First, A Video:

Welcome to the world of iWallet. Welcome to Lenny. Lenny knows about finances, how to secure your personal information, and how to play the global markets.

 – “Lenny. It’s our anniversary. Can we afford a fancy dinner?”

 – “Sure. You have it coming. Get the tasting menu with wine pairing. If income streams remain steady, you can pay off this meal before incurring finance charges.”

 – “Thanks, Lenny.”

 -“If you had opened a yen account as I’d advised last month, you would not be worried about this.”

 -“I said, ‘Thanks, Lenny.’”

Slide:

Does your wallet have Lenny? Of course it doesn’t. Your wallet is just a wallet. iWallet is the world of finance: personal, micro and macro. iWallet is what you’ve been waiting for because you love your wallet. Admit it. You never had a chain joining you to your phone. You even let your dog off its leash. It’s your wallet you’re attached to. You need iWallet.

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iWallet can’t be stolen because, if it is, it can call the police or, through the Tazer App, deliver a non-lethal electric shock to its kidnapper. It can’t be lost because, if it is, you can call it with your phone. If you lose your phone, you can call it with your wallet. If you open it to buy something it immediately scans what you’re buying and searches for a better price nearby. If you’re one of those drunks who likes to “buy a round for the bar,” when you get wasted, iWallet can stop you, settle your tab and put you in a cab. Belligerent drunk? iWallet will take a high quality video with pitch perfect sound to shame you the next day, gradually making you a better person. Stingy? iWallet will not let you ruin your social life by going Dutch on a date. iWallet can make you pay child support. iWallet can make you pay alimony. This will save your mother a whole lot of heartache because, thanks to iWallet, if you fail as a husband and father you can still succeed as a man.

Slide:

iWallet can make you pay parking tickets so that you don’t end up with a damned bench warrant. If you spend $53.37 iWallet can move the difference to $54 into a high yield savings account (in an optimum currency). Over time, iWallet pays for itself. You can play games with iWallet. You can play Angry Presidents. It’s cute! You need iWallet.

Slide:

iWallet was designed based on sketches made by Steve Jobs, just before he died. Steve wanted iWallet to be so sleek that it could attain invisibility when submerged in water, as if it were a perfectly cut diamond. To signify this, Jobs sketched nothing on the back of a bar napkin. Steve sketched off of a pitch by Perry Greenberg, the futurist and consultant known as “The King of TED.” Yes, this is me. But you know that, you’re a TED audience and TED audiences are knowledgeable, curious people, too skeptical to succumb to marketing parlance.

Slide:

I had envisioned a smart accessory so intelligent that it would be produced not for consumer use, but to protect Apple’s executives and Board Members from the entreaties of Wall Street bankers. Kept stealthily in a back or lapel pocket, the iWallet employs sensitive hearing and search mechanisms that cause the device to buzz gently if it detects invitations to certain forms of financial engineering, earnings smoothing or equity manipulation that can land a person in Club Fed. So, yes… iWallet can handle your household budget, and then some.

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When you’re not looking at a high definition image on iWallet, you can see right through it. You don’t have to put anything in iWallet because it scans and stores all of your credit cards, loyalty cards, identification cards, travel documents, insurance information and will even scan your library card, if you’re that sort of person. If you want to ruin the effect, you can put cash in iWallet. The cash will be safe, protected by iWallet’s previously advertised security features, but this will rob iWallet of its translucence.

Cash is the currency of criminals.

What, the bodega only takes cash?

Come on, look at your iWallet. You’re better than bodegas. Just ask Lenny. He will tell you that. Take iWallet someplace nice. Get the tasting menu. Get the wine.

Slide:

iWallet doesn’t get hacked. iWallet hacks you.

Slide:

iWallets are made right here in Baklistan, a country in Europe, wholly owned by American investors through Simon August Capital. Incorporated in Delaware, Baklistan is more a part of the United States than Puerto Rico, Guam or American Samoa. The country is run, in the words of Simon August “in pursuit of developing, discovering and scaling ideas for profitable and productive human well-being.”

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To get a sense of where iWallet fits into Baklistani society and the modern capitalist enterprise of the richest man in the world, you should imagine Baklistan absent these things. A small and isolated country, Baklistan was, from its earliest years, continuously invaded by Moors, Crusaders, fleeing Jews, Hindu extremists and radical Zen Buddhist pacifists. During the Dark Ages, Zoroastrians took over and set up a rigid system of good and evil and then, over the course of a century, decided that they were evil, rather than good, abdicated power and left. After World War II, Baklistan’s people decided that for the sake of the public’s health, they should abstain from discussing religion, politics or economics unless absolutely necessary and only then behind closed doors and with the utmost of apologies and circumlocution. At that point, Baklistan moved forward and joined the world economy and aside from borrowing money from German banks, made very few mistakes. Alas, that one mistake proved existential.

Slide:

The slippery slope of Baklistan’s potential history: IMF loans, World Bank loans, privatization of national resources, massive austerity, massive unemployment, growing debt and shrinking output. A failed security apparatus, a failed state, angry youth, radical ideas, haven for terrorists, subject of unwanted U.S. military attention, drone wars, violence, food insecurity, the death of society.

Slide:

Enter Simon August Capital, which, through a series of transactions, buys Baklistan from its people and then cancels its sovereign debts. A Director of Human Resources runs the country, now incorporated in Delware. Through hard work, Baklistan’s people will some daybuy their country back, enriching Simon August and his investors, which might include your pension fund or the mutual funds in your 401(k). The people of Baklistan will be:

Slide:

THE FIRST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD TO NON-FIGURATIVELY EARN THEIR FREEDOM.

A Baklistan Story:

All Redding Feldman wanted was some time to take iWallet and his potential lover, the enigmatic Kashmir Sabr, off-campus for some private fun. For weeks, he signed up for extra shifts, which paid the regular, low wage in Krona, but also won him Dynasty Credits, so that he and iWallet could treat Kashmir to a Groupon meal of kebobs and ale, just outside of the industrial park.

The Krona would pay for the meal, beers and the rental of a 250 square foot room for an evening. The Dynasty Credits were the longer-term promise. They were awarded by Human Resources for hard work and could be passed down through generations. When Baklistan repurchases itself, families with the most Dynasty Credits will be like colonial landowners after the American Revolution.

In this way, Simon August looms over Baklistan, from the hopes and dreams of future generations to the immediate desire for lamb on a stick, beer in a stein and a boy and girl in bed.

Kashmir’s family started out poor. They lost nothing because they had nothing. Redding had more recently been introduced to poverty when the European Central Bank cried “no mas” and his family’s fortune of Portuguese and Spanish sovereigns shriveled up and died. iWallet can deliver them from poverty. So Redding and Kashmir make iWallets for you.

They first met during the long, dark shift of the soul, which is always at 3 AM. Their mutual attraction, perhaps love, owed everything to an algorithm that, in emergencies, activates workers by dorm blocks, set to insure that no particular group works more than 16 continuous hours. Redding had slept two hours in 24. His lanky frame had gone involuntarily limp. Only a cup of coffee, 20 milligrams of Adderall and a protein biscuit enabled his motor control.

On his way to his station he tripped over Kashmir, who had dozed off in front of her standing workstation. Their eyes met. She looked fuzzy and entrancing, as if he were asleep. He apologized and offered her his next Adderall ration.

They courted for weeks, volunteering for extra shifts where they might run into each other, sharing work-enhancing drugs whenever one of them looked ready to collapse. For their first date, napped.

One dim morning, the mathematics seized Redding. He could not move. Even with the lights at their brightest, his teammates scrambling and his iWallet vibrating, Redding could not separate his back from the thin mattress beneath him.

He would never amass enough Krona at his job to ever actually procreate with Kashmir, even if he worked every hour of every day and holiday. His Dynasty Credits were a dream for someone else. Redding would die making iWallets. Rubio Millet, a runty blob assigned to Redding’s team shook him and encouraged him to get up. The team left. Redding fell asleep and did not stir for twelve hours, missing a second shift and his rendezvous with Kashmir.

Kashmir waited outside the factory security station for an hour, dressed in heels and a party dress, ready to be walked to kebobs and beer. She used iWallet to summon Redding, but received no reply. An unwelcome breeze chilled her. iWallet told her what wages she had lost by not taking a shift that night.

She came to the stunning realization that at her rate of pay, nothing would ever change, even if she never slept. She would wither in front of a table, operating a press that transforms grains of Rare Earth Element into “almost, but not quite, glass.”

She turned her back on the factory.

Like pallbearers, Redding’s white smocked colleagues carried him, stiff as a board, into the management wing and deposited him in the office of Alico OshKosh, human resources director for Redding’s section.

“Noncompliance,” she spat, signing his release into the wild.

They did not confiscate iWallet, but iWallet had already stopped speaking to Redding.