Yo, what's going on guys, we're on the Carl Fawkes Managements today. Welcome to Wizard101 and the Road to 100 series We are in Celestia. I'm joined here with Andrew Dragonblade, also known as Brenton. I am Finnegan Dornroad Der, also known as Finn, and we're speaking to my land Hawkins No, we were. No, not anymore. Yeah, how are you Mended? How's it going? Oh my god, it's been a great break my guy It's been a long time. Yes. Yes, it's been a wee while since we lost quite a wee while More than a wee. It's just been a while Extreme highlights. This is That was for Road to 100 Expanded. No, that's a long time ago. Yeah, we Road to 100 we too were. Oh my gosh. Like what two months ago? Yeah It's been a while. Your boy milk's content. You know what can I say? Yeah, I'm just a content milker. Yeah, king of a content milker. Fight me if you don't like me, you know They call Brent the milkmaid, but I'm a content My color's purple My mind's green and I don't know why it's green. Actually, I don't know why it's green because we're recording this just after the 24 hour live stream Oh my god, the one that I didn't make. Oh my lord. Hello Yeah, you went to sleep. Cheers King of the three hour nap Yeah, I hope I am.  I'm ready to fix a water pump. Wow. You haven't even done that. You're bad No, I haven't.  I did, you know, I did I did it real hard and good That's pretty hot That's what you said last night It's been a while, Finn's now got waterworks gear That's how long it's been. It's been a while. I think we're wearing this waterworks gear for like, I know for like two months Yeah, he's level 67 He's rocking the waterworks gear except the boots, but we're working on it How does your balance feel, right? I feel like he's a little rusty I feel like you I feel like you don't I feel like you you have to brush off the rust and Well, look at him.  No, look at my peps. This is yours Exactly and what how much more level are you? Significant yeah, that's what I thought Do you have leaf storm or um, guess what I'm casting But I'm loving it JK casted in JK. It's it's for fursuit guy. It's a legit fursuit boy Look at that dangle.   Definitely disgraceful. He's disgraceful to the human race.  I am Damage Yeah, there's a lot of vehicular devices outside Vehicular I'm not a bit and not a fan of vehicular devices, but are you not a fan of virtuals and virtuals of stupid You know what these guys look like what you know the handsome Squidward man. Yeah They look like a shittier version of handsome Squidward. Yes Like and What are you doing exactly like just 100 bring up bring up a handsome Squidward right here and then put it put the next next to them these guys. Yeah They could have gone with a handsome Squidward. They couldn't like they chose not to Mainly because this was in like 2010 Yeah, but handsome Squidward is just like that was hands you Squidward there What's good is that and yeah, it's handsome Squidward there not Squidward's always been their Brent They could have made it Squidward, but they didn't know they didn't


A few months ago, I was at a bookshop in Lagos, Nigeria. As it is my habit, I started picking out a whole lot of books, and after I and the friend I went with had taken out so many books, the bookseller, who was obviously surprised by how many books I'm buying, asked me a common question, which goes like, do books change anything in you? As we had the conversation, this guy confessed that though he sells books, he doesn't read them simply because when he reads, books don't change anything in his life. While you may be among a few people in the world who are convinced that books change lives, most people don't. And this is apparent from the fact that only a very few people are committed readers. To most other people in the world, reading books is a waste of time, and that can be very true. In today's video, I'll share with you three reasons why you might not get anything out of reading, hence, reading becomes a pure waste of time. Before I continue this video, if you're one of the people who have been wanting to know who was behind this channel, I'm now available on my personal channel and you can get to see me, know more about me, or learn from me, or even download my free books if you check the description box of this video. Now, let's get into this video. 1. Most books leave you with two to three takeaways, and that's not a big deal. Tell me about the best books you've ever read and I'll tell you something you already know. Those books really didn't give you a hundred ideas. Most books will only leave you with one or two takeaways, and that's a big problem for many people. I mean, these books are usually between 200 to 500 pages. Who in the world sits down with 300 pages book only to stand up after several hours and see that he can only remember a few things he actually learned from the book? This is one of the reasons why most people don't read.  Wait for the next point. 2. It takes a whole lot of little ideas to transform your life. Everyone who knows me knows that I am a big fan of books. If there's anything at all I'm addicted to, it will be a book. I love books. I genuinely do love books, and I'm convinced that books have transformed my life, but not by reading a book or two.  The truth is that no single book can change your life completely. Like most things in life, there's compound interest in how our lives are being transformed. So it usually takes a whole lot of little changes, and I'll explain with some practical examples. Around the year 2007, I read The Magic of Thinking Big, and that book changed the way I see myself. But that wasn't enough to completely change the history of my life. In 2006, I read Reach Dad Poor Dad. The book confirmed my suspicion about the school system and taught me about assets and liabilities. Yes, those were good lessons, but again, your life will not suddenly change because you know those two things. Around the year 2007-2008, I read Awakened the Giant Within. The book left me believing that I can achieve whatever I wanted if I called model other people who had done it before, among a few other things I learned. Again, your life will not completely change just because you know these few things. In the year 2015 thereabout, I read The Purple Cow and Idea Virus. Those are some of the best books of my lifetime, but again, few lessons you take away from those books will not automatically make you rich.  That is what I call learning compound interest. Think about investment. Even the greatest investor the world has ever known, Warren Buffett, needed to wait so many years for his investment to make him a billionaire. He needed compound interest, because that's where the real money is. Think about your marriage. You might feel that you love your partner the day you meet her, but just wait for a few years and you'll see the effect of compound interest. As a guy who is married to a woman he met a decade ago, I can tell you that if you get it right, relationships simply become better and unbelievably better. It's a relationship's compound interest. Now, let's get back to books. People who think books cannot transform their lives usually don't read a lot, and because they only read a few books, the few ideas they got from the books are not sufficient to really transform their lives. That's like investing a thousand dollars for three years. Well, if you invest in the stock market with an average of 67% returns on your investment or in any other similar investment, you've only got a few dollars on your money. If you read three books a year, well, if each of the books leaves you with two ideas, you've only got six ideas. Reading 10 to 20 books means a different thing, and reading 50 means a whole lot more different. You get the point. Your life will not change because you read five books in five years. Your life will not be transformed simply because you read a bestseller. Just as you can never build a business with a single idea, you can never build your life on a single idea. If you need me to explain this, I will. Anyone can start a business with a single idea, but for that business to grow and thrive, you need a thousand ideas, often little ideas. Again, it's about compound interest. Your life will not change because you read five books in five years. Your life will not be transformed simply because you read a bestseller. Just as you can never build a business with a single idea, you can never build your life on a single idea. If you need me to explain this, I will. Anyone can start a business with a single idea, but for that business to grow and thrive, you need a thousand ideas, often little ideas. Again, it's about compound interest. So here's my advice for people who don't read books because they think it's a waste of time. Read a whole lot more because you need the combinations of several little ideas to get your life transformed. 3. Reading for knowledge actually changes nothing in you. When I advise that you should read a lot, if you want to see the effect of knowledge compound interest in your life, some people would tell me, but I read so much and nothing happened. Well, I know a few people like that. I have friends who read many books about money and they are still broke. But guess what? They really never do anything with what they read.  So here's the thing. The purpose of reading shouldn't be to get you knowledge. Yes, you heard me correctly. You are not reading for knowledge, but for actions. Books are not supposed to make you know. They are supposed to make you do. It's about doing. Before the year 2008, when I went fully into the business world, I had read about 250 books and you might be tempted to think that the reason why I had the courage to go into the business world, even though I had almost no money, was because I read a lot about business. That assumption would not be absolutely correct because there are so many people in the world who read more than I do and they are still broke because they never really get themselves to take action. For such individuals, reading books is a waste of time. So what is my point here? Well, reading a book about marriage wouldn't necessarily make your marital relationship better except you follow the simple advice you read in the book. Reading 10 books about money won't automatically change your financial situation except you stop spending the money you don't have and learn about investing or start in your own business. And listen, start in your own business or start in an investment plan is even nothing. If it is about starting, everyone will do it because everyone can start anything. Anyone can go to the gym for one week because they want to lose weight. Everyone can be a good husband for one week because they just attended a marriage seminar. Everyone can start a business and run it for three months. These are not a big deal. I failed in the business world for eight long years before I had my breakthrough. Listen, that's what most people cannot do and that's the real deal. So you don't want to read books just to have the knowledge but to use the knowledge. You don't just want to apply the knowledge for a few weeks. You want to stick with it and remain persistent for as long as it takes you to get the desired result. So here is the summary of this video. First, every book, no matter how big they are, is likely going to leave you with only a few ideas on how you can change your life. Don't be discouraged. It's absolutely normal. Second, because of the above reason, you have to read a lot. So there will be a kind of compound interest in knowledge. Third, don't read to know. Read to do. And when you decide to do, decide to remain a doer for as long as it takes you to achieve your desired result. I'm a doer and I love people who don't only learn but also force themselves out to take action. If you're one of the people who want to know who is behind this channel, now you can see me or even have some relationship with me. Simply join my personal channel in the description box of this video. I love you.


My name is Patrick and I am an English teacher and I have been for about 10 months. So I don't have some of the experience of teaching that some other of the speakers have had. I did my TESL course this time last year. I was just finishing up this time last year and I started teaching in February. So my own background before that was as a psychotherapist I worked at a small practice in Dublin. I am post-grad in psychotherapy studies. So basically what I want to look at today a little bit about is trying to bring some of what I learned about people, how they operate, how emotions affect us, our decision making and our learning. And I came up with this phrase and I was very excited when I came up with this thing called person-centered teaching until the name of my academic coordinator pointed out that somebody had already come up with that phrase a long time ago. So I thought I'd coined a new phrase but I hadn't. So what we're looking at here is sort of drawing on psychology a little bit and a thing called person-centered therapy which has been around for a long time developed by a guy called Carl Rogers who believes that if you apply certain core conditions in the therapeutic sense that amazing things and extraordinary things can happen. So I thought well maybe if we can recreate that in a teaching context extraordinary things can happen in learning too. Empathy, when we talk about empathy we talk about the ability to understand and share the feelings and experiences of another. I'm a native speaker, I'm Irish, I'm from Dublin, I haven't really travelled the world nowadays, I've never really lived abroad. Well I teach a lot of people who are in their maybe early twenties. How often do I stand back and say what's it like for these people to be here? Lots of them are from Latin America, thousands of them are from home, away from family, away from friends. How many people consider the difficulties they have, the problems they have? And should we think about that a little bit more? Or do we just see them as a homogenous group of students sitting in front of us? Do we see them as people at all? The problems, the problems, the challenges. And congruence is the quality or state of agreeing or corresponding. In other words, don't be fake, be real. In human interaction, be real with the person. Because students are very astute and they will sense if you're plumb awesome in any way. You won the risk, I think, then of losing respect. So you need to mean what you say and say what you mean respectfully. And writers also believe in this thing called unconditional positive regard, which is really about respect. You know, that you respect the individuals. You don't have to like them, but you have to respect them as a person. Okay? And acknowledge that whatever their attitude or behaviour they would be doing their best. So maybe the guy in the class was really getting on your nerves as soon as well as he can. You know? Maybe you need to step back a little bit from what you're feeling yourself. Learning as an emotional experience. Learning is not just an academic or a cognitive experience. It's also an emotional experience. And this has been kind of neglected down the years traditionally. And if emotions were paid attention to at all, they were seen as problematic anxiety, for example. Gets in the ways, what can we do to change it? Other emotional factors such as excitement, hope were often ignored. And they could be great motivators for learning, especially library learning. So learning is also an emotional experience. So if it's also an emotional experience, then we need to be paying a bit of attention to the emotional world. Of the people in front of us. Yeah. Algebraing is an emotionally loaded experience. There's a strong relationship between cognition and emotion. We're not robots.  We've got to reach them. They're human beings. And research on learning characteristics has suffered from a general emotional deficit. That's what the psychology of the language learner revisited. I'll read that and Steve and I will discuss it. Okay. So emotion and cognition is a strong relationship. Language to learning is an emotionally loaded experience. And any description of what makes a particular learner unique needs to take this into account. Swain argues the relationship between cognition and emotion is minimally interdependent, maximally there and separate. And one general lesson drawn from a review of aptitude research has been that cognition does not function in isolation, but interacts with other mental functions such as motivation and emotion. Therefore more elaborate and educationally meaningful conceptualization of language aptitude would not necessarily be restricted to cognitive aptitude alone. So I'm just reinforcing the whole idea that the emotional world plays its part in our students' learning. Whether we like that or not, that's a reality. Okay. There are many ways to make me address this, but this is the one that I'm going to focus on here. Building rapport with our students is a good way of reaching that part. A number of others have explored the impact of building rapport. There's the references there. And here are some of the benefits of building rapport. Students feel individually valued. I don't know about any of you guys, but whenever I was in a learning environment as a student myself, whether of the kid or later as an adult, that kind of thing meant so much to me. You know, if the tutor or the guy teaching even knew your name or knew something about you or asked you how your football team got on or something. Wow. Well, I feel a bit taller. I feel better for that. I'm not anonymous. I'm not just sitting down there. Students feel comfortable being honest with the teacher. This is very important because they feel able to give you feedback. Yeah? You're talking about getting students involved in it. They're not going to do that if they don't feel in some way that there's a relationship, a relational process happening. And students are more likely to participate and be excited about their learning. So how do you go about building that rapport? How do you do that? How do you make that happen? Gather and share information. Students are people. The way we connect with people is by communicating with them. Students are no different. Talk to them. Ask them questions. What do you like to do? Where are you from? What's the local football team there? Do you support them? Ask them the next week if their team wants. Tell them something about yourself when it limits, of course. You can decide your own limits. Human connections through communication. Let's lose this teacher student. Consciously create the atmosphere. It was one day morning and you were walking in there with a hangover or you had a rail with your partner. And you don't address that and leave it at the door that's going to impact the experience of those students in that room. I believe that. Take five minutes. But the atmosphere in the room is your responsibility as much as the context in that room. Move around the room. Sit next to him. Get him from behind the desk. Abandon the desk. Sit on the floor. It was an empty seat. Sit in there. Decide to move about. This is the difficult stuff for you. For somebody. You've got to know yourself and your own prejudices. We're all human beyond of some prejudices. But you don't need to bring them into the room. Leave them outside the room. You can't do that if you don't know what they are. So like we said, they're hard questions. Take responsibility for being a flaw of human. You might have some prejudices. You're not perfect. And leave them outside the room. Don't take them in there. And this is my favorite. Resist the pedestal. Your students will want to tell you how wonderful you are a little to time. You're the best teacher I've ever had. I've heard of so many times that I want to believe it's true, but I know it can't be true. Just because somebody offered you a pedestal, you don't have to climb up on me. Because if you do, you're no longer meeting their needs. You're meeting your own ego needs and you've lost it. Don't get up on the pedestal. You're not the best teacher in the world. You really aren't. You know, the emperors, the Roman guys, when they come back from the war, after a conference somewhere, they go on the chariot through the streets, the plebs would be cheering. You'd have a slave standing behind them, whispering in his ear, remember your honor, in case he got carried away with himself. So none of you out there are the best teacher ever. And you never will. Yeah, so that's basically, I'll just recap on the main points again. I'm drawing here on psychology, person-centered therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, the tree, core conditions. I'm not saying you go in there and become a therapist, but at least be conscious of these things. Be aware of them. Because there's a human experience in that classroom. Learning is an emotional experience. And I was doing some research with that kind of surprise neighbor. Try and build and foster the rapport, and whatever you do, resist the pest. Okay, thank you very much.


It is my great pleasure to introduce one of the leading Rothbardians and a very faithful Rothbardian this evening. We're comrades in arms. We've known each other since 1985. Together fought the good fight, hopefully, for Austrian economics and libertarianism. The person I'm introducing is a hero in that he has initiated the property of freedom society on his own and with the help of his lovely wife, Gultrin Emre. And that this is certainly a politically incorrect but a truth-telling organization that has no peer in the world. And I'm, of course, talking about Hans Hermann Hoppe. Hans was educated at the University of the Sarlans, Gerde University of Frankfurt, both in Germany, and the University of Michigan for studies in philosophy, sociology, history, and economics. He earned his PhD in philosophy and his habilitation, which is an advanced degree, advanced even beyond a PhD, in sociology and economics from Goethe University. He taught at several German universities, as well as at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Advanced Studies in Bologna, Italy, and his professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In 1986, he moved from Germany to the United States to study under Murray Rothbard and remained a close associate of Rothbard until Murray's death in 1995. Dr. Hoppe is currently the distinguished fellow of the Mises Institute, the only one who has achieved this recognition. He is former editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies and is a lifelong member of the Royal Horticultural Society. I don't know where that came from. Among his English-language books are Democracy, the God that Failed, The Myth of National Defense, Economic Science and the Austrian Method, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, The Great Fiction, From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy, and numerous articles on Philosophy, Economics, and the Social Sciences. Best of all, all of these books and articles can be read by people without a PhD in anything. Okay, by regular people, by real people. And I recommend that you dip into these works and you read them and you will soon become addicted. Hans and his lovely wife, Gulchan Imre, Dr. Gulchan Imre, live in Istanbul. So I introduce to you Hans, Hermann Hoppe. Thank you, Joel, for that nice introduction. Thank you, Misesinsud, Jeff Deist, Lurokwell, Pet Barnett, for the honor to be the keynote speaker here. I will not talk about horticulture, even though I'm a member of the Royal Horticultural Society, thanks to my wife, who is an ardent gardener. I'm just more spectator. But my topic is coming of age with Murray. I first met Murray Rospart in the summer of 1985. I was then 35 years old and Murray was 59. And for the next 10 years, until Murray's premature death in 1995, I would be associated with Murray first in New York City and then in Las Vegas at UNLV in closer and more immediate and direct contact than anyone else except his wife, Julie, of course. Now being almost as old now as Murray was at the time of his death, I thought that it would be appropriate to use this occasion to speak and reflect a little bit on what I learned during my 10 years with Murray. I was already an adult when I first met Murray, not just in the biological but also in the mental and intellectual sense. And yet I only came of age while associated with him. And I want to talk about this experience. Before I met Murray, I had already completed my PhD and attained the rank of a privatozend that is a 10-year but unpaid university professor that incidentally is the same rank that Ludwig von Mises once held in Vienna. Apart from my doctoral dissertation, I had already completed two books, one that revealed me as a Misesian and another about to be published in the following year, 1986, that revealed me as a Rosebardian. I had already read all of Mises's and Rosebard's theoretical works but I must admit that I had not yet read Murray's voluminous journalistic work which was essentially unavailable to me at that time in Germany. Thus it was not my personal encounter with Murray then that made me a Misesian and a Rosebardian. Intellectually, I was already a Misesian and Rosebardian years before I ever met Murray personally. And so notwithstanding the fact that I am and consider myself also foremost a theoretician, I do not want to speak here about the grand Austro-libertarian intellectual edifice that Mises and in his succession, Rosebard, have handed down to us or about my own small contributions to this system but about my long personal experience with Murray about the practical and existential lessons that I learned through my encounters with him and that turned me from an adult to a man who had come of age. I moved to New York City because I considered Murray the greatest of all social theorists at least in the 20th century if not of all times just as I considered Mises the greatest of all economists of all times. And with Mises having gone long ago and out of the picture I wanted to meet, get to know and work with this man Rosebard. I still hold this view concerning the greatness of Mises and Rosebard indeed even more so than 30 years ago. And since then there has been no second Mises or a Rosebard not even close and we may have to wait for a long time to come for this to happen again. So I moved to New York City knowing Murray's work but knowing almost nothing about the men. Remember this was 1985. I was still writing in long hand and then using a mechanical typewriter, acquainting myself with a computer for the first time only during the following year at UNLV and Murray never used a computer but stayed with an electric typewriter until the end of his life. There were no cell phones, there were no emails, no internet, no Google, no Wikipedia and no YouTube. At the beginning even fax machines did not exist. So my correspondence with Murray preceding my arrival in New York City was by old regular snail mail. Murray expressed his enthusiasm about my wish to meet and work with him and immediately offered to enlist the help of Bert Blumert and indeed Bert Blumert then was of instrumental help in facilitating my move from Europe to the US. The wonderful Bert Blumert incidentally was the owner of Camino Coins and also the founder of the original Center for Libertarian Studies that would ultimately be integrated and merged with the Mises Institute. Bert Blumert was one of Murray's dearest friends and confidants and he was also a great benefactor and dear friend to me. I had seen some photos of Murray. I knew that he like Mises was Jewish that he taught at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute which was subsequently renamed as New York Polytechnic University and nowadays Polytechnic Institute of NYU that he was the auditor of the much admired Journal of Libertarian Studies and that he was closely associated as its academic director with the Ludwig von Mises Institute that Lou Rockwell had recently then 35 years ago in 1982 founded and that was about it and so both unprepared we met for the first time in Murray's University office. Here was I the cool blonde from the North. That was a popular advertisement for bitter tasting Norse and German beers young tall and athletic and somewhat unsociable dry and with a dry sense of humor and more on the blunt sarcastic and confrontational side. So you might say I was perfect Wehrmacht material if you will and there was Murray the big city neurotic to use a German title of Woody Allen's comedic Annie Hall a generation older short and round none athletic even clumsy except for typing gregarious and hilarious never moping but ever joyful and in his personal dealings quite unlike in his writings always non confrontational well-tempered or even tame not exactly Wehrmacht material so personality wise then we could hardly have been more different indeed we were quite an odd couple and yet we hit it off from the start given the long special historical relationship between Germans and Jews so I I as a young German meeting an older Jew in America had been afraid that this history might become a potential source of tension but not so quite to the contrary on the subject of religion itself there was general agreement we were both agnostics yet with a profound interest in the sociology of religion and quite similar views on comparative religion yet Murray greatly deepened my understanding of the role of religion in history through his unfortunately uncompleted great work during the last decade of his life on the history of economic thought moreover in our countless conversations I learned from Murray about the importance of complimenting Austro libertarian theory with revisionist history in order to come up with a truly realistic assessment of historic events and global affairs and it was I then as someone who had grown up in defeated and devastated post-World War two West Germany with the then and still official history taught across all German schools and universities of a feeling guilty and ashamed of being German and German history and be believing that America and America's democratic capitalism was the greatest thing since or even before the invention of sliced bread so it was I who had to revise his formerly still despite all austral libertarian theory still quite rather naive views about world affairs in general and US American and German history in particular as a matter of fact Murray made me fundamentally change my rather rosy view of the United States and helped me for the first time to feel consoled content and even happy about being just a German and to develop a special concern for Germany and the fate of the German people to my initial surprise then and ultimately my great and pleasant relief Murray was quite a Germanophile he knew and highly appreciated the German contributions to philosophy mathematics science engineering scholarly history and literature his beloved teacher Mises had originally written in German and was a product of German culture Murray loved German music he loved German Baroque churches he loved the Bavarian beer garden atmosphere and the from church to beer garden we go tradition his wife Joey was of German ancestry her maiden name being Joe and Schumacher and Joey was a member of the Richard Wagner Society of all societies and a lifelong opera buff as well most of Murray's friends that I would eventually meet turned out Germanophiles foremost among them Ralph Rayco the great historian of classical liberalism who I had hoped to see again at this occasion but who sadly left us forever almost a year ago now I met Ralph only a few months after my arrival in New York City at the party held at Murray's apartment on the Upper West Side I immediately took to his caustic sarcasm and over the years we developed a close friendship apart from our many meetings at various Mises Institute events I still fondly remember in particular our extended joint travels in northern Italy and especially when at a conference in Milano sponsored by some friends and affiliates of the ones but no longer the sessionist Lega Nord some self-proclaimed who would have guessed that anti-fascist demonstrators appeared in front of the conference hotel to denounce us to our great amusement as libertari fascist Ralph was also the one who introduced me to the revisionist history revision scholarship concerning World War one and World War two as well as the entire interwar period and it was Ralph who taught me about the history of German liberalism and in particular its radical 19th century libertarian representatives that had been almost completely forgotten in contemporary Germany incidentally Lou Rockwell too early on showed that his Germanophile credentials when we first met in New York City in the fall of 1985 he drove a Mercedes 190 he then went astray for a few years driving an American made pickup truck but ultimately returned to the fold by driving a Mini Cooper produced by BMW but above all it was Murray who taught me never to trust official history invariably written by the victors but to conduct all historical research instead like a detective investigating a crime always first and foremost and as a first approximation follow the money in search of a motive who is to gain whether in terms of money real estate or sheer power from this measure or that in most cases answering this question will lead you directly to the very actor or group of actors responsible for the measure or policy under consideration simple as it is to ask this question however it is much more difficult and requires often arduous research to answer it and to unearth from under a huge smoke screen of seemingly high-minded rhetoric and pious propaganda the hard facts and indicators the money flows and the welfare gains in order to actually prove a crime and to identify and out its perpetrators Murray was a master in this and that at a time when you did not have access to computers the internet and search machines such as google and to do this detectives work I as I learned from Murray you must go beyond official documents the mainstream media the big and famous names the academic stars and the prestigious journals in short everything and everyone deemed respectable and politically correct you must also and in particular pay attention to the work of outsiders extremists and outcasts that is to disrespectable or deplorable people and obscure publication outlets that you are supposed to ignore or not even know about to this day I have heeded and indeed relished following this advice anyone who could see my list of bookmarks of frequently visited websites would likely be surprised and any establishment terry in or leftist in particular would likely be shocked and shudder in disgust now with this general perspective and outlook on things revisionists such as Murray and then in his footsteps also myself are regularly charged contemptuously as some nutty conspiracy theorists to this charge Murray would typically respond first put bluntly and sarcastically even if one were a certified paranoid this cannot be taken as proof that no one was actually after you and your money after all and second and more systematically conspiracies are of course less likely of the larger the number of supposed conspirators also it is naive to assume the existence of just one big org encompassing conspiracy run by one or powerful group of conspirators but conspiracies often rival or even contradictory conspiracies that is confidential efforts of various groups of people acting in concert in the pursuit of some common goal are indeed an ever present feature of social reality as any action such conspiracies can succeed or they can fail and can lead to consequences that were unintended by the conspirators but realistically speaking most if not all historical events are more or less exactly what some identifiable people or group of people acting in concert intended them to be indeed to assume the opposite is to assume incredibly that history is nothing but a sequence of unintelligible events and accidents moreover in learning from Murray about the necessity of complimenting austral libertarian theory with revisionist history so as to gain a complete realistic picture of the world and worldly affairs i also receive constant training from him in the art of prudent and judicious judgment and evaluation of people actions and events pure theory allows us to make rather clear-cut judgments of true or false right or wrong and effective leading to the goal intended or ineffective but many if not most actions and events provoking or eliciting our judgment do not fall into the category of matters that can be evaluated in this simple yes or no matter we are surrounded or better encircled by a class of people politicians and state agents that they in and they out renders and enforces decisions that are systematic that is systematically impact and affect our property and consequently our entire conduct of life without our consent and against our explicit protestation we are confronted by an elite of rulers and confronted with politicians and political decisions then our judgment concerns the evaluation of at best second best the question is not true or false right or wrong effective or ineffective rather it is this given that political decisions are per se false wrong and ineffective which of these decisions is less false wrong and effective and comparatively closer to the truth the right and the good and which person represents a lesser evil or a greater one than another such questions do not allow for a scientific answer because answering them involves the comparative evaluation of countless immeasurable and incommensurable variables and in any case newly discovered facts about the past or future developments may well reveal any such judgment as mistaken but the answer is also not arbitrary what is true right and effective is given as fixed points and reasons must be supplied whether based on logic or empirical evidence for locating various second bests as closer or more distant to such points rather judgment making in matters such as these is a difficult art much like entrepreneurship is not a science but an art and just as some people are good at entrepreneurship and others bad indicated by monetary profits or losses so are some people good at judging political events and actors and others bad gaining or losing in reputation as wise or prudent judges now Murray was of course not unfailing in his judgments during the late 1960s and early 1970s for instance he misjudged the entire war stand of the new left as more principled than is actually wars something that he afterwards readily admitted as a mistake and I know of at least one rather personal case where Joey's judgment was better and more on the mark than his but this notwithstanding I have not encountered anyone of sounder and subsequent subsequently vindicated judgment than Murray now with this I want to come to a second major lesson I learned during my long association with Murray while the first lesson in revisionism concerned matters of practice and method the second lesson concerned an existential matter before I met Murray I knew of course that he was a radical outsider in a predominantly leftist liberal academia and I expected and I was willing to accept for myself that this would involve some sacrifices that is that one would have to pay a price for being a rospardian not only but also in terms of money but I was quite surprised to realize how high this price was I knew that Brooklyn polytechnic was not a prestigious university yet I expected Murray to occupy their comfortable well-paying post moreover at the time I still fancied the United States as Sebastian and Bolvark of free enterprise and consequently expected that Murray as a foremost intellectual champion of capitalism and the personified anti-cesus of Marx would be held in high esteem if not in academia then certainly outside of it in the world of commerce and business and accordingly be rewarded with a certain degree of influence in fact at Brooklyn polytechnic Murray occupied a small grungy and windowless office that he had to share with a history professor in Germany even research assistants enjoyed more comfortable surroundings not to speak of full professors Murray ranked among the lowest paid full professors at his school indeed my german national science foundation grant at the time a heisenberg scholarship turned out to be considerably higher than Murray's university salary something that I was too ashamed to reveal to him after I had discovered it and Murray's apartment in Manhattan large and filled to the ceiling with books was dark and run down certainly nothing like the penthouse that I had imagined him to occupy now this situation improved significantly with his move in 1986 at the age of 60 to Las Vegas and UNLV while my salary went down there as compared to my previous compensation Murray's went sharply up but was still well below 100k and he would could afford to buy a roomy but Spartan house even as the holder of an endowed chair at UNLV however Murray did not have command of any research assistants or a personal secretary yet Murray never complained or showed any bitterness or signs of envy but always plugged along joyfully and pushed ahead instead with his writings this was a hard lesson for me to learn and I'm still having difficulties following it at times apropos Joey and Murray once told me laughingly how at the time when they were still dating both had expected the other to be a good catch Joey Joey because Murray was Jewish and Murray because Joey was Gentile only to then find out that they were both wrong in their expectation moreover despite his towering achievements as an intellectual champion of free market capitalism Murray never won any prizes awards or honors to speak of that he did not win a Nobel prize in economics was not surprising after all the great Mises also did not win it but in the US alone there exist existed dozens of institutions think tanks foundations business associations research centers and universities that profess their dedication to free markets and liberty and yet none of them ever awarded Murray any significant prize or honorary award all the while they show our people with money and awards who had done little more than to suggest daringly some incremental reform such as let's say lowering the marginal tax rate from 35 to 30 percent were cutting were cutting the budget of the EPA by some percentage points or who had simply expressed their personal love of freedom and free enterprise often loudly and emphatically enough none of this faced Murray in the slightest indeed he expected nothing else for reasons that I still had to learn what Murray realized and I still had to learn was that the most vociferous and ferocious rejection and opposition to austral libertarianism would not come from the traditional socialist left but rather from these very self-proclaimed anti-socialist pro-minimal state pro-private enterprise and pro-freedom outfits and their intellectual mousepieces and above all from what has become known as the Beltway libertarians they simply could not stomach the fact that Murray had demonstrated with plain logic that their doctrines were nothing but inconsistent intellectual clap trap and that they were all to use Mises's verdict vis-à-vis Milton Friedman and his company a bunch of socialists socialist notwithstanding of course their vehement protestations to the contrary for as Murray argued once you admitted the existence of a state any state defined as a territorial monopolist of ultimate decision making in every case of conflict including conflicts involving the state itself then all private property had been effectively abolished even if it remained provisionally as a state grant normally private and all of that had been replaced instead by a system of collective or rather state property state any state means socialism defined as the collective ownership of factors of production the institution of a state is praxeologically incompatible with private property and private property based enterprise it is it is the very antithesis of private property and any proponent of private property and private enterprise and must as a matter of logic be an anarchist in this regard as in many others Murray was unwilling to compromise or intransigent as his detractors would say because in theory in thinking compromise is impermissible in everyday life compromise is a permanent and ubiquitous feature of course but in theory compromise is the ultimate sin a strict and absolute no no it is not permissible for instance to compromise between the two incompatible propositions that one plus one equals two or that one plus one equals three and accept that it is 2.5 either some proposition is true or it is false there can be no meeting in the middle of truth and falsehood now here regarding Murray's uncompromising radicalism a little anecdotal told by Ralph Reiko seems apropos to quote Ralph Murray was someone special I recognize that fact the first night I met him it was after the Mises seminar a body of mine and I had been invited to attend and afterwards Murray suggested we have coffee and talk my friend and I were dazzled by the great Mises and Murray naturally was pleased to see our enthusiasm he assured us that Mises was at least the greatest economy of the century if not the whole history of economic thought as far as politics went though Murray said lowering his voice conspiratorially well when it comes to politics some of us consider Mises a member of the non-communist left and Ralph concludes this by saying yes it was easy to see we had met someone very special unlike Murray quite a few individuals who had learned essentially everything they ever knew from Murray in particular from his man economy in state quite a few people were willing to make such intellectual compromises and they were richly rewarded for their intellectual flexibility and tolerance but that was not Murray and consequently he was and is still ignored excluded or denounced by the chieftains of the limited limited government free market industry and he was essentially left without any institutional support as a lone fighter until the arrival of Lou Rockwell and the Mises Institute I experienced this Rosebard phobia secondhandedly if you will for as soon as word had gotten out that the new German arrival was Murray's boy and also appeared rather intransigent I found myself immediately placed on the same black lists with him thus I had quickly learned the first important real life lesson of what it means to be a Rosebardian you will be black bald another lesson was in humility Joselano talked about that a little bit I have to add a few things Murray had a huge library and read and digested an enormous amount of literature and was consequently a humble man he was always reluctant and highly skeptical to assume or recognize any originality claims originality claims he knew are made most frequently by people with teeny libraries and little reading in distinct contrast Murray was highly generous in giving credit to others and he was equally generous in giving advice to anyone asking indeed on almost any conceivable subject he was prepared on the top of his head to provide you with an extensive bibliography as well he encouraged any sign of productivity even among his lowliest students while I was why I always try to follow this example I could not bring myself to go quite as far as Murray did because I sought and still think that Murray's humility was excessive that he was humble almost to a fault his students at Brooklyn Polytechnic for instance mostly engineering majors or as Murray described Miseser students at NYU packaging majors they had they had no idea who he was because he never mentioned his own works they were genuinely surprised to find out from me who their jolly professor was when I substituted teaching Murray's class while he was out of town and at UNLV the situation was not much different while I actively promoted him as his unofficial PR agent Murray continued in his self-deprecation although he had written on almost any imaginable subject in the social sciences he would when he suggested or assigned term papers to his students mentioned his own related writings if at all only as some sort of afterthought or upon specific request yet Murray's extreme modesty had also another unfortunate effect when we moved to Las Vegas in 1986 we had expected to turn UNLV into a bastion of Austrian economics at the time UNLV's basketball team the running rebels under coach Jerry Tarkanian were a national powerhouse always slightly scandalous but impossible to overlook now we had hoped to become the running rebels of economics at UNLV several students had transferred and enrolled at the university in anticipation of such a development but these hopes were quickly disappointed already at our arrival at UNLV the composition of the economics department had significantly changed and then majority rule democracy set in to balance the Austrian influence only one year later the department majority decided against our opposition to hire a known name marxist I urged Murray to use his position and reputation to interfere with the university's higher ups and prevent his appointment except for Jerry Tarkanian Murray was the only nationalized nationally recognized person at UNLV he helped the only endowed chair at the university we knew the university's president and provost socially and were on cordial terms with both of them accordingly I believed that there was a realistic chance to overturn the department's decision but I could not persuade Murray of his own powers that I thought he clearly had after this missed opportunity matters became worse the department continued to hire anyone but an Austrian or Austrian sympathizer our students were maltreated and discriminated against the department and the dean of the business college denied me tenure which decision was overruled by the university's provost and president not least because of massive student protests and the intervention of several university donors the department chairman wrote an outrageous nasty and insulting annual evaluation of Murray's professorial performance upon which the university administration forced the chairman to resign from his position as a consequence a second chance for us arose to turn matters around plans were developed and were discussed with the provost to split the department and established a separate economics department in the college of liberal arts this time Murray became involved but the initial momentum to our advantage had been lost in the meantime and after the first signs of resistance Murray quickly resigned and gave up he was not willing to take off his gloves and our secessionist movement project soon fizzled out in defeat only to quickly finish our UNLV saga after Murray's death in 1995 I continued working at UNLV for another decade in an increasing hostile environment the once protective university administration had changed and I felt ever more unappreciated and out of place even my great popularity among students was used against me as proof of the great danger emanating from my teaching in 2004 many of you have heard this I became embroiled in a scandal in a lecture I had to hypothetically suggested that homosexuals on average and owing to their characteristic lack of children had a comparatively higher degree of time preference that is of present orientation a crybaby student complained and the and the university's affirmative action commissar immediately as if he had only waited for this opportunity initiated official proceedings against me threatening severe punitive measures if I were not too instantly and publicly recant and apologize intransigent as I was I refuse to do so and I must say I'm quite certain that it was only this steadfast refusal of mine to beg for forgiveness that after a full year of administrative harassment I ultimately emerged victorious from this battle with assault police and the university administration and the university administration suffered an embarrassing defeat a year later than I resigned from my position and left UNLV and the US for good now coming back to Murray naturally I was disappointed about the development at UNLV but they did not have the slightest effect on our continued cooperation maybe Murray had been right and more realistic all along and it was I who had suffered from too much useful optimism who knows and in any case there was one more important lesson about the larger scheme of things that I still had to learn whereas most people tend to become milder and more tolerant in their views as they grow older Murray grew increasingly more radical and less tolerant over time not in his personal dealings as I already emphasized in this regard Murray was and remained to the end a softy but in his speeches and in his writings this radicalization and increasing intransigence came in response to developments in the world of US politics at large and in particular was in the limited government free market industry and among the so-called libertarians assembled around Washington DC's Beltway there everywhere a slow yet systematic drift towards the left and leftist ideas could be observed a drift that ever since up to this day has only further gained in momentum and grown in strengths constantly new rights were discovered and adopted in particular also by so-called libertarians human rights and civil rights woman rights and gay rights the right not to be discriminated against the right to free and unrestricted immigration the right to a free lunch and free health care and the right to be free of unpleasant speech and thought Murray demolished all of this allegedly humanitarian or to use a German word good mention talk as intellectual rubbish and in demonstrating that none of these supposed rights were compatible with private property rights and that as libertarians above all people should know only private property rights that is the right of every person in the ownership of his physical body and the ownership of all external objects justly peacefully acquired by him can be argumentatively defended as universal and composable human rights everything except private property rights then Murray demonstrated again and again a phony non-universalizable rights every call for human rights other than private property rights is ultimately motivated by egalitarianism and as such represents a revolt against nature moreover more over Murray moved still further to the right in accordance with Erik von Künelt-Ledin's dictum that the right is right and the left is wrong in pointing out that in order to establish maintain and to defend a libertarian social order more is needed than the mere adherence to the non-aggression principle the ideal of the left or modal libertarians as Murray referred to them of live and let live as long as you don't aggress anyone else that sounds so appealing to adolescents in rebellion against parental authority and any social convention and control may be sufficient for people living far apart and dealing with each other and trading with each other only indirectly and from afar but it is decidedly insufficient when it comes to people living in close close proximity to each other as neighbors and cohabitants of the same community the peaceful cohabitation of neighbors and of people in regular direct contact with each other on some territory requires also a commonality of culture of language religion custom and convention there can be peaceful coexistence of different cultures on distant physically separated territories but multiculturalism cultural heterogeneity cannot exist in one and the same place and territory without leading to diminishing social trust increased conflict and ultimately the destruction of anything resembling a libertarian social order now if Murray had been ignored neglected or resented before by the usual suspects now with this stand against everything deemed politically correct he was vilified and met with undisguised hatred the by now only all too familiar litany of denunciatory terms followed Murray was a reactionary a racist a sexist an authoritarian an elitist a xenophobic a fascist and to top it all off a self-hating jewish nazi now Murray shrugged it all off indeed he laughed about it and indeed to the consternation of the smearbund as Murray referred to the united popular front of his anti fascist detractors his influence only grew and has continued to grow still further since his death it may not be widely recognized but without Murray there would be no Ron Paul as we know him and I say this without wishing thereby to diminish or belittle Ron Paul's own personal role and extraordinary achievements in the slightest there would be no Ron Paul movement and there would be no popular or as the smearbund prefers to say no populist libertarian agenda as for me my own views radicalized too along with Murray's my democracy the god that failed was the first major documentation of this intellectual development and if anything my radical intolerance regarding anything left libertarian and politically correct correct has been growing still ever since almost needless to say that I too then have been awarded the same and even a few extra honorary titles by the smearbund as Murray except for the self-hating jewish stuff yet I had learned to shrug it off too as I had seen Murray do it and as Ralph Reicho had always encouraged and continued to advise me in addition remembering a popular german saying helped me feel fine feel air many enemies much honor and indeed the ongoing success of my own property and freedom society which is now in this 12th year helped and conducted in a genuinely rospartian spirit has demonstrated the utter failure of all defamation campaigns directed at me if anything they have helped rather than hindered me and attracting an ever larger circle of intellectual friends affiliates and supporters I should add that during the last decade or so under the wise and strict guidance of my lovely wife Gulchan I have also made some strides in combining uncompromising intellectual radicalism with a certain degree of personal loveability even though I must admit that nature and natural dispositions have prevented me from coming anywhere close to Murray in this regard I have said far too little here about Lou and I apologize but I must say apart from Murray Lou has played a tremendously important role in helping me become the man that I am today and to Murray who I'm sure is watching us today from up high I say thank you Murray you are my hero I shall not look upon his like again and I hope you are happy with your student I always felt tremendous joy when you told me great hunts utter boy and even if I can hear can't hear you right now nothing would give me greater pleasure than if you said it again right now up there where the kings of thought are gathered thank you very much


Hey everyone, this is Dan. The banking stocks have dropped a lot in the last two months because of the failures of the Silicon Valley Bank, signature bank, First Republic Bank, and Credit Suisse. Many investors are worried that other banks might fail also. There is, however, one bank, the SoFi Bank, which has been growing and is in a very solid financial situation compared to the other banks. This might be a good opportunity to buy SoFi stock on the cheap. In this video, I will show you why the price of SoFi can possibly double within the next couple of years. First of all, let's look at how SoFi has been trending in the last year. Compared to the broad market, QQQ is up 8%, the SPI ETF is up 3%, and the Banking ETF XLF went down 4.8%, SoFi went down 9.4% in the last year. The reason why SoFi has dropped more than the broad market and dropped more than the banking sector in general is probably because SoFi is a relatively new bank. They got their regulatory approval to become a national bank just in January of 2022. So far, they have not been making a profit yet. The revenues and EPS trends, however, are saying that they will be profitable in 2023, which is the main reason why I bought SoFi shares. If you look at the last 10 days, SoFi went through this dramatic dip on May 1st right after the Q1 earnings announcement. I believe this is due to the sell on the news mentality. The bank actually reported pretty good revenues and earnings. I will go into the details of the Q1 report in the next few minutes. SoFi bank's official name is SoFi Technologies. They are an online bank. They have three operations, lending, technology platform, and financial services. In the Q1 earnings report, they show that they had record gap and adjusted net revenue for the first quarter of 2023. And their net revenue was up 43%. Their adjusted EBITDA of $76 million was up 772% year-over-year. Their total members was up 46% year-over-year. And their total products were up 46% year-over-year. Management raised their full year 2023 guideline. So everything looked very positive. When you look at the chart for the quarterly revenues, you can see that it's been growing steadily. The quarterly ETF started with a big negative number here, but has been progressively getting closer to zero. And they are about to break even and start turning a positive EPS by the end of 2023. When I plotted the quarterly revenues and costs for SoFi and extrapolated the lines into the future, I see that SoFi will most likely become profitable around July of 2023. This is one of the reasons why I believe it is a good time to buy SoFi stock. If you like what you've seen so far, I'd like to suggest for you to click the like, subscribe and notification button that'll enable you to get notified when I publish my next video. It'll also encourage me to make more videos like this in the future. Thank you very much. We have a lot of interesting stuff to cover. Let's continue. There are more positive points about a bank. I will cover them in the next few minutes. These are financial charts from the Better Investing Stock Selection Guide database. The black line is SoFi. The blue line is the industry average. As you can see, SoFi's sales have been growing much faster than the industry average. The pre-tax profit on a sale has been growing also faster than the industry average. The debt to capital ratio has improved in the last couple of years and is now as good or better than the industry average. The return on equity is a little lower than the industry average for now, but hopefully that'll improve in the next few months as they start generating positive EPS. Let's look at how much SoFi is worth. I started with checking the PE ratios for the leading banks. I also looked at Block and PayPal, the two very large online financial companies. We can see that the PE ratios range from 6.3 to 26. Those are the online players Block and PayPal commanding the higher PE ratios. You remember the chart that we showed a few seconds ago for SoFi? I extrapolated that chart all the way to the end of 2024. I then added up the projected net income for 2024 and calculated the EPS based on the number of shares outstanding today. I assume a PE ratio of 5, which is very conservative compared to the PE ratios of these other financial entities. I arrived at the calculated stock price of $20.67 for the end of 2024. Based on these calculations, I projected a very conservative price of $14 a share for SoFi to be reached by the end of 2024. Let's see what the professional analysts have been saying about SoFi. Compared to the last time I looked at this chart, which was April 11, 2023, the closing price went down a little bit from $5.97 to $5.47. My target remains the same at $14 a share by the end of 2024. Yahoo Business lowered their average price target from $7.88 to $7.5 and keeping everything else the same. Blue is neverlayer actually upgraded SoFi's fundamental rating from a C to a B. TipRanks.com lowered their average price target from $8.2 to $7.63 and lowered their low price target from $6.5 to $5. CNN Money lowered their median price target from $7.75 to $7. Overall, the changes were not very significant. Since 2022, five analysts initiated their ratings on SoFi, indicating that the bank is getting more attention from the investment community. There were two upgrades between May and September of 2022 and a recent downgrade on May 2, 2023. One of the reasons for the downgrade is probably because the management did not have a strong enough guidance compared to the expectation of some of the analysts. But overall, the management is still predicting that the bank is going to start generating a positive EPS by the end of the year. Let's address the market concerns first. First of all, the recent bank problems after the failures of Silicon Valley, Signature Bank, First Republic Bank and Credit Suisse are affecting the stock prices of the other banks. And people are worried that some of the other banks might fail because of the continued interest rate hikes by the Fed, which caused the bank's long-term investments to depreciate in values. And SoFi stock dropped 22% in the three days after the Q1 earnings announcement. Although SoFi actually beat both the top and bottom line estimates. Nevertheless, it's a cause for concern. SoFi now expects that 2023 adjusted net revenue of $1.95 billion to $2.02 billion, which is up from its previous range of $1.925 to $2.00 billion. At worst, the company's annual revenue could fall below the average analyst's estimate of $1.97 billion, and that's one of the reasons why the stock price fell after the Q1 earnings report. The other reason, of course, is the sell on a news mentality I mentioned earlier. With people worrying about bank failures, I decided to do more research on this topic. The downfall of Silicon Valley Bank was mainly due to the Fed raising interest rates by more than 5% in the last year. The securities held by the banks that they bought more than a year ago when the interest rate was very low are, therefore, worth a lot less money when the banks try to sell these securities today. Based on GAAP, the generally accepted accounting principles, the banks are supposed to classify the securities they hold into these two categories, available for sale or held to maturity. For the available for sale securities, the banks are supposed to report on their income statements that unrealized losses due to these securities. They don't need to report unrealized losses for securities that are marked as held to maturity. Let's see how SoFi Bank classified their securities compared to Silicon Valley Bank and JP Morgan Chase. From this chart you can see that SoFi Bank classified 100% of its securities as available for sale. They're not hiding anything under the held to maturity category. Whereas Silicon Valley Bank only classified 35% of its securities as available for sale and JP Morgan Chase classified 33% of the securities as available for sale. If you look at their unrealized losses as compared to their net incomes, SoFi Bank's unrealized losses due to these available for sale security is only 2% of the net income. Of course, they have a negative net income. That's why it's a negative 2%. Whereas Silicon Valley Bank, the unrealized losses were 853% of the net income. That's a huge number. And JP Morgan Chase, their unrealized losses were 58% of the net income. That's for 2022. To sum it up, I believe the way SoFi Bank is accounting for these securities is very conservative. They are already showing the worst case scenario in the income statement. They're not hiding any unrealized losses under the held to maturity category. Silicon Valley Bank, on the other hand, had a taking time bomb with huge amounts of unrealized losses compared to the net income. The Silicon Valley Bank time bomb eventually exploded when customers started to withdraw vast amounts of money that caused the bank to turn unrealized losses into actual realized losses. In its final days, Silicon Valley Bank probably had to sell some of the securities that were marked as held to maturity as well. From this chart, we can see that SoFi Bank is in even better shape than JP Morgan Chase when it comes to unrealized losses. There are other indications that tell us SoFi is a much stronger bank than Silicon Valley Bank. First of all, SoFi's total deposit has been growing in 2022, while total deposited Silicon Valley Bank was dropping quickly in 2022. 90% of the SoFi deposits are under $250,000 per person per account and therefore insured by FDIC and over 95% of the Silicon Valley Bank accounts were uninsured. SoFi's unrealized losses are 0.1% of the deposits and SVB's unrealized losses were almost 9% of the total deposit. SoFi Bank has some other strengths as well. Their unbalanced sheet, delinquency and charge off rates are still below the pre-COVID levels. SoFi manages delinquency risk by maintaining extremely high credit standard. The weighted average FICO of their borrowers is $730,000 and they have a hard cut off at FICO score of $680,000 below which they would not lend at all. And SoFi purchases hedges against interest rate movements and that's why the unrealized losses have been so low and SoFi checking and saving members will be able to protect the deposits with access to up to $2 million of FDIC insurance because of this cooperative partnership that they established with some other banks. Recently, as of May 5th of 2023, the CEO of SoFi, Antonin Nato, bought 30,000 shares of stock and that's a great show of confidence from the CEO. What are my strategies in light of all these? First of all, I bought and sold SoFi shares since April of 2023 and have made a small profit and I bought SoFi shares again right after the March CPI numbers were released on April 12th, 2023. I might buy more shares if the price continues to recover and I'll notify my Twitter subscribers if I do so. At this point, I'd like to remind you to subscribe to my Twitter account which is DanMarketL in addition to subscribing to my YouTube channel and if you like what you've seen so far, I'd like to suggest that you click the like, subscribe and notification button. Also, as usual, I very much welcome your comments, questions and suggestions.


You better lock your phone I'm looking in the mirror I'm taking a ticket, you're going in the mirror I'm sorry if it's touching the mirror I'm looking in the mirror You better lock your phone


So you've seen us running the new NY15 STI Round Bathurst here. Amazing experience for everybody to take our standard road car around here and this is where the roller coaster starts. Down to the great turn it in a little bit on the ripple stream out to the wall again. 150 we're doing cross top line left hand 140 it may taint it beautifully through the corner. All right here comes the skyline ordering you excited he's not looking perfect in the fourth close to the wall down onto the ripple stream into third this is the famous diva load up the car there we go short shift into fourth how's that so far good do we go down to the forest elbow into third get your line right bit of slower traffic and then we kick off down conrod straight the longest rate on the track and by the time we hit the chase we do it about 220 in this awesome STI.


The topic I wanted to talk about today is how we measure success. How we measure success in this space, I think, says a lot about what our individual goals are. It also says a lot about how our ecosystem, our environment, is changing over time. I ask people this question quite often. I ask, how would you measure success in this space? Whether we are talking about Bitcoin, open public blockchains, and other cryptocurrencies in general, what does it mean to be successful? When do we know that we are winning or have won this battle? When do we know that this technology has arrived? The answer I get really says a lot about the person I am talking with, because it is a highly personal answer. The silly answer is when the price goes to the moon. That is not a very good measure of success. It is not a good measure of success because that is not what we should be aiming for. Again, that is what a lot of people get involved in this space for. A lot of people get involved at first because they anticipate or have heard that this is a fantastic get-rich-quick scheme. Then they discover over the next harrowing weeks, or sometimes just days, that it can also be a fantastic get-poor-quick scheme. As they branch out into obscure altcoins they have never heard of, trade based on panic, start trying to cut their losses and blow all of their investment away. If you got into this space to get rich, you may succeed, but you probably won't. That is not a very good motivation. Fortunately, if you have a strong local community, what happens is, when the price goes shooting up across the cryptocurrency space, a lot of new people start showing up to the meet-ups. With a little sparkle in their eye, you can tell they are very excited about this technology. No, they are not. They are very excited about the possibility of making some money. As soon as the price turns, which happens on average just after it climbs to the very high point, then most of them disappear. I have watched these ebb and flows since 2012. I remember the first meet-up I went to, where only one other person showed up. That other person was Adam B. Levine, the founder of the Let's Talk Bitcoin podcast, which we have now hosted 386 episodes since 2013. It is the longest-running podcast in the space. I met him at the Napa Valley meet-up of the local Napa Valley Bitcoin community, which was Adam and me. I wasn't in Napa. I was just traveling there. It was a very sad meet-up. Fast forward about a year later, and that same meet-up has 50 people showing up on a weekly basis. About a year after that, there are only five. If you follow these trends, you will notice that there are space ebb and flows, and the price tends to attract a lot of new people. The trick with community is to get people who join for all the wrong reasons and help educate about the technology. Mostly by conveying why you are interested in this technology. Right now, if you got into this space in late 2017, to get rich and invest some point between October and December of 2017, and you are still here, clearly you are not here for the money. You have weathered the storm. We are on the other side of that mountain. Things are looking pretty grim comparatively. If you are still here, that means you have another motivation. That is great, because now you can start talking to the people around you and in your community about why you are still interested in this technology. What do you think it will do? For me, the important characteristics of open public blockchains have nothing to do with money. They have a lot to do with decentralizing trust. They have a lot to do with creating open environments that are borderless and global, operate across the world. That can create opportunities for people to engage in commerce and other trusted transactions in an open way, without restrictions. To me, it is about changing the architecture of one of the fundamental technologies we have in society, which is money. Possibly a few more related to that, for example, with smart contracts, law, and justice systems, contracts. That is what drives me with this technology. I have this crazy idea that this technology can change the world. We can in fact see a world where access to this technology changes people's lives, especially in places where there is very little access to financial services, access to fair systems, open systems, the ability to record the truth, the ability to transact without trust, the ability to kick out intermediaries from every commercial transaction, the ability to get rid of organized criminals who happen to have a banking license and are robbing people blind. Which, of course, is not as much of a problem in Ireland, but it certainly is a problem in the vast majority of the world. To me, those things are important. I measure success a bit differently. When I ask people, how do you measure success with this technology, I think the most common answer I get is mainstream adoption. If most of the people around me are using this technology, if I can use it to buy something from the local shop, then I think this is now succeeding. That is the measure of success. It is a very common measure of success that a lot of people talk about.  You don't have to say, do you take Bitcoin or Ether, Litecoin, Monero, or something else. They obviously do. That is the vision. That is how most people think about this. Alongside Visa, MasterCard, Cash, Euros, perhaps US dollars, you could pay in your local shop with one of these weird cryptocurrencies. Most importantly, it would no longer be weird.  Being there, done that. If you follow up questions, another measure of success is that the system maintains its fundamental principles. It leads to societal change, it creates freedom for people. People use it to free themselves from a banking system that is inflexible. We are able to bank the unbanked or de-bank all of us, as you've probably heard me say. This system allows us to introduce more fairness into commerce. It gives less power to corporations, more power to individuals. Some more idealistic goals for success. If you stop for a moment and think about it, you realize that those two goals are fundamentally at odds. If the measure of success is mainstream adoption, then maintaining the principles that made us interested in this technology doesn't actually happen. The reason is that mainstream adoption means adoption by people who don't care about these principles. The vast majority of people around you. How many people in here care about privacy enough to sacrifice some convenience on a daily basis? How many of the people you know use the same password on every website? How many people here would never share their private information on Facebook? How many people around you do you know who think Facebook is the internet and haven't ever left that space? Now, vote based on what they see there. The problem is that mainstream adoption dilutes principles. The mainstream doesn't share your principles, it doesn't share your motivations. You're not the mainstream. You're the weirdos who are into Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. We all are. That's okay. This isn't a mainstream thing. It's important that we recognize that when we have some principles that we really care about, we can still affect change in the world, even while those principles are being diluted. I want to talk about what success looks like from my perspective, having seen a couple of disruptive technologies in the past. Emerge, disrupt, and then get absorbed into mainstream use. I think it's important to see that the measure of success isn't necessarily exactly what you think it is. It's not as obvious as it might seem. Let me start by asking a question. How many of you here use the Linux operating system? For those who didn't raise your hand, all of you use the Linux operating system every single day.  It's in the little robots you bought for your kids, in your loan more. It's in every Android phone. It's in Windows now. But that's not how it started. Linux operating system was started in 1991 by a Finnish student by the name of Linus Torvalds, who had a crazy idea. At the time, he was too poor to afford to buy a license for one of the commercial, Unix-like operating systems, the very powerful operating systems, that were made by companies like IBM, AT&T, and Sun Microsystems, and sold to other powerful corporations for thousands of dollars of licensing fees per year. That's how operating systems worked at the time. This Finnish student had an idea. He thought, how about I write my own?  The Unix operating system that AT&T created in the 1960s under Bell Labs, and then has been built by these giant corporations, is the operating systems that run the space program, the mainframes of all of the banks. This is seriously heavy-duty commercial operating system software. Yet this 18-year-old says, let me write my own. Most of the people around him treat him exactly as you would, your cousin cleaners who suddenly says, I'm going to build my own rocket and colonize Mars on my own. They're like, yeah, okay. And yet he did. Three years later, maybe four years later, I downloaded an alpha pre-beta version of that operating system from his university file server, from his home directory, onto 200 floppy disks, and installed it on my own personal PC, and it barely worked. I was elated because I as a student had a Unix operating system on a personal computer that I could control, the same thing that they had at the university, just as powerful. He had put together a group of programmers and built it. At the time, if you ask people, what is the point of an operating system that is completely open, free for anyone to use, where anyone can use it to innovate, and build systems as small as embedded microcontrollers, all the way up to running the biggest supercomputers on the planet? They would say, well, success would be if all of the corporations used it. Success would be if we put all of those other operating system companies out of business. Success would be if nobody paid for an operating system like that again. And on that measure, ironically, Linux succeeded in all of those things. AT&T no longer makes operating systems. IBM no longer makes operating systems. Even Microsoft really no longer makes working operating systems. Now they support Linux, their greatest foe. Linux now runs everything from the smallest Raspberry Pi computer that you can buy for $30, then you can use it to run your sprinkler system in your garden, all the way to every single one of the world's top 100 supercomputers. They all run Linux. Linux is everywhere. And yet, if for a moment you thought that mainstream adoption meant that your mom uses Linux and knows that she's using Linux, or your uncle uses Linux, and they know they're using Linux, in that measure it failed. Nobody knows they're using it. It's not branded. Nobody uses it on their desktop apart from a few weirdos. Yes, me again, and a few others in the audience, I'm guessing. Who uses Linux on their desktop? Linux on desktop. Okay, yeah, you can see the correlation, right? That's how they get you. It's a gateway drug. You start with Linux on the desktop. Eventually you're in an amphitheater full of cryptocurrency weirdos. It's a slippery slope. The measure of success is not mainstream adoption. And it's not mainstream adoption in the way that you think it is. It's not mainstream adoption where everybody knows that this is part of their life, and it succeeded in that way. It's a much more subtle measure of success. Because what Linux did is it gave everyone the choice to run an operating system that's extremely powerful, and the freedom to run it without even knowing that they're running it because it's in their thermostat. But what it also meant is that anyone can build a thermostat and start a company that builds thermostats and use an extremely powerful, multi-threaded, robust operating system that has millions of different drivers for different pieces of hardware, and eventually every piece of hardware on the planet you can use with this operating system. It's open. Everybody's innovating around it. And so it breaks the monopoly of the big companies and gives that freedom of choice to everyone, to the point where they no longer know they're using it. I'll go a bit further back and talk about what does it mean to measure the success of the internet. Most of the people in this room are too young to remember a time before the internet. I was there. I not only remember this. I grew up in a country where we didn't have computers in my school, and I bought my own computer at age 10 and a half. Well, I bought. My mom bought me my own computer at age 10 and a half. Thank you, mom. And I started getting on the internet surreptitiously through an account that, legally speaking, I didn't own access to, because it was a university account at the local university, and I was 14. So anyway, the details aside, statute of limitations and all that, I got on the internet and it opened for me this whole world. I suddenly realized that if you got computers to talk to each other and they could collaborate using open protocols, this incredible flow of information could start happening.  And if you ask me, then, what is the measure of success for the internet, I would say everybody uses it, right? And not just that, but we break the back of monopoly publishers like the New York Times and the London Times and the Murdoch Empire of broadcasting and the flow of information from governments to citizens and despotic dictatorial regimes that censor their citizens and residents and give access to information to people who've never had it before. And maybe one day a farmer in Kenya with a mobile device will be able to read an encyclopedia written by a German student about their own president or something like that. I could imagine all of these scenarios. But what if we changed the measure of success and said, well, success would be that we had this very powerful decentralized network that gave us all access to information, then by that measure the internet has failed?  That's clearly not the cyberpunk vision of the future that we had hoped for. At the same time the internet is highly centralized with a few very important choke points onto which an entire surveillance infrastructure has been imposed so that all of that information is sucked up and processed in vast amounts and it becomes a panopticon. It sounds like a dystopian nightmare. By that measure of success the internet has failed. It's failed to deliver freedom. It's delivered. What is it delivering? It's delivering a new set of media moguls to replace the old set of media moguls without changing the architecture. I didn't want to switch Murdoch with Zuckerberg. That doesn't really solve the problem. The problem is changing the architecture of access to information. So if you look at that you might think the internet has failed. But it hasn't because it's not just Facebook. The internet is also mesh networks and relay networks and dark web and dark networks and peer-to-peer networks and Bitcoin. The internet is also wireless communications sent into North Korea. The internet is also WikiLeaks and whistleblowers. The internet is also citizen journalists and bloggers who challenge governments by revealing information they don't want revealed. We get to choose which internet we use. A lot of the people in this room are choosing to use the other internet, the free, decentralized, open internet. If you look at the big picture you might say we failed. If you look more closely you'll notice there's an engine of freedom and choice there that is still capable of bringing to birth these incredible innovations that are unexpected, radically disruptive, and unstoppable, like Bitcoin. It's still able to do that. So is the internet free or is it not? Is it open or is it not? Is it decentralized or is it not? It's both. It depends which part you're talking about. And it has achieved all of its goals. Even while a big chunk of the population didn't adopt those principles and simply replaced the old moguls with new moguls in order to get heavily filtered bullshit information delivered to them like a drip feed through a TV. Nothing changed. For some, everything changed for some. When people ask me, do you think that big corporations are going to start their own cryptocurrencies? Or do you think governments are going to start their own cryptocurrencies? And could they beat Bitcoin? Could they beat Ethereum? Could they beat the other open public blockchains and replace them with closed private blockchains? That's basically the same question about how do you measure success? What does it mean to go mainstream? So what does it mean to beat the open public blockchains at this game? Let's say Facebook releases their own coin. Okay? Facecoin. That sounds terrible. Anyway, so they release their own and you look at it and you ask the five basic questions. Is it open? Is it neutral? Is it borderless? Is it decentralized? Is it censorship resistant? And the answer is no, no, no, no and no. It is closed, it has borders, it's controlled by jurisdiction. It is not neutral, it is absolutely centralized, and it has censorship on it, because it must. So therefore, it fulfills none of the criteria of an open public blockchain that we care about. It doesn't fulfill any of the principles that we care about. The Irish government, through the central bank, releases error coin. And is it open? Is it borderless? Is it neutral? Is it censorship resistant? Is it decentralized? No, no, no, no and no.  So how do you deal with these phenomena? Because if as a measure of success you take mainstream adoption, which one do you think is going to be more popular? The free, open, neutral, borderless, decentralized bitcoin or other open public blockchain, where there are a few criminals, there are some weird QR codes. A lot of the people are wearing ponytails for some reason. And they have a lot of tattoos. And if you do the wrong transaction, there's no customer service to call. No, no, I'm sorry. This is a free, decentralized future. Your keys, your coins, no customer service. Nothing is reversible. With great freedom comes great responsibility. Isn't that what you wanted? No, that's not what we wanted. What we wanted was face coin, where every time you do 100 transactions, you get a little purple star. If you collect five purple stars, you get a free Frappuccino at Starbucks. All I have to do is sell my soul, all of my privacy, fund war criminals around the world somehow indirectly, because it always ends up being something like that, and make Zuckerberg king of the universe. That didn't seem like the original cypherpunk plan. So, if the measure of success is going mainstream, realize that a whole bunch of the mainstream is far more interested in using the loyalty reward points of air coin, or face coin, or some other crap coin that is centralized and controlled. They will not follow your principles. That means that, in many cases, the local chippy won't take bitcoin, even while they do take face coin, and apple coin, and whatever other corporate concoction is created. We don't beat PayPal, we don't beat Visa, we don't change the banking system by doing what they do, by becoming them only weirder. We have to realize that in countries like Ireland, where the banking system works and the payment networks work, the need for a decentralized currency like this isn't quite there. You don't need bitcoin. Ask of Venezuela, and if they need bitcoin, they need it. Someone from Argentina or Brazil, Ukraine, Greece, Cyprus, they may need it. People who live under despotic governments, people who live under dictatorships, people who are fighting revolutions, people who are dealing with currency controls and corrupt banks, and the inability to trade internationally, people who do not have sufficient documentation to open a bank account, people trying to transmit money to their relatives across borders and conflict areas, they need it. They need something that is free and open and borderless and censorship resistant. They need that for smart contracts, they need that for privacy coins, they need that for currency itself. But you can buy efficient chips with a euro. You don't need to use bitcoin to do that. If mainstream adoption means adapting so that we release the principles, we start diluting the principles, then we lose the game. That is not a measure of success, that is a measure of failure. Measure of success to me is keeping the principles, remaining free, open, decentralized, neutral and censorship resistant, while becoming available to as many people who need it around the world. That is my measure of success. That measure of success is very different from what we see in our industry. As you may have noticed over the last couple of years, especially over the last year, a lot of new money and a lot of new suits have showed up in the cryptocurrency space. They talk the same words, but the bottom line is that they don't want to change the architecture of the financial system. They don't want to break the monopolies, crush the cartels, break open access to financial systems, give economic inclusion to as many people as possible. They simply want to replace the old layer of the 1% with themselves. The architecture is fine if I'm on top. They do not share your measure of success, perhaps. What I'm reaching at is that we have to understand that there will be closed systems, centralized systems, and those systems will be faster and cheaper. Another measure that you commonly see in our space, which is very pernicious, is market capitalization. How many people have heard that term or seen that term in relation to Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other cryptocurrencies? Right. How many people have heard the term the Dominance Index? The Dominance Index is the measure of what percentage of the total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies is owned by Bitcoin. Here's why this is not a good metric. Here's why we shouldn't look at that metric for any of the cryptocurrencies. Market capitalization tells you which is the richest cryptocurrency. I can guarantee you that there will be cryptocurrencies that are richer, bigger, and more broadly accepted than Bitcoin. It's very easy to do that. All you have to do is sacrifice the principles. You can make something that is cheap, fast, centralized, controlled, and censored. Then you can pump money into it and make it mainstream. Facecoin will be bigger than Bitcoin. Fentcoin will be bigger than Bitcoin. How ripple may be bigger than Bitcoin sometime soon? What do the banks have that we don't? Ultimately, this is about changing the architecture of finance, at least to me. What do the banks have that we don't? Money. What's the worst way to measure success in our industry? Who has the biggest amount of money? Well, we've already lost that game. They have all of it. They printed it from nothing and controlled the creation process. Their entire industry is rent-seeking. Of course, they have money.  They don't have any of those things, but they have plenty of money. If you wanted to really screw with a nascent disruptive industry, what better way to drive everyone bananas than to persuade everyone that the measure of success for this new disruptive industry is the fuel of the status quo? We will measure the new disruptive industry by the metric that we have the most of already, which is money. Being the biggest cryptocurrency is worthless. If, in order to get there, you sacrifice being the free cryptocurrency, if you sacrifice liberty and decentralization and neutrality to become the biggest, all you've done is recreated the status quo, just replace the people at the top. Then, that, to me, is a measure of failure. We are not going to be the biggest. What I hope, especially because of how difficult it is to change this system, which is a great feature, by the way, because everyone is trying to change it right now, especially to remove these pesky freedom-related principles of the system, what I hope we are, is not the biggest. I hope we are the freest system of commerce on the planet, the most inclusive system of commerce on the planet, the most open system of commerce on the planet. If that means we're not the biggest, great, I'll take that. If you want to win, if you care about the principles, if you're still here after the price dropped and you really want to see this technology project succeed, the most important thing you have to keep in mind is have a clear perspective of what the measure of success is, and the measure of success is liberty. Thank you.