Your Kid Is Going to Ask You About Money
You Should Probably Know the Answer.
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My father’s MIT diploma is in a box in my office. MIT, 1947. He paid for it washing test tubes at two dollars an hour. A year’s tuition cost four hundred dollars. Two hundred hours of honest work and you had a degree from one of the best schools on earth.
Today a year at MIT costs sixty-two thousand dollars. The buildings are the same buildings. The professors are, on average, about as smart. What changed was not MIT. What changed was the dollar.
I have four children. When the oldest was young, I sat her down at the kitchen table with a serious look on my face and started explaining inflation, purchasing power, and the Federal Reserve. Her eyes went glassy inside thirty seconds. She asked if she could go play. I said yes. I sat at the table for a while after that, thinking about what I had done wrong.
What I had done wrong was not that I tried. It was that I started with the answer to a question she hadn’t asked. But underneath that mistake was a worse one, the one that kept me sitting at that table. I had opened my mouth to explain how money works and realized, with my daughter already heading for the door, that I didn’t fully understand it myself.
I knew money was broken. I had known since I was four years old, standing in the kitchen, watching my parents trade their lives for something called a paycheck, and thinking the whole arrangement smelled rigged. I spent twenty years building enterprise systems for companies whose executives understood leverage and whose employees understood paychecks. I paid for an MIT Bitcoin course in 2017 using Bitcoin. I had been circling this question my entire adult life.
But circling is not the same as understanding. And understanding is not the same as being able to explain it to your kid at the kitchen table without their eyes going dead.
So I did what I always do when I don’t understand something. I went looking. Not for opinions. For the mechanics. How does money actually work? Not “what is money” in the philosophical sense, but the engineering question: what makes it hold value, what makes it lose value, and who has their hand on the dial?
What I found was a pattern. The same pattern, running through every civilization that ever controlled its own money supply. Rome. England. Revolutionary America. Weimar Germany. Us. A government controls the money. The money starts honest. A crisis arrives. The government needs to spend more than it collects. It can’t raise taxes fast enough without provoking a revolt, so it does the quiet thing instead. It makes the money worth less. A little at a time. Slowly enough that most people don’t notice.
By the time they notice, the damage is structural.
The Roman denarius went from nearly pure silver under Augustus to five percent silver by the time of Diocletian. That took two hundred and fifty years. Henry VIII accomplished the same trick in four. The Continental dollar collapsed in five. The pattern accelerates. It always accelerates.
In 1913, Congress created the Federal Reserve. In 1971, Nixon severed the dollar’s last connection to gold. Since then, the money supply has expanded from about seven hundred billion dollars to over twenty-one trillion. The national debt is approaching thirty-nine trillion. Interest payments alone now exceed the defense budget. The dollar has lost more than ninety-five percent of its purchasing power since the Fed was created.
These are not projections. They are not opinions. They are numbers you can look up while you’re sitting at your own kitchen table, after your own kid has gone to bed, wondering why everything costs so much more than it should.
That is what What Every Parent Needs to Tell Their Children About Money is about. The subtitle is Crossing the Rubicon, because that is where we are. Not approaching the river. Standing in it.
The book is the framework.
It starts where every honest conversation about money should start: with what money actually is. Not a thing. A technology. A tool humans invented to move trust between strangers. The best versions of that technology carry their own proof. Gold is heavy because it’s hard to produce. A Yap stone is valuable because someone crossed an ocean to quarry it. The cost is baked into the object. You don’t have to trust the person who hands it to you. You just have to check.
A dollar bill costs six cents to print. The difference between a hundred-dollar bill and a one-dollar bill is the number on the front. Same paper. Same ink. Same weight. That is a fundamentally different kind of money. Not proof of work. Proof of authority. And authority, given enough time and enough pressure, changes its mind.
The book traces that pattern through two thousand years of history, lands on the two dates that matter most (1913 and 1971), walks through what happened in 2008 and again during COVID, and then does something most money books don’t do. It looks forward. There is a chapter on artificial intelligence, not as science fiction, but as a force multiplier on the same pressure that has been compounding since Rome. When large language models can replace a twenty-year copywriter in eleven seconds, the displacement that follows will create spending pressure that gets filled the same way it has always been filled. More money, created faster, with the same consequences.
Then the book turns. Part Three is Bitcoin, explained the way I’d explain it at that birthday party. No jargon. No code. Just the three properties from the first chapter: scarcity, verification, and memory. How Bitcoin satisfies each one. Why the objections are worth asking and why they don’t change the fundamental design. What self-custody means and why it matters. And a chapter on what you should actually do that starts with the most important advice I can give: nothing dramatic.
The last section is the one I care about most. It is about having the conversation. How to talk to a five-year-old about scarcity without using the word. How to talk to a ten-year-old about ledgers using nothing but a cookie-debt argument. How to talk to a teenager by showing them the purchasing power chart and asking what they think it means, then shutting up and listening.
I wrote Mara and the Stones of Stonewater for the child at bedtime. I wrote Crossing the Rubicon for the parent sitting at the kitchen table afterward, staring at the wall, realizing they need to understand this too.
The two books are two sides of the same conversation. One installs the intuition through story. The other names the intuition and puts it in historical context. A child who reads Mara already knows what proof of work is, what a distributed ledger is, what happens when someone floods a market with cheap counterfeits. They just don’t know the words yet. A parent who reads Crossing the Rubicon has the words, the history, and the framework to meet that child wherever the conversation goes.
I’m not going to tell you to buy Bitcoin. I’m not going to tell you the dollar is about to collapse. I’m going to tell you that your kid is going to ask you about money, and when they do, you have two options. You can say “that’s just how things are,” which is what every adult said to me when I was four. Or you can have an actual answer.
That’s all either book is. An answer that took me sixty-nine years to find, written down so you don’t have to wait that long.