First, uh, you know, what was the impact on capital markets of, uh, say, the last, uh, several years, um, of commission action? And then second, you know, how does that inform you, uh, in, in the most pressing priorities, uh, for the year ahead?

Well, I think, you know, the nearly 30 years I've been a corporate and securities lawyer, or actually I should say over 30 years, and then nearly 20 years here at the SEC, it's given me a pretty good baseline as to what the SEC typically does, regardless of who is the president.

And I can tell you, the last four years were a complete outlier to anything I've seen in that, that over three decades of time as a, a, a corporate and securities lawyer.

And it was unfortunate because I think we really went off track.

We became, instead of a regulator with our tripartite mission of protecting investors, maintaining fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitating capital formation, to more of a business conduct regulator, and even beyond, uh, that.

Um, all of a sudden, we were gonna somewhat micromanage, uh, whether you issued dividends or engage in share repurchases, what your cybersecurity looked like, uh, your supply chain management, human capital resources, uh, the makeup of your employee workforce, DEI at the board level, um-And not to mention greenhouse gas emissions, environmental issues, resource extraction, your mine safety record, all of these things, uh, um, how you, you paid your executives.

Um, we're supposed to be a disclosure agency, and that is something that we have hewed to regardless of whether this was during the Clinton administration in the '90s, George W. Bush, President Obama.

Um, so where do you see the SEC today, you know, with respect to this history? And, you know, what else do you think that we, we need to do to ensure that, uh, America's, uh, has leadership in the financial services, uh, in the years ahead?

Are we getting enough clarity? How quickly might we know what tokens are securities, for example?

We have a lot of ground to catch up.

The last four years in the Biden administration, we saw a lot of efforts to suppress crypto, at least in the United States.

That was one of the things that the president did I think it was the third day of this administration, January 23rd, when he issued that executive order with a clear goal.

We need to make the United States one of the global leaders in innovation in crypto and digital assets.

That was why one of the things I did immediately upon becoming the acting chairman was to name one of my fellow commissioners, Hester Peirce, who spent an awful lot of time talking to the crypto community.

You're going to be in charge of our efforts, leader of our crypto task force, and that now under our new chairman, Paul Atkins, has now pivoted into what we call Project Crypto.

Should it be dropped?