 I will say this is that I've come around a lot more to Cliff's view, I think, than I would have expressed 10 years ago. In other words, I see, especially at the local level, the applicability of political activism of getting people elected to make things happen locally, I think, is important. And so I don't know about some of you, but even certainly 10 years ago, but maybe even five years ago, I was one of those people who said, oh, you know, all that matters is the state. And so the, you know, some disgruntled traffic cop or some lazy DMV worker has more power over you than Google or anybody else like that. So let's just focus on the state. And I've changed my thinking somewhat on that. I think that now we have sort of a nexus of state tech actors, and we ought to concern ourselves with that. So there is, I think, forms of power over us other than pure state power with which we ought to concern ourselves. And I also think that, you know, Cliff mentioned earlier, people are just worried about their mortgage, or they're trying to find a boyfriend or girlfriend or something like that. I think that the time is running out for us to just lead our own lives and completely ignore what the state is doing. Because in a sense that's rational, right? Just live your life, try to amass maybe as much money as you can, as much happiness, as much property or whatever, leave something to your children, and don't spend your time and mental energy worrying about politics because it's, from a libertarian perspective, a mug's game anyway. And I think that sounds good, but that's changing because there are people like Bernie Sanders and AOC are not kidding. They're not kidding. When Republicans say, oh, I want to get rid of the income tax, I want to abolish the Department of Education, we don't need a Department of Energy, they don't mean it. We're going to ban abortion. No, they're not. All they're going to do is get into office and give out the political jobs to their friends. That's what it means to be a Republican. But when Democrats say we want to eliminate billionaires, we want to seize oil companies, we want to ban fossil fuels, we want to have all Americans using so-called renewable energy within 10 years. They actually mean it. They mean it. They're serious. It doesn't mean they get everything they want, or as quickly as they want, but they do mean it. So, you know, the right is kidding, the left is not kidding. And so I'm not sure how much longer of a window we have to simply not care about politics and focus on our own lives because some of us are, you know, children might have grandchildren and we have to worry about that. We have to worry very much about the future. So I want to give just a little bit of historical background for the case against politics perhaps. And if you follow me on Twitter, I even say politics can't work. So I've kind of made a boast there and I better live up to it. But here's why I think we have reached a point where I have to somewhat agree maybe with Steve Bannon here and say that we are living in post-political America. If you think about our history, there are almost infinite numbers of events that we could look back on and say, oh my gosh, Jeff, from the get-go, America turned away from its original premise, which was a strictly limited federal government that was designed to create liberty for Americans and towards statism, towards state action. We can call these inflection points or we can call them turning points. And we can start, of course, with the constitutional invention itself. In many ways, the Constitution was a usurpation of the Articles of Confederation and a bad one at that that gave us a far larger, more powerful centralized state. I mean, Alexander Hamilton and the Hamiltonians presented a plan of government in 1787, which would have, from the get-go, for instance, put militias under federal control, would have made federal law supreme in every area. So almost from the very start of what we think of as America, at least under the Constitution, we were going the wrong way from the Articles of Confederation. You don't have to fast forward too long. Just go to the Alien and Sedition Act. In 1798, we're already calling people traitors if they don't cotton to certain points or certain viewpoints of the federal government. A few years later, 1803, Marbury versus Madison, the Supreme Court grants itself, Judge Napolitano disagrees with this, by the way. The Supreme Court grants itself this mystical right of judicial review that's nowhere to be found in Article III of the Constitution, and all of a sudden deems itself the ultimate arbiter of what federal government can and cannot do. Okay, you could say in 1803, oh, it's too late for politics. As far back as then. Move forward into the Civil War. Where do we start? I mean, we had Abraham Lincoln just absolutely suspending civil liberties across the board. Really, in many ways, the 1860s represented the end of federalism in this country, any kind of system of separation of powers. Not long after that, you may have learned this in history. I hope you did. The Sherman Antitrust Period of the 1890s was just unbelievably extra-constitutional. You look at what Congress said at the time of that bill's passage. They basically said, we're going to appoint ourselves the arbiters of what kind of business size and business combinations are a-okay. I mean, just wildly extra-constitutional, and you could have said as late or, excuse me, as early in our history as 1890 that we're beyond politics at that point. That Congress is so out of control. And of course, we move into the 1900s, and we get a whole century of statism. I mean, what neoliberals think was this great liberal century in America was a century of central banking entitlements and war. I mean, go to 1913. We had a couple of terrible things happen that year. We had the Federal Reserve Act passed. We had the 16th Amendment passed, which for the first time gave Congress the ability to impose an income tax on people. Which really in many ways set the stage for FDR in the 1930s and the New Deal, which created a wildly unconstitutional social security system, which we're still laboring under today. And then the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson gave us the Great Society programs and of course Medicare. And even in my lifetime, 1979, under the auspices of Jimmy Carter, we were blessed with the Department of Education, which it might have been the final nail in the coffin. So this little historical rundown has been in service of the idea that there are a lot of inflection points where we could have said, you know what, Jeff, you're right. It's too late. Forget politics. I got to move to Nicaragua. I got to do what I got to do. But what's so interesting is if you look at the 20th century here, if you look at the 20th century, you'll see that even when all these bad things were happening for much of the century, the total federal debt didn't really rise that much. It really wasn't until the 1980s that the federal debt really took off. And so a lot of the programs that were put in place decades earlier by legislators who were long dead didn't really bear fruit for many, many decades. And of course that's one of the terrible realities of democracy, is that politicians can sort of give us free stuff and get votes in exchange. And the bill comes due a long time later with our children or our grandchildren. So that's an obvious and inherent flaw in democracy. I don't know what you do about that. But even with all of these terrible events that I've listed, terrible from a libertarian perspective, from a lot of people's perspective, these were good and happy events. But even with all of these terrible events, I would argue that as late as around 2000, we still could have saved this country politically. There was still a way that we could have voted our way out of this. So in 1980, Ronald Reagan gets elected. He enters office in January of 1981. There's one trillion worth of U.S. federal debt. And Reagan said this number was unfathomable. He couldn't even imagine it. He couldn't conjure it. When he leaves office in 1988, it's three trillion, by the way. So there's your limited government conservatism for you under Reagan. So a few years later, George W. Bush gets into office. It's January of 2001. We have about $5 trillion worth of debt at that point. So my argument today is what happened over the next couple of years was the final turning point. That despite all of those terrible things I've mentioned in the past, the final turning point for America politically came in those couple of years in the early 2000s when George W. Bush came into office. And if we have to crystallize it into a single date, we'll say September 11th. The infamous date of the terrorist attack on the buildings in New York and the flights in Pennsylvania and the Pentagon. So that date sort of crystallizes that period in our minds. But there were really three things that happened, I think, brought about the political end of the United States during this period. The first was the tech stock crash of 1999 and 2000. And so those of you who recall who were invested in the marketplace probably lost some money. And so Allen Greenspan came along and said to markets, we're never, ever, ever going to have that happen again. And this is called in finance, this is called the Bernacke put, which basically means that the central bank is telling the world, not just U.S. investors but worldwide investors, we'll never let another stock market crash like that happen again. We will inject as much liquidity into banks and firms as necessary to make sure that the stock market stays high because we never want to have that happen again. And as a result of that, a new era of monetary policy was entered into and that has allowed Congress to go into hyperdrive with respect to federal debt. Not long after the 2011 terrorist, excuse me, the 2001 terrorist attacks happen and George W. Bush all of a sudden gets it into his head that he has to avenge his father's halfway war in Iraq and that we have to get Saddam Hussein out of there and we have to fight him over there so we don't fight him over here. And so he decided that he would get Congress to enlist Congress's help, enlist the U.N. in going into Iraq and Afghanistan and those two events have added trillions upon trillions upon trillions of dollars to the national debt, which is why you see that line going parabolically upwards. So first Alan Greenspan starts giving Congress the ability to monetize debt and then George W. Bush starts spending like a drunken sailor on two wars that I think most of us in this room would consider wars of convenience if not unnecessary and harmful to our interests. So these two wars send federal spending and federal debt into hyperdrive and then something that people don't talk about very much happens. George W. Bush decides that he kind of likes being president and would like to be reelected for a second term and he decides he'd like to defeat John Kerry in the general election so he decides that he needs to do something for seniors. So in a naked play to get senior citizen votes, the Bush administration conjures up something called Medicare Part D which is a prescription drug benefit for senior citizens and if you go back to the legislative history of that period you'll find that Medicare Part D was projected to cost infinitely more than the original Medicare. In other words, prescription drugs cost way more than just the actual doctor visits the original Medicare from the 60s was designed to make free or low costs for seniors. So once Medicare Part D was installed, as you probably know, federal entitlements don't go away. They're a one-way street. You ratchet them up, you don't take them away. Nobody is running for president or congress saying I want to get rid of Social Security, at least not people who are winning. So as a result of these three unholy interrelated events that all occurred within the same few years, the federal deficit went, as I say, into hyperdrive. And I don't think we ever get back from that. I don't think there's ever a way in which this federal debt is paid off meaningfully. Now maybe it'll be paid, you know, you'll still get paid for your treasury debt but only through heavily-inflated dollars that almost become worthless to the point where your phone bill is $1,000 a month or something like that. So what does it mean if this debt is never going to be paid? Well, in theory it means that our creditors, people who are still buying treasury notes, ought to be demanding junk bond interest rates, right? They ought to be looking at Uncle Sam and going, look, if I'm an investor and you're a firm, I don't see anything in the way you've been governing this firm that leads me to believe you're going to get your fiscal house in order anytime soon to put it mildly. If I'm going to invest in this sinkhole known as the U.S. federal government, I want 20% junk bond rates. And it's only through some pretty incredible machinations, really, of both the Fed and in tandem with the ECB that we don't have to pay 20% junk bond rates for people to buy U.S. treasuries. So why do I think it's too late for politics? Well, we can't pay this off in any meaningful way and I don't think we're going to vote our way out of it. I don't think we are going to sell federal land to pay it off and I don't think we are going to cut spending precipitously at any time in the future, especially when you consider that the percentage of people in the United States who are over 65 is set to double in the next 30 years. So you might have heard of the term fiscal gap, which a couple of economists at Princeton came up with, that basically looks at the graying of the U.S. population and looks at the entitlement promises we've made to seniors, both in terms of Medicare and Social Security, and says, you know, gee whiz, what are our likely future tax revenues going to look like versus our likely future entitlement promise payments? And it's easy to be glib about entitlements, but there's a lot of senior citizens in this country who are very close to the bone, who are very dependent on that Social Security check for their basic necessities of rent and food and utilities. And there are a lot of people in this country who are heavily dependent on Medicare doctor visits and Medicare prescription drugs. So we shouldn't be glib about this. We've made promises to people, promises which they rely on, but the entitlement gap, excuse me, the fiscal gap, the difference between what we're likely to take in in taxes over, let's say, the next 50 years and what we're likely to have to pay out in entitlements over the next 50 years is 200 trillion. Trillion with a T, not a B. 200 trillion. It's not payable. It's not payable. And so we've got a federal government where it's no longer about, you know, my city can't fix the potholes or my car got broken into and the police weren't very helpful. No, no, no, we're talking about something on a weaponized mass scale. We're talking about millions and millions and millions of senior Americans who aren't going to get what they think they're going to get and combine this with increasing life expectancies or, well, we think increasing life expectancies and you have an absolute recipe for disaster. So I don't look at this chart and say, you know, vote harder. That's not my conclusion from this chart. My conclusion from this chart is to start thinking about how to protect yourselves in your personal lives, protecting, obviously, your own finances and your family, but also how we might re-engineer American society when all of this comes home to roost and whether that involves some sort of breakup or secession, some sort of radical decentralization, some sort of devolution of federal power back to states and localities, which is something I favor very strongly, is going to be an interesting question and it's also not an academic one. So thank you very much.