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Paul, I want to turn to the, uh, White House crypto summit that we are going to see here tomorrow. And I bring that up because you just published a Substack earlier this morning kind of talking about President Trump's plan here for the strategic crypto reserve. And I think it's fair to say at the minimum that you're a bit skeptical just in terms of what this looks like, how this will be funded, the point of it. Why are you so skeptical of this effort?

Okay. I've been in many, many crypto meetings. Sometimes, uh, people, you know, trying to understand what it's for, sometimes going to crypto conferences where I'm the designated enemy. Um, and, uh, you know, crypto is not a new technology. Bitcoin was introduced in 2009. And we still have no major legal use cases for it. There's essentially no legitimate transaction that you can carry out using crypto. Um, to the extent that crypto is in widespread use, it's almost entirely for criminal activities, money laundering, extortion payments. Uh, why are we doing this? What what? I mean, you could say, well, look at the price. And it's true that people have bought crypto and driven the prices way up. But you ask, well, what why are we investing in something where it's still not at all clear what the point is. And what does it even mean to have a crypto reserve? It's not like a reserve of oil that you can use if, you know, there's a cutoff oil of oil, and we can extract some strategic petroleum reserve oil to fuel the economy. Um, crypto is just ones and zeros on a computer. And it's not really clear what what you do with it. You know, uh, apparently North Korea has been pulling off some big crypto heists. So I guess we can use it to make, to bribe, uh, Kim Jong-un. I you know, it this is the most oddest thing. We're establishing a reserve of something that sort of doesn't really exist and doesn't have any clear uses. And yet, we're going to spend, if Trump can get the authorization, which is not clear, but we're going to spend tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money on acquiring, uh, something that is kind of virtual. It doesn't really even really exist.

All right, Paul. Wish we had more time. Sure there'll be a lot of pushback from those within the industry. Obviously, look forward to continuing this conversation in the future. Paul Krugman, thanks so much.

Thanks a lot.