Are you kind of any more quantifiable than just the notion of a bubble not popping?

All right, I guess here's my oversimplified, I was afraid you were going to ask that.

For listeners, here's an example of what, in my mind, defines the bubble.

Open AI is not profitable.

Sam Altman has publicly stated that it won't be profitable until 2030, maybe 2029.

Meanwhile, I've seen some graphs.

OpenAI buys hardware from NVIDIA.

Anyone else, Lou, on that or any other on your list? I got one more and then we'll jump into Bitcoin.

Anything else to say about the shutdown? We got you covered.

So not specifically about the government shutdown, but another thing that was a government thing was Liberation Day, April 2nd, which caused a lot of market angst.

That's when tariffs were first going into effect.

The S&P 500 went down 19%, and there was so many predictions.

April of 2020, a little bit later that same month, Jamie Dimon stated that a U.S. recession was a likely outcome.

Consumers would stop spending, would see a great recession.

Towers would drive inflation, which would result in mass layoffs.

No, I'm still in

What are you thankful for?

All right, so I have a number of things, but the first one is, and this is much more recent, I am grateful for credit unions stepping up and helping out during the government shutdown.

And I say this for a somewhat selfish reason, which I'll explain in just a second.

But yeah, there's a typical skip of pay and loan modifications.

But many credit unions I've seen around the country offering things like paycheck assistance programs, interest-free loans with automatic repayment once direct deposit starts, meals for members, those members who are missing SNAP payments, getting gift cards to local grocery stores, donations to community food banks, which were being drawn down by all the federal workers who weren't getting paid just so much.

And banks are not doing that because it's not profitable for them.

to their shareholders.

God, he's on fire, man.

If they think of other credit unions as their competitors, does that erode the spirit of cooperation? I mean, I think the piece that I feel is such a strong differentiator here in the U.S.

And that was specific to a couple of countries that I was in a session with.

Interesting thing they did at World Credit Union Council is...

In parallel to a typical breakout session, they gathered people who wanted to attend this into groups of eight.

And you were put in a group of eight with other people who are like you.

So CEOs with other CEOs, staff with other staff, in my case, volunteers with other volunteers from different countries.

And that's where we discussed mergers and a shrinkage of number of credit unions as one of the biggest topics.

It's that last one that I've been totally fixated on in terms of open banking, but the fact that they're seeing common cause, that's pretty powerful.

It's supposed to, but the reporting requirement here is what really gets me.

Agree.

It seems like the information, though, is a lot more readily available than in the case of the Illinois Prohibition Act, where the burden that's placed on businesses or ISO to either change the routing or change the authorization amount into taxes plus tip versus the remainder for real-time interchange calculation or...

they left this rebate route in the Interchange Prohibition Act where the merchant basically brings the shoebox of receipts to presumably their merchant acquirer or a third party who specializes in, somebody who specializes in obtaining rebates for the interchange paid on tips and taxes.

To me, the ability to discern Wages versus tips in the first case that no tax on tips versus table to separate out taxes plus tip versus the rest of the credit card charge.

That seems like a big order of magnitude difference in data collection and data reporting.

What are you kind of focusing on there? I think, are there certain things that you've seen in the agenda that particularly kind of strike your curiosity?

Funny you mentioned that.