 So today I want to talk about what I consider the most, I don't know, hated industry in our country. Maybe the most hated industry in history. An industry that throughout the last 2,000 years has been blamed for every crisis, every problem, every economic disaster. It's always their fault. And it's not just their industry. It's the practitioners themselves have been demonized time and time again in our media, in our literature, in our songs, in our plays, in our movies. Certainly in our movies. You know, Shakespeare wrote one of his most famous plays, The Merchant of Venice, on Shilok, The Money Lender. I'm talking about finance. I'm talking about financiers. Every way you look, finance is denounced. Finance, oh these Wall Street guys, they're just greedy. They're just, you know, they'll come in fraud in a second and they cause every financial disaster we had with the Great Depression. The 2008 financial crisis or whether it was, you know, they were thrown out of the temple by Jesus after all. For 2,000 years, since Jesus threw them out of the temple, we have blamed every financial crisis on financiers. Is that just? Is that right? How should we approach the whole area of finance? How should we judge whether finance is this evil industry? Because because we've evaluated, basically it's evil. We regulate it. We regulate it extensively. Every aspect of banking, every aspect of investment banking, every aspect of finance today is controlled and regulated by the government. We don't trust them. We believe that if we left them alone, they would bring about disasters. They would cause major crises and they would destroy life as we know it. You know, somebody did a survey a few years ago. It might have been quite a while ago, but I think it still holds about who commits the most murders on television. Who commits the most murders on television. And the result is overwhelming. Almost 50% of all the murders on television and our TV shows are committed by businessmen. And a significant percentage of those happen to be in the area of finance. We don't trust business, but we certainly don't trust finance. As I mentioned, Shylock is one of the most famous villains in theater. Dante. I don't know if you've ever read Dante's Inferno. But the moneylender, the banker, is like on the seventh rung of hell. He's got a bag of money around his neck and the bag is being drawn downwards towards the fire, dragging him into the deepest pit of hell. These are horrible evil people. And we need, we need to control them. We need to tell them what loans to give out. We need to tell them how much interest to charge. We need to tell them, you know, what kind of products to sell and what they can and cannot do. We need to have say into every single part of how they do their paperwork. And, you know, this is what we have today. We have an unbelievably regulated controlled industry. And yet, and yet, if you think about it, think about the value of this industry, the value to human success, the value to human flourishing, the value to ability to live our lives in almost every dimension, in almost every dimension. Finance, financiers, financial institutions, financial markets are crucial, essential for our ability to live well. And I don't know about you, but my standard of the good is individual human flourishing. Is, does this thing, in this case, does this interest industry, promote human success, promote the creation of wealth, promote flourishing, living well, living as a human being well. And when you look at finance, everywhere you look, in every quarter that you look, what you see is finance helping start businesses, whether it's through venture capital or through banking. Finance helping grow businesses, whether it's through debt or through bank loans or through allowing companies to go public or buying and selling their shares. Finance, seers and bankers allowing us to buy homes we couldn't otherwise afford until we accumulated enough cash, which would take us 20, 30 years, but because of mortgages, we cannot buy homes that we can't complete, that we can afford over time and allowing us to do what I call consumption smoothing, buying stuff today that we will pay for tomorrow, credit cards. And we don't have to store all our cash, you know, under the mattress, in a safe in our home, we can have it at the bank and conveniently use credit cards and checks, if anybody still uses checks. Now electronically we can transfer money, we buy our cars, with debt provided us from bankers. Every aspect of our lives, our business lives, our personal lives, lives as producers, lives as consumers, every aspect is made possible by the existence of these financial institutions, these financial markets and these financiers that we so, so, so love to hate. So what's going on? What's going on? Is my assessment of the value that financiers create in our lives right? What am I missing? Are these guys really the bad guys that our TV series, that our movies, that our literature, that our, what do you call it, drama, poetry, portray them to be? Is this really true? Which one makes sense? Because you can't have them both. You can't have contradictions. I mean, I used to be a finance professor, so I know a little bit about this topic. And I used to teach a class called finance and ethics and people used to look at me and say, wait a minute, that's a contradiction of terms. You can't have finance and ethics. Really? Really? We think that lowly of this profession that makes all the wealth we have around us possible to the extent that we don't believe it's compatible with ethics? Well, it's true. It's not compatible with a certain type of ethics. We're going to talk about that. And I used to ask my students, this was their first and most difficult homework assignment. I used to ask them to go find a movie or book or novel where the hero in the movie or the novel was a financier. Not just any financier, not some loser financier, but a successful financier. A financier who'd made a lot of money by being a financier, by working in this profession, made a lot of money, being successful and portrayed in the movie positively or in the book. Now, this was the hardest homework assignment I gave these kids. They didn't know what to do with it because it's hard to find anything. I'll give you an example of one or two where it's positive, but I'll give you some examples of negatives. But, you know, they really went out and they really couldn't find anything that portrayed financiers. Now, you could find loser financiers who feel bad about all the money they made and then become good guys. You can find loser bankers like the hero in It's a Wonderful Life, who runs a failed bank and is therefore the hero of the movie. But the successful banker in It's a Wonderful Life is a really, really bad guy. It's somebody we love to hate. So you think, think about a movie or a play or a TV series or anything, any work of art, any work of fiction that portrays bankers positively.