 Well, thanks, Nomi. Appreciate that very much. We have an opportunity for questions for her and also our other financial panelists. That's really the objective this morning is to talk about how we might liberate ourselves a bit financially. Chris Casey is a longtime investment advisor and a great friend of the Mises Institute. He's a principal at Wind Rock Wealth Management in Chicago, and he's someone who specifically specializes in advising people on investment strategies from a hard money and a libertarian perspective. Albert Lu is new to San Diego County, works now for Sprott, up in Carlsbad. He is now the president and CEO of Sprott US Media. He hosts a great podcast called Power and Market Report, which you should check out, and he works directly with a lot of great people at Sprott. So we're very pleased to have both of you gentlemen with us, and if either one of them have some comments on the state of the economy or otherwise, then we'll get into questions for all three. You know, keeping with the theme of strategies for liberty, I just thought of a couple ideas as far as helping people with their investments, what they should be considering. And I think there's really three things. And in keeping with the theme of liberty and freedom, there's freeing yourself from economic myths that are out there, and by virtue of all of you being here and being students of Austrian economics, you've certainly done that. I think there's also the importance of freeing your mind from financial markets groupthink. There's a lot of so-called mainstream axioms out there that I think everyone should take with a grain of salt. And finally, I think you need to free your mind from your own nature. I mean, humans have a lot of bad instincts when it comes to investments. Let me just drill down on a couple of these quickly. As far as economic myths, I clearly think that the greatest threats to everyone's portfolio at any given time are recessions and inflation, the threat of those. And being Austrians, we have unique but more importantly correct interpretations of what causes that economic phenomena. As it relates to financial market groupthink, we've all heard these axioms in the mainstream media from various people in the financial business. You can't time the markets. This is a new era. And these phrases are very old and quite meaningless. I mean, the new era phrase goes back to Irving Fisher in 1929 when he said, stocks have reached a permanently high plateau literally months before the crash. And finally, I think we have to fight against our own nature. We all have to embrace the concepts of discipline, of patience and decisiveness. As it relates to the latter, it's probably fitting that we're very close to the Marine, one of the Marine centers for training. And the Marines incorporate the 70 rule, right? They understand that in combat as well as in any life's activities, there is imperfect knowledge. And so the 70 rule means that when they are convinced that they're 70% correct, when they have 70% of the information, they act because the cost of indecisiveness far outweighs the benefits of gaining more information. So I think everyone should keep those concepts in mind. I've always thought that the best way to make money in the markets is through a contrarian strategy. And it's identifying extreme market valuation high or low in the catalyst that'll bring that valuation or move it away from that extreme. And the beauty of Austrian economics is that it's not a catalyst that's unknown. You know, people think of catalysts that are, the best catalyst would be something that's unknown. Think of the apocryphal story of Nathan Rothschild when he knew Napoleon had lost the battle of Waterloo when he bought a whole bunch of British bonds. The beauty of Austrian economics is it's out there. It's there for everybody. I mean, virtually every document or writing is there free on the Mises Institute's website. But the beauty of it is that they simply, the mainstream media, the mainstream financial, people do not believe in it. And so I encourage everyone to continue reading and apply it in their everyday lives. So it's a little difficult to make sort of broad investment recommendations in a setting like this, because I don't know all of you, but what I can do is provide maybe an analogy that some of you might find useful. So just imagine that you're in a friendly debate with someone, someone like Walter Block, for example. And you're getting very frustrated because he's making these outrageous arguments, but when you decompose them, they all make perfect sense. So instead of continuing with this futile task, you decide you're just gonna punch him out, which is what I would do. And then the way I would do it is I would surprise him because he's this kind of cuddly, benign guy, but sort of like a bear. If he felt he was threatened, he might be dangerous. So I would just kind of surprise him, say, hi, Walter, how's that thing with the New York Times going? And when he raises his hand to answer, just bam, right? And another thing that's important is you wanna take care of it in one shot. So if Walter is here, right, and you're gonna hit him, you don't aim here, right? Everyone knows that because if he moves back, you're gonna miss him. And if your arm is fully extended, he can just bat it away. So you don't wanna do that. You wanna aim behind him, right? So when you come, you're here. If he moves back, you still hit him. And if he tries to swatch your way back, he's down on the ground. And then when he's down, you can say something smart, like, you know, now that's what I call undefensible or you can't block that. One good Austrian deserves another. So what does this have to do with investing? Well, a lot of people invest with a crisis in mind, meaning they tailor their whole investment strategy about an event, some crisis that they think is coming. And that might be a hyperinflation, it might be a stock market crash, it might be an enormous widespread debt default. The problem is that the environment is right for all of those things, but you don't know if it's gonna happen or when it's gonna happen. So designing your whole portfolio around that is dangerous. And getting back to my analogy, Walter's face in this analogy is the crisis. Now I happen to think that he's a handsome guy, but in this particular analogy, his face is the crisis. If you invest for the crisis, and the crisis moves back, which we've all seen, you're gonna miss, okay. If you invest for the crisis in some external event or some external force, like a silver manipulation or a live war manipulation or a forex manipulation, wrecks your plan, your plan is wrecked. So I guess my recommendation in general is not to tailor your whole investment strategy or on a crisis that you think will happen by some time. Because that's very dangerous. They were talking on Bloomberg recently about sort of the dollar debasement, inflation, purchasing power falling. And I think some columnists had written, if a tree falls in the forest, but it falls really, really, really, really slowly. Does it make a sound? And I think the answer is it doesn't. If it's over a hundred years, which is what we've seen with purchasing power declining, the economy can absorb that. And so be very careful about that, I think. What you want is a strategy that can endear a crisis, but not one that relies on the crisis to succeed. And so that would be my action item is when you're thinking about implementing your strategy, ask yourself, does this assume knowledge about something that is really impossible to know? Excellent, thank you, Oliver. So we have our new throw box microphones which require some audience participation. We're gonna test all of your throwing arms today. And you have to relay it at times, but these are a quicker way than bringing mics around, especially in a tight setting like this. So I know we have some questions for Nomi and our panelists. Where shall we start? Thank you all. Great panel, by the way. Nomi really admire you, I've read your last book. Question for you based on your solutions. By the way, my name is Anthem, sorry, nice to meet you. I was kind of interested kind of in your solution toward going toward the IMF-SDR, because it seems like our problem has been more centralization. It kind of would like your take on decentralization and cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, other blockchain innovation and kind of how you see decentralization kind of playing as the new evolution in the future. Thank you. Thanks, Anthem, that's a really good question, nice to meet you. The thing about the IMF and the SDR is that it's a way of decentralizing the dollar. Even though the dollar is in it, it's sort of like what happened in terms of having a basket of currencies rather than having an individual currency. So the Fed can't have as much power over the value of money throughout the world if the dollar isn't the main reserve currency throughout the world. So it's sort of like a step in between in terms of having a breaking of simply one dominant currency. And it's not just because it's a reserve currency, it's also because it's our politics, our banking system, how our banking system changes the world, how the Federal Reserve requires other central banks to operate. So there's a lot tied up in the currency in terms of power. And it's a way of decentralizing elements of that power. So that's why it's sort of like a step in between. And it's a way to counterbalance just having one currency. Thank you just for further clarification. So because my understanding is that the IMF is just an extension of the U.S. Treasury. And so when I met with the Ministry of Finance in Japan 12 years ago with James Cerk of Gold Money, he told us that the IMF wouldn't actually allow Bank of Japan to buy more gold for their reserves. They can only keep what they have or sell what they have, which we both found fascinating. Apparently it was all public knowledge very deep in the annals of IMF code, which we received photocopied to us in that meeting. So it just seems like the IMF really is an extension of the Fed already. So anyway, that was just an interesting observation. But just interesting, just on the gold, that was 12 years ago. I think a lot has changed. I mentioned that even the BIS, the IMF who called out these policies, quantitative easing, manipulating currency, manipulating the cost of the value of interest and money and so forth as much as they have done with so many different ways. And in this period, things have changed. So the IMF, I believe, has considered gold more than it talks about publicly, just like it considered including the Chinese ran into that SDR, which was something that happened first non-public. The U.S. was very against that. They were very against that because they didn't want to have another currency balance, from a standpoint of money, from a standpoint of geopolitics and diplomacy and everything else. So in that way, and yes, the IMF is an Augusta institution and it is part of the problem, but it's also interesting to see how it's reacted in the wake of this rise of the Federal Reserve and this new element of power over our financial system that I don't think it even imagined. Or the Fed probably didn't even imagine it back in Bretton Woods in 1944. Thanks for your response. Appreciate it. Okay, yes. What I'm hearing today alarms me more than the headlines we keep hearing about that the biggest problem in the world is climate change. So shouldn't we be putting forth the narrative of financial change and creating the same urgency of what we're talking about today to that this is actually more of a threat globally than the climate change that to this day we still hear our politicians and one more thing real quick. With the way that money is deposited today, direct deposits from the government and whatnot, has cash become irrelevant? When we don't even have to print the cash anymore, we can just hit a few keystrokes and deposit $20 million for some government contract and that money gets disseminated. So to me, that's a big fear as well is that cash is already irrelevant in a world where we can just create money at the stroke of a key and not even have to print it anymore. I'll be real quick on that because I know you have some wonder what... On climate change, not to go off on climate change, it's a completely different topic, but it does relate to where some of these countries are looking at investing and China has risen in it. The BRICS have created their own development banks specifically to invest in clean energy projects. So it's interesting and that's maybe or not because they care about the environment but from a financial perspective, it's a way also to take their own power in terms of investments, in terms of where they develop going forward relative to what the US has done and relative to old energy. That's just on the financial side. It's an interesting byproduct. I just covered a little bit in the next book but that happens. But it's related to this new shifting in the financial system, in the monetary system, which has been the result of what's happened since the financial crisis. I think it is dangerous. I mean, I love your analogy with the block and the fight because we don't know when a crisis is gonna happen. I get asked this question all the time. When's the market gonna crash? I don't know. All we can say is that the magnitude of financial change that has happened since the financial crisis puts us in a much more precarious position than we were before the financial crisis because now we're falling from a much greater height. We're falling from a height of that $325 trillion of debt that's been created or a large portion of that debt that's been created because money's been so cheap. The investment in the stock market because there's nowhere else to invest because the return on governments or higher level corporate bonds or whatever so limited because rates are so low because of the central bank manipulation. There's nowhere else to go. And all that artificiality has been puffed up since the financial crisis. So I agree. I don't know when but it is a problem that should be discussed. And these G20, G7s, they get together all the time and discuss this. They come up, they don't even get where their solution should come from. All they do is meet, greet, say hi, spend a lot of money, drink and then they go home and they just continue the same policies they've been doing for the last 10 years. So it is. I actually think that they're both problems. Climate change, not necessarily because we can't address climate issues. Technology has done a good job of doing that. And also the decline of the use of cash is not necessarily a problem because digital cash is convenient. Problem is the degree to which they encroach on our freedom. And I think both have been very effective on that front. So I'm equally concerned actually about both. You know I'm not gonna talk about climate change per se except to say that I don't even think the proponents actually necessarily believe in it. I think they view it as clearly a mechanism and I think they're pretty open about it at these conferences to implement or use it as cover for greater government intervention in economic arenas. I think they're very clear about that. So to the effect that it's more pronounced in the media or what have you, I mean that's by designing on purpose. As it relates to the war on cash, I completely agree with what Jeff had stated earlier. I mean this is, in the Mises Institute has done a great job, especially like Joseph Lerno about talking about this. It is an ongoing, very deliberate policy this war on cash has been going on for many years and will continue simply because it gets in the way of negative interest rates. And to the extent that they have difficulty in suppressing it, they have to continue the war on cash both overtly and covertly. And by that latter I mean, maybe they just stopped printing $100 bills. There's things they could do without right laws and regulations. So I guess I agree with the points you were making. Okay, next question, this gentleman back here. Regarding the dollar being the reserve currency, if you take a very simplistic approach, you've got the United States which hopefully we're still a capital, republic capitalism, and the rest of the currencies really are some form of socialism, communism, totalitarianism. Seems odd to me, and I understand diversification and all of that, seems odd to me you'd want to diversify or diversification into socialist currencies. Well that's, I mean, the point is I guess also tied to nationalism, wouldn't the U.S. fight tooth and nail against an effort by the IMF to plant the U.S. dollars in world reserve currency. We benefited hugely from it. And it absolutely has been. That's why I was saying before there's been that shift, that the United States has been very against, for example, China being included in the SDR. And not necessarily because of the political ideological elements of how our country versus other countries operate, but really because of the economic and the financial benefits of controlling the level of currency and controlling the dominant currency in the world. That's the reason they were concerned. So both Tim Geithner, who's the Treasury Secretary in Obama and the following Treasury Secretary Jack Liu had been very active in trying to get the IMF, for example, not to consider China. And their argument had nothing to do with politics. It had to do with not wanting to give away that power. So it's almost like the power in general, whether whatever you believe it to be was the dominant reasoning that they used to, they didn't say we want to keep our power. They basically said they're not ready. We don't want to, the idea was they didn't want to give up their currency power, their trade power, their political power. And so diversification outside of that, it's also power diversification. At the end of the day, we trade with the rest of the world. And whatever beliefs aside, that's what we're talking about in terms of finance, in terms of currency, in terms of central banks, in terms of private banks, that element of finance and economics also has that relationship. And if there's one dominant currency within that, there's no checks and balances outside of that. And it could be an SDR, it could be gold, but the checks and balances outside of that one dominant currency, it has the potential, which it did in the financial crisis, to really hurt the rest of the world and the United States. The crisis started here, the recession started here, but it exported very quickly around the world, and then it came back. And so the circle of lower growth and the circle of more speculation, the circle of more artificial central bank intervention continued because we are in the same world and we did start a financial crisis. And a lot of these activities, these ideas of the new currency and SDR and the IMF changing, had to do with the reaction to not wanting to be caught up in someone else's crisis. You know, Nomi, when you leave Goldman Sachs, you're supposed to go to the Treasury Department. What are you doing at the Mises Institute? See, you screwed up. Well, I totally screwed up. This gentleman. They would have preferred that too, I think. It's so annoying to be on the outside for them. I haven't seen any good throws yet, so somebody needs to be far away, the next speaker from this guy. Go ahead. I have two quick questions. Are the big banks able to lend between each other in order to keep investing in the market to keep driving it up? And the second question is, does the Federal Reserve have shareholders? The Federal Reserve shareholders are its members. So just like I mentioned, where did I, I didn't see where that question came. What's your name? Greg. Greg, hi, sir, hi. Nice to meet you. The shareholders of the Fed are the members of the Fed. So what happened was when the Fed was created that the member banks got a proportional amount of shares relative to their size, and there was probably some conversations at the time which wasn't only their asset size, but a little bit of their influence and power and relationship size. And there used to be until 1941 reports of exactly which banks had what proportion of shares in the Federal Reserve, and they just stopped reporting that information in 1941. So if you go online, I think it was the St. Louis Fed. It's the last Fed that actually talks about how those break down. So the shareholders are the banks and they are a portion based on size. And that's really the key thing. I'm sorry, your first question. Are the big banks? Yes. Because are you a member? And so that goes back to Jack O'Island, the club. You're members of a club. You have access to club privileges. And in club privileges, if you are a member of the Federal Reserve, aside from which you also become various directors of the Federal Reserve, throughout the entire financial crisis, Jamie Diamond, who's a CEO and chairman of JP Morgan Chase, was also a class A director at the Fed. So he basically had the, he was inside discussing how the Fed could act in order to save the financial system and his bank. So yes, they can get money from the Federal Reserve and right now that money costs basically nothing as can other large banks in other countries. There's a greater cost as you go down the food chain. It costs more for a bank outside of prime membership to really get access. They have access to the discount window. They just don't get as much. And yes, banks can trade with each other, but they don't have to. It's much cheaper not to do that. It's much cheaper to do it directly with the Federal Reserve. But yes, they can absolutely, they absolutely have credit lines with each other. They have derivatives contracts with each other in existence all the time. I'll just make two small points. One is that, I personally have never really concerned myself with how the Fed has structured with these private shareholders, et cetera. I mean, as Ron Paul said years ago in the paraphrase him, it's a very curious corporation when the president appoints the leaders of an entity. So, I mean, it is the government, one and the same. But as it relates to banks lending to each other, they certainly can, but there's no need since 2008 because the excess reserves are so gigantic. I mean, they really don't need to. That's why a lot of these interest rates that are quoted in the papers are somewhat meaningless as of today. Another question. Yes, gentlemen. Yeah, my name is Frank Tulak, and I've been very honored to be here. And I've loved the Mises Institute and to see it here in San Diego and have a meeting here is just a dream come true. And to have known me Prince is something that I've really enjoyed her work. And I find her much more enjoyable than Christine Lagarde. So, I mean, she could say that she's kind of like Christine Lagarde except without numerous and arrogance, you know, I don't know French, I gotta say. Now, the reason I'm very important is I wanna try and help. I don't wanna spend here a lot of time and I don't wanna waste anyone's time. But I remember watching the challenger take off, right? And I'm watching that that show craft go and go and go. And I'm hearing them going, everything is go, everything and go, telemetry is go, everything is going. And you're watching it explode. And you hear saying, yes, everything is go, everything is go, everything is wonderful, everything is go and it's in, it's gone. So, one of the- Apart from the challenger analogy, which I've never heard, but probably fitting for a libertarian conference, a specific question for one of our panelists, please. Okay, I beg your pardon, I apologize. Ms. Prince, if you were, as Lagarde says, you know, it's going to be reset. And she meant it as a manual reset where she's gonna pull the plug because we have $1.5 trillion that we cannot cover. It's officially dead. If you were Ms. Lagarde, I'm Mrs. whatever she is, when would you pull the plug? And by the way, know me if you wouldn't mind answering in some numerology gobbledygook like Christine Lagarde does, so that'd be great. I was actually at one lunch, I was at the Fed a couple, actually in 2015 and I was asked to talk about why the banks weren't doing what the Fed wanted them to do. In other words, the Fed, you know, the Fed had done this whole process of cheap money and keeping liquidity in the system and the banks were beneficiaries, the stock was up, the bonuses up, you know, why aren't they lending? Why aren't they doing more with respect to small businesses and individuals and so forth, why? I get up, because they don't have to. It's really pretty clear. And she came in for the lunch of Mrs. Lagarde, I, anyway, she came in and she was talking about the dangers of the Fed raising rates and there are dangers. This is the thing, we're in this catch 22, like you mentioned, that the system is dead, what's resuscitating, what's keeping it alive, is this artificial stimulation of cheap money, is this artisanal money, is quantitative easing and all the other permutations of it. And she said, you know, if you raise rates, and this was what Janet Yellen had said, maybe I will, maybe I won't, but maybe I will. The emerging markets countries and some of the other countries are gonna have some real problems and she wasn't wrong, they've basically taken on all of this debt, all this dollar-denominated debt and if you raise rates and the dollar goes up higher, it's more costly for them to pay back the debt that they've taken and that creates an international debt crisis. And so you can't do, unfortunately, a complete reset, it's like in your analogy, you know, there's someone dead on the table and they don't have a leg or they don't have two legs, you might not reattach the legs, you might just try to work with, you know, making their heart pump or whatever it might be, but that's not a great analogy. Sorry. But it has to be done gradually. I think rates should be raised. I think there should be some form of an external standard, whether that's an SDR, whether you bring gold back. I think there has to be a way to diffuse what's happened and to diffuse this idea that the Fed and all the banks that are copying it, it's required to copy them, can keep the level of money and therefore what's pumped into all of these markets artificially where it is. It will be painful, you'll have to deleverage a lot of the system, you won't have it, the derivative should be deleveraged, there should be less of them, banks should not be allowed to have a little bit of capital against a lot of derivatives risk just because they say that they've got this, which is basically what they do. While they're failing really bad stress tests with all the central banks, or if they're not failing them, they're barely covering their requirements. So I do think you have to raise rates. I do think there has to be a movement away from just a single currency. I think you have to break up the banks in such a way that they can't use deposits as hostages in order to be able to speculate and continue to leverage and say it's okay. I'm concerned about what can happen if we continue to go down that route. So the reset has a lot of components to it. But these are the things that, when the leaders get together of the central banks, they really don't get, they really don't discuss. How do we get out of this? It's all like, this is really bad, but how do we get out of this and they go back and they continue to do the same thing? You know, we could get Christine Lagarde here, but as she's facing charges, maybe 10 to 15 years probably. So hang on. I'd like to just make one comment on that. I think if a Fed was in the business of making space shuttles, none of us would fly. I think that's a pretty solid point. And I think it's a good analogy and it differentiates what's going on in the markets versus what you see in physical reality and physical reality when the ship blows up, it's gone. We can't pretend it's still flying. But we invest in sort of a matrix market, like the movie. Remember the movie? Some rules can be bent, some can be broken altogether. They can create illusions. So for instance, interest rates are always positive, right? But they can make lending rates negative and they can do that because we're sort of investing in a simulation. And I mean, that's a good question. I mean, the Bible talks about a debt jubilee. At some point, a recognition that people become so indebted that they just need to be let out of it and reset. I mean, what does a global reset look like or is it something that takes place over a century? The idea of a debt jubilee is something, for example, that Greece wanted. And instead of getting that, which would have helped Greece, it would have helped the rest of Europe. It would have helped our relationship economically with the rest of Europe. It might have allowed some of these policies to at least pretend to change or start to change. And it didn't because the idea was there's no way to let you out of debt. But at the same time, the Fed, the ECB, has trillions of dollars of debt. They're just holding doing nothing. So if you could cancel some of that out as well as some of the debt, it could be literally, it's a math problem. There's debt that's not being used for anything. And there's debt that's crushing countries and causing them to adopt programs that are crushing citizens. So if we could cancel some of that out, so you're reducing the debt, you're allowing, just like the banks got, they basically got out of their problems by receiving cheap money and leveraging it. That's like debt cancellation. They don't have to pay to have the liquidity that they had as much as they used to have to pay for it. That's like a debt cancellation. So if we could do that, and we could basically cancel out some of it, first of all, reduce our debt as a country if we could just basically take out the debt that's on the banks of the Federal Reserve, the ECB, the Bank of Japan, and so forth. There are national issues as well. But I think you can cancel and proportionally get rid of central bank debt at the same time. In other words, out of the roughly $20 trillion in US FedGov debt, I think about six to seven of it is owned by our own Fed. So there's an argument that Ron Paul made in the past that that portion could be canceled without any real pain to Main Street. It's absolutely doing nothing. It's a balance sheet. It's at the Fed. It was issued by the Treasury Department. It's not being used for anything. It's what you could do in any one of your businesses. You basically cancel the costs on both sides. Another question with the box? Yeah, yes, just one. How do we make this work? It's working. Oh, good. I'm taking a survey of you three people on a very practical question that has to do with the title of the panel. What percentage of my, let's assume I had a million dollars. I'm very hopeful. What percentage of my money should be in cash in my safe at home? You said you had a million dollars? That's the scenario? Yeah. OK. If I had $10,000, maybe no cash at all because I might need it next month to pay rent. But if I had a million dollars, I may not need it right away. There's three people up there. Each of us, we're talking about what I need this for. We don't want to put all our eggs in one basket. We don't want it to shoot at the crisis that may never come. Things like that. The only answer I'll give you, that's obviously a subject question. The only answer is I wouldn't have much of it in a safe deposit box in a bank. As a matter of fact, that's about the last place I'd have it. I'd have it at home, no matter how ever much it was. It's a really tough question for us to answer, not only because of facts and circumstances, but from a regulatory standpoint, Albert and I probably can't address it at all. But suffice it to say, you always want to be very liquid in times of crisis. So keep that in mind. If you should have the misfortune to die, depending on what state and what jurisdiction you're in, the local or that state's estate tax folks might come pay your safety deposit box a visit and audit it without your knowledge from beyond the grave. So another reason to be concerned about what you keep in safety deposit box, we really have to treat banks as de facto agents of the state. I think at this point, that's the only rational approach. Lady in the back? Yeah, I'm Dr. Nancy Verus. I am a casualty, well, a veteran in the ongoing war against physicians. So I'm glad you brought up the war against cash, because actually there has been a war against private property in frame of America. And it probably started in January of 1850 when the British left. But my question is about analysts. It struck me, I think a lot of these economic, so-called experts and political analysts, but not the Mises Institute. And thank you for sponsoring me. But the reason like nobody ever heard of you and they all heard of some other places is because they all heard of Motley Fool and not you, because you're not making money off of us. You're actually advising us. You're actually helping us. So and you're not just using us for money. So but anyhow, my thing about analysts, in medicine we have a expression, if you don't take the temperature, you won't find the fever. So in the analogy is, if these financial and political analysts, they tend to be in DC or New York, they don't know what is going on in the heartland. They do not know. And from having lived in flyover country, they really don't know. So why would you pay any attention to them? You need all the data in order to analyze something. And it's like the Charles Krauthammer syndrome. He's very bright, double mensa, you know, he's great analyst, but he just lives in a ghetto. He does not know what's going on in the country. I think that's a good question to know. Let me talk about the financial media for us, the financial press and what they feed us. A lot of it's repeated information from its own sources. And that's what I've said before in terms of whether you look at something on Reuters or Bloomberg or Fox or CNBC, there is a setup. Like if I get asked to do one of those shows, it's because the producers already know what they think I'm going to say. And they want that piece of what they think I'm going to say to be a part of their show and balance whatever else they want their show to be. So a lot of the information, even if some of the facts are accurate, the way that it's packaged together is really produced. And it doesn't seem like that, I know, because we are, like if you're on top of it, you're talking off of your own thoughts, but it's with pre-interviews, it's with being asked in advance. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that goes into what looks like fairly loose talk. But the point you made, which I think was really good, is that getting out in the world is deeply important. It should be, it's the job of a journalist. I supposed to journal what is going on, whether that's a point in history or whether that's a place or whether that's a person. And in order to do that, you need to be there. Or I believe you need to be there and you can't be everywhere. But I think that's very important. And a lot of times it isn't about that. It's about what's the topic of the day and how is that going to be spun and who's going to say what we need to make a show. It wasn't always like that, but it's really become more and more like that. And so yes, getting out there for all of us is very important. But also if you'll recall before the crash of 08, in the middle of the 2000s, some of the shows like Jim Cramer's show and Larry Kudlow's show, I mean, these guys were creating infomercials for the market. Okay, and where's the accountability for that? How many people did they lead down a path who lost 40% in 2000? I think it's pretty shameful, personally. I lost basically most of my savings in Bear Stearns, I just wanna say. And so when Jim Cramer was talking, because I'd worked at Bear Stearns for seven years and as a part of working there, like any type of 401k or some type of a program, I decided it would be most prudent to not take my money out right now and use it, but to basically keep it for the future. And when Bear Stearns got taken out and taken over by J.P. Morgan Chase at $2 a share, which was not long after Jim Cramer said it was a screaming buy. I don't remember his exact words, but it was something like that. I was really pissed off at Jim Cramer, so. I think we have time for one more question before our break. Dodd Frank with the rollback. What effects do you think that'll have and going back to what Jeff was talking about with incremental changes on the margin outside of the ideal banking system? What sort of small change would you like to see? And sorry, I don't have a long analogy. Well, I think we've identified our Aussie. New Zealand. Oh, I'm, oh, ooh, very sorry. Some people in the room would like to talk to you about a passport later. So any response to his question? Right now the rollback for Dodd Frank. First of all, Dodd Frank was not as strong as it could have been for a lot of reasons. The big banks are bigger than they were before the crisis. They are fed, you know, this is what we're talking about all morning. This is just actual fact. They should have been made smaller. They should have been broken up. That's not what Dodd Frank did. But one thing it required was for them to at least imagine what they would do that doesn't involve the government's money and doesn't involve external intervention if there were another crisis. And that's in Title I and Title II, the beginning of Dodd Frank. And even that, the banks couldn't really do. Seven out of the eight largest banks in this country when they had to present that plan to the Federal Reserve and the FDIC, which ensures our deposits, failed. One or both of those two bodies. The only bank that didn't fail was Citigroup. And the only reason I think Citigroup didn't fail is because Jack Lew, who was a former Citigroup executive, was the Treasury Secretary, I just think. But, so weakening that, which is one of the things that is being discussed right now on the Hill, I don't think makes any sense. I think it should be strengthened, but at least we would like to know, we should want to know what would happen that doesn't involve as much on our backs if there were another crisis. And in terms of other rules that are being discussed now, there's the idea of letting banks trade more. They had some reductions in what they could trade speculatively for their own account, so they couldn't go against their clients. And that's sort of one of the ideas at Dodd Frank that works called the Volcker Rule. And even that was really pretty weak in terms of allowing a lot of loopholes for banks. I don't think that should be dialed back either. I mean, all this is not about telling a bank what to do, it's protecting us from what they do. And again, I think regardless of ideology or anything political, we should be concerned that they can do what they've done again with no ramifications except to become bigger and to receive more liquidity, more money, more cheaply to do what they did last time. So I would advocate a reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, but I would not advocate because I think it hurts us, all of us loosening some of the already fairly weak roles that Dodd Frank put into play. I mean, I would just say that to understand how onerous Dodd Frank is, look to the fact that not one community bank has been started since this implementation. I mean, that's staggering. But the sad truth is it's a drop in the bucket as far as regulatory burden on the economy as a whole. To the extent that that's rolled back, that's obviously very, very good and it should benefit smaller or medium-sized companies more to the extent that it would larger companies. So that's a potential investment thesis there. Albert? Yeah, just one comment. We can't have a question without an analogy. So I'll say that sometimes the knife does more damage coming out than going in, right? So I can't say that it'd be uniformly good or bad. From where I said, I think loosening the regulations would help because it helps smaller providers and it helps brokers serve their clients. On the other hand, I don't know what big banks will do if we roll that back. So I think it could go either way. And again, it was big banks that wrote most of the language. So I mean, I agree that when Dodd Frank was written to it, smaller banks, community banks were really disadvantaged by the language. And there's a way to create a rule and law. It's using language that can allow community banks and smaller banks to have a bigger benefit and a more potential for growth and still protect us from the larger banks that wrote most of the law. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna take a quick break. Nomi will be here for a while to sign books if you'd like to purchase one in the lobby. I will be back at 10.45 with Tom Woods, but please a big round of applause for our panel. Thank you.