In this episode of The Future Of, Randy Quarles, Executive Chairman at The Cynosure Group, and until 2021 the Vice Chairman for Supervision, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, that also worked directly with 2 of the presidents of the United states; joins host Jeff Dance to discuss the future of Money.

 

Randy Quarles : I think somewhat paradoxically about the future of money, I think the expectation that physical money will disappear is overblown. A lot of it depends on the particular culture in which digitization is happening.

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Jeff  Dance: Welcome to the Future of, a podcast by Fresh Consulting, where we discuss and learn about the future of different industries, markets, and technology verticals. Together, we’ll chat with leaders and experts in the field and discuss how we can shape the future human experience. I’m your host, Jeff Dance.

In this episode of The Future Of, we’re joined by former governor and vice chair of the Federal Reserve System System, Randy Quarles. He’s here with us today to explore the future of money.

Randy : Thanks for being here with us. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Jeff : For those of you who don’t know Randy, just to give you some high-level details, he was vice chair of the Federal Reserve System System. He worked directly with two of the presidents of the United States. He earned a JD of law from the Yale Law School in 1984. I noted the summa cum laude, which is awesome. I know that was a long time ago, but clearly a very smart person that’s worked his way all the way up to leading, helping found many private equity companies, and being in the highest ranks of our government, implementing and advising on policy that affects our world. So we’re truly excited to have you. I was just wondering, as we think about your background, can you share any other kind of details that help us understand how you came to be in such prominent positions and how that affected the perspectives that you’ll have on the future of money?

Randy : Thanks. Well, I grew up in a small town in northern Utah in the 60s and 70s, but decided to go to college in New York City. It’s really the first time anybody in our town has anybody… I don’t know if you ever remember doing that. And after college, as you said, I went to law school at Yale. And so I started my career at a New York law firm, having kind of shifted the center of gravity to the east called Davis Polk. And that was one of the, if not the leading financial law firms that focuses on financial services in the U.S., one of the top three of the legal profession in New York over a century. And that dictated the focus of my career, given where it was that I was practicing law.  And in the year that traditionally you’d become a partner at least in those days, this was in the late 80s, I left temporarily to join the U.S. Treasury’s response to the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. That was a section of the financial system, a category of institutions that basically had become insolvent as a category. And the Treasury spearheaded the creation of a governmental response to address that issue. And they asked me to join the team. I was viewed as a very startling thing to do at that time, just as the partnership decision was made. And I was about to be made. I came back as a partner at my firm in 93. But, you know, I had that connection to public service, connection to a lot of people in Washington now and not just in New York.

So then in 2001, I was a partner during the 90s, co-head of our financial institutions practice. But I left again to join the International Monetary Fund and then the Treasury and sort of more senior Senate-confirmed positions. And after leaving the Treasury, I left the law entirely and became a partner at the Carlyle Group, a big private equity firm, part of the group. I started the first financial services fund at the firm. And then, you know, in 2013, I left Carlyle to start my own firm, Cynosure, which is headquartered back in Utah, where I began. But one of the lessons I’ve always drawn from that experience is that, particularly if you’re involved in things like law at the big law firms or the big private equity or investment banks, those sorts of careers, yanking yourself off that track is very easy to sort of get very much in the pursuit of the brass ring. And yanking yourself off that track is very easy to sort of get very much in the pursuit of the brass ring and yanking yourself off that track. Even at particularly critical times can be important in broadening your career. If I hadn’t done that, I would still be a partner at a law firm in New York.

Jeff : Makes sense. And thank you for sharing that additional color on your background. You’re talking to world leaders around the world, as you talk about policy, you’ve had probably still in a lot of deep conversations with people that are advising our current president. And I’ve seen you in interviews, in public speaking venues. I think your influence is still at large and people are seeking your wisdom. And so there’s a lot of serious conversations that are happening. What’s a person like you do for fun?

Randy : I’m a pilot. I like to fly planes. I’m a skier. Growing up in Utah, that’s almost mandatory. So I love to ski and fly. I’m a voracious reader, history, economics, biographies.

Jeff : Awesome. Thanks for sharing that. Well, let’s start with some basics. And then I want to talk about a few questions about the current state of money today. And let’s lead into the future of money. Just briefly, for those that aren’t economic majors, what is money? Obviously, we see cash, we see digital currency, cryptocurrency, but what is the definition of money for you?

Randy : Well, there’s a standard definition of money. That’s actually a pretty good definition, even though it’s a standard. If you ask the IMF or the central banks of the world, including the Fed, academics, money is a unit of account and a store of value and a medium of exchange. And so what do each of those mean? A unit of account means that money is something that can be used to measure the value of other things and to make those other things comparable. So the dollar is our unit of account. Then if this chair is worth $200 and this rug is worth $100, I know that one chair is worth two rugs. And the store of value point, if something is money, I can hold it for a while, for a long time, and it will be worth the same amount. So a rug could be eaten up by moths or damaged or burnt in a fire. You know, the old phrase where moth and rust corrupt and thieves break in and steal, and then I wouldn’t have a rug. But if I have $100 in money, ideally, I have something that’s worth a rug either today or next year or next decade. And ideally, it’s something that’s worth a thousand dollars. So I’m thinking that would be straightforward to protect from theft. And finally, the medium of exchange, you know, if I want to buy a rug, I can take money and exchange it for a rug or for many, many other things. And I can count on that being taken at an accepted value. So those three factors, money should be at least one of those things. And ideally, it’s all three of them.

Jeff : Thank you for the basics there. You know, you’ve been at the side of regulating money for a while and thinking about those forces at play. Generally, how is money regulated?

Randy : Well, so there’s some regulation that’s directly aimed at money itself, like what money, what physical money issued by the government has to look like, coins and bills, et cetera, or rules about how money is transferred through the payment system. Really, in a larger sense, most financial and especially banking regulation is ultimately regulation of money. It’s designed to either protect or enhance one of those three definitional elements, unit of accounts, store of value, medium of exchange. So banks, for example, are required to maintain a certain amount of capital and a certain amount of high quality liquid assets. And that regulation, even though it’s about banks, it’s really designed to ensure that the bank accounts that represent most of the money in our system are a good store of value. The bank won’t go bust. The money will be there when you go to get it. And most financial regulation, and again, particularly banking regulation, even when it seems to be, you know, something that is quite different from money. Money itself is ultimately designed to ensure that those bank accounts, which are money, continue to satisfy those three definitions.

Jeff : Thank you. So we talked about what money is, high level, how it’s regulated, and you’ve been vice chair of the Fed. You also recently wrote an essay about the future of the Fed. Help us high level understand what the Fed does and why its future is also evolving.

Randy : Yeah. So that’s, the Fed is a very unusual beast in our governmental system. It is, the bulk of the Fed system isn’t really even part of the government. You know, the Fed is the U.S. Central bank, the Federal Reserve System is the U.S. Central bank, and it’s really 12 central banks that are scattered around the country that have policy that’s coordinated by a board in Washington that is a governmental body. That board and the members of that board are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. But the broader Federal Reserve System banks are private organizations that are owned by the banks in their district. You know, and the Fed has a lot of roles. Its original fundamental role was so that if banks came under pressure in a particular area, particularly if they were subject to a bank run, There would be a central pool of liquidity so that a bank that was fundamentally a sound institution, but people had kind of got hysterical and were trying to take all their money out of it at the same time, would be able to provide liquidity to keep that institution above water until the hysteria died down. And that’s the fundamental reason for the creation of the Fed. And it still has that role. Over time, it has developed or been given a broad variety of roles for regulation of the financial system, for the execution of monetary policy, essentially governing the cost of money or certainly the cost of money for short-term borrowings, trying to keep the economy on an even keel. And in The Depression, it was given some emergency powers that have rarely or never been used, but were pulled out. During the COVID-19 event and exercised that are quite dramatic. The Fed can create any amount of money and lend it to anybody for anything if the government declares that there’s an emergency. And that’s a potentially, you know, extremely broad power.

Jeff : And that’s been part of the evolution, essentially, that we’ve witnessed just recently. Exactly.

Randy : The Fed didn’t originally have those powers. They were given to the Fed during, you know, at the very outset of the Great Depression, but they were almost never used. They really weren’t used very much during The Depression. And then they were shelled. Then during the Great Financial Crisis in 2008, some of them were pulled off the shelf. And then during COVID-19, we pulled more of them off the shelf. And I think there was a good reason to do that. But, you know, the Fed had always said, for example, we can’t really lend to municipalities. That’s up to, you know, the local municipalities and their taxing authorities and democratic decisions. And if the federal government is going to do that, then Congress needs to determine the terms on which that will be done. But we did do that during COVID-19. We created a facility that provided loans to municipalities, having said for many, many years that it wasn’t really within our power.And so, you know, that has caused it’s not been dramatically public, but there has been in the world of central banking thought and in the political world, some consideration about should the Fed have those powers? If it does have those powers, how should they be further used and regulated?

Jeff : So as we think about it, there’s a lot of things that we need to be thinking about. So as we think about uncertainty, you know, the Fed has become more and more powerful. The economy at large sometimes seems like it’s on its shoulders and the market’s reacting to its every move in dramatic ways, not just the U.S. Economy, but the world economy, right, is paying attention and moving based on these decisions that the Fed makes. As we think about its continued role, why does the future feel uncertain for the Fed?

Randy: Well, in my view, there are a few things. One, I do think that the Fed is occupying too big a role. In the economy and financial system generally. And part of that is a role that has been ceded to it. It’s just, you know, people are looking to it almost as a signaling device as much as a central bank. Got it. But more fundamentally, the uncertainty that concerns me has to do with these emergency powers that the Fed has, because they could be a way of circumventing the appropriations role of the Congress and the, you know, the basic financing role of the Congress. It’s a little bit on the board of governors. You know, sometimes we call ourselves the Supreme Court of Finance. And it’s a little bit like the Supreme Court, you know, for most of its existence was not a particularly dramatic part of the government. And then in the 60s, it revealed that it had the ability to make certain legal decisions that had enormous social consequences and were decisions that you couldn’t get out of the democratic process out of the Congress, essentially. And that made it a big political prize. And so presidents used to send up nominations for justice on the Supreme Court and they’d get approved by Congress in the afternoon. Now, approving a justice to the Supreme Court is a weeks long national drama. And that, again, in the COVID-19 event, as the Fed revealed, we can do all these things. It’s up the ante for political control of the Fed as a way of saying if we can get political control of it, then maybe we can make it do some things that it had always said that it couldn’t do and that we didn’t realize were within its remit. And so the same thing has happened. My replacement, the first person that they tried for my replacement couldn’t even ultimately get nominated. Then the person who was ultimately nominated, their nomination, a lot of drama and was shot down. The person who was finally confirmed to replace me was confirmed, but with a very narrow margin. So I worry a bit about that. That that’s an indication of exactly this battle for control of the institution to get it to do some things that probably should not be doing, but that it does have the power to do.

Jeff : Thanks for sharing the inter complexity there and how things have been getting more politicized that parallel the Supreme Court. It makes sense. In the last five years, there’s been a lot of talk about cryptocurrency. In the last couple of years, a lot of money was made, money lost. What’s significant about these currencies and how they? Impact the market and the role of the Fed in regulating these as well.

Randy : Well. You know, I think it varies depending on the type of cryptocurrency that we’re talking about. I think there are cryptocurrency, crypto assets, essentially, it’s a type of money. Some of them, it’s questionable whether it’s money. If you go back to the three elements of the definition we talked about at the very outset, but that generally makes some use of blockchain or distributed ledger technology. And there are three main types. You know, most people listening to this will know what you might call Crypto Era, Bitcoin, Ethereum, etcetera. Stablecoins, which is a different type of digital currency and central bank digital currency or CBDCs for people who live in this world. And each of them, I think, has slightly different issues and slightly different prospects, slightly different implications for money in the future of finance. The first type, Crypto Era, Bitcoin, Ethereum, they try to create value not through reference to some traditional asset, but through other means. Usually there’s some intrinsic mechanism to ensure scarcity so that there’s value in scarcity. It’s what allows gold to be used as money because it’s scarce and it’s hard to create more of it.

So Bitcoin’s mining process is a way of artificially ensuring scarcity or intrinsically ensuring scarcity. Or there’s some characteristic of the coin that can’t be matched by the traditional payment system, such as anonymity, inviolable anonymity. That’s one category of assets. But those features that make it what it is also ensure that its value is going to be highly volatile. So Bitcoin, Ethereum, et cetera, they’re very, very volatile. And so, you know, value has varied enormously. So that makes it hard to be a store of value because you could buy some Bitcoin today and it might be worth twice that in a year. It might be worth half that in a year. Makes it hard to be a unit of account to say, well, how much Bitcoin is this chair worth? Right. I don’t know because it varies a lot. So I think at the end of the day, those will be interesting speculative assets. I think the regulation of them is relatively straightforward and simple and ultimately not that important. Because they won’t really replace big parts of the financial system. Stable coins are digital currency that does create value by reference to a traditional asset. Say you’ve got a pool of securities that are denominated in traditional fiat currencies. And that, because it is related, it’s anchored in the value of a relatively stable pool of assets. It’s not going to gyrate in value as much as Crypto Era. And that allows it to be a relatively decent unit of account and store of value, the reasonably good mechanism of the exchange. So I think stable coins can be quite important going forward. And then there are also central bank digital currencies. And the difference between stable coins and central bank digital currencies is that, as is implied by the name of the third one, that’s a digital currency, again, using some sort of distributed ledger technology, usually that is issued by a central bank, whereas a stable coin is issued by a private issuer, usually.

Jeff : Thanks for the definitions. I think that really, really helps. And there’s a lot happening in the news. We’ve seen the U.S. Justice Department, you know, go after Binance recently for $4 billion. We saw the Sam Bankman-Fried issues there with the FTX founder. And there’s just a lot of noise happening in this space and sort of hard to kind of piece it all together. But it sounds like, you know, the elements of these digital currencies and sort of cryptocurrencies do have a role in the future. It’s just that some of the original are a lot more speculative and there’s a lot of speculation that’s happening in this space. But as we think about, you know, the components that tie more closely to money, you see a strong importance of those continuing.

Randy : I do. Yeah, I do. Particularly stablecoins, CBDCs. I hope we don’t have one in the United States. I don’t think we need one and I don’t think we will have one. But there will be CBDCs around the world. Ultimately, I don’t think they become that important. But the principal problem with our current system of money is with the biggest practical problem, I guess I’d say. If you want to leave aside philosophical issues, international transfers of cash. They can take a long time. They’re needlessly complicated. They’re very expensive. And the stablecoin technology allows those international transfers to be done today with technology that exists today much more cheaply, much more quickly. And, you know, that efficiency, which also carries over into the domestic system as well, although it’s less significant because most countries’ domestic systems work pretty well, it means that there’s going to be a role for that asset for stablecoins. And I think an important and valuable role. There are regulatory concerns or issues that the government is rightly focused on that are the same sorts of issues that lead to the financial regulation of banks. They’re designed to ensure that if something’s going to be money, that you try to ensure that it does keep its value, that it’s a store of value principally. And that it can be used as an effective medium of exchange. And so some regulation of the types of assets that a stablecoin can have and the relationship between the holder of the coin and a claim on those assets. These are all issues that I think a government has a fair interest in, but they’re pretty straightforward and can pretty straightforwardly be addressed in the U.S. And around the world. We’ve been slow in addressing them, I think unnecessarily so, and we should just get around to doing it.

Jeff : What other problems do you see, you know, as we think about the future and talk about more about the future shortly, but what other problems do you think we need to solve for today? So speed is one of them. Any other thoughts about the kind of key problems you’re seeing?

Randy : Yeah, speed and cost when it comes to payments. I think, again, I think in this system, particularly of new types of money in the digital currency system, I think the government should be rightly concerned about ensuring that if something is going to be used as a payments mechanism, that it does retain its value, that if something’s going to be a stable coin, that it should have a stable value. So that’s not just speed and cost, but also the structure of the instrument itself. And there’s been… There’s been, I think, too much suspicion of stable coins in particular, digital currency in general, in the government, particularly after things like the failure of FTX and some of the other Wild West issues that are out there. We can address that by simply creating a clear framework of regulation. The issues are clear. Create that regulation, require folks to follow it, and then allow innovation to proceed. And we should, again, we should get on top of that as opposed to… Sort of creating obstacles to the development of these technologies.

Jeff : They say clear is kind and that creativity can still thrive within constraints and often does. But as we think about regulation and some of the technology innovation that we’ve seen over the last five to 10 years really accelerate happening on the Wild West and where a lot of value is created and lost, how do you think about balancing the macroeconomic policy and regulation that’s needed with the technology innovation that is also trying to solve problems faster? So how do you think about balancing those two?

Randy: Yeah. I think you hit it on the head in framing the question or in the preamble to the question, which is that clear is kind. It’s always an issue. The regulators are sometimes concerned that it’s hard for the official sector to stay even with, let alone ahead of innovative developments in the private sector. I don’t think that you have to. I think that we can be very clear about what our interests and concerns are. Again, we’ve talked about some of them. Again, we’re designed to ensure that things that are treated as money maintain the characteristics that are part of the definition of money and that it’s not rocket science to develop them. There are legislative proposals that have bipartisan support in the Congress right now that do a pretty good job of addressing this. They just need to be enacted. And then once you enact them, the system will adjust itself to allow innovation within that framework. You decide these are our concerns. These are our legitimate concerns. Here’s how they need to be addressed. But within that framework, create new value. And I think that we would see it happen. 

Jeff : Nice. As we look ahead to the next 10 to 20 years, what are some predictions of how things might evolve? There’s things at the U.S. Level, but really the U.S. Monetary policy has been something that’s affected the global economics. So if we could peer into the future a little bit, what are some trends that you see continuing or some things evolving? I know that’s a loaded question, but that’s what we’re here to talk about.

Randy : Well, I’d say a few things. On some deep level, maybe they’re all related, but they aren’t at the surface level related. But I think there’ll be features of the world of money going forward. I think that the very low interest rates that we have seen obtain throughout the advanced financial economies over the last 15 years, certainly the last decade, I don’t think that interest rates go back down to that level. I think the cost of money, if you will, will be more like what it has been over most of my lifetime. And that’s you can have a very… Very dynamic and fruitful economy, even if the cost of money is quite a bit higher than it has been for the last 10 or 15 years. But there will be some transition costs associated with that because lots of people have taken on debt that they can afford because of how cheap it was. And refinancing that will be an issue. I think somewhat paradoxically about the future of money, I think the expectation that physical money will disappear is overblown. A lot of it depends on the… The fact that people are not going to be able to afford it. In which digitization is happening. So the Scandinavian countries seem to be quite comfortable getting rid of physical money. That will not go over well in Germany or Switzerland. They still use an enormous amount of physical money there. They’re somewhat skeptical of credit cards. And interestingly, the demand for physical U.S. Dollars, even though I don’t usually have a lot of them in my pocket, has been steadily rising since I was an of the Treasury in the early 2000s. And long before that, I was a Secretary of the Treasury. And long before that, I was a Secretary of the Treasury. It just rises every year. People want more dollars, physical dollars. Most of those are held outside the United States because other people are concerned about their own country’s currencies. They don’t have the stability of the U.S. Currency.

Jeff : Argentina.

Randy: Argentina is an example. A lot of it is also just small value transactions. If you go on vacation down in Cabo and you buy some souvenirs, you probably are buying those with dollars rather than with pesos. Right. Because it’s just, you know, again, for small dollar transactions. So, again, somewhat counterintuitive given all the digitization we see coming around us. I think that the demand for physical cash will remain globally for much longer than people expect.

Jeff : So physical cash will remain, cost of money will go down, but not as much as people think. These are the kinds of trends that you envision continuing in the future. Other thoughts, especially as it relates to technology, do you have any other thoughts on how things will trend? And I heard that, you know, it might be different from economy to economy, kind of country to country, given that, you know, some countries have certain things they like or certain things they don’t like. And culture matters, right, as it relates to how they transact and run.

Randy : I think the way that the consumer interaction with the financial system will evolve. And there I’m talking principally about the evolution of fintechs or financial technology firms. There will be a lot of useful technological development that will make the financial system more efficient. Right. I think that most of that will happen, however, without replacing the fundamental bank infrastructure of the United States. On the wholesale side, technology that makes the wholesale system more efficient, the banks will just absorb that. On the customer-facing side, you can have some very large and valuable firms develop for the customer to interact with. They’ll have banks kind of behind them as opposed to becoming banks themselves because of the heavy layer of regulation that there is over that. And banks will be happy to have that kind of symbiotic relationship, each filling its own role.

Jeff : Thank you. As you think about some of these centralized currencies and then decentralized currencies, how do you see that changing the way we transact internationally? Do you see that evolving? And do you see power shifting as a result of that?

Randy : You know, not in my lifetime. That’s shorter than it used to be. But not in your lifetime. I think part of your question, what you’re suggesting is, do technological developments ultimately affect the dominance of the dollar in the financial system around the world? Yeah. And, you know, when you say, well, will the dollar remain the world’s reserve currency given all of the issues that there are around the U.S. Economy and the issues around the dollar? Yes. So what would replace it? Yes, the dollar could be a better world reserve currency. But are we going to replace the dollar with renminbi? Not soon. Are we going to replace the dollar with the euro? Not soon. And so over time, the role of the dollar has gradually eroded over the course of the last 50 years, even though it is still the dominant currency. And you would expect that as other economies grow, you know, that there will be more diversification at the margin away from the dollar, but that the dollar’s central dominant role won’t change because there’s nothing to replace it.

Jeff : Thanks. It’s interesting, you know, just thinking about Argentina as an example and how other countries might also adopt our currency and how they already are like half adopted. Right. And how that evolves as well, whereas some countries, like we mentioned, may be a lot more advanced than others, you know, are just coming back to core stability and that adds value to the dollar as well.

Randy : Yeah, absolutely. The Fed doesn’t really like when other countries dollarize their economies, particularly a country as large as Argentina, just because it then puts a lot of international pressure on the Fed as it conducts monetary policy. And it will always conduct monetary policy focused on the U.S. Situation. And the U.S. Situation won’t always jive with the Argentine situation. And so you could end up with a policy that’s necessary for what’s happening in the United States that’s causing problems in Argentina. And then you’ve got the Argentines complaining to you about it. And so the Fed, in its perfect world, would limit dollarization around the world. But for many countries that have these long standing issues with maintaining the value of their currency and discipline around the value of their currency, dollarization is a very sensible step.

Jeff : I think there’s a reason why everyone’s paying attention to the Federal Reserve System and the movements in it. And I think that’s a reflection of being the world’s currency still, right? Yeah. Thanks for these perspectives. Any other thoughts on the future as we think about how things are evolving and how things need to be evolved that you want to share?

Randy : Yes, I do think that the, I guess this is related to the dominance of the dollar. I think that concerns about the various Chinese steps that, you know, China developing its own central bank digital currency, China developing an alternative payment system, a whole alternative financial system, possibly China and Russia together. I think those, again, are very overblown for what will actually happen. Not to say that there won’t be developments there. There will. But the core value of the system that we have and anchored in the value. The dollar ultimately can’t be replaced by these, again, much more speculative currencies, much more difficult to deal in. And that’s not going to change for decades.

Jeff : Any other thoughts on AI? Do you see AI playing a role? I mean, there’s been so many advancements and so much conversation there. Do you see that shaping the future of money?

Randy : I think that developments in supportive artificial intelligence could be quite useful in thinking about any complex system. And the Fed thinking about monetary policy is clearly one of the most complex systems that are out there. And I think having that as a guide will be useful. Again, I think it will be a long time before it can be anything other than a reference or a guide, but it could be a useful one. I sort of think back to, I’m a big fan of the Tesla automobile. I have one. I like the autopilot feature. But when I bought my first Tesla seven years ago, I think I paid extra for the feature that would allow you to just get in it and it would drive you from your garage to the office. And that was supposed to happen in a year and a half. And that’s what I think. That’s not, it hasn’t happened. And it’s obviously not going to happen anytime soon. And I think that we’re going to see the same thing with, but I find it very useful. I have it on when I’m on the freeway. It’s a useful support and I think we’ll see the same thing with AI over the course of the next 10 and even 20 years that it can develop to be quite a useful support, but it’s not replacing a lot of the current system.

Jeff : Makes sense. Three small questions just to wrap up. And thanks for all the insight so far. A good book that you’d recommend for someone that wants to go deeper on this topic of the future of money. Anything come to mind?

Randy : So there are some good books about how the system of money works. Two of them happen to have the same title, Rules of the Game, although they have different authors, Ken Dam. So I recommend those. But for the sort of future of the financial system, understanding what’s happening in the financial system right now, I would highly recommend reading the regular columns of Matt Levine at Bloomberg, who has a tremendous grasp of what’s happening and what developments there are in the financial system generally.

Jeff : Great. That was my second question. Is there something you follow to kind of stay up to date on the news? So thanks for answering that. Last question is, how much cash do you routinely carry in your pocket?

Randy : I usually carry about $30 dollars in $5 dollar bills to use for tips.

Jeff : Okay. Love it. Well, thanks for your wisdom, for your insights about the future, for helping us understand the basics, but also projecting forward. Really enjoyed having you on the show, learning from you. And I know our listeners will as well. Thank you for being with us.

Randy: It was a pleasure. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

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