Welcome to the zeroth edition of The Fire Next Time Podcast/Newsletter. The world’s in a really weird place right now, and I want to talk about it with you and figure out where we’re going. This first video I want to share with you isn’t actually a podcast. It’s a presentation I gave in NYC at Lair East on February 11th, 2020, that was supposed to be about how our financial system was being pushed to the brink in a world drowning in artificial liquidity. I wasn’t in New York that day. Instead, I was halfway around the world in Japan, holed up away from the coronavirus. The talk itself is unfinished. I had made no slides when the day came, and when I woke up early to slam some slides out I felt like I was back in college, rushing out another essay that no one would read. Ever since I heard about the coronavirus, I felt that This Was It and my nerves were frayed from three weeks under a suffocating sense of crisis. The first half of the talk was about how fucked we were, and it slid right out of my brain onto the screen, ideas and narrative fully formed like smooth stones under the running water of my anxiety. Then I got to the second half, about what comes next. And I realized I was totally blanking here. I had some ideas jumbled in my head that felt like building blocks, but no evidence or even a coherent framework for how they fit together. I threw them out there anyway because I ran out of time, but I knew I was just scratching the surface here. So that’s what this video is about. Two months hence, a lot of the ideas here have been hashed and rehashed already. But I still think it’s worth looking at how we got here. Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFC_vNP93z8