly. The faith that it’s just it’s all very religious. The way they talk about it, the terms are very religious. The fervor is very religious. It’s like a revival, like Bitcoin meetups are like tent revivals.
CJ FOLLINI: It it is, it is a religion. It is a complete religion. We could talk about Bitcoin for three hours too. I don’t think I want to go there but I think to your point, I think there are a lot of people online today that are selling this idea of money and monetary freedom as in at least quasi religious terms. And that’s a problem I think. Actually oh my God. Yeah, yeah. And frankly I think that you bring up Bitcoins, I actually think it’s the cryptocurrency fervor that is starting to bleed or starting to transfer into general general absolutely and well yes I, I think it was so niche that it could be dismissed as a weird little cult. See it wasn’t it was it was real but now those religious terms and the feeling from the cryptocurrency is expanding and you’ll see the same people a lot of financial influencers are former Bitcoin evangelists who just expanded their topic toolkit.
PAUL: Yes. No that’s it exactly. It’s very true and it’s going both ways really. By last by Latin yeah I mean a lot of sort of traditional finance people have gone into Bitcoin and they’ve become proselytizers for Bitcoin. Yeah absolutely. I mean when BlackRock became one I said all right that’s it, game over, game over.
CJ FOLLINI: On the pushback I think it comes down to then you have to ask. Stuff like what is money and why do we have it? What is it for and what’s the purpose of it? And to me money is and should be. It’s basically an accounting system. It’s a way for society to keep track of its stuff and to distribute resources. If you have X amount of money you can buy X amount of resources. That’s basically what it should be. It should be a very utilitarian thing. It’s a proxy. It’s a yes proxy for portability. You can now move that building but you can move the value of that building right? Exactly. It is a proxy for value.
PAUL: And I think the problem in our society is that we have stopped looking at it that way and we have started looking at it as something else. We have started seeing it in religious terms. You’ve started seeing you start, you started looking at money as a proxy not for value but as a proxy for whom the gods favor. Who who is favored by God. Remember the golden calf, the golden right? Yes that’s it. That’s the, that’s the, that’s the real problem. That’s the real thing I’m trying to explain in the book. That’s what I’m trying to get at. And I think that is where the real problem is. Come look. Money is a tool. Any tool can be valuable. Any tool can be useful. Money can be useful. I’m not arguing for a post money no money world. What I am arguing for is that we understand better what money actually is and what it is actually supposed to do and start treating it that way.
And reorient our economics, not around the pursuit of wealth, but around the well-being of every person. That’s what I think should come first. And then if you want to have a system that rewards people for hard work and for ingenuity and for building, that’s all fine. That’s fine. You should have that. Like I said at the very beginning, I want to get rewarded for writing this book. I think I did something ingenious and I would like to be rewarded for it. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when that becomes the only thing we care about.
CJ FOLLINI: Very interesting and I actually understand your book far better now. I want to bring this to a close. Yeah we’ve had a great. You’re right. We could go on for hours. I really could. This has been incredibly interesting and engaging but I want to make it real and practical. Yeah. If someone, if a young, older Gen Z, young millennial, or a high earner puts down your book, reads your book and says OK that was great but what do I do on Monday? Yeah right. What’s my practical takeaway? So I’m going to ask you, what is one concrete shift you’d want them to make or steps they can take in the immediate around work, spending, debt, and even how they define success with their own self-worth. What would be one or two?
PAUL: A lot of practical look, I think the first thing I would, I would advise and if anyone is out there has bought the book and then reads it, I thank you for it. Thank you for your patronage. But look you’re done with the book. You’ve read it, gotten to the end, you put it down. What should you do? What should be the first thing you do? Sorry my dog is.
CJ FOLLINI: That’s OK. I love that.
PAUL: What should be the first thing you do? The first thing you should do is nothing really. Nothing like sit with the ideas because these are kind of I think these are really big ideas. These are really sort of world changing ideas. I want them to sit with it like digest it, think about it. Don’t do any. Don’t make any big changes in your life. Realize that the things I’m talking about are beyond anyone one person’s ability to change wholesale. So you just need to sit down. Like digest the book, digest the ideas and try to start seeing in your own life you know how money actually is being used in your own life and in the world at large. And then you can start to see I think where maybe you can make changes in your own life, in your community, in society. You know it starts. Let’s start at an individual level and you have to start to see things a different way. And once you do that you can start to link up with other people and start to effect bigger changes. But to do it first you have to start with yourself. So what I think I would do is just don’t do anything but just sort of like sit and and and just chew on it, Mull it over.
I would even recommend actually also looking at some of the books I cite and going to read them and doing more research. I certainly don’t think what I wrote is the last word on the topic. So that would be the next thing I would say is do more research, do more reading, dig in deeper.
CJ FOLLINI: You said you’re a history buff. I’m a history buff too. I think there’s so much that we can learn from what has already happened and what has been written that that would be the next thing I would do. And thank you. Thank you for that. I think that’s, I think that’s a very counterintuitive but excellent piece of advice is to to dive deeper. I would add something about the Morgan Housel psychology of money. I’m not sure if it’s booked but the idea of idea of identifying how you identify self worth if your self worth is any in any way intertwined with your finances. I mean look the problem is.
PAUL: Society forces that onto you. Well no it does. It does. It absolutely does. There’s even the most money resistant person. I’m sorry. You are subject to whether or not you feel that way about yourself society feels that way about that is what society does. That’s why you get paid what you get paid. That is society putting a value on what you do. And it is I can’t imagine the sort of self, the self ego it takes to completely resist that. It’s very hard to resist. So but again like you can’t change that overnight but what you can do is you can come to recognize that you can understand that and why does society put a value on what you do? And why does society put a value on what other people do? Look at what other people get paid and why does society put a value on them and you? Why? Why do teachers make a tenth of what TikTok stars make? Why do teachers make what teachers make and why do football players make $15 million a year and a teacher makes $50,000 a year? Like what does that say about our society and the values we have. Those are the kinds of things I want you to start thinking about and questions I want you to start asking yourself. And you will start coming up with answers that might surprise you. And at that point you might be able to start making some changes in your life.
You also understand that this is such a big thing that it is going to be hard for you to make these changes on your own. It’s not a task. It is really a mindset shift. I certainly don’t want to encourage anybody to go out there and say well money’s not real. I don’t need money. It’s all a big illusion. And it’s you know and I’m just going to quit my job and I’m not going to make money anymore. No don’t do that. You’ll starve. It’s a terrible idea. Don’t do that. Like you have to keep working and you have to make money. Just do but just start trying to understand what the nature of this system is and then you can kind of maybe see where you can make some changes and your own life and maybe link up with people and make changes on a larger scale.
CJ FOLLINI: Amazing. Hey Paul I want to thank you for sharing your your time. Yesterday hopefully someone found this. Hopefully there were people who are either who have read your book and now like myself I understand it even even better and it provides more deeper insights because of what you just elaborate or they’re going to read your book and give it to you in the almighty the almighty almighty. That’s it. Yeah. Like how money became God, Reed became virtue and debt became sin. We went light on debt. Actually we should be clear for that wasn’t even a possible question. And when we were going to college. No no say is it worth it would have been ludicrous to even consider. I remember it’s funny I remember so I went to College in the 80s. We went light on debt. Actually we’re going to maybe follow up just on debt. But you know what we said at the end? I have a follow up. I’m going to pull out a quote from the archives that I haven’t used in a while but I think it’s very appropriate to cap this last discussion opens.
From Milton Friedman the famed monetarist from the University of Chicago and I remember this he said. Money is in its use is only as good as whether you want to find and I’m butchering it. But as long as you want to find a better experience provide for your family provide shelter or to give you the substance that you need all food. Anyone who seeks it beyond those needs is a fetishist of little green paper.
He’s basically quoting Aristotle who said the same thing yeah 2300 years ago and that Aristotle made the exact same quote. I’m going to put your Aristotle now where he said that that the pursuit of money if it’s done within the term within the framework of you’re trying to provide for your house and your family that is an acceptable use of money. That is an acceptable pursuit of greed. If it is outside of that that is unacceptable. So Aristotle said the same thing. And all that really shows is that this issue has been battered back and forth for thousands of years. It is not going to be solved today or tomorrow. Probably not going to be solved within our lifetimes. This is something we will be contending with for a long time. And that’s what makes your book universal and Evergreen hopeful. Thank you.
PAUL: And I’m going to do our outro now. If you found today’s hello welcome everyone. Thank you for joining. If you found today’s discussion helpful please subscribe to our newsletter Your Wealth Blueprint. Normally Noyack wealth weekly and you can find it at wearenoyack.com. That is wearenoyack.com our website. And each week we share straightforward actionable financial education where we make financial literacy practical. Maybe fun maybe not but either way it’s a necessity. Paul great to see you again CJ.
CJ FOLLINI: Good to see you. Thanks man I appreciate it.
