2:05:30 that and understood or fully grasped the extent to which you didn't want to be shown investment opportunity like that one. And in any case, this is a deal that we would have never booked or invested in on a discretionary basis in the context of the mandate that you had given us. So there are clients that appreciate to be shown opportunities or shown investment ideas, and there are clients that are not because they're not consistent with it. But in 25 years, nothing like that had ever happened before. Right. That was a long clip. So anyway, it was a long clip. But there's a funny thing. They start off with their sales force sales. They're talking about the sales guy, sales guys. And then they change it. They changed the term to investment professionals. Yes. Who is progressing his career. Profession investment professional. Anyway, the guy was.
2:06:20 The whole thing is an hour and it is just one of those meetings that you're just a fly on the wall and you just shake your head the whole time. It's just like these guys are trying to sell, sell, sell and he's not even remotely interested in anything they have to sell so he dumped them. Well this leads me nicely into the next segment which revolves around the presidential hopeful Congressman Ron Paul. who now that New Gingrich is officially out is the contender against Mitt Romney. And he's been doing some very interesting appearances of late, which I like very much. I think it's an interesting strategy. First it was CNBC, he was on The Morning Show as a guest host, and then he appeared on Bloomberg Television, which again has a rating of asterisk.
2:07:13 However, a lot of people do watch Bloomberg Television who are in the financial industry and who have access to cash and could possibly support him. I kind of like this is surely a Doug Weed strategy. Did you see this where it was Paul versus Paul? Did you see this particular item? No, I did not. Ron Paul versus Paul Krugman. Now, Paul Krugman is, I believe, a Nobel Prize winning economist who writes for the New York Times, correct? Yeah. And I think the guy always comes across as a dick. Yeah, he does. And so there was this Ted Attack. He didn't win a Nobel, he won a Pulitzer doing this.
2:07:53 Krugman? I thought he... I'm pretty sure... Wait, is it Paul Krugman? Let me look him up. We have to be accurate. We do it in real time everybody. We consult the book of knowledge. Oh, there he is. Yeah, I thought he was a Nobel prize-winning economist if I'm not mistaken. Yep, yep. Informally the... Oh, he won the... The Sveriges Riksbag prize in economic science is informally the Nobel Prize. Okay, so his credentials are even kind of lame-o. But he always comes across as a dick. I can't help it. He writes stuff, you know, I don't know. He looks like a douchebag. Yeah, he does. So, the douchebag beard.
2:08:38 So he's actually in studio which always gives an upper hand for so yeah, you're in the studio You got the upper hand, but this is a very interesting exchange I've cut it down into two pieces and I will and I'm gonna play this first piece and then I'm gonna ask you some questions about it because you of course have studied the Austrian economics which is Ron Paul subscribes to and then we will play clip 2 as It turns into a war on history. Well, there's certain things, you know, I You can't leave the government out of monetary policy. If you try to think, you know, we're just going to let it set itself, it doesn't happen. The government is actually always, the Federal Reserve, the Central Bank, is always going to be in the business of managing monetary policy. If you think that you can avoid that, you're living in the world as it was 150 years ago, right?
2:09:25 We have an economy in which money is not just green pieces of paper with faces of dead presidents on them. Money is the result of the financial system. It includes a variety of assets. We're not even quite sure where the line between money and non-money is. It's kind of a continuum. And look, history tells us that in fact a completely unmanaged economy is subject to extreme volatility, subject to extreme downturns. I know there's this legend that people like probably you, Congressman, have that the Great Depression was somehow caused by the government, caused by the Federal Reserve, but it's not true. The reality is that was a market economy run amok, which happens, happened repeatedly over the past
2:10:05 couple of centuries. You do need, you know, I'm actually, I'm a believer in the market economy. I'm a believer in capitalism. I want the market economy to be left as free as it can be, but there are limits. You do need the government to step in to stabilize. Depressions are a bad thing for capitalism and it's the role of the government to make sure that they don't happen or if they do happen that they don't last too long. So here, uh, Paul Krugman, the fake Nobel prize winner. Well, we, we have to remember right off the bat, he brings in a piece of questionable information that ruins the premise of whatever he's gonna say from then on. He says the Great Depression happened during the reign of the Federal Reserve, which is supposed to control things to the point where you don't have a Great Depression. So his logic is already askew.