 I got an email last night saying, hey, somebody canceled on this session about money. Do you want to fill in? And you offer me a stage and an audience, and I'm always going to say yes. So that was easy. But then I had to figure out, OK, what am I going to say about money? And it turns out the session's not even about money. It was about investing, about banking tools, about technology. But there was always almost nothing about money, right? Which is what this is supposed to be about. So I have a feeling that most of you didn't come to hear about money. You came to hear about investing in technology and startup companies and cool stuff like that. And I would rather listen to that stuff. But I want to talk about money because that's what they asked me to talk about. And really kind of take a step back from all of this. And I was trying to think, I was sitting there trying to think, how am I going to connect what I'm supposed to talk about with all these wonderful presentations? I have no clue. But I started thinking about it, and there is a connection. We have a certain attitude in the culture we live in towards money. We have a certain attitude in the culture we live in towards money. And this is particularly, I believe, true of younger people. And it's not a positive attitude. Yeah, we all want money. We all need money. We all use money. But deep down, there's something a little uncomfortable about money. It's like self-interested and selfish and greedy. It's the pursuit of money. And that's reflected in the financial world we live in. Why is banking such an entangled mess? I love that ball of because that's an expression of all the regulations and controls that we have placed on the banking industry over the last 100 years. It's exactly 100 years, by the way, since the Federal Reserve was established at the beginning of that tangled mess in 1913. We've got entangled financial industry because we don't trust the financial industry. We don't trust bankers. We don't trust banking. This goes back hundreds of years. We don't trust money. We don't trust people who pursue money. So we try to regulate them to death, and we create controls and a mess. And you need a startup to come in because no existing bank can even approach trying to do what these guys are doing because it's such a disaster out there. I mean, they're barely surviving, and they've got the regulators breathing down their neck on a daily basis. If you think about why are kids? What is it about derivatives that is hard for kids to even connect with? Well, for the last five years, all we've heard in the news media is how derivatives almost destroyed this country. We were on the brink of complete financial collapse because of what? Well, everybody in the media that you ask will say, oh, well, those evil derivative markets, right? So people have already got a shield up against that. We live in an economy that's growing, what, 1% a year? The stock market needs a lot more than 1% a year to really do well over the long term. It's hard to gain confidence in all this. So what is it? What is it? We live in this environment, which is, I think, very hard for young people to get engaged in these financial kind of thinking and financial decisions. We live in an environment where very people understand what money is, and I really wanna talk to you about what money is, because the Federal Reserve is putting $85 billion a month. What is that? Is that money? Is that, how does that affect us? What's involved here? So what is that stuff? This paper that we carry around, is this money? What does it represent? Why do we use it? Where does it come from? So what is money? What is this stuff? Purchasing power, right? So this allows me to buy stuff. And why is this cool? Where did this come from, right? Who invented this, right? So it wasn't the Federal Reserve, as I said, it was only invented in 1913. Money predates the Federal Reserve a little bit. So where does money come from, right? So in the old days, really old days, even before I was born, right? What did we do when there was no money, right? You wanted to get stuff. Yeah, you bought it, right? I exchanged my cows for your chickens. Not very efficient, not very productive, not a good way of doing stuff. So we come up with something, right? Something that facilitates trading between chickens and cows. For example, you know, if the chicken's only with half a cow, half a cow's not worth half a cow, right? Once the cow's dead, not very useful. So you can't, I mean, bought it is like a cumbersome, inefficient, you know, horrible system. So we come up with this medium of exchange. We come up with something called money that facilitates these transactions. That makes it possible for us to exchange cows and chickens and other stuff easily, efficiently, smoothly. And we've used lots of things in the past for money. Tobacco was used in money in colonial America. Rocks, special rocks, cool kind of looking rocks, have been used for money. Obviously, what's the obvious one that in the last few hundred years has been used for money? Gold, gold and silver have been used for money. Precious metals, because what don't you want money to be? You don't want money to be too plentiful, right? You don't want money to be too easy to create because then what happens? You get a lot of money coming. The same number of goods, what happens to the price of those goods? The same, more money chasing the same number of goods, what happens? Teaching economic one-on-one here, right? Price go up, right? Because everybody wants the same goods, so we'll need to bid them up and prices go up, right? Right now, Fed is printing $85 billion a day. So we've got more money. The economy's not growing by $85 billion a month. It's not growing by $85 billion a month. So what happens to that money? I see they've got a trick up their sleeves. It doesn't actually go to purchase more goods. Where's it going? Where's the $85 billion actually going? Well, some of it's going into the stock market, which is partially why you're seeing the stock market go up nicely, and part of it is going into where? In a bank reserves. So the banks are putting it in their saving account and the Fed is paying them interest on that saving account. So the Fed is printing money on one hand and paying people to keep it in their reserves on the other. So the money is actually not entering the US economy, which is one of the reasons prices are not going up. In spite of the fact that we have the same number of goods with more money chasing it. So just a current event, sideshow. So money, you want it to be something precious, something that's hard to come by, something that grows only so much, right? And you don't want it to be plentiful, you don't want it to be easy, you want it to have some value that people have, some in a sense intrinsic value that people value it for beyond just money. So if I get stuck with the gold, I could theoretically turn it into jewelry, I could turn it into a crown, I could make something nice out of it, right? It's not just a waste, it's not just something I throw away. So that's how money kind of evolved. And if you think about, well, why the guy was supposed to talk instead of me who's, I'm sure, a lot more interesting than this, I was gonna talk, I guess, about Bitcoin or Bit-something, right? Why is Bitcoin interesting? Notice that they've created certain characteristics to Bitcoin that make it look like kind of a precious matter, right? It's limited supply, only so much is released at a time. You cannot release more than that, it's only gonna be, at a certain year, they stop producing it, there'll only be a finite amount of this stuff. And people are willing to accept it for transaction, now why are they willing to accept Bitcoin for transaction? Why would you accept this digit? It's basically a string of encoded zeros and ones, right? What's that? You can exchange it, but why would people accept it? Somebody is willing to accept it because they believe somebody else will be willing to accept it, right? But why does this get started? I mean, that's an interesting question, I don't necessarily have the answer. I suspect, and this is just my suspicion, one, you can buy illegal goods with it because it's not traceable. It's true, I don't know if you saw this black market, right? The black market that was shut down two weeks ago online, the guy was caught in San Francisco, basically they were buying and selling drugs, right? Illegal drugs, the heroin, cocaine type stuff, right? And you could use Bitcoin to do that, untraceable. You can't trace who's buying and who's selling. You can't find the two, and it took them two years just to find the guy, the marketplace, who owns it, right? Because the encryption is so difficult to trace, right? So it allows you to buy illegal stuff, right? What else? Well, in an era where we're kind of losing faith in the dollar, in an era where we're kind of losing faith in money, in traditional money, it's an alternative. And it's an alternative being used primarily by people who are somewhat on the fringes, who are suspicious of the dollar, who are suspicious of the same people who are probably buying gold right now, are probably trading in Bitcoin, so it's on the fringes. It allows transaction to happen that are invisible, invisible to the authorities in an era when the NSA is listening to everything we say, right? You can use Bitcoin to avoid all of that. So it's a bit of a phenomena of paranoia, of paranoia about the state of the world, about the state of privacy, about ability to be anonymous online, and that's what Bitcoin really provides. That's the characteristic, the added characteristic is money, it gives you anonymity. This theoretically gives you anonymity too, right? I give you a dollar, nobody can trace that dollar back to me, right? This is anonymous, but once you go online, it's hot. Because once you go online, they can trace everything. So Bitcoin resurrects the anonymity that a paper money has. So money is this medium of exchange. It's the way we trade. How do we get money? We get money by creating stuff. We get money by building stuff. We get money by being productive, by being innovative, by going to work and working hard. And the more productive we are in an economy that is just and works right, the more productive you are, the more money you get. So money is a reflection. It's a reflection of our own productivity. It's a reflection of our own creativity. It's a reflection of the work that we do. It's a reflection of our success. Money's never, or shouldn't be, and this is important for young people. Money's not an end in itself. Now why does Bill Gates, when he used to work, he's not working anymore, why do these really, really wealthy guys still work? I mean, as people have said, right? They could, three generations, four generations could try to spend this money and they won't be successful. They've made so much of it. Why do they keep working? And why do they keep making money? It's not just about working. They keep making money and they keep measuring it because money measures our success. It measures the amount of value we create because how do you get money? You get money by offering somebody a good and then paying you. Why do they pay you? Because it's valuable to them. They're not forced to pay you. Money is this beautiful mechanism by which we transact value for value. Bill Gates becomes a gazillionaire by what? By selling us a product that we hate, that we despise, that is destroying our lives. No, he sells us a product that we value, that makes our lives better. You pay a hundred bucks for Microsoft. Now I know we hate it as well, but it's a love-hate relationship, right? We couldn't survive without it. So you make money by providing a good, by providing a service. Money is just a measure of how good you are at it. It's a measure of how valuable people out there, society, if you will, values the good and the product that you have created. The more, the more valuable it is. Money has been portrayed in many cultures, in many eras, as the root of all evil. I think money's the root of all good. Because all it is is a measuring stick, a tool. A tool that we have both to measure success and then to be able to use that success, to use that money to transact with other people, and that's a measure of their success, the value that they have, the product or the service that they make your life better. This is trade. Trade is, who loses in a trade? Who loses in a trade? I buy an automobile for $20,000. How much is the automobile worth to me? More than $20,000, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered to give the $20,000, right? How much is it worth to the seller? Less than $20,000, otherwise you wouldn't part for it for less than, for the $20,000. Win-wins, trades, you enter, now you buy a lemon once in a while, but you generally enter into a trade as a win-win transaction. Money is the facilitator of win-win transactions, and in that sense, money is one of the great things we have in our culture. So we should celebrate money, we should change people's attitudes towards money, and if we do, they'll start using all those wonderful financial tools that we have for them, and I'm being almost shoved off. Thank you.