me and another reporter, David Kessenbaum and I went, we bought falafel and like a smoothie. And this was when Bitcoin was like, I don't know, 20, $20 for one Bitcoin, you know? And so, yeah, I mean, well, it's cheaper now than it was six months ago, right? Six months ago, it was a $50,000 lunch and now it's a $20,000 lunch.

So if it keeps going, maybe it'll get back to normal. I mean, that does, to your earlier question about money and crypto, like money doesn't work that way. You don't regret buying a sandwich because the value of money, it actually appreciated so much. You don't hodl money. It doesn't make sense.

That's not what money is for. And so, you know, on a simple level, it demonstrates the extent to which certainly Bitcoin is not money. And I think the closest thing to money in crypto, sort of ironically, given the history, is stable coins, right? Which is funny given that like so much of the sort of crypto noise is about the unreliability of the dollar, that the thing that actually functions like money is the thing that is pegged to the dollar.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life money, and travel. If you're new here, I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and I'm a diehard optimizer who loves doing all the research to get the best experience in life without the expensive price tag.

That means optimizing travel, think flights, hotels, points, miles, money, think savings, investing, and getting deals, as well as life and work. Think happiness, leadership, negotiation, and so much more. To make this happen, I sit down with the world's best experts each week to learn the strategies, tactics, and frameworks that shaped their success.

And this week, I'm talking to podcasting legend, Jacob Goldstein. Many of you know him as an NPR correspondent and the co-host of Planet Money for over a decade. Before NPR, he was a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, and he recently published his first book, Money, The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, which is a fascinating look at the history of how money came to be.

Finally, he just launched a new podcast this year called What's Your Problem, where he interviews founders and CEOs about how they solve the world's hardest problems. Our conversation today will be all about money, including what's going on with inflation, what you can do about it, the genesis of money, and what might be in store for its future, including how crypto might fit in.

I'll also make sure to get some of Jacob's favorite money hacks along the way. So let's jump in. Jacob, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Hi. You've written a lot about inflation, and that it's often based on what people think and whether they think there should be inflation.

So I'm curious if you think what we're in right now is a self-fulfilling prophecy of what people think that just will get compoundingly worse, or is this different because we kind of have these supply chain issues and the Russian gas stuff? So I hope it's not a self-fulfilling, compounding prophecy where it's just going to get worse, right?

And it may not be. That is maybe like the most important macroeconomic question for the sort of medium term, you know, for the next year, couple years term, is do people expect inflation to stay high? And there is this weird thing about inflation, which is inflation expectations, what people think inflation is going to do, has a huge effect on what inflation actually does, right?

And for a long time, a sort of bizarrely long time, we lived in this world where we had persistently really low inflation, right? After the financial crisis, through the aughts, into the teens, whereby like 2019, we were in this world where unemployment was super low, the economy was doing well, the government was borrowing tons of money, and all of those things you would think would give you higher inflation, right?

That classically is a really inflationary environment and we didn't see it. And part of the reason it seems, it's kind of a mystery why we didn't see it, but part of the reason it seems is because people expected it would stay low. So now what do people think? I mean, you can look at the markets, you know, you can look at various financial markets and people don't think inflation is going to stay at 8% for like five years.

So that's kind of encouraging. So I'm hoping people's expectations are still kind of moderate. I was doing some quick math, looking at what is inflation been like in some countries. And if you go back and look, Argentina, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, 8% seems like nothing. But even right now, Turkey is like in the 50%.

So is 8% really that unreasonable? Inflation is weird because it can be nonlinear, right? And it's useful to distinguish 8%, high inflation that we have now from your, certainly Venezuela, Zimbabwe is where it was like thousands of percent. So it was just runaway. And also Turkey, whereas you say it's 50%.

I mean, in those runaway cases, in those Venezuela, Zimbabwe cases, it's not just inflation. It's basically an economic collapse, right? And the inflation is as much or more an effect, a symptom of the underlying collapse as the cause, right? We don't have that. We're not going to be Venezuela or Zimbabwe.

And if somebody says that, it means they don't know what they're talking about. But 8% inflation is bad. I mean, one thing that's really striking is people just hate it, right? Like people really hate inflation. And the other simple thing is real wages are going down, right? If you look at how much wages are going up versus inflation, inflation is going up faster than wages.

And that doesn't usually happen, especially when the economy is growing. And that means people are getting poorer. And it's bad when people are getting poor. That's the simple reason of why inflation is bad. It is a basket of goods, and some of them can have an outweighed impact. Are there any areas that you're aware of right now that aren't really doing as poorly, where it might actually be-- I know fuel prices are driving inflation significantly.

Yeah, so it's interesting to think about the different components of inflation. Fuel is obviously the most salient one, right? Gas, gas prices. And gas prices are really interesting. So if you look at the sort of budget, the typical household budget, which is like the inflation basket, all the stuff a typical family buys.

Gas is somewhere around like 5%. So it's not that much, right? But one, the price of gas went up way more than the price of basically anything else, right? It essentially doubled. And the price of nothing else really doubled. Two, and this is-- two is psychological, right? You see gas prices in like giant numbers as you're driving around.

You stand there pumping the gas in your car, and you see the numbers going up in front of you. And so it has a disproportionate impact on people's awareness, right? People freak out about gas prices in a way that they don't freak out about, say, health care, right? Health care prices, in fact, right now are not going up that fast, not going up as fast as I think the rest of inflation.

I haven't checked on that number in a while. And health care is a bigger chunk of the household spending basket than gas. But it's like the opposite in terms of salience, right? Like if you have a job, and you get health insurance through your job, your employer is just straight up paying a bunch of your health insurance premium.

So you don't even see that. And then the part that you're paying comes out of your paycheck. So you don't really notice it unless you're like looking through all the stuff, you know, on the gross part of your paycheck that's not flowing through to the net. So it's like health care is like the least salient part.

And interestingly, it's a place where at this moment, inflation is relatively low. So those are kind of two poles. And to the point I made earlier about people's expectations. One thing that I kind of personally am fearing is there's kind of a everyone assumes inflation is high right now.

Maybe even people are assuming it's higher than it actually is, right? If you see gas prices double, that's not 8%. And when they report 8%, they're annualizing a number, right? So it's like if it went up 1% in a month, it would be 12% reported. Yes. Well, sometimes they're doing year over year, they do do the month over month.

But the typical annual number they're doing the year over year. But they're not saying in May, prices went up 9% or 8%? They're not. They're saying between May of 2021 and 2022, prices went up 9%. People traditionally, like there are surveys, people traditionally think inflation is higher than it is, you know, at baseline.

So does that give restaurants kind of permission, even if their underlying food costs haven't gone up 10 or 15%, you know, are they like, "Oh, you know, we might as well raise prices right now. Everyone's going to accept it because everyone assumes prices are going up." And it kind of creates this, "Okay, well, now food prices are up." And everyone's like, "Oh, now I need, you know, to work an extra job, or I need to demand for my employer." And employers are like, "Well, if we're going to pay people, we got to raise our prices." And even though the underlying food might not be getting it as expensive.

Well, so there's a lot in that question, and it's worth unpacking it, right? So one part of that question is, can businesses sort of sneak in price hikes under the sort of veil of broader inflation, right? And it's an interesting question to think about. I mean, I personally am a price conscious consumer, right?

Like I like a deal. I know what I'm paying. I look at the price before I buy things. And you know, we want businesses to be competing against each other all the time, right? Inflation is good for consumers. And so if, you know, when we order in, we usually order in Thai, right?

And there's two or three Thai restaurants that we order from, and they're like pretty similar. And if one of them suddenly got more expensive, I would just start ordering in from the other one, right? So they're competing on price. And so if they colluded, they could raise prices, but that's always true, right?

I assume they're not colluding. So I don't think there is that much room for that. I mean, what there is, and this is the, you know, important, I think most important piece of inflation right now is not expectations. That's important for the long run. But as you alluded to earlier, you know, basic supply and demand are the two drivers right now.

There's, you know, less supply certainly of oil, to some extent of food, both because of the war in Ukraine, and then to some extent manufactured goods, because China has been doing this, you know, COVID zero extreme lockdowns. And so their manufacturing output has declined. So that's less supply. And then demand is high.

And that's important for price increases, right? Demand is high because, weirdly, it doesn't feel like it, but the economy has been really strong. I mean, it feels like all of a sudden, it's like, whoa, are we in a recession? But unemployment is below 4%. Savings is really high for US households.

And so people are willing to pay more, right? And that piece goes to your question. People are willing to pay more because they have more money, and also because their wages are going up. Their wages are going up faster than they've gone up for a long time, just not as fast as inflation.

So demand is high. So that allows, that does allow companies to raise prices. But we hope that's constrained by competition. Let's talk about one thing that you mentioned to me right before we rolled. Inflation can be a good thing for a certain type of product. I'll let you, I won't steal your lead.

For sure, for a certain type of person. If you have debt, and your debt is at a fixed interest rate, not a variable interest rate, inflation on average makes it easier to pay off that debt, right? Like as I mentioned, wages are going up really fast, faster than they've gone up in a long time.

And that is partly a result of inflation, right? Prices of everything are going up. And labor is a price. We don't think of it as a price, but it is, right? When you go to work, you are selling your labor. And the price of labor is going up. And so that's good.

If you are a person who sells labor for a living, it means you're getting more money. And notably, if you have a student loan or a mortgage, that is at a fixed interest rate. I have a mortgage that's at 2.9%, not to brag, but I was fortunate to buy a house last year.

So my wages are going up. My mortgage payment is staying the same. So what that means is as my wage goes up, I have to work less to make the same mortgage payment, right? So that's good for me. And it's bad for the bank, frankly, right? They're getting paid back in dollars that are less valuable.

The higher inflation, the less each dollar I pay the bank buys. So like it's definitely a win for debtors, although, you know, obviously in a limited way. And people get mad when you say that because nobody wants to hear that anything is good about inflation. Well, I mean, I'll give an example.

So I bought a car and it was a Tesla that I've been waiting a year for, and it was kind of two crazy things. One, you could see the inflation because Tesla, thankfully, locks in the price when you buy it. So when I put in the order for it last year, it was locked in at one price and that price went up about 20% since I ordered it.

So when I went to... Could you have just sold it back to the dealer for more than you paid for it? Well, here's the crazy thing. I was thinking the price today is 20% higher and you have to wait a year. So I was like, "Man, if I could sell my place in line, someone would presumably pay more than 20% because they would get it now instead of a year from now." And then I thought, "Gosh, if only Tesla reservations were on the blockchain and it was easy to transfer." But we can get there.

It wouldn't have to be on the blockchain. It wouldn't have to be on the blockchain. I know. I know. It's just what came to my mind living in Silicon Valley. I mean, if anybody was going to put reservations on the blockchain, it would be Tesla, right? If only you'd paid a doge.

Oh man. If you paid a doge, you'd be screwed. So I was looking for a loan. I was looking for a loan and I will share one tip for anyone listening. You do not need to finance your vehicle with the company you buy the car from. Many people had told me, "Oh, what's Tesla's rate?" I was like, "Well, I shopped my rate online and I went and looked at tons of credit unions around the country and some of whom only adjust their rates monthly, some of whom don't really adjust them at all.

And the range of rates I saw were anywhere from three, 4% for Tesla, I think was at 3.74 to the lowest rate I could find for a five to six year loan was 1.99%. 1.99 is really low for a five year loan right now. That's amazing. And that's now.

That's in this, when a mortgage is, what is a mortgage now? Five or six, right? Yeah. It made no sense to me, right? High yield savings accounts right now are paying, I know the Wealthfront Cash Account is at 1.4%. I was like, "Gosh, you're almost at the point where if rates go up as expected, over the next few months." We're just two or three year treasuries, right?

Two or three year treasuries are at what 3% or something last I checked. So I mean, there is a tax thing there, but yeah, it's obviously a sweet deal to finance at 1.99%. But it's pretty close. We're not that far away from the ability to earn more than your loan cost if you locked it in.

And so for anyone listening, definitely go look around. I might even link to this Tesla Google sheet where people that are from some Tesla forum put every credit union, all the deals there. I went to credit union one, had a great experience, highly recommend it, but I locked it in.

They told me they could lock the rate in for 60 days. And so I locked it in the morning of the Fed rate cut because I wanted the most time to buy the car. You knew it was going to go up. You knew it was going to go up.

You would think they would have known it too, right? It's interesting that it was so low, but you know, it means you're going to be paying that money back in dollars that are worth a lot less than dollars are worth now, right? A dollar four years from now when you're still paying off your loan is going to be worth, you know, more than 10% less than a dollar today.

We don't know the path of inflation, but 15, 20% less, right? It could be a lot less. Based on treasuries and everything, like it's definitely going to be worth less. And the thing that blows my mind, there's a tool, the CME group has this tool on their website called the FedWatch tool.

I don't know if you've seen it. And it shows the probabilities of rate hikes at different Fed meetings. And the thing that I thought was so crazy was I'm literally going to pull it up here and it says, you know, by the end of the year, December 22nd, there is a 42.6% chance it will be in the 3.25 to 3.5% range.

And then a 34% chance it'll be 3.5 to 3.75 and then an 8%, it's 3.75 or more. And to be clear, that rate is just the overnight rate, right? It's not a five-year rate. It's the overnight rate for the safest credit there is, basically. So it's wild that it's going to be that much higher and that you were able to lock in a five-year loan at one point.

And it wasn't just one credit union. Most of them were 1.99 to 2.5, even though people way smarter than me and spending more time on this than me are like 80-plus percent confident that rates will be in the 3% by the end of the year. Yeah, it's interesting to think about what's going on on the credit union side, like why, like where are they getting the funding?

I mean, I guess it's deposits, right? They're still paying zero on deposits. Now, if deposit rates have to go up, then they might get underwater, right? That's a thing that has happened. They might get screwed being on the other side of your loan. But for now, they're paying 0% to get deposits and lending to you at 2%, I guess.

And that's why I think it's important for everyone to realize that most banks that are lending the money out to you, like most of the average Chase Bank of America, Wells Fargo, they're paying no interest on their savings accounts. I'm sure they're still playing, it's close to zero, isn't it?

And checking accounts, I mean, we've forgotten now, but checking accounts used to pay interest. Oh, yeah, you cannot, it is hard to get interest at a brick and mortar bank these days. So as inflation rises, I was going to ask you what you're doing to prepare for inflation, but I'll share one thing, which is as inflation rises, and different institutions are paying over 1%, or hopefully in the future, over 2% or 3% on savings, leaving your money at a place paying 0% is not a great idea.

I'm curious what you might be doing. Yeah. I mean, so a couple of things, right? And as I mentioned, I bought a house a year ago, before that, I was saving a down payment, right? So enough money to make it worth, enough cash to make it worth sort of shopping around.

And I used American Express has an online high yield savings account. And it went to zero during the pandemic when everything else went to zero. But that one, I think it's back up, a lot of them like it. I think I saw an ad for Marcus, which is Goldman Sachs sort of consumer facing online bank.

So there are a lot of just FDIC insured, you know, totally liquid, put it in today, take it out whenever you want that are up around 1% now. I mean, my favorite one, I don't know if you've talked about it on the show. Have you talked about IBONS on the show?

I've written about IBONS in my newsletter. And I'm doing an AMA episode where people are asking where to put cash right now. And IBONS was the answer. We haven't talked about them. So we could just go now. And I could just skip that on the AMA. Well, I don't want to, I don't want to step on.

I don't know. But it's my favorite answer. It's the thing that I'm most, like, I don't generally believe in tips. You know, my basic investing tip is always just like, buy, buy index funds, right? Just buy index funds and look away. Don't do anything because whatever you do, you could do the wrong thing.

We could talk about tax loss harvesting, right? But anyways, so my big hack with money that I'm excited about now is IBONS. You obviously know about them too, so we can both talk about them. What are they? Let me ask you. What's an IBONS? So the government has these bonds that they issue.

It's a series I savings bond. You know, you can only buy them on a terrible website, TreasuryDirect, or. So bad though, so bad. It's literally, for anyone who hasn't used it, the only way you can enter your password is through a virtual keyboard that you have to click with each letter with your mouse.

It's really hard. Or I think you can still buy them paper ones with your tax refund. Yeah. So, so yes, up to. So you can buy them and there's limits on how much you can buy. You can buy up to $5,000 with a tax refund and up to $10,000 just straight up on the terrible website.

I should also make a distinction. Sometimes people confuse them with with TIPS, which are Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, I think it stands for. But it's a different thing. And those are like a regular market. The amazing thing about IBONs is basically they are guaranteed to pay an interest rate that keeps up with inflation.

Essentially, there's some formula, but that's basically what it is. Yeah, they have a they have a rate that right now I think is actually zero. That is like the base rate. And then they add on every six months, they change whatever the current inflation rate is. So from May, May 2022 to October, if you get one, you'll get the first six months, you'll get nine point six, two percent interest.

And we should just pause and wave our hands at nine point six, two percent interest, right? Like this is the most safe, you know, borrow. You're lending your money to the government, the safest thing you can do with it. You have to leave it in for a year, essentially.

There's like a small penalty if you take it out less than five years, you have to leave it in for a year. But getting nine point six percent interest from the government guaranteed is extraordinary. And I should add, depending on how fortunate you are, how much cash you have.

So it's limited to ten thousand per person per year. But you can also open an account for your kid or your kids. So I actually I opened one for each of my daughters and I and I bought the Max last year and I bought the Max this year. And you know, I mean, I also have a lot of money in the stock market that I've watched go down.

And it's like to me, I now have a non-trivial amount of money that is very safely and comfortably going up. And it just makes me happy to think about it. We did the same. If you have a revocable trust, which in an episode recently we talked about, you know, is not the same thing as these crazy high net worth trust.

It's a pretty basic legal document that can be another entity. And so you could do another one there. So you know, if you had a family of four, you could conceivably put five that fifty thousand five, ten thousand dollar savings, series I savings bonds or bonds in a year, which is a real amount of money.

It's a lot, even if inflation goes to zero before the end of the year, which I think is very unlikely personally. But even if inflation went to zero, you would earn nine point six two percent for the first six months or four point eight one because, you know, it's an annualized rate and then zero on the rest of the year.

So even earning four point eight one percent is a much larger number than any other government backed place I've seen. You could invest money for, you know, less for a one year horizon. Other side. Right. If inflation keeps going up, the interest rate you receive, you know, it resets, as you said, every what is it, six months?

It keeps going up. So like. It's a wildly like it shouldn't exist, right? Like it's a weird it's like a loophole because like. I have to assume the reason there is a cap is because this is not a profitable endeavor for the U.S. government. No, it doesn't make any sense, right?

People are like the rate on on, you know, these kinds of. They borrow most of their money, you know, from the market and the market will will accept a profoundly lower rate of interest. So I mean, I think the idea is to encourage saving, right? Their savings bonds, right?

Like if you're old enough, like when I was a kid, you know, like your uncle would give you like a hundred dollar savings bond and they would pay fifty dollars for it. And the idea is like you hold it for ten years and then you can cash it in for a hundred or something.

And I think this is the sort of legacy of that. Yeah, well, it's a real hack, though. Like I feel good. I feel like I'm bringing a hack to the show with that one. I totally agree. And you talked about things not making sense that the government does with money, which is a great thing I wanted to talk about.

In a past episode, I talked with someone about charisma, Vanessa Van Edwards, and we talked about how it was this thing that everyone kind of knows. But when you actually try to say like, what is it really? People can very rarely answer the question. The answer she found was that it's a balance of warmth and competence.

But you know, I was thinking about money and your book made me think, gosh, money is kind of similar. It's this thing that, you know, you did an interview on This American Life for an episode. Ira Glass called what is money the most stoner question he'd ever posed on the on the show.

And it made me think, gosh, it's this thing that we all know what it is, but like, what is it really? And that led you to write an entire book. So I'm going to just ask you now that you're the expert, like what what is money? The reason it seemed interesting enough to me to write a book about is at a more complex level, the answer to that question has changed an incredible amount over time, right?

The book is a history book, basically. It's like a series of origin stories, really, of of money. And the really striking thing to me, I think, at the root is at any given moment. What money is just seems like the natural state of the world, right? Like most people most of the time don't really think about it.

They just think, oh, yes, this piece of paper, my wallet, this number in my account, that's what money is fine, whatever. That's just the way the world works. But the lesson, the insight to me that was really interesting, exciting is it's not necessarily the way the world works. It didn't used to work that way.

It'll probably be different in the future. And so that's that's what's fun. Money turns out to be this, you know, set of rules, the set of arrangements that a society agrees on without really realizing that they're agreeing on something. Quite often it is kind of emergent and they're like it's kind of bottom up more than you might think, rather than, you know, let's have a constitutional convention and decide what money is.

So we're not going to go through the entire history because there's a wonderful book that I read in advance of this. Yeah, you can read it first. But where did it all start? I think I didn't think it started where it did. And I'd love at least that story to jump in here and let people get a little glimpse.

Yeah. So. There's where, like the best guess now of where it started, and then there's what people always thought. Right. And it's interesting to to distinguish between them. For a long time, there was this sort of a parable, almost a kind of just so story that people told about the origin of money.

And that was, you know, before there was money, there was barter, right, trade. And barter was inconvenient because for you and me to make an exchange, not only did I have to have something that you want, but you also had to have something that I want. Right. So maybe I've got a thing and you want my thing, but you don't have anything that I want.

So we can't make a deal. Right. And that sucks because it would be good if we could make a deal. It'd be good for me and it would be good for you. And money solves that problem. Right. Then if you want something I have, I don't care what stuff you have.

Just give me some of your money and I'll give you this thing that I have that you want. Right. That's the traditional story of money emerged from barter. The thing is in the 20th century, basically, anthropologists from largely Europe and the U.S. started going around the world and studying different societies in, you know, stages of development that people had imagined this kind of barter universe would exist in.

And what the anthropologists found was they weren't like that into barter. What they were much more into was social agreements about like borrowing and lending and gift giving and reciprocity. There were all these rules. Right. And so these are basically tribal societies. Right. They're small, you know, kinship based groups of people where everybody knows everybody else.

And there are lots of rules about exchange, essentially, you know, exchange of material goods. Some of the sort of canonical cases have to do with marriage is a big one. There are very often rules like if you're going to marry somebody, you know, you have to give their family, your family has to give their family cattle or your family has to give their family a certain kind of boar tusk or whatever.

Another one was around murder. Kind of awesomely. Lots of societies have rules where, like, if you kill somebody, then your family has to give their family, you know, typically same kind of stuff. Cattle in a lot of places, cowry shells, whatever, some some prescribed thing. And those things, those are really proto money.

Right. Because once there's a thing where it's like, well, probably not going to murder somebody, but like my kid's probably going to get married and when my kid gets married, I'm going to need some cows to give to, you know, the bride's family or whatever. That's really, I think, the best guess for the roots of money.

It reminds me of something I think you probably wrote in the book that said, you know, it's also money is what you have to pay your taxes with. It's like the reason I care about having dollars in my bank account is because that every every April I have to send dollars to the U.S.

government and they only accept that. It's a good starting point. And certainly in places and times where different things are sort of competing to be money, you know, that's a world we're not used to now. But there have been times where that was the case. If the government comes in and says, you will pay your taxes in this thing, and sometimes it was cloth and sometimes it was some currency, then that thing becomes like the cows you have to give for marriage, a thing everybody's going to need at some point.

And and yes, it becomes money. I mean, one of the interesting things distinguishing between the sort of barter story and the, you know, marriage and murder story is the barter story is really this very cold, impersonal market story, which I think is like the typical sort of vibe we associate with money.

But it's really interesting to me to think about the other story, right, the murder and marriage story, because that's a much more like hot, social, interactive story of what money is. And that side of money, right, this social creation, this thing that works because we all agree to use something as money is a really interesting piece of it.

And I think underappreciated. And you mentioned cattle as an example. Cattle is not something easy to bring up and divide and all that divide. No, no. Is that ultimately what drove to the kind of creation of paper money was like, we just we can't I need something from you.

And a cattle is just too valuable. How did we get because I don't think it was like overnight that we just switched there. How did how did what happened then when you needed half a cattle? And how did we end up? Yeah, so, so, so paper was much later for sort of technical reasons.

Paper wasn't invented until like, I don't know, 1000 AD, hundreds of years AD. But coins, coins came along first. Coins came along around, I don't know, 600, 700 BC. And the short answer to your question is yes. But the longer answer to your question is, so, you know, before coins, whatever, if you go back to the ancient, ancient world, there were these small, you know, sort of tribal societies like we talked about.

And then there were bigger civilizations, right? If you think of the classic cradle of civilization, you know, the Eastern Mediterranean and those societies were very top down, right? They were like today we'd call them command and control economies, right? There was somebody there was a ruler, like a king or a queen or a priest or whatever.

And they would essentially direct the exchange of good. They would, you know, take grains from the farmers and give them to the bureaucrats who worked at the temple or whatever. So there was not a market exchange, or at least not to the extent at all that we're used to.

Right? So, so there was a solution to like, how do you do exchange in a bigger civilization? Well, you just have a king take and give and decide what everybody's going to get. But then the first place coins really took off was ancient Greece, interestingly. And I think arguably, not coincidentally, certainly interestingly, around the time democracy was emerging, right?

And what you had in ancient Greece, this is like, you know, classical Greece, the Olympics, the whole thing was something that was bigger and more complex than a tribal civilization/economy, but also a more bottom up power distribution than you had in these, you know, very top down kingdoms. And so you needed some new way to do material exchange that was neither top down nor everybody knows everybody and we all share the same rules and coins, money was the perfect solution for that.

And back then and fast forward a lot longer than I thought. So I was blown away reading that in the 1800s, we still had lots of different kinds of money. It wasn't like we'd centralized on this is the kind. So I'm intentionally fast forwarding because there's a book, go read the book.

I thought it was great. We don't need to recap the entire book. But I'm going to make a hard turn from the conversation of the history of money and talk about maybe a little bit of the future, which was, I think you said there was 8,370 kinds of money somewhere in the mid 1800s in the US, and I thought, okay, right now it feels like if you talk to a lot of people, the future of money is something online and there's all these cryptocurrencies.

I was like, it feels like there's probably 8,370 different cryptocurrencies. I'm curious what happened in that last, let's call it 200 years, watching money evolve from lots of different things to get more centralized. Do you think anything like that plays out in the world of crypto and how do you think it falls into the world of money?

I know it's a loaded question. Yeah, no, it's an interesting question. So let me just say a little thing about the moment you're alluding to in the 1800s and then we can jump to now because it'll help it make more sense. So the way it worked in the US in the like 1830s, '40s, '50s was there was the dollar.

The dollar was the unit of account, right? But private banks issued their own paper money and this was still the era when paper money was like a claim check for gold, right? The real value or silver, the real value was the precious metal. And so there were in fact 8,000 different kinds of paper money because each bank issued different looking pieces of paper and it was wild and interesting.

And like you said, you can read all about it. But still the underlying thing was the dollar. So there are some elements that are similar to cryptocurrencies and some that are different and people have been writing about that. I mean, the thing that has happened over the last couple hundred years is the government has gotten more and more power over money, right?

Going off the gold standard in the 1930s gave the government much more power over money. Doing deposit insurance for banks actually sort of gave the government a much bigger role in money. And I think the central role that government has in money is like the most important thing both about money today and frankly in thinking about cryptocurrency in the context of, is it really going to be money?

Are people really in a widespread way going to use crypto to buy and sell stuff? And I think it's unlikely that governments will relinquish their control over money, right? We basically have a monopoly on money now. And yeah, you can find scattered use cases like ransom or people who want to move money out of countries like China where there are capital controls, where cryptocurrency has a clear use case.

It's striking to me how long in a sort of technology standpoint, Bitcoin has now existed, right? 2008 was the white paper and I think 2009 was when the first block was minted. So that's a long time in a certain way for it to not really take off. I remember I started covering Bitcoin in 2011 and at the time I was like, "Wow, this is really interesting.

Either it'll work and be this wild new thing or it won't work and it'll kind of go away." And the surprising thing to me is I was wrong on both of them. It didn't really work and it totally didn't go away. It blew up, right? So I feel like there are a lot of non-monetary potential use cases for stuff on the blockchain, cryptocurrency/the blockchain.

And I'm kind of surprised that those haven't worked yet, like remittances or even just payments, right? Like we pay a lot to credit card companies to pay with a credit card. We don't see it. The merchant pays it. But I would love it if somebody could make something on the blockchain that lowered fees.

People pay a lot to send money home when they go abroad to work. It would be great if there were just some simple, boring blockchain product that people used who didn't care about blockchain. Like that's what I'm waiting for and hoping for and I'm surprised that it hasn't happened yet.

And do you think it will? I mean, do you think it will? When I think about the projects that everyone I know working in this industry are excited about, it's like generative art, you know, as NFTs and, you know, there's some value to those projects, but they're not going to necessarily change the cost for someone living in America to send money to South America or to Europe.

I feel like, you know, if you go people compared to the internet or to the web and like, you know, there was this moment in the 90s when like the internet was kind of interesting and weird and people didn't know what to do with it. And then somebody, it was Hotmail, Hotmail came along, which was the first web-based email.

And like before web-based email, it was a huge hassle to get your email. You had to have like a special app on your computer and if you were on a different computer, you couldn't get your email, if I recall correctly. And so it was just this obvious killer app that was useful even if you didn't care about the web per se, it just let you do a thing.

And it wasn't about the technology, it was about the thing it let you do. And that's all I want out of blockchain. You know what I mean? I want something if it's finance, sure, but just have it be financing something in the real world, right? Like DeFi just seems to be financing other DeFi, right?

It's just like a Russian doll of people borrowing in crypto to buy more crypto. Like, I believe that finance can do useful things in the world. I don't know. Like, do you think, I mean, when you talk about whatever NFT art projects, like, truly, what do you think? I view it as one of the, like a project where I'm like, okay, the entire crypto experience, I'm like, I don't know what it will become.

I have, there's enough use cases that people talk about. You mentioned remittance, title insurance. There's all these things where I'm just waiting for a real project. I think it's crazy that when you buy a house, you pay a company to- Title insurance. It's like an anti-hack, right? Title insurance.

You just get hosed. And then someone else pays that insurance the next time they buy the house, and you're all insuring against the thing that, you know, it's crazy. So that could be- Yeah, put my title in the blockchain, please. You know, please. But I haven't seen it, but there's so many people, some of the smartest people I've ever met are all working on different projects, and some of them in, you know, earning yield, some of them in NFTs, and some of them in crazy other stuff that's still taking shape.

And so I do think there is a future of use cases that we haven't seen. And I can't remember which podcast it was that I heard Chris Dixon from Andreessen Horowitz on, and he made a kind of crazy case of, you know, when the App Store came out for the iPhone, no one really knew what the apps were.

It was like, there were people that were like, "Oh, I want a calculator that can do some advanced functions," because that's what we were thinking of. But so many things happened that were out of our wildest dreams, like we couldn't even come up with them. And so I believe those things are coming.

I'm just, I've been waiting. Like you. It's been a while. I mean, I will say, I think, when did the iPhone come out? I think Bitcoin is about as old as the iPhone, right? So you know, it's certainly taking longer than the App Store did to kind of deliver.

I mean, and whatever, easy for me to say, because I'm not doing the work. But like you, I mean, you know, in a way the collapse in crypto prices might be useful because there is so much like scammy noise around crypto that like, it's just obviously scammy noise that you just kind of want to wave it all away.

And maybe the crash will sort of wash out the scammy noise to some extent and leave the people who are actually working in good faith on potentially useful projects. And I think there are a lot of those people. And I don't know how to pick the winners right in right now when I think of it as a to bet on it.

You know, there was, there's not a way easily to bet on mobile, I guess you could buy some Apple stock or some Google stock. It's like here, I like that the ability to bet on a fundamental piece of technology is a little bit more accessible. You could probably assume that maybe, is it?

I don't know. I mean, you think not accessible, at least with, well, at least with the stock market, you have like a stream of revenues. You have a way to value it, right? You can do sort of fundamental valuation, right? Like you could have bet on mobile 10 years ago, whereas if you're buying, I mean, you can buy tokens.

I get the logic of buying tokens, but the, but how to value them, Oh, seems very hard. I'm not trying to convince you that it's not a speculative asset, right? It definitely, and most certainly is, but like, what is the right price, right? And like, what is the right, like, there's no, I don't know of any, I mean, people with Bitcoin are like, well, it's like gold and the, you know, the sort of total value of gold is much larger than the total value of Bitcoin.

But that's kind of a different thing than what we're talking about. Yeah. I think, I think it's cool that there's something happening and it's exciting and there's a way to put a small amount of money into it and see what happens. Yeah. It's like a trip to the casino with that's like maybe more intellectually interesting than going to the casino.

Yeah. Now that we both share a common story that in sometime almost a decade ago, for me, it was, I had some Bitcoin and I've, I made a purchase where I was looking online and I was like really into fantasy football. I was really into fantasy football for a few years.

And there was this site that I'm not going to say I understood whether it was legitimate or not, but you could get access to stream all the football games of the season for the low price of like a Bitcoin or something. You know, it was like maybe it was, I think you understood that this was not legitimate, but let's keep going.

And I remember thinking, gosh, you know, it would be way more expensive paying for NFL Sunday ticket because that's like $300 and you got to get direct TV looking back. You know, it was probably like a $10,000 subscription to watch, you know, 16 or 20 games during a season.

I know you also bought a sandwich that probably, you know, maybe as a $10,000 sandwich, maybe more. Yeah, more. Me and another reporter, David Kessenbaum and I went, we bought falafel and like a smoothie. And this was when Bitcoin was like, I don't know, 20, $20 for one Bitcoin, you know?

And so, yeah, I mean, well, it's cheaper now than it was six months ago, right? Six months ago, it was a $50,000 lunch and now it's a $20,000 lunch. So if it keeps going, maybe it'll get back to normal. I mean, that does to your earlier question about, you know, money and crypto, like money doesn't work that way.

You don't regret buying a sandwich because the value of money, you know, it actually appreciated so much. Like you don't hodl money. It doesn't make sense. That's not what money is for. And so, you know, on a simple level, it demonstrates the extent to which certainly Bitcoin is not money.

And I think the closest thing to money in crypto, sort of ironically, given the history, is stable coins, right? Which is funny given that like so much of the sort of crypto noise is about the unreliability of the dollar, that the thing that actually functions like money is the thing that is pegged to the dollar.

OK, so we don't have to go too crazy on crypto. But what do you think about institutions like Fidelity saying, oh, we're going to let people put crypto in their 401k and kind of starting to try to treat it as a mainstream investment? Yeah. I mean, I guess the underlying question there is a question about sort of paternalism, really, right?

Like, I mean, if some friend of mine or family member said, should I buy Bitcoin? I would say don't invest what you can't lose, right? Like if you want to make a little side bet, that's fine. But like the S&P 500 is a much safer bet for the long run, is what I would say.

Whether Fidelity should let people is a weird question, right? Because it's like, I guess ultimately it's OK with me. I'm not comfortable being that paternalistic. I'm not comfortable saying to people, I know better than you and I don't think you should be allowed to do this. But I mean, if somebody asked me for advice, I would say don't put much money in it.

So to get back to the book, at the end, you had this conclusion section of the future of money and you had these three possibilities. And sure, there are more, but I loved the three, which was a world without cash, a world without banks, and a world that sounds like the world you described in the past, which was the government's going to kind of manage it all and print money and give it to anyone who wants a job.

Is one of those a world where you actually think this is where we're going? So the world without cash is probably the most reasonable of those, right? It certainly feels like cash is going away. I mean, there are a couple of things to say about that, though. One is, in fact, cash is not going away.

In fact, there is more cash than there has ever been, despite what it feels like. There's an extraordinary amount of cash in the world now. You know, when I wrote the book, it was something like 40, four, zero, hundred dollar bills for every man, woman, and child in America, which is just astonishing when you think about it, right?

More hundred dollar bills than one dollar bills. And so then there's the question of like, where is it, right? Where are all those hundreds? And the awesome answer is we don't exactly know because it's cash and kind of the whole point of cash, certainly the whole point of hundreds, let's be honest, is it's like nobody knows where it is.

It's not tracked. You know, it's pretty clear that a lot of it is outside the United States, right? In a lot of countries where the banks are unreliable, where the currency is unreliable, people like U.S. paper money as a store of value, as a real store of value. So that seems useful and it's like a good export for the U.S., right?

People want to give us stuff and we give them paper, like that's a good deal. So crime, right? Like people just use paper money to commit crimes a lot. There was this story that came out after I wrote the book. It was at the beginning of the pandemic when all the stores shut down.

And in L.A., in Southern California, the DEA just started seizing these vast sums of cash. And what had happened was the drug dealers in L.A. were using these stores to launder their money. And when the stores shut down, they couldn't launder their money anymore. So the money was just like piling up and they just had all this cash that they couldn't hide anymore.

So that is still going to happen. The other piece of it is money is largely already digital. If cash goes away, I mean, there are certain people, like people don't have access to bank accounts. And so you would definitely want to create a system to basically give those people bank accounts, give everybody a bank account, give everybody a debit card.

That's solvable. The key thing is our money is already mostly digital, right? Even though I think if people sort of close their eyes and think about money, they'd think about a $20 bill or a $100 bill, the vast majority of money in the world is just a number on a bank's computer, right?

So if cash goes away, the world wouldn't look that different. I think there's a, I don't know how much, but there's a decent amount of our economy that happens with cash, people that get paid in cash don't pay taxes again, which maybe isn't good that that happens, but yeah, no, you're right, you're right.

There was this famous moment in Italy when they decided to start including in GDP and the measure of their overall economy, the black market, the illegal economy. And because of the nature of the Italian economy, their GDP grew a ton when they decided to start counting it. They passed, I think they passed to the UK, they became a bigger economy than the UK and they had like a celebration.

They called it il sorpasso because like, "Hey, we're bigger than the UK," which is fun. How did they account for it? Yeah, I don't know. Oh, okay. What's funny, my fun moment was I had a tenant and we had an Airbnb and we were talking about the U.S. economy, he was from Germany and we talked about cash and he was like, "Oh, do you want me to pay you with cash?

Is it okay if I send it electronically? Do you take credit card?" We were talking about it and he's like, "Because in Germany, you know, we say that cash is tax neutral." And I thought that was the best description of cash I'd heard to date. Cash neutral is funny.

I mean, arguably it's cash, it's tax, tax neutral is funny. Arguably it's tax negative, right? Like if in the proper world, you're paying the tax and then you pay in cash, you don't have to pay the... Oh, yeah. It depends on what your baseline is. Yeah. So it's good that you've learned a lot about money.

You've researched it, talked about it, run a podcast for over a decade. But I saw you say that before you started thinking about money, you didn't really think about it that seriously. It became this thing that you're now known for. And now that you have a family and kids, I'm curious what kinds of money-related lessons or thoughts you're trying to pass on so that they have a better understanding earlier on than maybe you did.

Yeah. That's a good question. I mean, you know, the way I thought about money before I started studying it and writing about it was I was always really into saving money and not spending money. I, you know, I, yeah, just the way I was raised or my personality is like, I like a deal, I think twice before I buy things.

And it's interesting, you know, you ask about my kids. And so a thing I think a lot about with them is what's the right balance? Like I think I was sort of neurotically cheap to some extent, or in some settings, like the way I thought about money, like, but at the same time, like, I'm glad that I, you know, know the value of a dollar, right?

And don't take for granted buying stuff. And so what I'm trying to teach or model for my kids, because the modeling is the real thing, right? With kids, what you do is really what matters. So what I'm trying to model for them is some happy medium, right? Like A, recognizing that we're fortunate to just be okay and not have to worry about buying food and paying the rent.

Like, that's a big one, right? Like, don't take that for granted, we're lucky. Two, like, it's okay to buy yourself something nice. But remember, like, if you buy this thing, you're going to have less money and less ability to buy something else in the future. So is it worth it to you, right?

It's that that idea, that idea of value. That's really what I want to teach my kids. And how are you modeling those two things? Well, it's hard. I mean, I'm trying to be like thoughtful about money, but not neurotic, right? Like, I'm just trying to be the, like, money person I aspire to be in my behavior in front of them.

Do you talk about, "Oh, we're going to make this decision. You mentioned you got to buy a house. Did you?" I don't know. I don't know how old your kids are. So maybe that's too much. They're, you know, 9 and 11. We did talk about, I mean, I explained to them the mortgage, you know, I explained to them how a mortgage worked.

And for that matter, we had, we lived in an apartment before and we had a mortgage. And I explained to them, they're curious, smart kids, you know? And so I explained to them, like, "We're going to sell the house and we're going to get money. And we're going to use that money to pay off the bank for this mortgage.

And then we're going to have some leftover. And we're going to use that to buy some of the house that we're buying, and we're going to get a loan." Like, they were into the mechanics of it. And we talked a lot about it. So like, that part is just fun.

Like, I'm a nerd. My kids are kind of nerds. And so the, like, the mechanics part, to me, that's like the fun, easy part. The more, certainly the harder and maybe more interesting, ultimately, a part is the more emotional, frankly, more emotional part. Because like, rationally, like, I save a lot of money and, you know, I'm fine.

We're fortunate and I work and my wife works and whatever. But you know, as you know, there's a large emotional component to money. And managing that and being reasonable about money, that I find hard at some level. And I think the hardest thing, there's an unlimited number of studies that show that people who have money would think they will be happier if they have more money.

Which I think is probably the hardest emotional thing to solve. You know, whether it's keeping up with the Joneses or the hedonic treadmill or whatever name you want to give it. I have not found someone give any kind of, "Here is exactly how you fix that." You know, the answer has been, you know, you just have to accept that what you have is enough.

And maybe it's gratitude. Or is there anything you've picked up in all the episodes you've done or conversations you've had that would help someone kind of get out of that rut of kind of always thinking more would be better and not being content with what they have now? At a broader level, and this might be too broad, but a thing I have found in my, just in my life, frankly, more than in my work, is that I'll have some emotion about money or about work or something.

Some worry. I worry a lot, whatever. And then I'll go for a jog. I like to jog. I think that exercising just makes me less worried. And I'll feel better. Right? I'll stop worrying about the thing I was worried about. But the thing hasn't changed at all. The money situation in my life or the thing at work or whatever I was worried about.

And so like for me, a big insight of adulthood has been my emotions are more about what's going on inside of me than about what's going on out in the world. Right? So to me, the key thing to worry less is to not fix something external, I mean, unless you have some horrible thing in your life.

But I unfortunately don't have horrible things in my life. It's to manage myself. It's to run. It's to whatever. Sleep if you need to sleep. Take a break if you need to take a break. It's recognizing that the source of a lot of problems, a lot of worry, is internal.

Interesting. My answer would have been something that I don't think contradicts what you said, but complements it on the other side, which is a lot of the source, I think, of people's struggles with money are thinking that most people have more than them, which I actually think is not true.

And so my challenge to people is if you're feeling like you can't keep up with the Joneses per se, try to just talk about money. It's like the most uncomfortable thing, and I don't know if people will, but I imagine the person on Instagram who posted a photo in a Greek island that you're jealous of, talk to them about money, and they might say, "Gosh, we're still struggling to pay off our student loans." And you're like, "Oh, wow." They're not posting their student loans on Instagram.

They're not posting the credit card payment they missed. And so your example is think inward, and mine is a complimentary one, which is talk to the people that you aspire to be like, and you might find out you're a lot more like them, or you might even be better off.

They just might be making you look like you're not better off because all you see... Stay off Instagram also, right? Instagram is a vehicle for that. I mean, you know, one word that's interesting to talk about in this context, I think it's under-discussed in the context of money and other things, is status, right?

A lot of the time, I mean, obviously money and status are closely linked. And sometimes what people will articulate as a worry about having enough or whatever is actually a worry about status, a worry about, "Oh, I am lower status than this person who went to Greece," or whatever, right?

And I don't know exactly what to do about that, right? In my dream world, it was like, "Don't care about status." But I haven't been able to not care about status, candidly, right? We're hierarchical animals. It's very hard to not care about status. But I think to at least be aware of it and be aware of what status games do you want to play?

What status games can you get out of playing? Whether that's at work or with respect to material things or the kind of car you have or whatever, just an awareness that a lot of what we think of as like, "Oh, I need this or I need that, or I'm worried that I'm not going to have enough money," is really a kind of status hierarchy, primate brain doing weird things in the way we think about money.

That I also find helpful. If there's a person that I could think of that might have some suggestions, and I will take it as homework to bring them on the show in the future, is Ryan Holiday, who talks a lot about stoicism, I think if I were going to try to solve that with a conversation, I feel like he would be the best kind of sparring partner for that.

So I will send you a note when he comes on, which if anyone listening is like, "I'm buddy," send him a note. I don't know Ryan, but I will find my way to him and encourage him. I mean, that guy does a ton of stuff. I bet you could get him on the show.

Before we wrap, I have a couple of things. You said you're a nerd about money. You love a deal. You love saving. In our first conversation, before we hit the record, I know you've said you've got some hacks for money. I'd love to hear, what are the things that you do that you often find your friends or peers or colleagues being like, "Oh, that's great.

I got to start doing that," other than the I-bonds, which we'll go down as the main one for the episode? Oh, I mean, yeah, that's the big one. Everything else is so small and goes more to the neurotic side. It's like the stuff where I don't actually save that much money in the big picture.

I just like the feeling of getting a deal. Do you know the website Auto Slash? This is a weird one, but there's a website called Auto Slash. I just bought a car for the first time a couple of years ago. I live in New York where you can get around without a car.

Before the pandemic, I didn't have a car until we would rent cars pretty often, if we're going to go away for the weekend or whatever. Renting a car in New York is really expensive. There's this weird website called Auto Slash where you just type in where you want to rent a car and whatever, who you are, what kind of car you want to rent.

If you're a member of Costco or the AAA or if you have this credit card or that credit card. Then the weird thing about it is it's not instant, but like, I don't know, an hour later they email you rental car deals and they tend to be really good deals.

In New York, it's like the difference between 100 or 150 bucks a day and like 25 bucks a day for a rental car sometimes. It's like a big deal. That one, I don't know. Is that too little? Is that the wrong size hack? I think I would say no, because the CEO of Auto Slash, Jonathan Weinberg, is actually we're recording episode next week all about rental cars.

Okay. Well, you're welcome, Jonathan. You just teed that up perfectly. But yeah, I think rental cars, especially right now, there's no supply of cars in the market. I noticed when we ordered our Tesla, they said it's going to come in April. We had our second child in June, car hadn't come.

Car said in the app, it's coming in July. We were like, we can manage for a month in a car that doesn't fit everyone. That's okay. And then it said, okay, it's got pushed back. It's no longer July. It's going to be somewhere between December and next April. And we were like, so I called Tesla, I was like, what is going on?

And they're like, ah, you know, it's normal that the dates shift like that. I was like, what do you mean? What do you mean? It's normal that the dates shift by six months? It's normal that you go buy a car and drive home. That's what's normal, Tesla. And then a week later it shifted back and it said, ah, this is the thing that I thought was so crazy.

It said August 11th to October 12th. And I was like, okay, I guess it's normal that it shifts by six months. And then the next week it said August 12th to October 13th. And I was like, how could a company have enough precision to change my delivery estimate by a day when two weeks prior it was six.

But the window is still two months, right? We know it won't be August 12th anymore. It's still a big window, but we're shifting it by 2%. Yeah, well, the hack for this, though, that I learned, which I didn't want to share until I got the car right now, I don't care is that when Tesla has a car that is ready for pickup, they email someone say, hey, your car's here.

And if in three days you're not ready for it, they put it to someone else. And so can you like fly standby with Tesla? Can you get on the I want to be on the someone else list? So I wouldn't say it's like accepted, but it's also maybe not like prevented.

This is this is the hack. This is the perfect hack window. Yes. So if you go not to the showroom, but the delivery center. So in every major area, there's a delivery center in the Bay Area. It's in Colma. And you know, I would say for a cemetery, yeah, I know.

I would say, you know, it, it helps if you genuinely have a need. We went in, we're like, our family doesn't fit in the car we have today. But we would like it. People are willing to make an exception. If you're flexible, you're like, we will change the color.

That's fine. We found someone and they said, look, if a car shows up and no one wants it after two and a half days, you know, or if we get a verbal confirmation that they don't want it, we'll give you a call because they want to get the car off the lot.

And if they if they know someone that's going to come right away, it's helpful. I think they're supposed to put it back in the queue and give it to the next person in line. But, you know, every now and what we ended up getting was a car that came in six months ago and had something wrong with the door.

And because they prioritize people who own cars, they prioritize fixing their cars. This car just sat there for, you know, four or five months before they fix the door. And now it's technically a twenty twenty one and the new cars are twenty twenty twos. So they kept calling people and saying, hey, you're twenty twenty twos here.

It's actually last year's model. Nothing changed. They changed like the charge port is slightly different and that's it. And for anyone listening who's a huge nerd, they also added this like swiveling screen that's motorized, but it didn't matter to us. So they're like, gosh, here's a person that said I will take it.

Let's stop calling people that keep saying no and give it to that person. You just so you just got it now. You got it in June instead of August to October and your whole family fits in it. We got it yesterday. I spent yesterday afternoon like putting two car seats in there and getting it all ready.

But yeah, it's a one day old car with a one point nine nine percent loan that I'm excited about. That's a good hack. What else you got? I hit really hard the filters on like kayak, like really hard kayak trip advisor, you know, in the like left rail on kayak.

You can do all kinds of dialing, right? Like so I live in New York, for example, and there's multiple airports, which is helpful. But you know, you can turn on and off like I'm big at just like pricing different things, right? Like there is some price for which I'd be willing to fly on Spirit Airlines, but it's typically not the price, you know, some price differential.

There's some amount of price differential that makes it worth it depends on am I flying with my kids and it's going to be a lot, lot more right. On the other hand, the thing about flying with kids, as you know, is like everything is suddenly 4X. Here's one. Okay.

Here's a hack. I don't know if it's a hack. I find it useful as a hack. If there's some recurring thing you pay for, whether it's, you know, a monthly bill is easy, but even like a thing you buy at the grocery store every week, annualize it, right? So if there's something, if you're spending an extra 10 bucks a week at the grocery store on something, something's 10 bucks more than the other thing, that's actually 500 bucks a year, right?

And I find saying, is this worth an extra 500 bucks a year to me feels different than is this worth an extra 10 bucks to me every time. So like that's a sort of behavioral hack, right? It's a way of framing things that helps me spend less, frankly. And same with subscriptions, obviously subscriptions are killer that way.

I haven't signed up for, do you use, you know, there are those products now, there are a subscription product to manage your subscription products. And I've, I've been interested in those because I have so many now, like for software, like I have, you know, Microsoft and Adobe and Dropbox and all these ones that like, I don't use that much.

And they are, you know, altogether, certainly hundreds, maybe $1,000 a year, right? I could use a hack on that one, I think. Can you help me? So Truebill is a sponsor of the show, and as people know, no, no, no, that I didn't ask you to. You're welcome. You're welcome.

Truebill. I, I vet all the products that services anyone that wants to sponsor the show. I'm like, I am very serious. I'm like, I'm going to use the product. I'm going to try the product. My wife will try the product. And I say no to most of them. So I downloaded Truebill.

I'd never used it before. And you know, I get, they're getting a free ad here that it's not part of the ad, but basically what you can do is you can see a calendar of when all your subscriptions are, where they are, even just the free version of, of not hiring them to do anything.

And it's just, what are they all? And that's free. Because there's so many, there's so many, and they recur. And like, I mean, there's the simple things of like right when you sign up, you know, make sure it's not automatically recurring. Like that's a useful one. There's so many, like very often I'll get an email that's like, Hey, thanks for renewing your subscription for another year.

We just billed you 90 bucks. I'm like, ah, um, one, a great one. I'll give you two, two ones for this. So one is if you have a capital one card, they have this browser extension called Eno. And I dislike the fact that they have hijacked a keyboard shortcut that I used for something else.

But other than that, what they do is they give you a virtual card for everything. So you install this browser extension and a lot of the virtual card companies like privacy is an example. They route your money through your bank account. You don't earn points. I don't love it.

I like the points. But, but the advantage is it doesn't automatically renew, right? It's sort of self-destruct. So they can't bill you again. That's the advantage of it. Right. So because this one's tied to capital one, the card issuer, you still earn all your rewards, but you can say that this card, yeah, for this card, I want to only allow a purchase of a hundred dollars and then, or I want to go manually turn it off.

So I want to buy a subscription. It's a one-year thing. They don't have the ability to cancel it. Maybe you have to call to cancel. I just buy it and immediately turn off the billing for that card. And the great thing is it's just not going to go through.

They're going to say, Hey, we had to cancel your subscription. Now True Bill does have a feature where you could say, Hey, just call them for me and cancel it. And like that, that is a part of their, their premium subscription. They'll just do all that for you. But I like to use capital one's thing because you still get the points, but they will go in and cancel, cancel the thing.

And it just happens that I use my capital one card for a lot of internet stuff. Cause it's the like two X on everything, not the, you know, travel bonuses and grocery bonus. You got any travel hacks for me? And here's the thing for me with travel hacks is like, again, because I have kids, like I'm definitely in the like schmuck category now where I have to go at the time when everybody goes, I have to fly the weekend.

You don't want to have to fly. Right. So I'm starting in a bad place, right? I'm starting where I'm the guy who has to pay retail for the seat. And I don't want to be that guy. What can you do for me? I mean, going back and listening to a handful of episodes is probably not the best answer for you.

Like I'll probably cut that. Maybe I won't. Maybe I won't. The best answer is you should have been listening to the podcast. We've got a handful of episodes that tackle this. The hard answer is. I sometimes think that if you have the points, things open up last minute. So it's like the scary option, which is if you can find something, you know, I'll sometimes buy the Southwest flight that I can cancel last minute, pay for a refundable fare, and then keep looking for the for the last minute deal.

Yeah. And most of the airlines now are refundable. So or not refundable, sorry, cancelable, and you get a full credit, but you don't have to pay a fee. So if you book with an airline where, you know, I fly Delta all the time. If I have to cancel this and get a 500 dollar Delta credit, it's going to be OK.

Buy the ticket. This is something I'd like to buy the ticket and then make the barrier having to cancel to when you get a better deal instead of holding off and making the action. I have to go buy it. And so I say buy it and then check in regularly as late as the day of or the night before.

A lot of times within the last week, tickets are really, really inexpensive with points. My wife's family wants to come visit because we had the new baby and they're coming next week, like within five days. And we looked on United and they live in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which is notoriously an expensive place to fly to because it's just United and Southwest.

And they route through Denver and they have a monopoly over the airports. And it was so cheap for points. It was like the lowest inventory, 12000 points each way or 12.5 for a ticket that was like six or seven hundred dollars. So it ended up being a fantastic deal because they booked within a week.

What they could have done is bought a Southwest ticket a month ago, canceled it if they needed to. Yeah, sure. I also want to talk about the podcast. I mentioned it in the intro, but you started a new podcast after being in this space longer than most. What led you to this topic?

Yeah. So I started this show called What's Your Problem? And it's really a show about people solving technical problems in the real world. Right. I talked to, you know, engineers and founders of, you know, companies that are doing things that seem interesting and important to me. You know, drone delivery, self-driving cars, but also events markets.

I just interviewed somebody who started the first company that was approved by the CFTC to let people bet on real world events. That's an interesting one. And you know, what led me to start it was, I mean, it just seemed fun to start something, frankly. Right. But I think that sort of the big idea that I got excited about when I started learning about economics, which didn't happen until relatively late in my life, was this idea that the pie can get bigger, that everybody can be better off, that the world is not fundamentally a zero-sum game.

Right. I feel like that is actually the big insight of economics. And I didn't know it before. And I think it's not intuitive, right? Like I think the intuitive idea of the world is it's zero-sum. If somebody's getting more, somebody else must be getting less. But that's not true.

Right. Like the good news of economics is everybody can get richer. Everybody can have more. And the way that happens is technological improvements, basically. People figure out how to get more stuff out of a day's work. Right. People figure out new efficiencies, ways to do new useful things. And so the show, the big idea of the show is like, let's talk to the people who are actually figuring that stuff out.

I think next week is going to be DNA storage, right? People are figuring out how to store data in DNA, which is just like rad. And apparently you can fit the whole internet in a shoebox. But of course, it's super expensive now. And there's like all these hard problems.

How do you make it cheaper? How do you make it actually work? So that's the idea of the show. One thing I always ask everyone, because a lot of our listeners love to travel, is pick a place you're pretty familiar with. Someone's in town there. Where should they go for a great meal?

Maybe a drink and some unusual thing to do to spend an afternoon. I mean, I live in New York and you know, my hack for New York is like, just walk around. I don't know if that's too obvious to be a hack, but like, I love New York. I love living here.

I don't, even before the pandemic, I never really went to the theater. Didn't go to, didn't go to anything. I just like being in New York. I just like walking around. Just get on the subway, walk around downtown and just, just enjoy. It's free. Eat anywhere. It doesn't matter.

Eat at a cart, you know, just be in the street. So that's one. I don't know if that's weak or not. The other one that came to mind, I grew up in San Diego and my favorite place to eat in San Diego is a taco shop called Roberto's, which is just like super low key, cheap taco shop.

It's actually, there's several of them. My favorite one is in Delmar and it's just a little taco shop near the beach, near Torrey Pines is the name of the beach. But just go there and get whatever. You can get a, get whatever you want. Get a carne asada burrito if you want to get one, sort of mild classic, but get whatever you want.

You sit out on the deck and you have a view of the ocean. It costs, you know, it's cheap, it's delicious. The beach is right there. You can go jump in the ocean. It's an incredible state park, Torrey Pines state park with these beautiful bluffs out over the ocean.

You can hike there. Maybe you'll see a dolphin. You see the ocean. It's amazing. That's exactly the kind of recommendation people love. Thank you. Roberto's Torrey Pines, Delmar. I love the show. Thanks for doing it. People should definitely check it out. Any other places people should find you online before we wrap?

I spend too much time on Twitter. I'm @JacobGoldstein. If you ask me a question there, I'll see it and answer it. It's nice. Awesome. Jacob, thank you so much for being here. It was a delight. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. Thanks for having me. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye.