1983 FBF: Doing Business with Bitcoin & Central Banks vs Crypto-Currencies with Patrick Byrne CEO & Chairman of Overstock.com

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It is my pleasure to welcome Patrick Byrne to the show. You've probably heard that name. He's quite well known. He's the chairman and CEO of Overstock.com he is an American entrepreneur, e commerce pioneer, and he's just done some incredible things. Most recently he was in the news for his being the first major e tailer by a long shot to accept Bitcoin. And it's a fantastic opportunity to talk to him about that and some other things today. Patrick, welcome. How are you?

Jason, it's a real honor to be on your show.

Well, it's an honor to have you. And just to give our listeners a sense of geography, where are you located?

We are in Salt Lake City, Sandy, southern edge of Salt Lake City, Utah.

Fantastic. Well, so the decision for Overstock to accept Bitcoin, what was behind that?

Well, there are both business reasons and philosophical. The business reasons are easy. First of all, bitcoin, While only a tenth or two tenths of 1% of Internet revenue, now is growing, I believe at around 30% a month. There's that reason. And then in addition, we pay say 3% fees on credit cards, either between the credit card or the cost of fraud and the cost of people checking the fraud, et cetera, et cetera, comes to say 2 to 3% for a typical retailer, some 3 to 4%. You get to eliminate all that with Bitcoin. There's no fees to interchange fees, there's no fees to a credit card company. There's no fraud risk. For us, there's no chargeback risk. The risk that a customer says, oh, I got my sofa, but I'm going to tell Visa not to pay for it or something. So all that gets. So it's great on the business side and given that we're sort of a 1%, hopefully on our way to 2, 3% net margin business, the idea being that they would save 2 to 3% more is quite impactful on our bottom. In addition, and I'd say maybe the bigger reasons, or at least as big are the philosophical reasons, which are I'm not a fan of fiat money or central banking or fractional reserve banking, which all sort of go hand in hand. I'm one of those guys who have thought we should at least be. We should long ago have gotten rid of fractional reserve banking, gone to.

100% reserve backing and maybe even a gold based currency. And, and some years ago I looked into maybe even starting with an overstock, some sort of gold based currency where we held the reserves. Then I saw the Feds went after some other company who tried to do that because they really don't want people dealing gold.

And thinking that way. Bitcoin comes along and bitcoin really has a lot of the virtues of gold.

And so because of that I won't go on too long. Because bitcoin has so many of these virtues of gold, I got behind it and so that's why we first did so. Those are the two sets of reasons, the business reasons and the philosophical reasons.

Fantastic. Well, so first of all, I just want to ask you, you must have created some enemies here. I mean, think about it. MasterCard, Visa and American Express could stand to lose huge amounts of revenue. Of course, the most powerful people in the world who run the central banking cartel, you know, a lot of people are now learning unfortunately about the pitfalls of fiat money and the way people around the world are being impoverished by devaluation of their currencies and trade agreements and manipulations of fiat currencies and so forth. But just on the more simple and straightforward MasterCard, Visa, American Express side, have any of these card issuing clearinghouses have they said, hey, we're going to cancel overstock.com's account or anything?

No, they have not. I have made new enemies probably in those companies.

I haven't seen any signs of it yet. I'm on the alert for them. But my new enemies are going to have to stand in line behind all my old enemies.

I've been talking about the mafia for years. I've been Talking about Mafia infiltration of Wall street and its effect on the financial system. So there's a whole. They're going to have to stand in line.

Wow, I love that philosophy. Can you. I mean, you know, it's funny you talk about. I didn't know that you had anything to say about the Mafia infiltrating Wall Street. And I'll tell you, I have for at least 10 years now called Wall street the modern version of organized crime. So that's a very interesting.

Well, it's not just a version of organized crime.

It is organized crime.

Listen, it is organized crime. On July 24, 2011, Barack Obama signed an executive order declaring a national emergency on the grounds that organized crime, transnational organized crime, has infiltrated our financial system. And BO. Well, this is all the stuff I've been saying publicly since 2004, 2005 in particular. Where they've infiltrated is, I believe, the settlement system. But. And now it's, you know, you can just. Your listeners can go Google operation. I know people look at you weird when you talk about organized crime and the Mafia. Like, you watch too much Hollywood. I don't know if they think that there isn't any such thing. There actually is something organized crime, and it's really out there. You can, if you go to YouTube, I did a big talk about this in Washington in December. If you go to YouTube and search for my name and organized crime.

You'Ll see an hour and a half talk. Come up in front of a crowd in D.C. about this. All with nice PowerPoint that people say. So, yeah, organized crime has infiltrated Wall Street. Really? In the 1990s, you can Google the expression Operation Uptick. And if you Google that, you will see that the FBI in 2001 swept in, or 2000 swept in and made the largest mafia bust in US history. They rounded up 120 mafia figures in one day. And they were characters all over Wal. So the largest FBI arrest of organized crime in history occurred all across Wall street in one day. So I think it's just really bizarre when I talk about organized crime on Wall street and people look at me like, God, what are you, some kind of conspiracy theorist? Just read the newspaper.

You know, I gotta tell you, this whole conspiracy theorist way to be dismissive of people in the mainstream media has got to end. Because of course conspiracies exist. I mean, a conspiracy, Patrick, is nothing more than two people talking about doing something and other people not being included in the conversation. I mean, the United States was the result of a conspiracy. I Mean, what's so bad about that?

You got to remember that a lot of those mainstream talking heads have basically room temperature IQs.

Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday. Your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has hand picked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy.

They can't see anything. They can't. It's just amazing to me that these guys, how economically illiterate they are and just really, you know, illiterate and not unintellectual. Anti intellectual they are. You can't even have. I know a lot of these people. You can't even have a serious conversation with many of them. Now. Some of them are very, very sharp. So I mean, I could rattle off like Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone, Gretchen Morgenson at New York Times, Charles Gasparino, Cade Metz at Wired. There's a. Anyway, there are some sharp figures within the national media, definitely. But for the most part, when you're talking to these people, remember when you're talking to a journalist, you're talking to people often who are like around at the 20 to 30% mark in their respective. I mean, I read a study on this once in universities. You take the journalists by and large come out sort of the 20 to 30% level.

In terms of ranking within their class. And so you just have to remember that when you talk to these mainstream journalists who have zero imagination, can't even understand sort of what you would think of as basic economic arguments, they just look at you dumbfounded.

All right, now most of them are reading a few prefab questions or talking points and they just know very little about the subject. I mean, it is amazing to me to watch those talking heads on CNBC because I'm so interested in finance and just, it's just mind boggling. There's really, it's just a shallow. Television especially is the idiots medium. Like, it's just such sound bite. It's so short. It's so, it's just so shallow.

There's a couple of good ones. I agree, Bloomberg is quite good. Bloomberg and Fox Business are both really trying to set a new standard. CNBC is, you know, CNBC is for people who move their lips when they read People magazine. CNBC is. I have sources within CNBC and I've been on cnbc, but I have sources who tell me that there is a fax machine within cnbc. And every morning you get to see these journalists lined up in front of the fax machine and their respective hedge funds. And a hedge fund, each of those journalists is owned by some hedge fund. They're just faxing in basically the talking points for the journalists hit that day. So the hedge funds are giving them their talking points and trading in front of them. I like to quote Buffett, who says that if you ever sit down at a poker table and in 15 minutes you haven't figured out who the pigeon is, you're the pigeon. Well, if you're getting your information from CNBC and trading on any of that, you're the pigeon. You're trading on information that some hedge funds have fed them and traded in front of.

Yeah, yeah, Very interesting. Let's go back to the bitcoin thing for just a moment. Has your willingness to accept bitcoin, which is a great move, by the way. I mean, I love the move. Philosophically, I have concerns about bitcoin and let me just lay those out on the table. I hope it succeeds or I hope it opens the door for some ultimate cyber or cryptocurrency to succeed. However, I think the powers of governments and the central banks are going to do everything they can to squash it. That's just my opinion. Would love to hear yours on it. But, you know, I'd like to know, have you put pressure now on, say, Amazon.com to accept Bitcoin, or are they. Are there rumblings about it with the other big etailers?

Well, I am hearing things I can't say explicitly, but I do think that what we've done. Yes, especially if bitcoin goes on to become 1, 2, 3% of the market, then Amazon cannot cede that territory to us. So this will force Amazon's hand and you will see them adopt it. I can't imagine that they can't stand both the publicity we're getting and the fact that there's now a fraction of the market that can only shop at our site, not theirs. And the longer they wait and the more overstock and bitcoin become associated with each other, then the worst that's going to be for them. I do think that this is force in the hand and you'll see other large retailers accept it.

That's awesome. That's awesome.

It's a better mousetrap. It's a better mousetrap. A better mousetrap. Well, you build a better mousetrap, the world will be the path to your door.

You made the remark earlier, Patrick, about how you don't like fiat currencies. And I didn't ask you about that, but I don't like them either. But what, what's behind that? Why don't you like them?

Well, I'm a pro freedom guy and some people object to me using the phrase pro freedom to describe my beliefs. But I point out, look, there's a whole group of people in the political class now call themselves progressive. They've hijacked the word progress and they said that that's our, you know, what we believe in is progress. Well, if they can co opt the word progress and they get to own it by calling themselves progressive, I'm going to co opt the word freedom and say, well, what we believe in is pro freedom. If you believe in freedom, you want limited government. Now there are some people again who feel differently that believe their basic worldview is freedom comes from the government issuing freedom coupons. And if we only get a bigger government who can issue more freedom coupons, then we become more free. Well, that's not a good strategy. You want a limited government. If you believe in freedom, you want limited constitutional government. As Jeff said, constitutional government is founded in jealousy and not in confidence because it's jealousy that forces us to bind down governments with constitutions. Jealousy in the sense of doubt, suspicions, et cetera. So if you believe, if you're pro freedom, you want limited government. If you want limited government, you can't give government unlimited control over the money supply, which is what they get once you go to fractional reserve banking and central banking. The great thing about gold, I mean these guys, the anti freedom people, believe that which spreads across both parties. Basically the mainstream Republicans and Democrats believe that people who like gold like it fetishistically. Like there's something, John Maynard Keynes actually made an argument that it was like a fetish that made people like gold. I think that that's wrong. The real reason is for 5000 years mankind's stock of gold has been climbing at a rate of 2 or 3% per year. And there's nothing any government mandarin can do to whisk more gold into existence with a stroke of a pen. So if you tie your financial system to gold, your monetary base, then that constrains, that handcuffs the mandarins from trying to run the economy with their edicts, which is why of course, they hate it. Now. I've always dreamed that someday we would return to a gold based financial system, but it always seemed extremely unlikely. Then bitcoin comes along and bitcoin has that same feature in that it's limited and in this case not by physical quantity of anything like gold is, but Rather it's limited by the laws of mathematics. And so there's nothing any government mandarin can do to change the laws of mathematics. So it has that key virtue of gold.

And so I've also, I hope I've discovered why it is I don't like fiat currency, which lacks all these virtues.

Sure, sure, yeah, absolutely. That's an interesting point. And here's what really happens, I think as a result of government loving and having fiat currencies, it allows our politicians to pander and, and exploit class envy because then, then they can form a dependent class that's a, a permanent voting bloc. If they don't have access to fiat money, if we have sound money, the politicians can't do this. They can't create money out of thin air to pay people to vote for them. The pandering goes away and then the whole political process becomes much more honest, doesn't it?

Right. Central banking, fiat currency all goes along with big government. Big government needs this now. They have a tissue thin veil of arguments that the economy needs them, that it booms and busts unless they step in. And they try to manage things through.

Their central banking. I remember Buffett 30 years ago saying, believing you can manage the financial system or the economy by, by the money supplies, thinking that you can steer an 18 wheeler down a mountain road by sitting on the front bumper and sticking a straw in the sand and bending this way and that you can't, it's much too big. You see, what they can do is just, what it really does is it opens the door for just what you said. It lets them get a much bigger government than we would otherwise have. That bigger government pays off various constituencies and borrows the money from the teacher in one way or another, either through issuing bonds, or when they can't stop any more bonds down the world's throat anymore, issuing more bonds but paying for it out of the central bank, which is what we're doing now, which is a little bit like taking a checkbook out of your right pocket, writing yourself a million dollar check, putting it in your left pocket and going and buying a new car because you've just got a million dollar check in your left pocket. It's a really reckless, abominably reckless strategy. And it is really all about, ultimately it's all about political systems here, as you indicate, they veer towards paying off people who will vote for an imp off in different ways. Can be the defense, military, industrial complex, it can be other things, but that's what it's all about. And why Government wants that power.

Yeah, there's another one. I coined this term. At least I think I did. I call it the government entitlement complex.

So you got all the people that are receiving something from the government and they get something. You've got the pharmaceutical complex. I mean, there's so many of them that have their. You've got the agricultural complex that have their lives. Lobbyists that are just. They. They run the government. It's a joke.

Well, it is. I do want to, you know, I haven't gotten. I think that some of the people get entitlements. A lot of them deserve entitlements. And the old people and the people who served in the military and, you know, I do think that we are need to take care of basically three groups. Old people, sick people, and poor people. However, you've got it a. You can design much better institutions than what we have now, humble and freedmen. But beyond those three groups, there's a lot of entitlements. You know, there's corporate. Don't forget, there are corporate. Yeah, corporate entitlements, agribusiness, Wall Street. I mean, I mean, there's. It's the entitlement. When people hear entitlements, they think of Ronald Reagan's. What did he call her? The welfare queen or something. That's not the. They're not the problem. I mean, we could do better by how we provide education to do it, but that's what people think of when they hear entire.

But those people aren't the real problem. The problem is the vested corporate interests who have slashed themselves onto the public, you know, the public sugar feet. And they're just draining us.

Yeah, they most certainly are.

Well, Wall Street.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Very interesting. You know, I remember you would talk a lot about, you know, over the years, how long. You're the founder of Overstock, is that correct?

Yes.

And overstock is 1999. Was that the launch?

October 99, yeah.

Okay. And by the way, you know, congratulations on your incredible success. And I want to ask you about that in a moment because it's better.

To be lucky than smart. All I've shown is it's better to.

Be lucky than smart, better to be lucky than good any day of the week. But we can't count on that darn luck. So we'll take smart as a second smarter, ambitious as a second backup position. And I want to ask you about that in a moment. But you used to talk a lot. Maybe you still do. I'm not sure about how people Kept shorting overstock stock, and that was really wreaking havoc with your stock valuations. What was going on there? I mean, tell us about this.

Well, let me. Okay, love to. But let me point out two things. That was kind of the public spin that the mainstream press put on it. I actually was talking about the financial system in general, and even not shorting, but a specific type of activity called naked short selling, which sounds like short selling, but it's really a much different thing. It's a way of manipulating stock stock manipulation. And I now, I sort of became aware of this because I saw it going on in our own company and some certain things were happening.

And I got interested in the subject, and then I started investigating it. What I found was by 2005, I had figured out that there was a criminal syndicate of hedge funds on Wall street centered on a fellow named Steven Cohen and some very close associates of his who were all in this game together and were manipulating stocks and had journalists who they had essentially bought off who were publishing, like Bethany McLean publishing and keeping them apprised of when she was going to publish and things like this and that this real racket had emerged. And they had some officials at the SEC who, because of the revolving door, were, you know, were doing their bidding for them and such. So that's really what I was. And ultimately that organized crime was involved. Now, how it actually was being done, it involved an insider trading network. It involved techniques of insider trading which went along with the whole stock manipulation. Now, as soon as I came out and started talking about this, the mainstream financial progress, who are largely Chogis, they're largely shills for these kinds of characters, started spinning it as, oh, this guy's just mad the stock went down. That's all he's saying. Well, that became this smokescreen through which it got very difficult to push my message. However, then once 2008 happened. Oh, and I have been pointing out all this systemic instability that's created. Well, 2008 came along, and the SEC went from. From laughing at me to. They went and implemented exactly the things that we had said should be implemented. And then the largest investigation of Wall street began, and the largest insider trading investigation began, and they've now put 80, 90 people in jail, another couple hundred indictments, and guess what? It's exactly the group of, say, 15 hedge funds I was talking about in 2004 or five centered on Stevie Cohen, who just paid a billion eight fine for insider trading. So it really. It's not about me. It's not about overstock it's really not about short selling. It's about a type of stock manipulation called naked short selling. And also just in the last year, finally, there have been a whole bunch of DOJ actions and SEC actions coming out against exactly the people we said were doing it for just the things we, you know. So anyway, that's what it's about, really. Our market is rigged, less rigged than it used to be. But there was a way all through the last decade for people to manipulate the market in a way. You thought you just lost some Money in your 401. You actually were robbed. Somebody figured out a way to manipulate some of your stocks. That's part of the reason your stocks went down. I think it's still out there. It's just moved into a different corner of the market.

Wow. Amazing. Amazing. It's such a complex game, but, you know, I can completely agree with you that the game has got to be rigged. It has got to be rigged. I mean, just the people winning on Wall street are the insiders, including Warren Buffett, who is so hypocritical sometimes I can't even stand.

I gotta catch. I gotta, I got. Well, I don't know. I gotta catch you there. Warren Buffett's a great friend of mine and a great friend and a great teacher and I love Mr.

Pilot. Yeah, well, listen, I love his value investing philosophy, I will tell you that. I just, it's just sometimes he comes out with these statements that, oh, yeah, let's. I'm gonna buy $5 million or billion maybe of bank of America stock. I can't remember. And I don't know, I just think there's some advertising going on there. That's all. That, and that, that, that sort of bugs me. But we don't need to go into that whole Buffett subject. I appreciate, I like a lot of things about Buffett too, so we'll leave that as it is. But you know, do you think with the fiat currencies that we're going to see a lot more inflation or is the future inflationary, deflationary, stable? Your thoughts?

Well.

What we're doing reminds me of something that some people do on Wall street, which is. Sounds technical. The expression would be say, selling long dated out of the money puts and booking it as income. Another way of saying it, simple way is you're making bets and there are certain kinds of bets you can make that nine days out of 10 are going to pay off. And let's say you make million bucks and one day out of ten you're going to lose and you lose $50 million if you are those first nine days. Well, Buffett calls those businesses picking up dimes in front of a steamroller. You know, most days you make a dime. Once in a while you hit the steamroller and have a bad day. Well, that's what our central bank is doing. That's what this administration, this is not at all to blame Barack Obama. This goes long back. This goes back through decades, this way of thinking. But they are taking a very reckless policy for the last five years. I mean I think that they did have to do some emergency measures to get us through late 2008, early 2009. But then they've adopted a really reckless policy and they through that policy they're able to reflate the economy somewhat. So we have this thing that they've been telling us is a recovery. It's not a recovery. All they've done is reflate a of bunch bubble and call it a recovery. It's going to work until the day it doesn't and then the day it doesn't work, you'll have a. I think it'll be a disaster. Now it's kind of funny economic activity. Well, so I think that fundamentally these are inflationary, but it does not mean that inflation is going to break out today or tomorrow. What it means is someday I think unless the government gets its fiscal house in order, there will be a Treasury auction that fails. The world will not show up to buy treasury instruments. And at that point interest rates go up. The price of government bonds. Well, all bonds crash. Interest rates go the other way. They go way up. And the problem with that is the only price that the government can afford to pay now for its borrowings is zero. I mean that's basically 2% or something.

If interest rates go to say 10%, a gain of 8% on $17 million of outstanding debt is 1 trillion. 3 that would be nearly the entirety of the government's revenues or $2 trillion. So we would be almost at the point of the entire government. Federal revenue would be just covering interest payments, leaving nothing for army and or military and Social Security and everything else. So I think that when that day comes, there will be massive inflation. Until then that what's going on? I don't believe our. I think we're in a deflationary environment. But it doesn't show up because a. I think the Feds are lying. Well, they change the way they've calculated inflation progressively. If we, if we calculated in. I'm giving you too long an answer.

No, no, I love it. Go ahead.

If we calculated inflation like we did in 1980, our inflation right now would be about 6%. But. But what happens is. So they calculate the nominal GDP growth every year, and let's say they say it's 4%. And then they say, well, inflation is 2%. And so that means we grew 2%. Well, let me change the numbers so you can follow better. Suppose it's nominally growing 4%, but they calculate inflation to be 1.5%. Then they say, okay, the real growth was 2 1/2 percent. So 2 1/2 plus 1 1/2 equals 4. Well, what if they're lying? Well, they're changing the way they calculate inflation. Every few years. It's changed. And so, for example, they've now put this substitution rule in, so that if you. If people. If the price of steak goes up and steak's in their basket of goods that they use to measure inflation, they just say, well, we're going to assume people switch from steak to hamburger. And so it doesn't. It's a way of hiding the amount of inflation. If inflation really is 6% and the nominal rate of growth is 4%, that means that real growth is minus 2. And I think it may really be that way. I think we may be in a long, slow decline. And there's a lot of. I don't believe in this recovery at all.

I agree with you there. I think the recovery is totally fake. And I love the way you put it. All they've done is reinflate a bubble and call it a recovery. And of course, we've talked extensively on the show about the ways they manipulate the inflation numbers. Weighting substitution hedonics. It's just ridiculous. You know, and I wrote an article, you can't. I can't eat my iPad. Even though I love the technology. It's totally awesome. You know, what really, Patrick, Hedonics does to people is it says that we as people aren't entitled to progress. In other words, if they didn't use a hedonic index, which I think has some rationale, but it's. In a way it doesn't because it says that, you know, things aren't allowed to get better. I mean, in our life, if they. If they used Hedonics and put it against the discovery of fire or the invention of the wheel from ancient history. Right. There would be no inflation at all. Because look at the ways those things have improved our lives.

I'm going to quote Buffett again, even though you don't like Him?

No, I like. I don't not like him. I just don't like some things about them.

Buffett says, beware of the man who shoots an arrow into a blank sheet of paper and then goes up and draws a bullseye around it. That's what they're doing. They just keep changing the way they measure and report this. Government just keeps changing that. There's a wonderful site you probably know which unravels this. It's called Shadow Government Statistics by John Williams.

John Williams. He's great. Yeah.

And I didn't know he was. Well, yeah. And what's interesting is the government does disclose all these changes they make to how they do their calculations in their footnotes. But only real fanatics read it, you know, are going to read it. And this guy, John Williams does his site, Shadow Government Statistics basically reconstructs government. It takes government reported numbers and it goes back and reconstructs them as if they had not made these changes. So you can see where we really are. And it's in a much more perilous position than what we're being told.

And you think. No question about it. Well, Patrick, thank you so much for your time. I'd love to talk to you for hours and hours, but I just wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about. You're the board chairman of the Friedman foundation for Educational Choice, and I'm the very passionate about school choice as well. Did you want to talk about any of your work there?

I would love that. It's my great charity and not charity, it's my outside of Overstock. What I do is I'm on the Friedman foundation board. Friedman foundation is the intellectual center of gravity of the school choice movement. There's two things to fix in this country. I mean, you can think of all these things going wrong, but the two things that move a society forward are its ability to create human capital and its ability to marry human capital to financial capital. Well, marrying human capital to financial capital, that's Wall street and creating human capital, that's education. So the two things that really have to be fixed are education and Wall Street. The only way to fix education, we currently have a system that's organized top down and doesn't make any sense. And you could solve the entire state budgetary crisis around the country if people would just switch to vouchers. You give people a vou spending $16,000 per student in America in government schools. If you said anyone who wants to withdraw can take a voucher for say $8,000 and the state saves the other 8,000 and about 30, 25, 30% of people took that, you would solve the entire state fiscal crisis and you get a better educational system.

Isn't it amazing how simple some of these solutions are, yet we just can't implement them because of all these entrenched interests in government and all these unions, public employee un.

Just, they're just pillaging. I mean, it's unbelievable, right?

But with. Yeah, I'm not a big. In fact, I'm the NEA's public enemy with number one. I'm quite proud of that.

Good. You know, Steve Forbes a long time ago and I had Steve on the show, he called it the National Extortion association. And I love that.

Well, if you go on their website and you see their public enemies list, I'm up there. Number one, Walmart is number two. I'm quite proud that I'm viewed by the NEA as a greater threat than Walmart. Congratulations, but thank you. The issue really isn't the union, it's the guild. And the guild. Yeah, the union is part of the guild. But when I talk about the educational Guild, you got to remember that there's layers and layers and layers of the educational system that you never see. There is behind that local high school down the street with a teacher you love. There's, you know, there's the district headquarters, there's the county, there's the state and there's the federal staffed with all these people who have no idea what content and more than half the money is going to that now. So whenever you go out and talk about education.

And vouchers and stuff, they trot out as a smokescreen, as blue smoke and mirrors. They trot out your local high school teacher from down the street.

It's really this whole guild behind the scenes, just protecting itself.

Yep. Yeah. Very, very true. So the website for the Friedman foundation is edchoice.org ed like education e d edchoice.org and that's.org nada.com of course, everybody knows overstock.com, great company. I've been a customer for many years and I can't believe what a bargain some things are on there.

The more you spend, the more you save.

Yeah, yeah, that's a great thing. That's a great policy for the person, but not for the government. Okay.

Yeah. Well, Patrick, anything else you'd like to say in closing? There's so many areas I'd love to talk to you for another half hour just about your entrepreneurial success and how you started overstock.com, but we don't have time for that. We've been 35 minutes long. Call back.

Call back anytime and we will call back anytime and we'll have another conversation. My only I once asked Milton Friedman my, you know, what's the, what's the biggest priority for me near his nearest debt? And his answer was keep the books from being burned. In other words, keep. I'm actually optimistic. He was always, he was just a very optimistic guy. And we may be seeing we have good signs now to be optimistic that people are getting it. But in other words, these ideas, if we do go into some sort of intellectual dark ages again and the forces of state and centralized power and awash over us keep these ideas alive, they're better ideas and eventually.

The central planning system will exhaust itself.

Yeah. Yeah, Fantastic. Well, I hope to help keep those ideas alive and thank you for your contribution in doing that. And thanks for joining us today. That's Patrick Barron, chairman and CEO of Overstock.com and also the board chairman for the Friedman Foundation. And go check out, of course, both of those websites. Thanks for joining us, Jason.

It's been an honor. And yes, please go Google or Bing Friedman foundation and go in and if every one of your listeners would just make a $10 donation, it would be, I'd be any even great. You can call back for two hours next time.

I'm going to go and make a hundred dollar donation right now when we get off the line. Thanks for joining us, Patrick.

Thank you, Jason.

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