Gas Prices Just Jumped 50 Cents in a Week. Nobody Will Tell You Why. I Will.

The Answer Involves Ancient Magic, Quantum Physics, and a 20-Year-Old Joint I Found in My High School Diploma

Do you believe in magic?

You clicked on this because of the gas prices. I know. Oil just hit $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022, we’re bombing Iran, your grocery bill is about to look like a car payment, and you want someone to explain what’s happening and who’s profiting.

I’m going to do that. But not the way you think.

Because the real answer to why gas costs what it costs, why money works the way it works, why the entire global economy functions at all, is so much weirder and more terrifying than anything involving OPEC or the Pentagon. And the people who run the world would really prefer you never think about it. They have spent centuries making sure you don’t. Every war, every news cycle, every outrage machine, every algorithm feeding you rage bait about the other political team is designed to keep your brain occupied with anything other than the thing I’m about to tell you.

So consider this a reverse psy op. Operation Antivirus for the Mind. They spent billions engineering a system to keep you distracted. I am one guy in a farmhouse in upstate New York who is about to undo it with a Substack article. The asymmetry is hilarious.

Also, I want to be upfront with you. I am extremely stoned right now.

I haven’t smoked marijuana in years. I am at my parents’ farmhouse in upstate New York because my dad had a heart attack a couple weeks ago, and I’ve been staying in my old teenage bedroom, which is a psychologically fascinating experience for a man in his forties because my mom took the posters down and repainted at some point, but other than that it has basically sat here for decades in the exact same state it was in when I moved out, including the mattress with the same suspicious dip in the middle where a teenage boy apparently spent a decade sleeping in the exact same position like a rotisserie chicken that never got flipped.

Anyway. I was looking for a phone charger under the bed and found the storage box. Every teenage boy has one. It’s the box you keep under your bed that contains everything you don’t want your parents to see, which in my case contained a couple of old marijuana pipes, a few girls’ phone numbers written on torn out pieces of yearbook, a business card for the Marine recruiter I talked to my senior year, and half a joint that fell out of a folded up piece of paper that turned out to be my high school diploma. That joint has been sitting in my high school diploma under this bed for twenty years. I looked at it. It looked at me. I am a grown man. My father is recovering from a heart attack in the next room. I have a journalism career and 60,000 subscribers and a reputation to maintain.

I smoked it…

It still works. Weed apparently does not expire. Or maybe it does expire and I am currently hallucinating this article. Either way, I am going to write about what I’ve been thinking about for the last ninety minutes, and I am going to publish it while I am still high, because I cannot wait to read whatever the hell this turns out to be when I am sober again.

I have been thinking about magic.

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Paper Is Worthless Until You Trick Enough People Into Disagreeing

Here is a question that will ruin your afternoon. Why is money worth anything?

Not gold. Gold I understand. Gold is shiny, it doesn’t corrode, there’s a limited amount of it, and humans have been killing each other over it for about six thousand years, which is as close to a universal endorsement as anything gets. Gold makes sense.

Paper money does not make sense. Paper money is paper. You can write on it. You can blow your nose with it (don’t). You can fold it into a little hat for your cat. As a physical object, a dollar bill is worth approximately nothing. The paper itself costs the government about 7 cents to print. The rest of its value, the part that separates a hundred dollar bill from a very small napkin, exists entirely because millions of people agreed to pretend it’s real.

That’s it. That’s the whole trick. Enough people looked at a piece of paper and said “this is worth something” and then it was. Not because of the paper. Not because of the ink. Because of the looking. Because of the believing. The collective observation of millions of sentient beings literally willed value into existence where there was none.

If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.

Cryptocurrency, or How We Cast a Spell Using Math Homework

And then we went and did it again, except dumber.

At least paper money has the decency to exist as a physical object. You can touch it. You can lose it in the couch. It has weight and texture and that weird smell that is apparently a combination of ink, cotton, and the hands of every person who has ever used a vending machine. Cryptocurrency doesn’t even have that. Cryptocurrency is a series of ones and zeros stored on a computer. It is the digital record of a solved math problem. It is, and I need you to really sit with this, a receipt for homework.

And it’s worth more than the computer it lives on.

Bitcoin, as of right now, is worth tens of thousands of dollars per unit. Per solved math problem. There are people who have become millionaires because they convinced a graphics card to do algebra faster than the next guy’s graphics card. The combined energy consumption of Bitcoin mining rivals that of some small countries. We are burning enough electricity to power Argentina so that computers can do long division and produce imaginary money that only exists because enough people squinted at it and said “yeah, that’s currency.”

Millions of human beings observed this concept. They believed in it. And their belief made it real. Paper into gold. Math homework into a Lamborghini. Ones and zeros into a down payment on a house. The raw material is worthless. The magic is in the watching.

I Recognized This Trick When I Was Twenty-One

When I was 21, taking a few psych classes at the same college Jim Morrison attended in St. Pete, Florida, I found a book called The Secret sitting in the campus library. Most kids my age were reading normal things. I was already deep into religious and occult studies because I am a complete weirdo who believes in God, takes Scripture literally, and decided at a young age that I wanted to understand my enemy, which meant reading things that would have given my Sunday school teacher a stroke.

They should have called it ‘Satanic Witchcraft for Dummies’ but that doesn’t have the mysterious ring to it.

So I picked up The Secret and recognized it immediately. It was repackaged esoteric knowledge, hermetic principles scrubbed clean and dressed up in self-help language so it could be sold at airport bookstores. The core idea, that focused thought and belief can alter material reality, is not new. It is ancient. It shows up in kabbalah, in hermeticism, in gnostic texts, in Eastern mysticism, and (if you’re paying attention) all over Scripture. “Faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains” is not a metaphor. Or if it is a metaphor, it is a metaphor that also accidentally describes quantum mechanics, which is a weird thing for a book written two thousand years ago to do.

The Part Where Physics Agrees With the Stoned Guy

Here is where it gets uncomfortable for people who like their reality solid and predictable.

Virtual particles. They exist in quantum field theory. They pop in and out of existence constantly, everywhere, all the time. You cannot detect them with your senses. You cannot detect them with machines. But the math proves they’re there. Their effects are measurable even though they themselves are not. Forces that are completely invisible and essentially undetectable are shaping physical reality at the subatomic level every second of every day.

That is what people used to call magic. We just gave it equations and a lab coat.

And then there’s the observer effect, which is the part where physics goes completely off the rails. At the quantum level, particles behave differently depending on whether someone is watching them. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. The act of observation by a conscious being changes the behavior of physical matter. There are physicists (credentialed, published, not-stoned physicists) who believe that the act of sentient beings observing reality is what creates reality itself. That consciousness is not a byproduct of the universe but the mechanism by which it exists. That we are a self-perpetuating reality, dreaming itself into being, and the dream only holds together because enough of us are watching.

Paper money works because millions of people observe it and believe it has value. Cryptocurrency works because millions of people observe it and believe it has value. And the universe itself might work the same way. Enough sentient beings looking at it. Believing in it. Holding it together through the sheer collective force of paying attention.

If that’s true, then every church service, every prayer circle, every stadium full of screaming fans, and every stock exchange trading floor is a magic ritual. The only difference between Wall Street and a black mass is the dress code and the catering.

I Should Probably Stop Writing Now

I am going to be honest. I have no idea if this article is brilliant or if it sounds like a guy who smoked a twenty-year-old joint in his childhood bedroom and started rambling about the nature of reality. Those two things might be the same thing. I genuinely cannot tell right now.

What I can tell you is that I had no idea what to write about today. I came up here to take care of my dad. I found ancient weed. And now here we are, 1,400 words into a discussion about whether the global financial system is technically witchcraft. I am going to make sure this gets published before the high wears off and my editorial judgment returns, because I cannot wait to read this sober and find out if I just wrote something profound or something that belongs on a dorm room whiteboard next to a Bob Marley poster.

Either way, you read the whole thing, and I appreciate that.

Wise Wolf out. I’m going to go eat whatever is in my parents’ refrigerator.

Grace and Peace

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Note from Lily the Editor: I did not want to publish this. The Wolf called me at 11pm, said he found “ancient weed” in his childhood bedroom, and that I needed to publish whatever came next. He pays me, so here we are. He also forgot to write the call-to-action because he wandered off to raid his parents’ refrigerator and stopped answering his phone. So. If you enjoyed whatever this was, a paid subscription is five bucks a month and it keeps two freelancers from having to sell plasma to pay our server bill. If you can’t swing it, just share it. Thanks. - Lily