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No way, because I know where this ends up: two old time Wall Street types prey on my lack of financial knowledge to trick me into becoming CEO of JP Morgan Chase because I’ve already got a checking account there anyway, then in a private old time Wall Street guy club they
laugh at me behind my back for being bad at yachting and for accidentally eating my salad with my quail fork when we were having dinner with the Treasury Secretary, even though I think of these old poison-hearted bastards as quasi-parental friend-mentors and have started to
believe that I and my earlier multi-cultural assortment of millennial friends were a little unfair when we’d murmur about millionaire taxes and class war. Well, strap in because guess what — these two guys see me only as a patsy, and that fathers-son energy is all one-sided. See,
their actual plan is to crash the economy ON PURPOSE this time, while using secret rich guy stock market rules to somehow turn losing money into winning bonus multiplier money, making them even richer and leaving me holding the bag! So I’m completely wiped out and they even seize
Sara’s humble horse pottery startup and the police just cut off my business guy tie and dump us, broke and homeless, off of Niagara Falls (one of the cops shouts “Thanks for losing my ex-wife’s pension, though” right before he shoves me into the misty void), but anyway we survive
and walk all the way back to the city, and you can tell a lot of time has passed because there are all these old tabloid front pages with a big pic of my face and hurtful words like “CE-Dolt!” and “More Like JP Morgan Disgrace!” on them, blowing around wet and clinging to us as
we walk all the way back to the quirky Brooklyn coffee shop where we used to hang with our other struggling millennial friends. They’re all still there but of course our sudden influx of wealth really damaged the closeness we had — we’ve all been best friends since kindergarten
and I threw that away for what? A couple of hilarious shopping montages? An impractical car that is defiantly unsustainable? What about these, Luiz shouts, pointing at the stick-and-poke BE FRIE tattoo on his bicep that matches the ST NDS on my own. And my voice breaks as I
apologize for having told him maybe he should try to bike messenger himself up a job with a 401k and put a premium rush on it in a speech I was giving to his whole birthday party (look, ok: I was really drunk that night, to numb myself from the inhumanity of excess wealth, but I
leave it on you, the audience, to remember those circumstances, because mentioning those totally understandable extenuating circumstances now would spoil my heartfelt apology that has Luiz blinking back tears) and I turn to Dee and apologize also for missing her computer recital
in order to go polar bear hunting with the DeVos family when I know she’s so amazing at code even while being an overworked sous chef and great single mother to Danaerys (who earlier with the sass and clarity of a child told me “Tom, you look like shit” when I choppered everybody
out to my island for Friendsgiving last year, but I didn’t want to hear her due to the external markers of my success and because I wanted to show off that I was paying David Chang to cook for us all weekend and besides she’s a child), then I also apologize to Bruce. In the
course of the apology, though, a plan starts to maybe reveal itself: you see, maybe these friends that money had convinced me were of lesser value, well they had the real value all along, and money was an empty scoreboard once your needs were taken care of. That and between us
we happen to have a cross-section of skills that are even more undervalued and overlooked by the two old time Wall Street guys who got us into this mess in the first place! See, they think that what they do is the most important thing there is, but they don’t DO anything at all!
But with Luiz’s network of other bike messengers, Dee’s hacking skills, and Bruce’s being the one of us who owns a car (he’s an Uber driver, which is a full-time job, but not acknowledged as such by the company or the bullshit current administration even though haha their IPO has
been a real clown-falls-forever-down-an-escalator level hilarious catastrophe, so it’s like which part of the company knows how to do their jobs and deserves, y’know, *health insurance*?) So anyway bing bang boom we’re in their old time Wall Street guy offices late at night, and
because these old guys have all the computer security of, in Dee’s words, “those checkbook calculators they used to give away when you opened a checking account,” I guess because they’re so old and insulated from the friction of the world they keep removing more and more sources
of friction until they, like, leave their computers logged in at all times and give their SSNs to their personal assistant who just has them on a Post-It note on their monitor. So we’re gonna pull that classic scam where we make them buy a bunch of orange juice futures, but we
all wind up in this big argument over how that thing worked from the end of the movie which my other friend Paul seriously spent a good 90 minutes trying to patiently explain to me immediately after we watched it and plus there was that whole episode of 99 Percent Invisible about
but damn if I can keep any of this shit in my head for longer than 10 minutes in 20-fucking-19 with the news and these apps and all. So anyway, Luiz is trying to bring up the 99PI ep on his phone so we can step through it slowly together but right then the two old guys show up!
And they catch us and have the gall—the TENACITY—to tell me they’re “disappointed” in me, still exploiting that one-sided fathers-son thing from earlier, but I tell them hell no and hold up the tape that Bruce made of them in the bathroom literally laughing about their success in
tanking the economy on purpose and for their obscene personal gain, and I say “We’ll see who’s ‘disappointing’ when they hear this down at the New York Fucking Times, you saggy testicle faces whose hoard of this world’s plunder will not hesitate the reaper’s scythe one moment.”
But then one of the two just laughs and says they knew I was a patsy, but it wasn’t until now that they knew I was stupid. And he proceeds to lay out just how tenuous any idea of “truth” is in our shattered media landscape, not to mention that financial news is just a true snooze
(which, I mean, see above re the orange juice futures thing) and so the idea that a single recording made of two guys that the American public at large doesn’t know will launch some huge expose that would in any way endanger even a fraction of one of the many fortunes they’ve
stacked on top of larger fortunes still. Like, as tight as I think I am with my friends, they’re that tight with the leadership of both our supposedly oppositional major political parties AND the entire Editorial board of the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ. There are no checks, no balances
basically once you reach a certain level in American society, even politics becomes an afterthought because the sole uniting force is how awesome it is to have so much dynastic fucking money, he explains. And Bruce is like, "You're just like my father!" which is a pretty shocking
turn because, like, all along these guys have been, if anything, like my twin terrible fathers but he goes on to say that, yes, he grew up in wealth and went to Dartmouth and has this honestly pretty promising internship going, but he understands that even all of that privilege
he's been handed, his homosexuality makes his continued privilege essentially a negotiable quality decided by guys just like this and like his dad who hasn't exactly _disowned_ him but definitely makes little remarks under his breath and made zero in the way of moves to get him
established at his firm, or whatever. And Bruce jumps up at the one old guy and that guy's like "What are you going to do about it? After two generations of the myth of the prosperous American middle class we've essentially bred out any ability for your generation to know how to
fight back on even property, less it go on your _permanent record_ much less do actual harm to your actual betters." And Bruce tries to punch him anyway but the old guy shoots him right in the chest with one of the antique derringers that ironically I bought him as a Christmas
gift because we'd grown (I'd thought) so close over my short tenure as CEO of this major banking institution, which, see above, was also a lie. And it's like Bruce getting shot flips us all into a frenzy and me and Luiz and Dee and Danaerys and even Kensington their manservant
just jump on the one old Wall Street dude and find his old muscles just give way from bone like dough. And that's when the other old guy starts like deep awful screaming, like from way down inside his guts. You can tell nothing in his life actually prepared him for this, and he
thought like just jerking off to John Galt's speech was exactly the same as steeling himself for the real deal and, buddy, _it did not_. So anyway this gets Dee's attention and she's like, "I've got an idea" but she remembers her daughter and she's like "Look away, baby girl,"
but Dany's like, "Aw, c'mon, I wanna see him cry like a little bitch." So fast forward some to the old time Wall Street dude dining room and we all of us, me, Sara, Luiz, Dee, Dany, Kensington the manservent, and Bruce who it turns out was just scratched by the shitty antique
bullet, we all sit down to this five course fucking feast that Dee has prepared out of the slow-roasted bodies of those Wall Street dudes. And I pick up a bottle of the same wine that they taught me about in that first montage when they were trying to class me up a bit before I'd
have to meet with, like, heads of state and such. So I rase a glass of that wine and we're just about to really just pig the heck out on this smorgasbord of reptilian human privateer meat when oh shit the cops show up. Except get this -- it's that cop who threw me off Niagara
Falls and he remembers me, he's like "This is the guy who lost my ex-wife her pension!" and you'd think we'd just leave it at that BUT WE DON'T because what the hell is with policing in this country, not to mention the hacky misogyny of rooting for your own wife to lose her
pension, even if your marriage went bad and even if it ended in a bad place where she was more quote unquote "at fault" than you, didn't you once have love there? Can't you at least see her as a fellow human being struggling in this world? So anyway we eat him, too, we just pork
out watching the secret NetFlix that only the rich get access to, the one that still has, y'know, *movies* and has early access to, like, Mindhunters Season 2 and I Think You Should Leave deleted scenes. But anyway, in conclusion, WARREN, I won't be doing any of that, okay,
because I'm a vegetarian, and to me that means something, even in a class war. Roll credits, including song that retells the plot, "Bank on It (We Came Hungry)"
