We've set up a situation now that is completely unsustainable without government reform. This is a systemic crisis and this is the reason why gold is doing so well. This is the reason why there's a thought behind Bitcoin. This is why people are searching for something outside of the matrix of what you or I learned about 30 or 40 years ago in business school.
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Welcome to the first episode of Open Position. I'm Steve Feldman. I am the co-founder of Wealthion and I've been on the channel from time to time, and decided this year, as I leaned a little bit more into LinkedIn to good result, that we would try out a show. The first thing that came to my mind and the producers' minds is, does YouTube and does podcasting need another financial education show? And the answer is probably no. So we had to try to make this a little bit different.
I'm sure most people here are used to what's on Wealthion, and you see a lot of talk about macro, a lot of punditry, a lot of predictions. I'm sure we'll have quite a bit of that on the show, but that's not the point. The name of the show is Open Position. It's a bit of a double entendre. You as a trader or someone who's an investor, you could have an open position, but as individuals, as business executives, as investors, as citizens, as parts of communities, we all have underlying responsibilities and judgments that go along with those open positions. I often say to myself, certainly as I've gotten older: What's my motivation? What's the point? What am I solving for? That's something that this show is going to try to get to. If it works, it'll be a good show. If it doesn't work, I'm going to go back to my day job.
I am thrilled that the first episode is going to be with Anthony Scaramucci, and that's for a number of reasons. First, I've known Anthony for almost... and we started at Goldman together, and I absolutely—
37 years ago. 37 years ago. And Anthony is—we haven't always—
A mentor, by the way. You helped me out a lot. You probably don't remember all this, you're not going to because you're not going to flatter yourself with all this, but I was a young guy, absolutely clueless at Goldman Sachs, and you really helped me out.
I appreciate that, and I remember a little of it. But what I really remember and what's really fresh in my mind is, for those who are the longtime viewers of Wealthion, we had a previous host and he was good and he was dominant on the show, and he decided to leave. It was a mutual decision, but it was abrupt, and the show was left in a lurch. I called Anthony—he had already built his reputation as a podcaster, and we'll talk a little bit more about that—and I said, "Listen, I need some help and I'm not an on-screen guy. What would I do?" And he said to me, "Tell me where to show up." Didn't ask about the money, didn't ask about the show. He just said, "How could I help a friend?"
I know Anthony has a very public persona, and you can judge him on that, but I will tell you for someone who knows him privately, and what he's done for me and what he's done for other folks that I know that will remain private, is nothing short of extraordinary. If you're in a pinch, this is a man that you would like to have on your side.
Oh god, hugging it out. Hugging it out.
Love you. Okay, sorry. Um, so, but I do love you because you're a great entrepreneur, you are a humanitarian, you are—
And I'll use the words of dear: You come across as a very kind person, but you are a kind person. So, let's get into the show.
We'll get into—we're going to get into—okay, so Anthony and I did a show together—
And you really crushed it on the gold thing. Congratulations.
Thank you, thank you very much for that. But he's also the founder of GBI, and we're having a moment.
And a well-deserved moment.
Thank you. So, Anthony and I did two year-end shows in 2024 and 2023, and they were on his Speak Up show on Wealthion where we made some predictions. And then he went on to greener pastures. If you don't know this, he has two of the top podcasts. One, The Rest Is Politics, it's like the number one podcast in politics around the world. Pretty amazing. I don't begrudge the fact that he went on, because it was a better show and a more lucrative show. But we had two prediction shows, and now I'm bragging, we had a lot of predictions and I have to say our batting average, except for picking the Super Bowl winner, was excellent. If you bought IBM or SoFi or QXO when we said it, you doubled your money. So that was pretty good.
And then when he moved on, I did an Outlook show by myself at the end of last year. It was a pretty well-received show, thankfully, and the premise of the show was that 2026 was going to be a year of reckoning. There were lots of narratives that the economy was working with, that the country was working with, and that business and investing was working with, and I don't think that those are going to last forever, and I think in 2026 a lot of that is going to come home to roost. What are those? One, that Treasuries are the safe haven asset; that everything gets refinanced; that technology solves all problems, including the climate; and frankly that technology is always good for you, and I'm not sure that's really true either. With that as a backdrop, we'll start to explore with Anthony some of that outlook, some of those—I don't want to call it predictions—but some of the things that we expect to see happen. And then we'll get to the open position, get a little under the hood with Anthony Scaramucci, which I'm sure people are more interested in, and we'll see how that goes. Anyway, again, so thank you, Anthony.
Hey, listen, it's great to be here.
All right, let's start out. You are an expert at the intersection of business and politics. And so when we were in business school, everyone told me that the Treasury was the safe haven asset of which all assets are measured against. So if you can make 4% on a Treasury, there should be a risk premium in everything, but the Treasury itself was a safe haven asset. Now, between debts, a less predictable political background and environment, tell me how you see the Treasury as the safe haven asset. And if it's not, what is that going to lead to in the market?
Well, I mean, it is in the context of everything, right? It's the tallest of the shortest, if you will. So it is still considered a safe haven asset in that respect. However, inflation-adjusted, Stephen, it's not a safe haven asset because it's underperforming inflation. If you go to truflation.com and you look at where the US dollar is over the last five and a half years, the US dollar is down about 28% in value. You know this as somebody that studied gold and has a large position in gold.
What we did in the country is we made a decision that we were going to have a very big welfare state, and we were going to overpromise the electorate and undertax them. So this is the baby boomer generation. These political leaders have basically failed the country: overpromise on services, undertax, underdeliver on revenues, and you have a structural imbalance that is not sustainable. If we could bring Milton Friedman back from the dead, he would say all deficit spending is unfunded tax liability, and so you have to pay it somehow.
We have decided as a society that we will pay it in what looks like a painless way for the politician, but is the most pernicious and most regressive way for the working-class people, and that's through inflation. Inflation is the most regressive form of taxation in the world, and it's crippled about a third of the US population.
I just want to give these stats, and I want people to really think about this. If you go to realtor.com, the median price for a house right now in the United States is $462,000. If you reverse-engineer the money that you need to live in that house and pay for a 30-year mortgage and not be house-rich and cash-poor, you need about $160,000. It'll give you a little bit of money as a cushion. The median income in the United States is $84,000. So that means that you're $80,000 away from that target. And if you really study the working poor, they're missing dental appointments, they're missing medicines, they may skip a car payment once in a while, they've got massive credit card debt, and they're angry. So we've set up a situation now that is completely unsustainable without government reform.
Will the Treasury pay you back 100 cents on the dollar that you lent to the Treasury? Yes, it will, because they can print the money that they borrow. So they're going to pay you back with dollars that are worth less than the ones that you borrowed, but they will be able to pay you back. But this is a systemic crisis. And this is the reason why gold is doing so well. This is the reason why there's a thought behind Bitcoin, although Bitcoin is going through its predictable four-year cycle and is down a lot this last six months, but this is why people are searching for something outside of the matrix of what you or I learned about 30 or 40 years ago in business school.
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You know, I think we could stay on this question for the rest of the podcast because there's so much in your answer to unpack. There's the societal piece, there's the economic piece, and there's the investor piece. Let's go backwards and layer this. Let's start with the investor piece.
You're sitting here today and people still have an income, you're still an investor, you have a 401(k), you have some account at Fidelity. And there was this thing called the 60/40 mix, which became the narrative. Remember I started this out saying narratives are going to break. Certainly since the pandemic, the 60/40 mix has been a loser. For 10 years, the return on the 10-year bond has been basically zero. And if you're a taxable investor, whatever interest payment you got, you had to pay taxes on it. So with $40 trillion of debt, you've got an unpredictable administration, you don't know how inflation works, but yet the 60/40 mix is still there. Can you buy a bond today? Should someone buy a bond today? Or is it just financial repression because inflation will inflate away buying power? It's basically dead money, only there to deploy if something else cracks.
Okay, but you have to do—like all things with investing and most things in life—you have to do a comparative analysis. If you inflation-adjust the equity market or you price the equity market in gold, the equity market has underperformed. If you look at—and you probably know the statistic better than me—but I would say over the last five years, the 500 best companies in the United States making profits have underperformed a metal called gold. That's telling you something structurally is broken. To use your words, the narrative is broken.
What's broken is that we have lost trust in these institutions. If the President of the United States is decrying the independence of the Fed, that will leak itself into the price appreciation for gold. If the President of the United States is saying unpredictable things about US foreign policy... and again, whatever you think of America, we've had a fairly consistent bipartisan commitment to the rules-based world order that was structured shortly after the Second World War. And now you have arbitrary and capricious rhetoric that's coming out where we're talking about the potential invasion of Greenland, a territory that is in the possession of one of our NATO allies. We are talking about crossing the border into Canada. We're flagging provinces of Canada on the President's social media, where now the Prime Minister of Canada has to actually go to the defense ministry and say, "We have to war game a potential invasion from the United States."
When you're doing that, people are looking around and on the margin they're going to put less money in the United States. On the margin, they're going to put less money in our Treasury markets. And on the margin, they're going to look around and say, "Okay, the US, Stephen, because of the decentralized nature of the government and the predictability of the legal system, became the most powerful and most prosperous country in the world." That's the irony. There was no Caesar, there was no authoritarian, but it was this collective, this decentralization that allowed your family to land somewhere in New York, my family—
Land somewhere in New York, and then their grandchildren, Steve Feldman, Anthony Scaramucci, could go on and live the American dream. If you're in Europe, there's a sclerosis there. There's an aristocratic sclerosis. I'm from a family of tenant farmers. I can show you that because the Napoleonic Code goes all the way back in Naples, the Kingdom of Naples. So I'm from a family of tenant farmers, went to Tufts and Harvard Law School, got educated, and lived a good part of the American dream, as have you.
We're busting that now. We're making it incredibly hard for these people. We took an aspirational America for working-class families and turned it into a desperational one. If you don't fix that and you don't push reform, if people don't look into the camera and say, "Hey, this is not working, as evidenced by what you're saying in the overall markets and the structure of the society"—the result of which we now have to reform it. If we don't reform it, unfortunately, America will dilute itself and it will become like other nations. Your corporate finance professors of 2035 will be talking about our Treasuries a lot differently. They won't be Argentinian treasuries, but they won't be what you learned about 40 years ago.
Well, listen, I see it. Yes, and so there's no political will. How is this politics? There's no political will to reduce $40 trillion of debt. There's none.
You don't have to do that, though. You don't have to reduce—
Right, and 3% inflation gets you a trillion dollars of debt reduction each year, right? Because you're inflating your way out of it.
And so the solution to that, as you mentioned, just creeps back into society. I think we have this sort of second deviation where, yes, someone could say, "Oh, we can inflate it away." Okay, if that was the answer, that's the answer. But it won't inflate away like Zimbabwe or Argentina, it'll just inflate away so people won't notice. But things are already unaffordable. Affordability is what brought Mamdani to New York. What happens to society when they start to understand that? I can afford inflation a little better than somebody who's making $60,000 a year. So what happens politically? Are we having more... is it just going to continue to be Mamdani as a clean sweep?
Both ways. You're going to have a right-wing populism and you're going to have a left-wing populism. Now, interestingly enough, they converge on a few things, like capping credit card debt at 10%. That's a Mamdani and a right-wing populist approach, right? What happens is a good third to half of the population rejects the social contract. They say, "This is no longer working for me." And then you get a populist uprising.
What populist leaders have a tendency to do is they'll start socializing, they'll start putting caps on things, which is absolutely the wrong thing to do. By the way, I understand the intent and the good nature of the intent, but it's bad policy because of the way humans interact with each other and the self-interest of the human being.
Better policy would be the Teddy Roosevelt policy. For those people that really want to understand our history, the father of progressivism was a Republican by the name of Teddy Roosevelt. It's been hijacked by the left. But what was progressivism? Teddy Roosevelt looked at the East New York slums. He had a Dutch journalist by the name of Jacob Riis, who he was very close to. Jacob Riis wrote a book called How the Other Half Lives. And when he was the police commissioner here in New York, he went down to these tenements and he said, "Oh my god, these tenements are collapsing and killing people. We need structural reform in building codes. We need structural reform in how we take care of the working poor."
Teddy took that to the White House and he got all the robber barons together and he said, "Okay, you're taking too much economic rent from the society. So we're going to enact the Sherman Antitrust Act," which came five or six years prior to him. "We're going to start busting these trusts, and you can have a very beautiful lifestyle, but you got to start sharing it with other people. We have to burgeon and create a middle class so these people don't descend on your Michigan mansions or wherever they may have been at that time with—"
Ohio—tiki torches and pitchforks and set the place on fire.
By the way, I'm a big Teddy Roosevelt fan. We keep coming back to this word "narratives," and I'm not thrilled with the Mamdani narrative, I'm not thrilled with the right-wing version of it. But Teddy Roosevelt did something which was as important as the legislation: He changed the narrative of what it meant to be rich and what the responsibility of the rich were in his day. He did a speech—I would highly recommend it, you can Google it—it's called "The New Nationalism." He basically explained that nobody in this country gets rich on their own. They get rich using the roads, they get rich using labor, they get rich using the rules and the law and everything else that this country gives to entrepreneurs. He cowed them first. He made people aware of it instead of today's narrative, which is the worship of the billionaire. "Wow, look how great they are, look at that yacht, and look at what they get to do, and they can send their friends into outer space, and it's really great." They have huge followings, huge social media followings, they're like celebrities, but no one is in an adult dialogue with them about their responsibility. It immediately goes to "tax the rich," wealth tax, as opposed to this moral persuasion argument.
And by the way, I live it, and I think you live it too, which is I think there's virtue in giving back. I don't have enough money to do what Carnegie did and build a thousand libraries. I don't. But if Elon Musk or if Jeff Bezos decided not to spend $500 million on a yacht and he decided that he was going to just build housing, billions of dollars of housing, and give back in a way that really changed the conversation so people thought that what was exalted in America was giving, being part of a community, bolstering the community, not having to have it be legislated to you by Bernie Sanders and Mamdani and AOC, to actually feel like, "Wow, you'll be lauded, you'll be the most popular person, you'll feel good, you'll get something deep inside"—I don't know how you get there. I think you do it in your personal universe, I know I do it in my personal universe. I do wish there was a way that we got away from wealth worship to—
See, to me there is a way because it's America, right? What would Buffett say about America? Don't bet against America. America is neutrally plastic, and America has a tendency to dip and then have a period of reflection, and then a period of redemption and renewal.
Let's just talk about America for a second and look at it in three 80-year blocks of time, which is consistent with Neil Howe's book, The Fourth Turning. We start America in 1776. 80 years later, roughly, we have a great Civil War. So we're really at a low point in America. After the Civil War, we rebuild. America becomes a formidable global economy. And then we go into the Great Depression. 80 years later, we have two wars that are catastrophes for the world, but also hurt America. We come out of the second war—combined 100 million people dead from the two wars—and we build a post-World War II society where America is a benevolent, powerful democracy as opposed to a hegemon or a bully. That makes a very big difference from the socialization of the world if the hegemon is a benevolent democracy as opposed to a bully.
It's 80 years out from that. What happens is the institutions that we created get forgotten by the younger politicians, they get forgotten by the younger people in the room. "Why do we have a World Bank? Why do we have a UN? What difference does the EU make?" And they start to question everything, and then you get a reflexive systemic rise in nationalism. We're 80 years out again, and we need reform, we need reflection, and we need renewal.
If you get the right political leadership to explain that to the people, the people will look around and say, "Okay, that's actually what we need. We don't need more bellicose rhetoric towards the left if we're on the right, or more bellicose rhetoric to the right if we're on the left, but we actually need a healing solution for America where we can cohabitate culturally in America." America's always had racism, Stephen, discrimination, and it's always had ethnic slurs against each other, but we more or less have lived here and cohabitated fairly peacefully, and we've all generally prospered here. How do we reconnect and how do we make that happen? I would say to you the right political leadership would help that.
In the '70s, Time magazine had this great four-week essay on American renewal. Jimmy Carter said we were in a malaise. Gold was at $800 an ounce—I don't know what that is inflation-adjusted, $8,000, I don't know what it is today—but we were in a malaise. Reagan came in and offered a renewal. Whether people liked Reagan or Bush or Clinton, there was 20 years of generally good executive management of the United States. Pursuant to that bipartisan commitment, we started running a budget surplus at the end of the Clinton era. We've now had 25 years of horrific, incompetent management. Again, whatever you thought of Giuliani or Mike Bloomberg, I submit to you we had 20 years of reasonably good executive management in the city. Good political management matters because for people like you and me, Stephen, we are minority partners. You're paying in taxes what I'm paying in taxes. So your majority partner is the President, the Mayor, and the Governor. They are getting 52% of the economic rent that you're producing. You're a limited partner to them. And so we have to get involved, we have to push the issues, we have to push the reform. If we don't do that as part of the give-back, then we're making a very big mistake. But this is fixable. This whole thing is fixable.
Okay, so let's go back to this whole macro question. What are you doing about it? You're a very good observer, but you're also a custodian. You're a custodian of a family, a custodian of a business. Frankly, you are a custodian of a public persona that influences people. It's nice to talk—that's what politicians do. Some politicians do more than talk: they fight, they write. You read these people in the House of Representatives, they have great big Twitter followings, but they've never introduced legislation, barely show up to vote. But a man with a good megaphone and pretty good influence—what do you do personally?
I haven't announced this yet, but I'll announce it here on your show.
I signed a book contract. The book is going to be published in September. The title of the book is All the Wrong Moves: How We Got Ourselves into This Political Situation that we're talking about and how we led to the rise of populism. That's basically the general title of the book. I've spent six months on it. I actually think I sent you a manuscript of it. It's now finished and polished. It will be published right before the midterms.
I'm going to go out on a massive marketing campaign to talk about the book because I believe in the book are sociological observations of how we got here. I think it's very important when you're going in the wrong direction to understand how you got into the direction you're going to. The last part of the book, generally a third of it, is how to get out of the situation that we're in, and I'm offering solution-based ideas in the book. I'm going to go out and market that book. Depending on the reception of the book and how popular the book is—books are hard to sell, by the way—the ideas could potentially gravitate and become popular. If that becomes popular, then I have another leg to the stool, but I've got to get the first leg down.
Well, the problem with running for president: I don't have a party to run in. Let's say I wanted to run for president. My wife believes in castration and I like my body parts. Stephen, you know I had some problems in my marriage, which are very well-documented by the tabloids, and I always say to people, I'm running for re-election in my marriage; I want to keep my family sacrosanct. Having said that, even if I wanted to run for president, I have no party to run in. The left hates me because I was once a right-leaning Republican, and the right hates me because I left them. So I have no party to run in.
One of the things that I write about in the book: We have a very tight duopoly at the top. They have structurally made it impossible for an independent, even though the independents now have 40-plus percent of the registrants. It's nearly impossible to get an independent to the presidency. Even if I get—and by the way, they would malign me. I probably don't meet the height requirement to be president.
You can carry me on your shoulders. They would probably go after me. But the message in the book is very clear: If America wants to heal itself—we're now through that 80-year cycle, we're in our third 80-year cycle—if America wants to heal itself, it's doable. We're the type of nation that could actually do it. We could pull ourselves out of the current abyss that we're in.
Here's the other problem, and this is why it would be generally hard to get elected: It's a 20-year fix. It's not a two-minute fix, it's not a cable news fix, it's not a podcast fix. It's a 20-year fix. You need 20 years to reform the excesses in the government. You need 20 years to reform the K through 12, very uneven public education system. You need 20 years to fix the infrastructure. You're never paying off the debt—let's just tell everybody that that's not going to happen. But what you can do is you can grow the economy, and you can structure things like we were doing in the '90s to prevent the debt from getting out of control.
We had legislation that George Herbert Walker Bush passed in the early '90s, which effectively became called PAYGO. Dick Gephardt, who was the congressional leader for the left at that time, signed on to this legislation. Some of the Democrats lost their seats, but the legislation was: If you're going to increase social services, no problem, you have to raise taxes. If you're going to cut taxes, absolutely no problem, you've got to find things in the discretionary spend and lower them. It created these guard rails. After 9/11, George W. Bush pulled the guard rails, and we had an explosion in deficit spending which is continuing.
By the way, let's include Bush in this: George Washington to George W. Bush, $7 trillion. The next three presidents, and one of them did two terms or was in his second term, $31.5 trillion. I want you to think about that. 17 years from 2008—January 20th, 2009 to today—we've blown through $31 trillion. Of course there's going to be a problem. Of course there's going to be an inflation problem. There's going to be a narrative-breaking problem.
Well, listen, first of all, good luck. Wouldn't it be nice to see an adult conversation regardless of who wins, something that brings people to discuss blowing up narratives?
That may be reason enough to enter a race, right? Just so that you could get an adult—
I'm not going to be your campaign manager, but I'm going to throw some ideas for you. First of all, I've been writing about this a bit on LinkedIn. Number one is I think the middle or the moderate has to be as radical as the left and the right. The problem is—and I call it radical moderation in the writings—the people in the middle have other things to do. It sounds strange, but I don't have the time to be extremely political.
They're the people that the Founders actually wanted to be involved.
Correct. The middle, the citizen, has to be as radical, so I call it radical moderation.
The second thing I would tell you, if you're going to run a campaign, use the word marketing. I would say: Have the book, get a bus, start with the reddest of red counties and the bluest of blue counties, the people where it's 90% one way, 90% the other way. Put your face on the side of the bus and do a listening tour. I think what we need—and I've been writing something myself, I don't write books, but you're better at this—is almost like a citizens' convention. How do you get people to sign on to a 20-year plan? I doubt it'll be because some politician will tell them to sign on. But if it's their idea, and so you go on this tour, you say, "I want to hear what everybody has to say, and I'm not listening because you're red or blue; I'm listening because I'm a good listener."
And then we're going to have some sort of lottery to create a citizens' convention, and we're going to sit down, and I'll lead it, and I'm going to put down some of the issues. We say, "Listen, $40 trillion of debt. What are we going to do? How are we going to do it?" It's going to be guided, it's going to be mediated. But when you have citizens' orders, when the citizens have talked, when that third estate is coming and saying, "This is how we feel. We've been unempowered for so long. We've been dominated by White Houses, by Congresses, by strong politicians, by the media, by the lobbyists, by the corporations, freed by Citizens United to go in and pervert—"
And so that idea, if we could break that, and if you're the leader to do it, God bless, I will help.
I'm not arrogant enough to think that I am the leader, but you said something about me which I do think: I'm an observer, and I'm a prolific reader, and I'm a student of history. So I want to at least make an observation. If you read the book, it is a different turn on looking at the events. I bring up Citizens United, I bring up the gerrymandering, I bring up the Ross Perot election, which actually tightened the duopoly. And then once they got smug, they're like, "Okay, we don't have to deal with the people anymore"—
Because we have 95% incumbent re-election rates. Chuck Grassley, I think he's 700 years old, I guess. I don't know how old he is.
Okay, but he's going to live for another 100 years. He'll be the senator from Iowa because we don't have to worry about this anymore. We have 435 congressional districts, Stephen.
There's only 22 that are going to be potentially contested in 2026. All the other districts have been decided by the gerrymandering and the squeezing out of adversaries in the district. So we have to at least explain to the American people what has happened and why the politicians are so arrogant. The big, beautiful spending bill, which adds approximately $4.4 trillion of deficit spending over the next 10 years—if you're poor and you make $50,000 or less in the country, you lost $700 of benefits. If you're rich and you make $1 million or more, you got $7,000 of benefits from the BBB, okay? And the politicians don't care because the lobbyists told them to do it, the big businesses told them to do it. And you mentioned Citizens United. You know, most people don't know what it is, so let's tell them. Citizens United was a decision that was rendered by Justice Scalia in January of 2010, which gave the right to people that had money to put unlimited amounts of money into political contests or policy ideas through political action committees. He said it was their First Amendment right, but it has now become the Plessy v. Ferguson of democracy. It's a separate-but-equal democracy now. And you know what? Plessy came out—it took 80 years, Stephen, to have Brown v. Board of Education to repeal Plessy. And we're in our 16th or 17th year now of Citizens United. We need to reform it immediately. We need to stop this insanity to get the narrative back on the people. Otherwise, you're going to have more radical populists that are going to pervade the society and make things worse, not better.
Okay. So now we're going to get a little closer to, more deeply into why Open Position should be a show. All right. There's a lot of people out there who are politically minded, and you have a lot of interests that are not politics. You have businesses, and you have a podcast, and you have a family and a wife that you want to make sure that you nurture that relationship. What's the motivation? Why are you the right person to write this book and get on a bus?
Well, see, that's the thing. See, I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I am.
But why do you want to do it in the first place? Why try?
I want to do it because I am intellectually curious. I have an unconditional love affair with my country even despite all the warts of the country. You know, if you read Jill Lepore's book about America, These Truths, there's a lot of bad stuff that has happened in America. There's a lot of bad stuff that happened to Italian-Americans and Jewish Americans in America, okay? So, but I don't care. I have an unconditional love affair with the country. I am a product of the country. Like what Roosevelt said, I'm the beneficiary of a great public school system, good infrastructure, predictable laws. I've had my fits and starts as an entrepreneur, but I've generally been very successful. I would class myself as financially independent. And so, and I have a love of life and a love of country, and I want to at least write down this observation. And if people like it and they say, "Okay, well, then what should we do?" then I want to be part of it.
