Danny Jones Podcast - #52 - The Untold Truth: How the 2008 Financial Crisis Happened | Patrick Lovell

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

The Con is an in-depth investigation into the 2008 financial crisis nine years in the making,  Who did it, why it happened and how our country went from “of, for and by the people,” to “of, for and by the corporation.”  And what’s past is prologue: The heist of our democracy that includes fraudulent practices, massive credit card debt, student loans, auto loans, and the revolving door between finance and government, is still going on, and will become even worse than before.  https://www.thecon.tv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Awesome. Thanks for doing this podcast, Patrick. Thank you, Daniel. It's a pleasure to be here, man. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So for everyone out there who may not be familiar, just can you give me a brief set up to who you are and what you do? Sure, man. Well, I've been a, my name's Patrick Lovell and I have been a television producer, film producer, producer of media for a long time over a couple of decades. I started off in L.A., working in Hollywood, and then I ended up doing television projects. I became an action sports producer, to be honest with you, and then I did a bunch of entertainment stuff. And then I became a television producer on a nationally syndicated television show, giving away houses all over the country. And that was in 2006 and 7, and that was my entry to why we're talking.

So what were you doing as a sports producer? Oh, I've done everything from football to, professional sports to you know extreme skiing, snowboarding, mountain climbing, mountain biking, all that sort of stuff, Red Bull type stuff. Your documentary, have you,

you haven't released this documentary series yet that's called the Khan. Right. It's, how did you get interested? What lit the flame for you? And started your interest in the 2008 financial crisis

and basically what inspired you to make this thing? I got buried. So I was living the one-on-one version of the American dream. Like I said, I've been a producer for some time, and I was relatively successful. And I was literally giving away houses as a senior producer on a show that we had about 40 people working for us. And traveling all over the country, telling really good stories, it was kind of like a home makeover show. It wasn't my cup of tea. Like, I've been writing scripts and

wanting to produce big Hollywood action blockbusters forever. So, you know, I can take it or leave it. But it was a really cool experience because I got to connect with a lot of great people around the country. And oddly enough, I was always scratching my head because it wasn't like a normal home makeover show. I mean, what it was was a front for mortgage lending. The people that were the executive producers of the show back then, and we're talking circa 2006, 7,8, they were a huge commercial real estate developer and residential developer out of Seattle. They had projects all over the United States. These guys were flying around in G5s one day all over the world. You know, so much money had made your headspan.

And then all of a sudden, in September, I wouldn't say September, it was more like July of 2007, when our show was really off and running, these guys go bankrupt overnight. On the show, we were like, what the hell was that? That doesn't make any sense. And so I go from, you know, being in my first house, I've got a young family at the time.

I'm married. My son is, you know, very young at the time. And I got a, out of my first house. I was making good money. You know, I basically at the time, and I'm quite a bit older than you, but at that time, you could go to the bars, man, and you'd meet up and hang out with people that were freaking flipping houses like crazy. Everybody had money. Everybody was blowing cake, like it was like no tomorrow, right? And so everybody's living high on the hog. And then the next

thing you know, suddenly the wheels fall off. And I'm like, what the heck just happened? Now, I'm a producer. I'm a business guy. I know contract law. I know how things are done. I'm not a chum. But yet, suddenly I'm in this situation where it's like nothing makes sense. Honestly, the media didn't make sense. The stuff that was happening in government at the time didn't make sense. We had just transitioned from Bush to Obama. He rides this personal mandate wave from the people to create a new beginning because the wheels just fell off the economy. And the stuff that was coming out of the White House at the time and the stuff that I was dealing with in the aftermath of the 2008 collapse didn't speak to my experience. And so as a producer and somebody who's been, you know,

I've been into watching great detective films my whole life. I mean, I guess I was a product of the Oliver Stone generation, Martin Scorsese, that sort of thing. And so, you know, nothing would really surprises coming out of that era, right? I mean, we grew up with like Pablo freaking Escobar and Columbia and conjugate and you name it. So we knew crazy stuff was happening or could happen, but yet I think we thought at the time that particularly, well, growing up in that time period, but the long arm of the law would always catch up with wrongdoing. I mean, that was just kind of the idea of America, right? We knew there's criminals and we knew that there would be consequences. Well, coming from that sort of background, it would never occur to me in the great financial crisis what actually happened.

And so ultimately, the reason I tee it up that way is because when shit hit the fan in my life collapsed and I was basically spit out of a cannon into a desert with my family on my back and nowhere to turn, because you could not make money at that time. Money just evaporated. Right. And so I start going through this foreclosure crisis and I'm like, all right, nothing makes sense. got to figure out what's going on. And long story short, I got lucky enough to put a project together with some very, very important people and people that have become my family. And that put in motion basically what became a nine-year journey to discover the biggest

gargantuan mammoth conspiracy lie of all time, then we're right in the middle of it. So at that time, were you a victim of this predatory lending that was going on? Oh, for sure. But I wouldn't at that time ever admit. I didn't know what predatory lending was. So I know you've got some fluency, right? I think you talked to a guy who was a mortgage broker and a lender. Yeah.

And he went to prison, I believe, if I read the thumbnail correctly, for quite a bit of time, or at least he was sentenced to quite a bit of time. So you probably have a pretty good understanding of what was happening on the lending side. All of the different products. He was a mortgage lender and he eventually got sentenced to 26 years and ended up only doing 12. Okay. But he he learned from that. Well, basically what he did was he did a lot of what was talked about in the documentary. Like he was falsifying bank statements, um, people's income. And he did that. He started working by working at the bank learning, you know, from his coworkers that, hey,

you want to close this loan. You want a couple grand. This is how this is how you do it. So then. For the fees. Exactly. Yep. And then so he eventually branched out. He saw the opportunity in it. And so he started doing it himself with houses. There you go.

So he started basically creating fake people and getting mortgages with fake identities. Yes. We're very unfortunately aware of that. So, so yeah, that's the extent that I'm aware. Okay. So you saw. I believe our pilot episode, correct? Yes.

Okay. So were you surprised by some of the things that you saw unfold in that? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of stuff I wasn't aware of. Like, I wasn't aware of the fact that there was these lenders walking around neighborhoods, knocking on doors, trying to basically sell them these fake mortgages or basically convince them to refinance their house for triple what it was worth. and I didn't know they were doing that, you know, walking through the inner cities of Ohio, praying on the low-income people of those cities. Yes, that's where the whole thing begins, all right? And it's been going on for a very long time.

So I'll pick up there because you're familiar with what that story is. And I'll try to... Yeah, I think it would be good to do this sort of like in a timeline. So I think that was the beginning of it. So which year was that? well the way we opened episode one which is our pilot episode it is through the horrific tragic story of an elderly african-american woman by the name of addy pulk at the time she was 91 years old she had lived in her home for over four decades and right at the height of the crash right in september of 2008 the sheriff's department had sent out like they do and you saw this like crazy in florida of course. They send out, you know, their officers to basically evict people from their homes, right? Because they didn't pay their mortgage. There's a foreclosure action. They've got to leave, right?

The property is going to get pulled back into the bank, right? So in her case, prior to that, she was informing the people that were leaving the notices of foreclosure. She called them, and you've got to imagine she's an elderly woman, right? And she's saying, I own my house. how is this possible that someone's trying to, it just didn't make any sense to her. But she didn't have somebody she could go to or an attorney or she didn't have the capacity to just like up and like figure out, or quite frankly,

the resources to, you know, go into the court system and challenge what was happening. And even if she did, as we know from what happened in Florida, she would have been overwhelmed by it no matter what. But so as the sheriff came to evict her, facing homelessness at the age of 91, especially after she was being evicted from a home that she lived in for decades,

that she and her husband were able to purchase an own outright because another tragic part of the story is that, as we all know, African Americans in this country have been fighting a massive, massive uphill battle really from the beginning. And part and parcel to that was after the Civil War, we get in reconstruction, which leads to Jim Crow. And a lot of people, a lot of African Americans from the agrarian southeast, particularly, relocated to mass exodus to the Midwest because in the wake of World War II, we had industrialization. And the factories needed workers. So they hired African Americans to replace the GIs that were fighting in World War II.

And so Adi and her husband Robert were a part of that migration. And as a result, he worked his life to the bone, two jobs apiece to provide for his job. wife. They were regular churchgoers like most people in the African community of that era, specifically from the South. They always lived within like walking distance of their church. And so here's a woman of faith, a woman of incredible dignity. And she and her husband literally put their life into that home, which for anyone who knows African Americans know that when they got a home that they owned, it was a great source of pride in achievement. And this is who howdy Polk was. And then suddenly she's in this situation where she's being physically evicted

from her home and she apparently doesn't know why. And now that might be hard for people to believe, right? But it's not hard to believe for someone like you who knows a guy who's doing a lot of document fabrication and all the things you just preface because that's also known as straw buying. And I'll get into that in a minute. But faced with this ultimate tragedy, poor Adi Polk, man, she pulled a gun out her husband's gun and shot herself in the chest five times. Unbelievably, it didn't kill her immediately. She died six months later from complications of those wounds. Oh, my God.

And she died. And so my partner and I, my partners and I, we had already, because of the length of time it took to put this thing together. Like, yes, how did I come to it? Well, I lost my home and I'm not a chump. I knew something was wrong. Nothing was adding up based on what media was saying. what government was saying and what my experience was. And I'm like, I've got to figure out what's going on here.

Now, for a lot of folks that probably are listening to you in Florida, many people either themselves went through this process or they knew somebody. And a lot of people out of Florida became what we call pro se litigants. And pro se litigants are people that are pretty smart. They know they've been played and they're going to figure out why and how they got played. And they go through the court system representing themselves. And a lot of these people ended up learning just about everything you can know from the system. without having a lot of resources, right?

So I ended up kind of being like that in a sense, but I'm a producer. I couldn't do that as a part-time job to save my life. I mean, these people, to understand the stuff, you kind of have to get a master's in criminology. You literally have to re-contextualize your entire life. You've got to understand policy. You've got to understand judicial procedure.

You've got to understand real estate law. You've got to understand all of these variables that you never had any idea. But what happens in what's common in these cases is that, people when they get fucked, they want to find out how they got fucked. Many people roll over and die, but other people don't stop. They're like insatiable until they get the answer. I'm one of those people. So I started reading articles like you couldn't believe.

I read like insatiably anyway. But at this time period, I'm reading everything in the media that I can get my hands on. There's a couple of writers that make more sense than others that begin to start making a lot more sense of this, times going on and I was able to finally go okay look some of these people are putting up whistleblowers from different parts of the industry that I know are telling different parts of a complete story and I can't get the complete story so as a producer and investigative journalist I want to go find out what the hell it is so I did and we figured it out and one thing led to another and my partner discovered the story of Addy and that's where this picks up again so as he was doing the

investigation and we were calling people to get on camera because to do a television program, of course, and you've seen this all the time on Netflix and Showtime and so forth, you have what's known as reenactments. And you want to recreate cinematically the situation. And we reached out to the sheriff that arrived to foreclose on Addie's home at the very beginning. And he didn't want to be on camera. According to him, he had already told the story. He didn't want to go there again. He was retired. He was over it. And because I have a very tenacious associate producer, we knocked on this guy's door until we finally answered, and we talked him in to going on camera. Well, as a result of him agreeing to go on camera, and just all we needed

him for was to say, I arrived at X time, this is what she did, this is what I heard, you know, just to get the facts, right? And we were going to build the recruits around that. Well, as we finished the interview, the guy's taken off his, I'll never forget this as long as I live. It's like a straight out of a, I don't know if you've ever seen Motherless Brooklyn or any of those kind of great noir type of, you know, active films. I mean, I love those.

And it was a moment like that for me. This guy, Don Fothery, who was a sheriff, he pulls off his microphone and he looks at me and he says, there's some people I want you to talk to. And as it turns out, he puts me in contact with another sheriff who's in charge of Summit County,

Ohio, which is Akron, northeast Ohio, near Cleveland, Ohio, where LeBron James is from, actually. Right.

And as it turns out, LeBron James grew up like, 300 feet from where all of this stuff took place. Really? Yeah, yeah, pretty amazing. And he doesn't know about this. Hopefully one day we can turn him on to it because I think you'd be pretty shocked. But so as this door opens from this tragedy from Addy Polk,

it leads a smack dab to the Summit County Task Force. And the Summit County Task Force had put together an investigation to where they were able to deconstruct as you do as investigator. what was going on in the area. And as a result, they were able to find the head of a smaller version of what was happening nationally. And they were able to put together a case that they did under RICO statutes. Now, the reason that's crazy is because my colleague, Eric Vaughn, is the director of our program. He always said to me, Patrick, why didn't the feds prosecute under RICO statutes?

That was a question that we had for three years prior to finding Addy Polk. We're like, what the hell? So here we are. We backdoored into this revelation that, yes, indeed, you were supposed to prosecute this. You could have prosecuted this a number of ways, but one of which was Rico. They put the bad guy in jail, and the question then comes, well, why didn't that happen at the higher levels of Wall Street? and if the AG and this task force in Ohio can put the exact same ingredients together, why didn't that happen, you know, for the CEO of Chase, the CEO of Goldman, the CEO

because they were all in on this, right? So that led to further investigations. And then ultimately, we realized this was the only RICO conviction in the United States. And so from what I understand, or at least from what I understand, that it's the only RICO conviction in the United States. So through this incredible tragedy of an elderly African-American woman, she literally personifies the whole fucking story in a microcosm that led to the revelation of what should have taken place. And so you've heard many people over and over, and you know this probably better than everybody. Everybody in this country knows the system is rigged.

Everybody knows it's corrupt. But nobody knows who did what went and how and what they got away with and who covered it up, right? So think about this like this. There's a difference between common knowledge, like I just said, in specific knowledge. So let's say you've got a hunch that your wife is cheating. The way you handle it is going to be much different if you have evidence of that. Right. You're just going on your cut, right?

Well, that's the whole reason we have crime in law and order is because you investigate these things. You get the facts and then you prosecute. So let's put this in perspective. You've got regulatory agencies around the country, like the Office of the Cromptroller, the currency, you're supposed to regulate the banks, especially the federal banks. You've got, I'll save you all the details in terms of what the alphabet soup of the acronyms of these agencies are. But their job is to prevent what took place, right? Then you've got the FBI. You've also got the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Securities and Exchange Commission was born out of the Great Depression. The Great Depression created what was known as the Pecoran hearing by FDR who put a crack Italian immigrant who was a prosecutor in Manhattan who didn't know finance but he understood the mob. And so FDR puts this guy in Congress to find out what Wall Street did to create the Great Depression. And as a result of that, everybody was, I mean, we got footage and you'll see this in later episodes. But America literally descended on Congress. And we're like with the pitchforks, like, you fucking do this right or you're dead. And that was what was going on then. And think about World War II.

What happened outside of the United States? Well, a lot of countries went to communism. A lot of countries went to fascism. We went to law and order. That's how we got the American dream. And we got the greatest resurgence of a middle class in the history of the world. Right? Because that's the nature of what happens when you have the law and integrity of law in honesty

that runs business. In the vacuum of that, you have absolute disorder chaos and criminality. So you can probably see where I'm going. But ultimately, what we reveal on this crazy journey is that you don't live in the country

that you thought you lived in. Wow. Yeah, it's almost, to me, it seems like it's, it was a situation that we hadn't really seen before as a country.

Right? I mean, typically we're used to dealing with people with as far as criminals are concerned. You know, we had the war on drugs. We're dealing with drug dealers, people with guns who are killing people, but not these people wearing suits. Right.

Running these banks on Wall Street. Although, let me, let me give you an example, though, of how crazy this is, too, right? So, like I just gave you that, that, you know, historical setting about the Pecora hearing. Right. And, yeah, Pecora got us, you know, five decades. of relative stability and finance, but in the 80s, we started having a lot of problems, and one of which was called the Savings of Loan Crisis.

And as it turns out, the 2008-grade financial crisis was literally the third act of the S&L crisis. So we went from S&L crisis to the Enron era frauds. You ever hear, Enron? Yes. Okay. So Enron was another variation of this. And then there was a lot of stuff in between.

We had the dot-com bubble. So basically since the late, well, sorry. Going back to the 80s, quite frankly, we had, do you ever hear of Michael Milken? Do you ever hear of, okay. So have you ever heard of junk bonds? Yes, I have heard of junk bonds. So Michael Milken was known as the junk bond king, and he actually got prosecuted under RICO statutes back in the day because he was doing a similar situation of what I just laid out for

it. And we haven't gone into details. But Milken was this top guy in finance. Everybody was like kissing the ring because this guy figured out. all these mammoth ways to make gazillions of dollars in ways that nobody could put their fingers on, but he was giving, you know, incredible returns for investors. And it was the 80s, the go-go-80s. And so there was a lot of Wall Street people making a lot of money. As it turns out, it's based on a lot of deception and a lot of Ponzi scheming. Okay. And so Milken, and it all works until it

doesn't, because it's always a bubble. Basically, the facade is it works, but it's all fiction, okay? So just like if you and I go and we're going to go sell, I don't know, let's just fucking, and we'll say we're going to sell dope, you know, but we're not selling the real thing, man, and we're selling securities on it. We can't keep up with it.

That's, by the way, what happened in the Great Depression with all sorts of securities from around the world. But the long and the short of it is that finance, if it doesn't have rules and regulations, if it doesn't have people that are policing, and you're dealing with big, big, big time money and very,

very smart people, they will unleash catastrophe. They do it all the time. Right. If you don't have the law bringing them in, then or accountability, you just wind up with corruption. Right.

So that's all this stuff is, is absolute corruption. Well, does it make it harder to deal with the fact that these people do have so much money and power and they are so much smarter? That the people dealing with this stuff, stuff maybe aren't as competent or don't have the resources? I think it's just courage.

It's certainly not the other because I can tell you, so I'm not a rocket scientist. If I could figure this out, anybody can figure this out. I just happen to have a lot of tenacity. And so I always believe in the world that makes sense, right? You've got to have an understanding of how things work. If I want to understand my car, I understand the engine. I read the frickin' owner's manual. If I want to fly in an airplane, I understand.

you know, all the forces of what it takes to enable flight. Now, this is all surface level understanding. I'm not going to, you know, know how the bits and pieces come together and in the electronic engineering and the rest of it. But I'll know the basics, right? And so if it doesn't add up, you know, especially, let me give you in a metaphor, let's say I'm on a plane crash, right? And it goes down and I somehow survive it. I might want to know what caused that plane crash. Right. Right. We've known this forever. Absolutely power corrupts, absolutely. So what we found were there were heroes at every step of the way. So not only did we find all the people that came on camera with us that are similar to the guy that you've had on that told you how the whole system work from his trade, right?

We did that with the lenders, with the appraisers, with the upstream people that with the credit rating agencies and so forth. We deconstruct this whole thing and make it such that you can follow this because it's a true crime. One thing that American audiences love are crime stories. That's all this is. It's a street crime. But it's a ginormous street crime with millions of actors involved. And it literally is. And this is not hyperbole.

It is the largest criminal conspiracy and cover up in the history of the world. What was happening when basically we realized that there was all these loans and people had made all this money propping up their banks or, you know, the CEOs propping up their banks on all the profit they were making. What did it take for it to crumble? Oh, man. What was the straw that broke the camels back? That's an easy one. And we actually just went through it again in September of 2019. But ironically, the world didn't know about it. And it got papered over because of COVID. And that's part of the story, too. Back then, it was, the run on overnight lending, which is called repo loans. So the way it works with the investment

banks is that everybody's borrowing money overnight. Okay. And we're talking trillions of dollars a day. So Goldman might borrow from another investment bank who borrows from another investment bank. And everybody's borrowing against the asset value, right? Right. The asset value in the case of mortgage-backed securities was determined on basically what we call the market players, mark to market, right? So you've got these tranches, which are made up of gazette. zillions of loans that supposedly have some sort of street market value, and that's what they sell them to pension funds and other institutional investors and other countries, China, Russia, whatever. And we're talking trillions of dollars based on, quite frankly, consumption of Americans.

And so the central aspect of consumption of the American enterprise is the home, right? So nobody ever thought around the world, they thought it was a great investment. There was $70 trillion around the world looking for investment. and they sunk it in American homes. But what we didn't realize was simultaneously, we killed the golden goose, right? So if you're going to have value for anything, right? If you're going to give a loan to somebody,

and I'm sure your broker mentioned this to you, typically the idea is that you want to make sure that that person has the capacity to pay that loan back. Right. Because you're investing in that person over the course of 30 years to make your money back. Well, that's the way the system used to work. That's not the way the system works now.

What happened was you get these warehouse lines from Wall Street. They were pumping hundreds of millions of dollars to what we call pretender lenders. They were companies that look legitimate, but they were just fraud shops. There were Ameriquest, Countrywide, Greenpoint, whole proprietary of these companies that weren't really banks. They didn't have any assets. They just were selling these mythical loans that they were packaging up, giving them up to Wall Street. And Wall Street was selling them to institutional investors. and then they were selling them and slicing them and dicing them into complicated derivatives

and financial instruments. And so, for example, in late 1998, on the upside of this, we had a derivatives market globally of $13 trillion. By the time we get to the great financial crisis, the bubble was at $600 trillion in the derivatives market. So you said, what happens when the whole thing goes sideways? Well, here's what's so crazy about it. Everybody in the food chain, but most notably the CEOs, who knew,

this whole thing was happening the way it was happening. And by the way, they're breaking the law every step of the way. They're felonies every step of the way. In fact, the most massive felonies in the history of the world. And ultimately, the CEOs, you know, they create this kind of bubble of plausible deniability. Well, simultaneously, they create this thing called Gresham's Dynamic, which is basically using perverse incentives to get people to do the stuff that you're talking about,

basically cheat as much as possible and make it look real, right? So they were packaging all of these securities and they were selling it to investors with the stamp of approval with the credibility of a Goldman Sachs, of a chase, of a city. These financial institutions that are the largest financial institutions of the world, you would never in a million years with all of their Ivy League graduates, with all of their, you know, top-notch, you know, attorneys, legal minds, scholars, accountants, all the rest of the professional class, they're, be no way in hell you could ever imagine that armada of professionals would ever be involved with a criminal enterprise. But that's exactly what happened because of perverse incentives. If you didn't play ball, if you didn't look the other way, if you didn't rubber stand, you were out of there. And that's how they play the aggression's dynamic. And it was all based on short term, short term, short term. And ultimately, they loaded this on the world. And you know what they did? They go meet with Hank Paulson.

Hank Paulson was the CEO of Goldman Sachs, turned secretary treasury under the Bush administration. And just so you know, before that, Robert Rubin was the CEO of Goldman Sachs. And he was the secretary treasury of the Clinton administration. So as you can see, Goldman's there no matter who the administration is, right? And that goes now for Black Rock and others because they own the system. And they are the power behind the power. But ultimately what happened was the whole thing crashes. And so Paulson meets with 13 of the biggest bankers in the country.

And he says, look, I'm going to give you a three-page document. You're going to sign this document and you're going to make, let me take care of this. Keep your mouth shut. Don't worry about it. You know, what it basically said was, we're not going to come after you. Do what we tell you and we'll, we'll take care of you. And what ultimately happened was that they came out in Congress with the TARP plan, it was the Trouble Assets Relief Program under the Bush administration.

and then we ended up with Obama in the White House and he had another stimulus. And that was $750 billion. So the rest of the world thinks that Wall Street got these emergency loans and the government invested in Wall Street and they got paid back with interest. That's the way the story goes. That's not the story.

Wall Street used the bazooka of the Federal Reserve to put $29 trillion into the financial system. $29 trillion into the hands of the people that just collapsed the global economy. And now here we are again. Wow. And yet in the media, which I found so interesting, is that it seemed like so many news channels of people in the media were blaming the people that own the houses that were getting foreclosed on, saying that maybe you should. earn more, you know, maybe you should have graduated from high school so you could have earned more money. Maybe you shouldn't have had so many kids. Then you would have, you'd be able to afford to pay

your mortgage. Now, we're supposed to feel bad for you because you're out in the street. It's your fault. Yeah, that's called blaming the victim or maybe some people might call it slut shaming, right? Yeah. Yeah, in this particular case, let's just, let's just kind of look at common sense. So would a bunch of people with a high school degree be able to pull the biggest caper on the smartest people in the world. Right. Right. I see what you're saying. Don't. Yeah. Yeah, Addy Polk, a woman. I mean, plus she was 91. I mean. Yeah, they're the ones. They're the ones who came up with this incredible freaking complicated, you know, it's complicated to a point, but it's not that complicated. It's certainly, like I said, not rocket science. It's just when you understand what

happens at every step of the way, you can manipulate it. And you can do. document fabrication. You can do all these things because they're incentivized to do it. And if there's no accountability, are they going to stop? Of course not. That's how they're getting paid. Right. You got these young aggressive people who are just are hustling their asses off trying to make these short commissions and they don't give a fuck whose lives they ruin, even if it's a 90-year-old widow. They don't even think about it because what they'd say is it's my job. And by the way, I got the portion. I got the front row at the freaking Orlando Magic Gamer. I'm going to go see Brady next year. Okay, great, dude, you're successful. That's what's sickening about this whole thing.

It's like, you know, I think a success as people who earn it, right? People who do good work and they bring some sort of value to society. Not somebody that spent 24 hours a day learning how to lie, steed and chill. I get that right? Lie cheat and steal. Yeah. That's what they are, dude. And that's what they got away with, you know, but at the end of the day, though, I mean, as bad off as those guys are, they were in the system, man, and the system was designed the way the system was designed. You got to look up top. And just like with the mob,

you got to roll the lower guys to get to the top guys. And that's what never happened. Yeah, it's the same thing with that. It's the same thing with the mob. It's the same thing with the war on drugs. And, well, I mean, there's something to be said with lenders in general to be lazy or like not do their due diligence on a home. Right?

It's one thing to say that, okay, we had to appraise or go out, appraise your house. We looked at your income statements. Okay, this makes sense. It could easily be that they didn't go out to the house and look at it themselves and walk inside and look at it. It's all paper, right? The person at the top of that lending company or the bank. It's actually digitized now too, which is even more scary because they can cover up their tracks even better now than they did then. Right.

So it could be fair to say that in a situation, I'm not saying that in a big conspiracy, that that's what happened. But it could just have been laziness or someone not doing their due diligence for this to happen, right? For them to loan way more money on a house than what it's actually worth. So I guess what I'm- No, no, that's part of it.

It's called the yield spread premium. See, they were actually incentivized to put people in the worst loans possible. Now, it just so happens that they hire. guys straight out of working at Burger King the year before because the guy that came out of Burger King, for example, and this is not a slight against somebody who came out of Burger King. My God, if you work yourself up through fast food, God bless you, right? But what happened with the incentive was that somebody who was making $18,000 a year working their ass off would walk into a deal like this and make $20,000 on one deal.

Right. So if you could like dangle the carrot to like lie steel and cheat and incentivize the little help, they found the right guys to do it. And they did it over and over and over. And they did that every level of the system. So again, there's stop gaps and everything that we have in the housing market, just like you have stopgaps when you design an aircraft. So imagine if you're designing an aircraft that you want to make sure that certain parts of it are going to fail because you're going to sell everything on the cheap package it. And then in the end, you're going to bet against it and you're going to collect on the insurance when it crashes. Right. So these smaller banks

or yeah so these smaller banks were basically fucking over the borrowers and packaging up the loans and selling them to companies like chasing Goldman Sachs now did the people at the top of those companies like chasing Goldman Sachs necessarily know exactly what was going on all the way downstream well let me just ask you kind of a rhetorical question I don't mean it to be a smart house but I do want your honest answer if you're good enough to pilot a multi-trillion dollar

you know, company, aren't you paid to do and know everything that's going on? Isn't that why you get paid the big bucks? I would hope so. So here's what you need to understand about control fraud. And that's what this whole thing is. And by the way, I know it's control fraud because I was taught by the master of control fraud. He got 30,000 criminal referrals in the savings of loan crisis that led to over 1,000 convictions of high level white collar criminals and the savings loan crisis.

His name's William K. Black. What is control fraud? fraud for people out there who don't know. So people that are high executives, they want the sure thing, which is short term. They're incentivized through progress incentives on the next quarter. It's all bonus structure. They need volume. They make their money on the volume of loans, not on the right loans, but on the volume of loans. So ultimately, it was predicated on getting bad loans. So did they know, oh yeah, how do I know that? Well, we've got, you're going to have to watch the series and see because we got it everywhere. So,

Like I said, who knew who did what went and how and what they got away with. That's what we got. What was the main thing that happened next? Well, we just get to the collapse. Season two is what happens after and that's a whole nother ball of whack. So basically really, like I think I may have mentioned this earlier, but the great financial crisis of 2008 was the third act of the savings alone crisis, which happened in the early 90s.

These are all financial frauds. Same with the Enron. Same with what's going on. And it happens because we had the three Ds that basically became policy. Dregulation, desupervision, and decriminalization. What happens if you take the cops off the beat? Sorry, if you take the cops off what? If you take the cops off the beat, what happens?

Shit just goes crazy and people just do whatever they want. Criminals take over. Right. So all Mr. Law and order people that are like, yeah, great in Portland and on mark. You got the commander in chief, by the way. get a loan to this. You know what? Would it be safe to say you understand predatory lending through the...

Yeah, absolutely. Well, but also through the vessel of Addie Polk, right? I mean, it's pretty clear she's a victim of predatory lending given the outcome. Yeah. Guess who else claimed to be a victim of predatory lending? You're not going to say Donald Trump, are you? I'm going to say Donald Trump. So he sued Deutsche Bank in 2012.

The only bank in the world that would give him any loans at being a victim of predatory lending and he won. Or at least he was able to push it off until I got a settlement. But that's all in between everything else that's going on. Yes, Donald J. Trump was a victim of predatory lending. On what? What was he? What was that? When was this? 2012. Yeah, you want to look at a book that David Inrich of the New York Times or it's called Dark Towers. It's, you know, he was out on the, on the circuit not long ago, this guy, David Eindrach because you know all the people like particularly the um ms nbc's of the world yeah wanted to interview him because it was off the heels of all the stuff that Trump's been involved with

with you know Russia and whatever else yeah and so they wanted to connect you know him to Deutsche bank but when I read the book I was I was like wow this guy Eindrich told the story that Deutsche bank was the same player in the story that we're telling and that was the big grip so he spends three quarters of the book telling the story that I just told you but from the vantage of Deutsche Bank because that's what city Bank was doing. That's what Chase is doing. That's what Goldman Sachs is doing. That's what Wells Fargo is doing in Bank of America and Deutsche Bank, right? And so he goes in this in this thing like three quarters in the book, he reveals my jaw hit the floor. I literally fell out of the freaking chair when I was reading us.

That Donald Trump sued Deutsche Bank for being a victim of predatory lending. I'm like, yeah, that makes sense. Oh my God. That is fucking mind boggling. Yeah. It's it's. It's. dude it's fucking same as it ever was really i mean i'm reminded dude i'm reminded like i grew up in the 70s and the 80s and there was this yeah it was this crazy cartoon this animation called heavy metal and you can see it all the line there's this guy who uh goes to this intergalactic it's like this total rock and roll yeah tripper film but there's this character who goes and he's like this corrupt guy who's got this like patsy to like you know go into court and just lie on his behalf and

every time I see that or I think about, you know, like Trump and in the way this system operates, you know, the animators of heavy metal knew these kind of clowns back in the 70. It's like one of the lines was, yeah, you know, he sold dump, he sold dope disguised as a nun. You know, and I'm thinking about all of these guys are just off the Richter, you know, in terms of their immorality and their ability to deceive. And it's just insanity, man. Yeah, it's the same thing with the Simpsons. They were able to predict a bunch of shit that's been happening.

Yes, most notably the Simpsons. I've been to pay attention to those guys for a long time. So what's happening today? I mean, is there, do you see anything else happening or any sort of residual effects of that going on in the financial world today? It's the same thing. So they double down, but they just turned it into commercial loans. And the commercial loan market crashed with all the same ingredients in September. And they papered it over with $11, well, $7 trillion in repo loans from the Federal Reserve that nobody in media had a clue about because they were talking about Trump and Russia the whole time.

Meanwhile, once again, the Ponzi scheme continues. And now we've got the CARES Act and we've got all the stuff where literally 30 million people are predicted to be out of their homes and into the streets because of the rental crash. And by the way, a lot of these people are renting from the same financial institutions that picked up all of these properties on the cheap when they imploded or foreclosed in 2008. So it's the same system. It's just the next way. So I'm sorry, go back. You said September 2019 is what you were referring to? What specifically happened?

So you remember you asked me what was the trigger in 2008? Yeah. And I mentioned that it was repo overnight lending based on a run on the, run on the assets. And the reason they did that because they shorted it, meaning they, the market makers, meaning the two big to fail banks that play both sides of the house. They are the casino. And they did the same thing in 2019. The only reason we don't know about it was because, well, twofold really. One, Dodd-Frank supposedly did the stress test with the banks and that's a whole other story. But the main reason was because they just kept quiet and nobody wanted to tell

the story and then we ended up with COVID and they papered it over. We've been living with this insanity for at least since 2019 in terms of the next exact way. Right, right, right. Yeah, and I know for a fact that this epidemic that this pandemic we're, this pandemic we're going through is completely destroying commercial real estate owners. And that's where the big run was because it's all commercial real estate that they replaced mortgage back securities with. And you're saying a lot of these big banks still own some of these, this corporate, this commercial real estate from 2008.

But what they're doing, what they're doing is they're able to take the so-called water cannon or the, the cannon from the Federal Reserve and they're able to prop up their own bonds. Right. It's another part of, it's another part of asset fraud. It's asset bubbles and they can play it every which way they do it. They've got control of the Fed. Black Rock is the administrator of the Fed. Black Rock is the operation that was there going back to the beginning. which was

explain to people who don't know what BlackRock is. A lot of people won't know. Black Rock is a major financial consortium

that's basically a hedge fund and I think they're in private equity also but they also manage pension funds, big, big pension funds, big institutional investors and their job like any hedge fund

is you make money and a lot of those people make money on inside information for one, Stephen Schwartzman and so forth and so they've got pensions where they're playing with their money that people earned

over course of 40 years. that they're getting returns, but they're getting returns on this market build of sawdust. Because let me ask you this, after the great financial Christ of 2008, when millions upon millions of people had no income and no jobs,

who in the world was buying commercial real estate? I don't fucking know. All I was doing was skateboarding in 2008. By the way, skateboarders saved the world, man. I'm an old school skater, man. Are you? Yeah, I grew up in Doctown area, man. I skate empty pool.

and run from the cops when I was a teenager. Oh, hell yeah. That's all I did for pretty much the first, well, the first three quarters of my life so far. I, dude, I dig it, man, because skaters are always freaking wise, man. I'll tell you, skaters get hit to the game good, and skaters always on the right side of this stuff, man. Skaters are the good guys, you know? Oh, yeah, hell, for sure. I know I'm being silly here, but I really believe that because skaters have an attitude because they got to, you know, to dial a trick,

it takes a lot of wiping out. In consequence, unlike Wall Street, when they wipe out, everybody else pays the price and they get to skate free. Oh, they got a foam pit. They got a giant phone pit when they launch up the rant. They get to land in. Meanwhile, we're surrounded by chicks and, you know, cocktails, right? And everybody's trying to get in.

And cocaine and hookers. That's right. Oh, by the way, I will tell you, that's the meaning of that. So going back to old school, right? I know everybody in the blogosphere talks a lot about Epstein and Weinstein and all these other things. But, you know, back in the S&L crisis, what a lot of these banks would do

is they'd have these huge parties, right? With, you know, legislatures, elected officials. And they'd get them on camera, you know, doing fucking illicit drugs and screwing around with hookers, right? And so they had leverage over them. They blackmailed them? Fuck yeah.

This was going on decades, man. This is like old school. freaking leverage, man. Yeah, and they still operate to that to this day. And this is nasty business. Holy shit. Yeah, I mean, obviously it's still going on today. I mean, you can see the parallels with the whole Epstein thing and the Galane Maxwell

thing. The biggest parallel to our story on that stuff is just that everybody that had an ability to stop that stuff, they knew about it for decades. Same with a lot of this situation. They know about it for decades. They just don't prosecute it because they wait until they're embarrassed, humiliated, or they're being accountable by a population that gets it. And so, you know, I mean, to me, it's like, you see the thumbprints of this stuff everywhere. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

It's not rocket science. It's not conspiracy theory. This is just how crime works. So right now in the middle of this pandemic, what is Blackstone doing? Black Rock? It's Black Rock or Blackstone? Yeah. Blackstone in Black Rock, uh, apparently.

apparently speared off the same company, and I'm not sure which manages what. I'm not an expert in BlackRock, but I can tell you that what are they doing? They're the administrators, the Fed stuff of the CARES Act. So we've seen they can lever up the loans. Okay. So basically, we were told like I think there was what, a $4 trillion, $2 trillion. Cairs. Yeah. Right. But that's levered to $11 trillion. dollars through all of these different acronyms of different ways that that that that investment banks can lever the loan volume from the Fed so it's not two trillion it ends up being 11 trillion it's just it's it's it's it's that way and they can and they can just buy their own assets and they can backstop their own bonds and they can pay themselves their own bonuses so they just manipulate it all day every day holy shit this is so hard for someone like me to wrap my head around

because I just don't know, I don't know how all this stuff works and how all these financial institutions work. That's not important for the con, though, because what's important for the con is it's a street crime. Right. It's a free crime every step of the way that was prosecutable. And of course, we found it because we were able to, you know, happenstance under this, this RICO conviction in Ohio, which was a miracle.

I mean, once you understand how they put together these investigations and you understand who did what and how, you understand the criminality of it. So like there's tons and tons of laws on the books. You can't, you know, you're not supposed to have what is it called deceptive acts and practices, which is illegal in all 50 states. It's a felony. You can't make up paperwork. You can't have fraudulent paperwork. You can't sell illegal reps and warranties to investors upstream.

These are just a handful of the many crimes that happened at every level. And so when you're able to actually get the evidence and you get the documentation fraud and you get. and you get the people that are involved with it and you get the whistleblowers. You put the case together. You identify the people who are going to roll. You go upstream and you find out that the CEOs are the ones that created this whole thing. That's how you get convictions. So I noticed there's one clip in there.

Why was Obama saying that what these executives were doing was not necessarily illegal? He said it was unethical, but it wasn't illegal. I love how you pointed that up because that's always the thing that burns in my school more than anything. So let's think about who Obama was, right? Obama was this change we can believe in people's mandate that rode the wave that could have had an FDR moment. His background was he was a constitutional law expert. I think he was the editor of the Crimson at Harvard. Super, super smart guy.

Yeah. He was also a senator in Illinois. And he was very well of predatory lending. And I know that because I have on camera a gentleman by the name of Ira Gaunt, Rheingold, who wrote the anti-preditory legislation with Obama as early. as I think in the mid-90s, late 90s at first, and then later, I think as they got closer to the actual crash. But then he also came out of Chicago, right? Yeah. He was a public organizer and everything else. But it was really fascinating that, you know, the Clintons, who really created the greatest growth of Wall Street and its history, right, because of deregulation, like I was talking about

earlier, a lot of this stuff came out of the Clinton administration. Right. When Obama ran against Hillary, it was probably a slam dunk for Hillary. But how come Wall Street got completely behind Obama? I don't know the answer to that for sure. All I know is he came out of Chicago. He certainly had a close relationship with Jamie Diamond and Wall Street. I don't know what that means exactly, but I do know that Jamie Diamond met with him 23 times after we met with Eric Holder as Department of Justice guy, and that's unheard of at the Department of Justice. So as the Department of Justice is trying to figure out who did what and when, supposedly, the president's meeting with the CEO who's being investigated.

What I learned from the Department of Justice is you can't, that's like meeting with the guy that you're investigating in a drug deal. You can't have a backroom meeting with this guy, but that's what happened. And then, of course, we ended up with all of these bailouts that I talked to you about, to the tune of $29 trillion. And Rolling Stone did a piece, by the way. I think it might have been 2012.

It was right at the height. of Matt Taibi's just phenomenal writing at that time. And the cover was of Elaine Fleischman, who was a whistleblower for Chase. And it just goes, it went to show that everybody in the system and all of the higher-ups and the executives knew exactly what they were peddling.

And by the way, Jamie Diamond in that company, I think they've been fined, God, Billy. Who's Jamie Diamond? He's the CEO of Chase. In fact, I think Biden was going to ask him to become our next Treasury Secretary. What? Yeah, of course.

He's probably the most powerful banker in the world. And so this guy, yeah, and he's got a reputation going back to predatory lending in the late 90s when he was working with the guy that took over Citigroup. It's all incestuous at that level. Let me tell you, man. These guys have been around and together for a very long time, all the top dogs. Jesus Christ, man. I mean, many of them are out of it now, but their next wave of their lie of their lieutenants came up. And they all came up in this system.

And now here we go again, right? I mean, it's just really the system. It's perverse incentives. It's the fish rots from the head. It's fishing for fools. It's all of these different ingredients of deception for a population that never in a million years would think this is possible because they think that there's laws and checks in places that would protect them and we don't.

Tell me more. So when is this documentary, when is it coming out and where can people watch it? So as you might imagine, we're not on Netflix yet, right? And I don't know why that is. Let me give you a little sidebar to that. So I do know that, you know, Netflix, I think they've seen us. You know, we're trying to get a deal. We've got a great distributor.

I mean, we've been through the ring around this. But Netflix recently announced that they're going to create a loan program to black communities across the country, a $100 million loan program. And so I was like, wow, man, what a better way to explore and expose why they would want to do that than with our story, of course. because just so you know, the African-American college-educated net worth evaporated 60% as a result of the great financial crisis. 60% of African-Americans' net worth college-educated evaporated because of this crime, right? And the face of all of it for us is Addie Polk. I think she's the Rosa Parks of this moment because of predatory lending and everything that it amures. And Netflix, you know, they haven't been knocking down our doors.

So we're going round robin at the moment. We're doing self-distribution where we're going to do a live broadcast on Facebook Live through ABC Cinema Studios. And we're going to be followed by live panel discussion. Now, this is going to broadcast live on August 5th at 8 p.m. Eastern time. and we're going to make our first episode free to the public, which is the one you've seen about Addy Polk. Right. We're going to have on our panel discussion the good guys from Ohio that got it right,

alongside the pastor who was really the voice of our protagonist, Adi, but we're also going to have on the panel the guy who was the former director of investigations for the FBI. This is news. This is news. We're going to be for once put together how one entity, criminal investigation institution got a RICO conviction and why the FBI didn't. And that'll be on display following it. It'll be the whole world should it be asking why wasn't this prosecuted?

They're going to get their answer. Wow, man. That's illuminating. So how long have you working on this? God, it seems like my entire life. So I went down to September 15, 2008. I bounced into this project at the end of 2011. So 2012 led to the first step, which was a documentary I did at the beginning called Forward 13, waking up the American Dream.

But that was just turned out to be prologged. This thing, the con, really didn't start to go on overdrive until about 2015, 2016. So five, it's really five or six years to pull this together on the con side. But it's been nonstop. And we lap this country 12 times aggregating all of the details all over the country. So for the first time ever, and I'll bring it back to Pecora. This is a modern-day Pecora hearing. It's what Congress didn't deliver to the American people in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

So where can people find, where can people go online like social media or websites, whatever, to find or follow the story and get the links to watch it? Right on. Thank you. You can go on Facebook. You can go to the con series. and like and subscribe for updates there. On our website is thecon.tv, and you can also post your own stories to that website. We encourage you to do so if you've gone through this calamity.

We want to hear from you guys. And then eventually we're going to be in theaters all over the United States, and I know that sounds a little weird because of the COVID thing, but what that means is we're going to have a virtual reality with theaters around, a virtual reality distribution with all the theaters around the United States. So the way it works now is like, let's say you've got an independent theater in your neighborhood that you like to go see movies, but you can't because of COVID. A lot of these people put stuff online. And so you can download like the cool film that came out, you know, that you want to see rock and roll, whatever.

We're going to be in all of those types of theaters and you can download the entire series from there. And then eventually, I think we're going to be on all of the regular, you know, pay-per-view sites. So it's like Amazon and Apple TV and so forth. And we'll keep doing that until hopefully there's such a massive catharsis from this that, you know, somebody like Netflix will be like, yeah, the public is demanding and hopefully that'll break through. But, you know, to just finish up, I mean, all of these guys like Apple and HBO and all the rest of them, I mean, they all get their debt financing from Wall Street. And we, you know, we basically, you know, reveal something they probably don't want the world to know.

Do you honestly think that? the acquisition's exact, but I can tell you what we've been. This is big, dude. This is as big as it gets. It's the whole system of power. It is the story within the story, within the story that everybody's impacted by. Student loans, car loans, health care, everything that we depend on rolls through Wall Street. And much of it rolls through the same sort of formula.

They just got their, they got their claws too deep, too deep into us. Yeah, it's not, it's not supply and demand. It's not creative destruction. it's not capitalism. What it is, it's crony capitalism or monopolies. And it's happened many times throughout history. It always ends bad. It never ends good.

Are there any other countries, are there any other countries you're aware of who are corrupt to the core financially like this? Well, I'd say all of them. I'd say all of them. You know, I mean, Russia is obviously. I think we can grow up more and more. I mean, do they have as big of a play internationally?

But you don't think, I mean, You think of Russia like, okay, right, that makes sense. But you don't think of the United States typically to be as corrupt as they really are. Like you said, like you said earlier, it's not common knowledge. Only if you really look for it, can you find out what? No, I was in the dark my whole life. I thought there was no way in hell this could happen. You know, honestly, I thought I was wise.

I mean, again, I'm a skater. I've seen a lot of shit, right? And the bottom line is that, no, I could never in a million years devise in my imagination what we found on this journey. It's so beyond comprehension. And it's just so sad and it's so disturbing because I want to believe in democracy. I want to believe in the integrity of law. I want to believe in courage. I want to believe in the right people doing the right thing more than the bad guys getting

away with it. But what you discover here, bro, is you walk through the goddamn saloon, you get to the back and you see the guy in the black hat, counting the money with the guys in the white hat. You've been betrayed. It's all about deception. It's that simple. So why do people want to listen to me? Who the fuck am I, right?

I'm one of you. I'm a guy that actually had the ability because I got lucky and I'm tenacious as fuck, part of my language. But I hate injustice, dude. I hate it. I hate it with a passion. I understand what created the Holocaust in World War II. I understand all of the Jim Crow scenarios.

I hate injustice. And all of the stuff that's happening now, like you said, these culture wars that are really, really serious and severe and terrifying and sad. but it's protecting a criminal racket, man. You know, can we put aside our grievances for the moment to get on to the business of getting rid of the corruption? I think that's something we should all be able to agree on. And yet it certainly hasn't galvanized this yet. Yeah, no.

A lot of people are too blinded by the moment or too blinded by thinly veiled ideologies to look deeper into what the problem is. because, you know, the government, because it's easy. Yeah, it's easy and it's primal. Because they're lazy. You can see it. I mean, you can see it's so clear, like, like, who people pander to and why they do it, if you really want to pay attention to it.

You can see who. I think this is all, I think this is all the consequences of institutions rotting from the core. And the thing is, the biggest problem, and I've got to believe this, and maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's too late to salvage today, right? Maybe we're done for it. Maybe we're on to the next, which is going to be even more brutal than anything we've ever seen. That could very much, very well happen. But I got to believe that there's more good people in this country than not. And if they're equipped with the information, will not stand on their knees or bend on their knees and cower in cowardice any longer. That's what I'm choping for more than anything. People have got to

reset their courage, man. And the only way you can do that is if you've got to information because you can't be snow job if you know what's up right well i'm glad we have people like you uh that are uncovering this kind of stuff and that are spending years to to to help this stuff bowl to the surface and and study it like you do and thank you to people like you for helping us get the word out because unless you have a system then there's no chance if there if it's ever going to happen man if there's ever going to be a change i think now is when it's going to happen you know it took it took all of this that we've been going through in the past year to make a change for better or worse, something's got to happen.

I'm with you on that, but here's what's crazy, right? Because honestly, nothing happens in a vacuum by itself. It's always a continuation of something else. I mean, your whole life is not right, right? Yeah. When I went through this madness, I thought the world ended. It literally nearly ended my world, right? And I couldn't think it could get any worse than that.

And now here we are. And now you're like waking up to it, right? And I hate that like woke culture and everything. else. You want to get hip to the game. You want to wake up just to understand what reality is based on what systems are supposed to do and what they're not and who did what went and how to cover up what. That's the deal. It's details. It's common knowledge versus specific knowledge and media fail to tell this. And I hope that we knock it out of the park. And look, if we hit 10% of the people that got wrecked by 2008, we'll have a huge audience. Yeah. And it's only getting bigger every day, right? And so I just hope that, you know,

You know, people, and this is the worst part of America, in my opinion. And I think we really need to get out of our shows. We tend not to react until stuff happens to us. Meanwhile, it's been happening to them for a very long time. You know what I'm saying? Right. It's true. You got to get out of our headspace and be like, yeah, you know what?

I'm going to click the screen and go on to the next thing and buy the next whatever. Because I can. It's like escapism until you can't escape. Yeah. Well, thank you for your time. Thank you for doing this, man. I really appreciate it. I'm sure a lot of people are going to go watch, go follow your story and look for this thing when it comes out.

Spread the word, man. Let me tell you, thank you again for what you're doing. And I'll tell you from where I'm sitting right now. It feels like we're standing in a forest of dry, you know, dry kenneling and with a match. And it just feels that way because of the feedback I'm getting right now. People are suddenly going, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yep. Absolutely, man.

Well, thank you for your time. It was great meeting you. Be well, Daniel. Take care.