Wall Street as we know it today began by the first settlers trading their goods with each other under an apple tree. They brought whatever they had more than they needed of and traded for what they didn’t have. Mainly food, of course, to begin with. However, by the early 1800s Wall Street was established and controlled and limited to mostly wealthy people who brought their wealth with them from other countries, like JP Morgan from London.
With the ending of WWI in 1918, it began the boom of victory for the mighty U.S. The twenties began a baby boom when the soldiers came home — both of my parents were born in 1924. The economy with the inventions and manufacturing grew like never before. Henry Ford invented the Model A in 1903, and by 1908 he was the first to begin an assembly line production. By the early 1920s almost everyone had a new and better model.
1920 ushered what is known as the Roaring Twenties. By 1924 it seemed like there could be no end to the buying frenzy. New companies and new banks caused big banks to keep their interest low. People began to borrow money like crazy. An average, middle class person with a job could borrow almost whatever they wanted to. JP Morgan built and owned most of the railroads all over and finally even to the west coast. Therefore he needed massive amounts of steel for rails and trains, so he founded and owned United Steel. He became the wealthiest man in the United States.
Because of the railroads, the Midwest and even the west coast could order merchandise from New York City, which caused Sears to become a huge company that hired massive numbers of people for assembly line production. We have to laugh — almost everything was ordered and delivered like everyone does today on their cell phones. However, you get it within the hour or a couple of days.
When my dad asked my mom to marry him, he ordered a house from Sears. It came as numbered lumber and you put it together. They railed it to a station about 15 miles from Daddy’s place and he had to go pick it up. I can’t help but wonder how long it took for it to get from where it was actually cut and numbered to where Daddy picked it up. I’m thinking several months, at least.
During the 1920s the stock market rose 425% and the U.S. overcame London as the financial capital of the world. Many of the big investors owned the banks and the companies. They bought their own companies through the stock market. Therefore they manipulated the markets, but it was legal — they called it pump and dump. The middle class saw some getting very rich, but everyone making money, not realizing how they were being manipulated. Average people began to borrow money from the very banks to invest in the stock market they were manipulating, and it made the markets grow like crazy. Even the average person making money could borrow 90% on their margin account. $10.00 would buy $100.00 worth of stock.
In the 1920s most of the population of America lived along the east coast and got caught up in the market frenzy — almost everyone had market debt and bank debt. The beginning of what is known as the Great Depression began on October 24 when the stock market began to fall. Large banks called themselves together and invested large amounts of cash to prop the markets up. It had worked before. However, the panic grew so fast by Monday — October 28, 1929 became known as Black Monday, and Tuesday, October 29, 1929 as even blacker.
Everyone rushed to the banks to get whatever they had in cash, but the banks’ doors were closed and locked. No one there to answer questions or calm fears. The market lost 89% of its value in a few weeks. 30 billion was wiped out the first week. Within a month, businesses closed — even big factories — because they were operating on borrowed money and stock market credit. Everyone lost their jobs along with everything they had. No one could pay their rent, so they lost their houses or apartments, therefore they were basically in the bread lines and on the streets. Even penthouse living went to breadline survival in a month.
Meanwhile, in the Midwest where our parents were young children, teenagers, and young adults being raised, most of their parents had homesteads and turned them into small ranches and farms. Because of the population growth in the east and the frenzy of buying, they needed more and more cattle, grains, mainly wheat, to feed the growing population. Because of the railroads they were able to rail their cattle and wheat to the east. Cattle had to be driven sometimes hundreds of miles to be railed, on foot, because there was a limited number of stations and no refrigeration on trains.
Everyone had their money invested in land, cattle, and farming, and they still owned that. The banks closed and you couldn’t do business, get your money out, or borrow more money, but they assured everyone everything would be better soon. By the spring of 1930 the banks were still closed — no one could get money to buy seed to plant the land that had been plowed up. Therefore it lay bare.
Spring and summer 1931 ushered in an especially dry and windy season, which continued throughout the 1930s, known as the Dirty Thirties and the Dust Bowl. The wind blew the dirt piled sometimes as high as the west side of the barn. The cattle died because there was no grass, and they inhaled and swallowed so much dirt it packed their lungs and stomachs. Any cattle that weren’t dead, the government gave the owners $17.50 and buried the carcass.
Continuous wind and dirt storms from the drought, trying to keep large families alive with such a small amount of food, and keeping wet cloths over babies’ and children’s faces to keep them from getting dust pneumonia and dying — many did, no matter what. Women lost their minds and men lost their will.
Farm families began to give up and leave the area and look towards the west coast. California was lush with all kinds of vegetables and fruits to be picked. Jobs were plentiful and whole families could work. Young men hopped on freight trains and hid in the cars. Anyone that had an old truck or car of any kind packed up everyone and headed west. Grandma’s grandfather traded three different families a good team of horses and wagons for their land so they could head west. The saddest part of all was when people flooded California, there were no jobs left. The desperation continued. No place to live, no way to make money.
Our families stayed, and in 1938 it began to rain again and things began to grow again.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president March 4, 1933. He went on a desperate and drastic mission to save the U.S. Where there had been no oversight or regulations on the stock market, he implemented the Securities and Exchange Commission — the SEC — and the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
The SEC was established June 6, 1934. It was designed to stop what was known as the pump and dump during the twenties from happening again, because most people agree it was what happened to cause the crash of 1929. We have a little nicer name for it now — we call it insider trading.
The FDIC — Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — was an insurance the bank had to guarantee: if the customer had a deposit up to $2,500, they could withdraw it in cash. The banks could not close their doors and leave everyone hanging. It was established June 16, 1933. Now it’s $250,000.
Roosevelt designed the Works Progress Administration — the WPA — from 1935 to 1939. It employed millions of unemployed people. They built roads, bridges, schools, and even the Hoover Dam. We heard the story of how there were a line of men who would show up every day to have a job, in case someone was killed because the work was so dangerous.
Most of our parents agreed there almost had to be something done. However, most also think it should have been cut off after WWII was over. After the Depression and the desperation of not having a job, the beginning of WWII provided a job for everyone. America and soldiers had to be fed. Soldiers had to have special packaging for overseas. The military had to be supplied like never before. The workforce went into high gear and higher wages. Women went to work for the first time. That’s the reason most people think welfare should have been cut off — if you wanted to work, you could get a job. Capitalism at its finest.
Most of our parents criticized FDR for not doing so. Most Baby Boomers agree, because we were a generation of women being educated and wanting to work also. Capitalism caused the American dream to thrive for our parents and us.
We think even our parents feared what is happening now — that welfare would be taken advantage of, to cause taxes on the American wealthy businesses that provide all the jobs for the middle class to pay their taxes, to cause the inflation for two generations. People who complain about big businesses not paying their fair share do not realize they must use every write-off they can to keep themselves afloat, to provide the jobs for those who want to work. Where would we be without business at all levels that provides the American dream?
My story is firsthand — when my grandfather lost his mill, when he lacked one payment and the banks closed. No way to get the money he needed to keep the house he built and the land it was built on, for his wife and ten kids. No money, no jobs. They had to move in with Grandma’s parents into a three-room house. My dad, his little brother, and a neighbor friend left when they were fourteen to sixteen years old to search for a job. My grandfather died from a second stroke at fifty-six years old.
After WWII our world became a totally different place. The beauty of capitalism began opportunity for our parents, us, and into the millennials. The wonder and the will to pursue the American dream.
We wish so much — you, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren — could live in an America like ours has been. However, we see so many warning signs. People taking so much advantage of welfare when they actually still have a job. So much fraud going on in government spending. We fear AI and robots will eventually take over so many jobs that the unemployment could be devastating. Our fear is a real fear because of the stories we have heard from our parents — the desperation of people, especially men, to not have a job to take care of their families.
In August 1971, President Nixon ended the convertibility of U.S. dollars to gold and announced a wage and price control. It was designed to control the inflation and because of the high unemployment rate at the time.
Our parents called it the release of the gold standard and didn’t agree with it at all. They thought back then just what has happened now. They instilled in us as young adults that it would permit the government to print U.S. dollars by the trillions and cause exactly what we have today — our national debt of 38 trillion and the waste in government spending. It seems now to us our parents somehow knew: if the gold standard — the amount of money that could be printed had to be backed by the amount of gold the U.S. owned — was released, the U.S. Mints would be able to print paper money around the clock, 24/7. Exactly what is happening. They felt our nation could have worked itself out of the inflation and high unemployment if given a little time — it always had before — without the drastic move, which would cause inflation year after year and a free reign to government spending. How right they were. What Nixon implemented as wage and price control fifty-five years ago has permitted the total opposite.
When you mention Bitcoin to almost all Baby Boomers and even most older millennials, we just draw a blank, followed by a big question mark. We don’t understand how something as important as an exchange for goods or services can be as simple as words and figures on a computer. We understood the American dollar because it has always made our world go around. How much, how little you had — how you spent it, invested it, or saved it — has meant everything to everyone, generation after generation. It is unbelievable what money means and has always meant to everyone. Money has had the ability to make families very rich only to destroy family relationships completely, while a lot of poor people have maintained beautiful family relationships for generations on hard-time stories and wondering how they made it through.
Younger people seem to trust cryptocurrency a lot more than we do. We are sure it’s because they understand it where we don’t. We mostly agree — if the gold standard was back under a new currency, or how about rare minerals that have become so important, we would probably be first in line to buy. But what we hear and don’t like is the bad stuff.
Our drug problem is such a sad, sad thing all over the world, and seems to only be getting worse. Since Bitcoin can be traded worldwide, is it simply a way to launder money for drugs, sex, terrorism? These three things are our biggest fears. We wonder if cryptocurrency was brought into existence for all the wrong reasons, grew like crazy, and even stays as a fund because it cannot be traced.
If there is a place on the internet — and we know there is — where very young, very poor kids can go, where ultimately evil people can lure them in with the promise of money and things — think of how cryptocurrency works both ways. The evil person promises the poor kid Bitcoins for their services. “We’ll send it to your parents, they can buy the goods they so desperately need, but no one has to know where it comes from.” Think of what it does for the evil trafficker — he doesn’t have to figure out how to launder his millions of dollars. Some of these kids are the oldest or older kids in large families who have a desire to feed their younger brothers and sisters. Think of the next step of evilness — what is saying it will ever even be sent to the child’s parents? The cruelty of trafficking goes on and on. We all know and appall the existence of something so evil.
Terrorism is the worst thing we fear in America nowadays. Because of cryptocurrency, we have no idea how it is being organized over the internet right now by some very savvy tech gurus. We are even hearing of people being kidnapped and held for crypto only, and people held and tortured, or their families threatened, for their cryptocurrency password.
Trent, what do you think — the future of AI being able to track cryptocurrency if it is being used for all the wrong reasons? Is there anyone trying to stop the illegal part of it, or has it already gotten too big, too scary, and too life-threatening to do anything about? Is it one of those things that is slipping under the radar, that it seems there are just too many things more important to worry about? After all, people are buying and selling it, making money off it — like the stock market. Isn’t that what makes the world go around?
Why do people buy cryptocurrency? What are the good things about it that we are not seeing? What do you think the future of it is? A lot of really smart people own it, even older people. In your generation and the next, do you think it could become the worldwide currency of the future? Tell us the good stuff about it and why Gen Z trusts it.
We think most people who bought into it when it was growing so fast thought it was a get-rich-quick — everyone was buying it because everyone else was making a lot of money off of it. Kind of reminds us of the stock market during the Roaring Twenties. The fifty-two-week range of Bitcoin, 2025 to 2026, from its high of $126,198 dropped to $60,074 — it lost more than half of its value. We hope for the people who own it that it will go up again, but it’s hard for us to trust something that has nothing of value under it.
When Trent was little, he called himself Mean Tough Cowboy Rogers, and he thought he would like to ride bulls in rodeos like his dad and I had when we were teenagers and young twenties.
We had a VHS video of the top bucking bull no one had been able to ride, named Bodacious. Trent watched it over and over, and when I asked him what he would say to the cowboys that got bucked off of Bodacious, he’d say, “Just don’t turn loose.”
This little boy who has grown into an especially smart young man took on life in the same way — however, thankfully, in a totally different direction.
We are the Baby Boomers. There are a lot of us, but we are the senior generation who are dying off fast. What is so sad is we hear so many say, “I am glad I am going out instead of coming in.” Most of it is because of technology we do not understand. A very large percentage of us retired early when we had to learn to use the computer to continue working.
We were born right after WWII, 1945–1965. Our parents came home from the war as the mighty U.S. who had claimed ultimate victory. They came home as conservative, God-fearing people who had witnessed the horribleness of war and were determined to make their lives good.
We were born into a beautiful country. The inventions and improvements in inventions came fast and furious. However, things had belts, motors, and on-and-off switches. All kinds of farming equipment became priority, because our parents felt like they must feed the world because so much of it was destroyed by the war. Focus was on bigger trucks and tractors and all kinds of farming equipment to make farming more productive, faster, and more convenient, and on oil and steel, and all the inventions of components to make the improvements. It created a U.S. and even a lot of the world where job opportunity was ultimate. All young men were able to have a job if they were educated or not, but willing to work hard.
We were taught to work because our parents lived through the market crash of 1929 which caused the Great Depression, when there were no jobs and no help from the government. It made our parents, that survived, tough, and they passed it on to us.
Most of us both had career jobs, which helped us to have the conveniences and houses of our own. Our parents were the Waltons, but we became the Cleavers with Fonzie, Elvis, Johnny Cash, and the Beatles. The opportunity was non-stop.
Nobody questioned how the TV worked. Nobody questioned the washing machine. The computer was, in a way, the first invention that expected you to understand it before you could use it — and that was new.
When I told Trent I just don’t understand how a computer works, his answer triggered the idea of writing this book together. He told me, even as much as he uses the computer, being educated in computer science and working with it all the time, he really doesn’t know the dynamics of how it actually works — he just enjoys the fact that it does. I thought, oh my goodness, as smart and as educated as this young man is, and actually a software engineer for the FAA, and he doesn’t need to know how it actually works to enjoy the fact that it does? It made me think maybe I don’t need to know how it works if I ever want to learn to use it.
I was born in 1998. Grew up with computers the way Boomers grew up with TV — never questioned them, just used them. Got interested in technology, earned a full scholarship to UT Dallas, studied Computer Science and Cognitive Science, and became a software engineer at the FAA. Grandma Rogers asked how a computer works, and the honest answer was: I don’t really know either. I just enjoy the fact that it does. That might be the whole thesis of this book.
What my dad was proud of when he talked about being a young man was he was able to stay in the U.S. because they trained him in radar. As a child, as a young adult, even when I was 40 and he died, I had never asked him what he actually did in radar. Now I have heard you mention it in your work with the FAA. Because you understand it, can you explain what it might have done during WWII and how it has evolved from there?
Radars are truly incredible technology, and while the fine details of how they work on the inside are amazing and complicated, the fundamental concept they operate on might feel more familiar than you would think.
Most people already know how to count the seconds between a flash of lightning and the thunder to figure out the range of the storm. That works because light is so much faster than sound. Echolocation (what bats use) and sonar (what submarines use — same idea as the bats) work the same way: send out a sound, wait for the echo, time the round trip to figure out the distance.
By the 1940s, radio was already in most American homes — families gathered around it for music and news. Radar uses those same invisible waves, but instead of carrying a signal, it sends out a pulse and listens for what bounces back. The WWII generation figured out how to time those echoes accurately enough to detect planes behind clouds, far beyond the horizon.
The name says it all: RAdio Detection And Ranging. Detection — figuring out what’s out there, what’s a plane and what’s not. Ranging — figuring out how far away it is, the same idea as counting seconds with lightning. Detecting which echoes are planes and which echoes are other things is most of what I work on to this day. Most of what we do with radar today is built on what that generation figured out then.
Then there came this couple of kids that just messed up our world — Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
Was there a computer before them? Was the technology somewhere in the world and they made it usable? Would you say they invented it, created it, or made it usable?
My friend told me, when she had to put the whole library on the computer, said there was somewhere a computer as large as a big room.
When Bill Gates and Paul Allen were teenagers in Seattle, computers already existed — some as big as a whole room, just like your friend said. But you had to basically be an engineer to use one. They figured out how to change that. They didn’t invent the computer. They made it so that a regular person could sit down at a desk and use one without having to understand how it worked on the inside. It’s a little like driving a car — you don’t have to know how the engine works to drive one. What Gates and Allen did was make it so the skill you had to learn was driving, not being a mechanic. Learning to drive isn’t always easy, but it’s a lot easier than learning to build an engine.
At the most basic level, a computer stores information using tiny, microscopic components that are either charged or not charged — like millions of tiny batteries that are either full or empty. We just call them ones and zeros because it’s a convenient way to name two states. The thing itself is just a charged or uncharged battery — the ones and zeros are just what we call them.
It’s a lot like Morse code: dots and dashes don’t mean anything on their own, but people agreed on patterns that let them send real messages. Computers do the same thing with ones and zeros — agreed-upon patterns that represent letters, numbers, and everything else. When your friend at the library put all those books on the computer, she was basically translating them into a kind of Morse code the machine could store.
We heard the other day there is more information on a cell phone now than all the technology they had when we actually went to the moon. Oh, these great cell phones — they have helped some of us skip having to learn to use the computer.
That one idea — making the computer usable — changed everything. Those room-sized machines full of ones and zeros shrank until they fit in your pocket, and now your phone holds more information than they had for the entire Moon landing.
Grandma Rogers read an article about China and “rare earth minerals” — and with all this talk about mining, it’s worth understanding why actual, physical mining still matters for technology just as much as it ever did.
Inside every cell phone speaker, every pair of hearing aids, every MRI machine at the hospital, and every electric car motor, there are tiny amounts of minerals with names most people have never heard — neodymium, dysprosium, lanthanum. They’re called “rare earth” minerals, and despite the name, they’re not actually that rare. They’re just very difficult to dig out and refine. Think of it like this: gold is hard to find, but once you find it, it’s gold. These minerals are mixed in with everything else in the rock, and separating them out is expensive, messy, and takes specialized equipment most countries don’t have.
China figured this out decades ago and invested heavily in building the whole pipeline — the mines, the processing plants, the factories that turn raw rock into finished parts. Today, China processes over 90% of the world’s rare earths. Even when other countries dig the minerals out of their own ground, they often have to ship the rock to China to be refined. If rare earths are to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th, then right now, one country controls nearly all of it.
That’s what articles like the one Grandma Rogers read are about — the scramble to build alternatives before it becomes a serious problem. It’s real mining, for real rocks, with real geopolitical stakes. And it turns out “mining” means something completely different in the tech world too.
Grandma Rogers heard the word “mining” in the context of Bitcoin and wanted to know what that means — because it clearly doesn’t just mean pickaxes anymore.
The name actually comes from the same idea as gold mining. People use their computers to do work, and if they’re lucky, they get paid in Bitcoin. Most of the work doesn’t pay off — just like most of the dirt a gold miner shovels doesn’t have gold in it.
Here’s what the computer is actually doing: guessing numbers. Imagine trying to guess someone’s phone number when you have no clues — you just start guessing and hope you get lucky. There’s no trick, no shortcut, no clever strategy. You just try one after another, as fast as you can. The computer does the same thing, except it can guess billions of times per second. When it finally lands on the right answer, the person running that computer wins a small amount of Bitcoin. That’s mining.
The guessing isn’t pointless — it’s securing the system. Every time someone sends Bitcoin to someone else, that transaction needs to be verified. The miners are the ones doing that verification. The guessing work is what proves they actually put in the effort, which is what earns them the right to add transactions to the record.
Normally, a bank keeps track of everyone’s money. You trust the bank to say how much is in your account, and they’re the ones who move it when you write a check or swipe a card. With Bitcoin, there is no bank. Instead, thousands of people around the world each keep their own copy of every transaction. That’s what “decentralized” means — no single person or company is in charge of the records. If one person tries to cheat, everyone else’s copy disagrees with them, and the cheat gets thrown out. You might hear the term “DeFi” — that’s just short for decentralized finance.
So many questions we don’t know how to ask.
Would be so wonderful for a stroke victim left unable to speak — the frustration, unbelievable. Do you think there will ever be the possibility for the technology to connect the brain of thought back to speech? An amazing thought.
If you help us to understand the basics about the brain and how we think, I think the majority of us would be very interested in the simplified basic steps, all the way to what you think might be the future — which is so far beyond our comprehension, because we were so busy living our lives we didn’t realize what was going on in technology until we are bombarded with all this unbelievable stuff.
The brain works with the presence and absence of electrical signals too — neurons fire or they don’t. But unlike a computer’s tiny batteries, neurons never sit still, and they’re always listening to lots of other neurons at once. The idea of “neural networks” came from trying to make computers work a little more like that. It took decades before computers were small and fast enough to actually do it. That’s what ChatGPT and all the AI you hear about is based on — very fast pattern-finders, built loosely on how brains are wired.
Neuralink and other brain-computer interfaces are starting to connect chips directly to the brain. Brains and computers both run on electrical signals — that’s what makes the connection possible. Early versions are already helping people who are paralyzed type with their thoughts, and the goal is to eventually help stroke victims speak again. Some wonder whether a person with a chip in their brain is still fully human. But it’s really no different from a pacemaker — having a piece of you that’s mechanical or digital doesn’t make you a computer. It just means that part of you is based on one.
When we got serious about writing this book with Trent, we were even more encouraged when he told us he was even concerned about some of the things that are going on with technology, and we were even more excited for him when he told us he was interested and taking classes in the safety field of AI. We think 99% of Baby Boomers worry it could get out of control real fast, if it hasn’t already.
A lot of Baby Boomers worry that AI could get out of control. A lot of people who work in technology share that concern. AI safety is a real field, with real people working on it full-time, and it’s part of why I started studying it. The instinct to ask whether anybody is paying attention — that instinct is right. It might be the most important question there is.
It is hard for us Baby Boomers to accept vehicles that drive themselves. Would they be much safer than we are as old drivers? Could we be able to keep driving longer if cars drove themselves?
They sound scary, and it makes sense that they do. But they don’t get tired, they don’t get distracted, and they can see in every direction at once. Early data from companies like Waymo shows their self-driving cars are involved in roughly 85% fewer injury crashes than human drivers — about six or seven times safer. And for seniors who might otherwise have to stop driving, they could mean staying independent a lot longer.
People like Elon Musk have done genuinely impressive things — Neuralink, SpaceX, Starlink restoring communication after storms. He’s a smart guy. But being smart enough to build something isn’t always the same as being wise enough to know whether you should. Sometimes smart people do dangerous things because they’re exciting, not because they’re good. I think he’s gotten to where he’s more interested in what’s possible than in being careful about it. That’s part of why AI safety work matters.
Technology is moving fast. The generation that watched all of this happen — from belts and motors to AI — has earned the wisdom and the right to ask hard questions about where it’s going.