 Well, thank you so much for that. Did everybody enjoy Katelyn and Patrick Byrne? It's very nice of both of them. They're both very busy people. You know, I was thinking, I was interesting to me that they both talked about civilization. They both use that term. And that's a term I like to use because I noticed that there were a couple of children or a baby in the crowd today. And that's really what we're talking about here today. We're talking about civilization and money in the future and what we're going to bequeath to those younger people. Katelyn mentioned that we used to have an equity society in the United States, meaning that there was some connection between the amount of money people saved and the amount of money other people could borrow as a result. And as she demonstrated since about the 60s, that's no longer the case. And really, especially since 1971 in the United States, that's no longer the case. And so these are the big picture questions that we have to ask ourselves because I know a lot of us in this room, we like to read Austrian economics. We like to think about more technical aspects of things. But really what we're talking about is whether our kids and our grandkids especially are going to have as good a lives as we've had. And judging by the relative ages in the room, you know, most of us have been very, very fortunate in our lives. And the notion that millennials and especially generation Y live under a cloud of suspicion that they might have a worse material, if not spiritual or whatever life than their parents and grandparents, that can ought to concern all of us very much. Speaking of millennials and generation Y, it's time for us to rethink what a mogul looks like. Does anybody in this room know who this is? I'm sure at least some of you do. This is the mastermind behind the cryptocurrency Ethereum. I'm sure I'm not pronouncing this correctly. He's Russian-Canadian, which seems to be a nice combination. His name is Vitalik Buterin. Am I saying that right? So we think of the cigar-chomping crony capitalist Robert Barron of the 19th century. Well, this is what the 21st century mogul looks like. He's got his Hello Kitty bag and he's standing in what looks like a very non-Western country. But he's behind one crypto in which I personally have an interest in in terms of the horse race. But beyond that, I don't really have opinions on which cryptos or whether Bitcoin or cryptos will prevail over the dollar. But I'm certainly feeling a lot better about it this morning after hearing two very brilliant people talk about the future. So I want to talk a little bit about not blockchain or cryptocurrencies, which we've heard about already. But I want to talk about the future of the dollar itself. And when we talk about the dollar, we have to remember that it's enjoyed a very long run as the world's reserve currency. And as a result of that, I would argue that everyone in this room has lived a... Everyone in this room who's American and normally uses US dollars in transaction has lived a life of privilege that perhaps has been unearned in a sense. So I was very interested to hear earlier this week that Tom Wolf died. I'm sure many of you have read The Bonfire of the Vanities, which is his big book that skewers 1980s Wall Street. A great novel, a very poor movie, very badly cast in my opinion. But anyway, the main character in that movie, Sherman McCoy, there's an episode in that book where he loses six million dollars for his bond trading firm, Pearson-Pierce, by trading inartfully a Giscard bond, which is a bond issued by the French government. And that's actually not a fictional creation of Tom Wolf. The Giscard bond was real. It's something that the French government issued. It's named after the one-time president of France, Valérie Giscard d'Estaing. I hope I'm pronouncing that a little better. He's still alive. He's 92 years old. He was president of France from 1974 to 1981. And Valérie Giscard d'Estaing was not so good from my perspective on the EU. He was part of the creation, really, of the European Union, but he was very good on money. And prior to being president, he was the finance minister of France in the 1960s. For then, President Charles de Gaulle. So you know you're watching a 1980s movie when the big loss to the investment bank is six million dollars. So that's what Sherman McCoy manages to lose in the movie, Bonfire de Vendies. So the Giscard bond that he's busy trading in that movie was a real bond. And what's so interesting about it, it was backed by gold. The French government issued about four billion francs worth of these Giscard bonds in 1973. And they were payable 15 years later, 1988. They were payable either a par valley or 95 grams of gold for each 1,000 franc note if the link between gold and the franc was severed during the lifetime of the bond. So it turns out that between the 70s and 1980s, yes, it was severed and unfortunately for the French government during that same period, the price of gold rose from about $100 an ounce to about $400 an ounce. So the French government really lost its shirt on this bond issuance. The French government's liability on it was 53 billion francs, which was about 1% of French GDP at the time. It was about 5% of government spending. And it was about 100 pounds for every man, woman, child in France. It was apparently worth about six months worth of global gold output. So it shows you the kind of folly that governments can get into when they issue debt. And that folly relates very much to our dollar that we're all forced to use more or less and the future of that dollar. So it was not Charles de Gaulle, as is commonly thought. It was actually Giscard de Stang who coined the term exorbitant privilege when referring to the United States dollar. He said this in 1965 and he was referring to this post World War II Bretton Woods system which effectively made the US dollar the world's reserve currency, which means that governments all around the world promise to redeem their own currencies in dollars rather than gold. And so when he said what the United States enjoys an exorbitant privilege, he meant it in the financial and monetary sense, of course, that America would benefit and become richer than perhaps it deserved. But I think we've actually become richer than we deserve in a broader sense, in a military sense and in a cultural sense as a result of that exorbitant privilege. So here's a quote from Charles de Gaulle in the same year in 1965. He says, The fact that many countries accept as a principal dollars as good as gold for the payment of the differences existing to their advantage in the American balance of trade, this very fact leads Americans to get into debt and to get into debt for free at the expense of other nations. Because what the US owes them, it is paid at least in part with dollars that they are the only ones allowed to emit. End quote. So now fast forward 50 years later, it turns out that de Gaulle was correct to put it mildly. And he was so serious about his opposition to this that he sent the French Navy across the Atlantic to pick up its gold in exchange for its US dollar reserves. He understood that the system was asymmetric, which means America could produce a new $100 bill for just a few pennies at the US Treasury. But other countries needed to produce $100 worth of actual goods to obtain one. And as de Gaulle correctly predicted, this allowed the United States to in effect export inflation. We've been doing it for a long time. So I think both de Gaulle and Giscard de Stang were entirely correct, but in ways beyond which they maybe could have imagined in the 1960s. It's not just that we've had undeserved monetary or economic riches, but we've had vast political and military and cultural power, which has accrued the United States in very large part because of the operation of the dollar as the World Reserve currency, because of the operation of our central bank, and because of the enduring market for US Treasury debt. And I think this privilege, this exorbitant privilege, has become so much a part of US society, so ingrained in us, so prevalent we've accepted it and we've absorbed it that we've become unaware of it. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is real privilege. So when we talk about the United States dollar as the World Reserve currency, it helps to have a little bit of context. So as you see on the slide, a reserve currency first and foremost means that it's held in significant quantities by governments, by other institutions around the world for their foreign exchange needs. The US dollar represents about 65% of foreign currency held by central banks, and it's very widely used. In fact, it's even required in some international transactions, especially think in terms of OPEC transactions, which are priced in dollars. So if you want to buy oil from an OPEC-producing nation, you do so in dollars. And as a matter of fact, Iran's threat to open an oil bourse priced in euro I think is behind some of the saber rattling that we've seen from the US government directed towards Iran over the years. We also have the idea of sanerage revenue, which Caitlin alluded to, which is the difference between the face value of a dollar and production cost. We're basically getting an interest-free loan when we produce dollar bills and send them overseas. And when we're talking about large bills, about 65% of US bills are used outside of America and 75% of all $100 bills are actually used outside of this country. Seven countries have adopted the US dollar outright as their currency and about a third of the world's GDP is produced by countries that have tied their currency to the US dollar. I don't know if anybody here trades forex, but 85% of all forex trades have the US dollar as one of the two pairs, which is very interesting to me. But this is where we really get to the crux of it. 40% of all the world's debt is issued in dollars, which means that countries like Japan, Germany, France, and the UK, they actually hold more liabilities denominated in dollars than their own currencies, which means that foreign banks need lots of dollars. And the 2008 crisis in many ways intensified the marketplace for dollars because a lot of the real estate deals and the derivative, the bundled packages that lenders were doing around the world were priced in dollars. And as a result of the crash, the Fed actually had to increase its dollar swap line that it had with other countries where they exchanged their own currencies for dollars because they needed more of them. And as the federal funds rate rises, which were promised, is going to happen, I'm not entirely certain that that will continue if we have any equity market shocks, but at least in theory, interest rates are going to be rising, and that is in many ways something that will increase lending by banks and which will also increase the demand worldwide for dollars. So as a result of all of this, regardless of what's happening with Bitcoin and crypto, right here right now the world still needs and wants lots and lots of dollars, both electronic and actual real currency. That means that we are, despite all of our profligacy, despite everything the Fed has done in response to the crash of 2008, the least dirty shirt in the laundry, as they say. And so the question is how long can it go on and how long can we benefit from all this? Well, if we look at the amount of money held by the Fed on its own balance sheet, you'll see something pretty remarkable. You see all throughout the early part of the 20th century when the Fed was created, the Fed didn't have much on its balance sheet and it rose and it rose and it rose over time. And then you'll see that last gray line, we had the crash of 2008. And so basically in less than 10 years, in less than a decade, the amount of base money, the monetary base held by the Fed, which consists of commercial bank reserves but also the currency out there quadrupled. So basically you're taking the world's reserve currency, at least in terms of its monetary base, and you quadruple it in less than a decade. This is historically unprecedented and we don't know what's going to happen as a result. And it's easy to tell ourselves, well, we're not Weimar Germany, we're not Argentina, we're not Zimbabwe, we're the dollar, it's okay. But we can't know that and the fact that it's historically unprecedented in the sense that we have never had a reserve, a widely used worldwide reserve currency have a crash or a crisis is something I think ought to concern us very much. And that's what makes me hopeful about cryptos and blockchain is that we can be, while this system is still being propped up and still breathing, building parallel institutions and parallel systems that might just save us in the event of something ugly. So when we're talking about privilege, you know what's really privilege is to borrow money and pay it back at little or no interest. That sounds like privilege to me. I mean, this is just a chart over the last couple of decades of the federal funds rate which basically influences the interest rates that prime borrowers pay and the interest rate that you would pay if you wanted to go out and borrow money for a mortgage, let's say. And as you can see, for about the last decade or so, we've had effectively zero interest rates. And in some countries in Europe, they've even had negative interest rate yields on government bonds. So if you've read Austrian economics, you think, well, this puzzles me because we thought interest rates were price signals and we thought that they reflected the time preferences relatively of the borrower and the saver. But if you believe people like Paul Krutman were all wet on that, that as long as the interest rates are held low enough, the Fed can inflate the monetary base basically forever if it needs to. And of course, we benefit in many, many ways from low interest rates. It's a form of privilege when we can borrow money at rates that are unrelated to anyone else's savings habits. And it does increase economic activity. There's no question about that. In a certain sense, we might consider it artificial. It also increases tax revenue, which is something the government likes. They like people borrowing and building and spending. But what's so amazing is that it allows Congress to spend far more than it brings in in revenue every year and keep doing it. Right now, Congress is incurring about $500 billion up to a trillion a year in new debt every year, above and beyond what it brings in in tax revenue. But despite all that, despite over $20 trillion in debt, the line item on the federal budget each year for interest service is only right now about $300-something billion. And that's because interest rates are very, very low. It wouldn't take much. It would just take historically average interest rates in the range of 5% to 10% to make interest on the national debt the single biggest item in the federal budget every year. It would be over a trillion dollars. It would be more than Social Security. It would be more than Medicare. And it would be more than defense. So the question is how long can this go on? How long will the rest of the world and people in the United States continue to buy Treasury debt at very low interest rates and allow Congress to keep spending more than it brings in in revenues? Well, the longer it goes on, the longer we're privileged. And it's been very nice. We've all benefited from it in this room. This slide we might call deadbeat privilege because it just shows in graphic form a U.S. federal government debt that it will never be repaid. It will never be repaid in meaningful terms. It might be repaid in nominal terms. The whole world knows it. No one's kidding themselves. No one looks at the U.S. federal government and says, you know, this is an organization that has its fiscal house in order. I think I'll loan them some money at a very low rate of interest. But what I like about this chart and I use it a lot is that we can finally see, starting in the late 2000s, that mathematically this debt is never going to be repaid. You can go back as early as let's say the 2000-2001 period where George Bush became president. George W. Bush. And there was still sort of the mathematical possibility of paying off $5 trillion in debt. It would require some very painful perhaps tax increases in entitlement cuts, but it was still mathematically possible. But fast forward to the decade of the 2010s and it's no longer mathematically possible. So the world knows this. I wonder if entitlement recipients or would be future entitlement recipients know this. What normally happens when a debt beat spends, whether that's a corporation or a family or an individual, when a debt beat spends more than they make every year, year after year after year, and they increase their borrowing and they borrow more and more and more each and every year. Well, what normally happens is first of all, their creditors stop lending them money. And that hasn't happened. People are still buying treasury debt. Now, it's arguable that the Fed is sort of creating a marketplace for that artificially, and that it certainly did that through quantitative easing. But nonetheless, to an extent, there is still a marketplace for US treasury debt. People still think of that as a safe and solid investment. The other thing that normally happens to debt beats is that they're required to pay a much higher rate of interest. But here we are still paying very low rates of interest on 10-year treasury bonds. In fact, we might even be in a situation where we have an inverted yield curve where a 10-year debt doesn't cost any more than short-term debt. The other thing that often happens to a debt beat is they're cut off. They're required to pay higher interest rates. But they're also required to sell off assets. If you're a doctor with that nice vacation home in the Hamptons and you've gotten in over your head, your creditors will come along and relieve you of your second vacation home and say, you've got to sell that to pay us off. But that never seems to happen, Uncle Sam, because that's the realistic way at this point of ever addressing any of this. Would be to start selling off vast amounts of federal land in the West, in the United States. Short of that, I'm not exactly sure how any of this gets paid in any sort of real or meaningful terms. But what we have to remember is that this really can go on a long time. Kaylan had a slide earlier that was interesting that showed the growing delta between savings and debt, actual assets and debt in this country. And you look at something like that and you think, well, it's expanding hyperbolically and it can't last. But a lot of people were saying that very thing in 1971 when Nixon took us off gold and they said, you know, from now forward, the U.S. government is going to be so out of control, there'll be nothing putting the brakes on and then U.S. dollar is going to hyperinflate and become worthless. That's almost 50 years ago. So the first thing we have to understand psychologically, I think, is that this can go on a long, long time. And how we can know when it'll stop is the question before us. That's really the civilizational question, how prepared we are for that day. So if the dollar fails, if it fails because of too much debt, if it fails because of the Fed, if it fails because the rest of the world wises up, if it fails because Congress spends too much, if it fails because alternative currencies provide a better alternative, if it fails under any of these scenarios, there's two likely outcomes for that. And this is something that actually, Pat Buchanan of all people has talked about. He says, well, you know, if we ever had a real dollar crisis or a real euro crisis, let's say in Europe, first we might have the IMF come in and say, well, we now have to create a global reserve currency. We can no longer trust individual governments or even a collection of governments in Europe to issue currencies. We can't even trust the United States, the world's biggest and most powerful government to issue currency because there's too much volatility and look, it's just like the crash of 2008 all over again. So now we need a global governing body to run a world's reserve currency. And maybe at the beginning that would look like some sort of basket of many currencies from different countries but maybe over time that would morph into an actual IMF currency called an SDR, a special drawing right. And so the IMF would effectively become the central bank of the world. Not a happy or rosy scenario in my perspective. So in other words, another crash would have a centralizing effect on money. That's one scenario. The second scenario that Pat Buchanan talks about is have the opposite, is we'd all go running back to older forms of currencies. In other words, the euro would fall apart and Germany would go back to issuing Deutsche Marks and the Italians would go back to Lyra. In other words, a nationalizing rather than a centralizing effect because people would go back to what they knew and what was safe before the crash and that might even include gold and other forms of commodity money. So those two outcomes are very interesting to me and I hope that the third one is feasible technically and otherwise before some real crisis with the dollar occurs. And the third one is of course private money. Private money in the digital sense in the sense of a cryptocurrency that is maintained and housed on some sort of distributed network, some sort of blockchain because this is really the money we need. We need money that's non-political, that has no central bank, it's decentralized and more importantly that it's competitive. One that allows average people just like people in this room and investors to diversify out of dollar risk. That's pretty hard to do. Most of us get paid in dollars and most of us invest in dollars and most of us hold assets that are denominated in dollars. You have to be a pretty wealthy person to really diversify yourself politically and also currency-wise. So a decentralized currency would allow average people to diversify themselves out of the US dollar and out of its risk. So let's hope that we have enough time that we can work this out technically and work this out ideologically in people's minds so that our privilege which has been going on for so long now doesn't become our curse because I'm afraid the money we need is not necessarily as fat happy Americans the money we deserve. Thank you very much.