In the News - Google’s Court Ruling, Stablecoin Regulation, and Presidential Power

0:00 Welcome to Something More with Chris Boyd. Chris Boyd is a certified financial planner, practitioner, and senior vice president and financial advisor at Wealth Enhancement Group, one of the nation's largest registered investment advisors. We call it Something More because we'd like to talk not only about those important dollar and cents issues, but also the quality of life issues that make the money matters matter. Here he is, your fulfillment facilitator, your partner in prosperity, advising clients on Cape Cod and across the country. Here's your host, Jay Christopher Boyd. Welcome. Thanks for being with us for another episode of Something More with Chris Boyd. I'm here with Jeff Perry and Brian Regan. We are all of the AMR team at Wealth Enhancement and glad to have you joining us.

0:43 We're talking about things that are in the news. Some really interesting things have been evolving. Brian wanted to lead us off because of a recent court decision as it related to Google that could have some significant consequence in terms of... Now, Google had this court decision a while back, but it was about this antitrust consequence and what kind of requirements were going to be placed upon them. Is that essentially the gist? Yeah, they were found to have maintained an illegal monopoly in internet search, but the news was the remedy that the court put on them, which was viewed as the market is pretty insignificant.

1:30 There were some serious outcomes that could have come, including divesting Chrome and Android and YouTube, none of which came to pass. It was viewed as very good news. They do have to share some search index data. They basically have to share their algorithm, which has been their competitive advantage for 20 years with likely qualified rivals. They can't do exclusive contracts. For example, they've had an exclusive contract with Apple to be their default search provider on the iPhone, which as you can imagine is a big competitive advantage.

2:16 Apple was getting something to the tune of $30 billion a year in order to be that search provider. Now, in search, that wasn't deemed to be a bad deal, but for new products going forward, as you can imagine, the Gen AI products, you're not going to be able to have those exclusive agreements. You can have non-exclusive agreements, but you can't have exclusive agreements. So you saw Apple rally on the news, right? Because they're going to be able to still partner with Google as long as they're quote unquote non-exclusive. I'm not quite sure how that would work.

2:58 But ultimately, even though their search platform was hurt and they're not going to be able to do the same types of things by having exclusive contracts with Apple, for example, for the next Gen AI products, their real distribution network wasn't hurt too much, right? From a strategic standpoint. So if you use Google and you use Google on Chrome, you use Google on Apple, you use Google through your Android, you're probably still going to be able to use Google on your Android, on your iPhone and through Chrome. So all that was viewed as very, very positive, both for Apple and Alphabet.

3:39 YouTube's going to remain, Chrome's going to remain, Android's going to remain. So this was very positive. And this was definitely something that was keeping Google's rating down. I don't really like to talk about price earnings ratios, but this could likely have a re-rating closer to where the other mega cap growth names are sitting rather than the sub-market PE ratio that they've been enjoying. Ryan, wasn't part of the perception as to why the judge was maybe a little more lenient than expected? Because perhaps with the AI evolution that people are using some of these tools in a way that they might've at one time used Google, but there's naturally evolving greater competition to Google for the search engine.

4:41 Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I think this ruling might be 10 years too late. They might've made a real difference a decade ago, but today, like Chris mentioned, there's all sorts of competition from these new entrants, whether it be OpenAI or ChatGPT or Grok or Facebook's product or Amazon's product. There's tons of competition there now. I think these exclusive right deals will be interesting to see how, if anybody could end up being the dominant AI, gen AI platform going forward.

5:21 But what I suspect is if you use an Android, if you use Chrome, you're probably going to be a Gemini user. That's what I'm expecting. I think that's the assumption under this ruling. And if you're used to using Google on Apple, you might continue to continue to use Google on Apple and probably more likely to become a Gemini user over everything else. So I think that's the general reaction today. I think there's still question marks for the future, but I think there's certainly less question marks than there were before this ruling. I'll be honest, when I first got the headline alert pushed to my phone, I thought Google would be down. But then reading more and understanding more about it, I think this is the appropriate response.

6:07 More like a relief rally, right, Brian? The fears of what this judge could have done as a remedy didn't happen, so the market responded accordingly. That's how I viewed it. I just don't think anybody's building a new search engine. They have to share search engine details, but that's old tech. That's relevant five years ago, it's not necessarily as relevant today. The judge talked about that in his decision, how some of these companies in the last 20 years didn't exist or the format, they didn't exist, and it's very difficult for the courts to handle a case like this. And we have to remember, this is a district court case, so it's certainly relevant to the facts of this case, but it doesn't hold any precedential value.

6:55 It's not a Supreme Court case, it's not an appellate court case. Although there's some dicta, there's some language in there about how companies should behave, every situation is different, so who knows what happens. What's interesting is Google's probably still going to appeal. The Department of Justice is holding this up as a victory and the market doesn't think it's a victory for the Department of Justice. And Google's going to appeal and that's going to stretch out for another few years. So they're going to be able to continue to have search without sharing any data and still continue to monetize search for years before there's any kind of negative influence.

7:37 And then by then, it could be moved. I think what's important is their ability to distribute Gemini, which I think was giving some landing gear here in this ruling, which is probably the most important thing. Very interesting. And so for investors, I guess that's encouraging for Google, encouraging for Apple, anyone who has an index fund has plenty of both, alphabet. Yeah. I guess the question is, who's the little guy that's being undermined in the process that people are using their search engine that they'd benefit from getting some of this data that presumably Google might have to share in time?

8:35 Well, I think the big one would be Microsoft, right? They would have to share their algorithmic data with Bing. So if you own a mega cap growth ETF and maybe Google's slightly negatively hurt and Microsoft benefits, you're going to be fine in the aggregate, right? Does anyone, I've heard of this thing, I don't know, it's like a duck or something. What's that? It's like a- Duck, duck, go. Duck, duck, go. Right. I wonder if there's a lot of users for that. But I mean, I understand it essentially gets rid of that tracking your data type perspective.

9:19 I mean, Google has an 89% market share in search, 89%. And they only recently fell under 90 for the first time since like 2002 or something like that. So they've been very, very dominant in the market for a long, long time. So I probably shouldn't be using Ask Jeeves anymore. You can if you want to, Chris. I do remember that one. That was very, you know, it just goes to show- Ultra Vista, wasn't that another one? Yeah. The early creators are not always the dominant force. One more comment that I have on Google is the judge, you know, certainly talked about, and it's a relevant element of an antitrust in a breakup situation is, has the consumer been harmed?

10:05 Yeah. And it's tough to make a case that the worldwide American, however you want to frame it, consumer has been harmed by Google's alleged monopoly. I mean- I mean, it's certainly not something that comes at a cost in terms of premium paid. I guess it's a question of how that data is used that should evaluate the cost or the harm, which is kind of hard to do. So that's an interesting point, Chris. On appeal, the argument that Google is going to make is that sharing this data would undermine the privacy of their users. And so the remedy would actually hurt the consumer, which I think is probably a pretty strong case.

10:47 Yeah. If the whole point of antitrust is to protect the consumer, then, you know, this could arguably, arguably hurt them. So if you look at the consumer as the ad, advertiser though, right? Like the customers, I don't know if that would be a stretch, I would say then - No, I think you could, I think the need to look at that, not just beyond the retail consumer, right? The customer of Google is a business. Yeah. So they compete over AdWords and they bid on AdWords. And if they could do it across multiple different platforms on search, then you would think that maybe they could get a lower price. But I don't know. If they were manipulating the market, right?

11:30 I mean, so the argument, counter argument is there's alternatives, there's Facebook, there's all these social media outlets. You could make the argument that they're the only ad exchange for search, right? So if there was one stock exchange, for example, the margins that they would get for exchanging stocks between traders could be much wider than it is if there's competition between exchanges. I think you could make a similar argument here or there. But I think, I can't help but to think about comparing this case to the Microsoft case in, was it 95, 96? Okay. It might have finally been settled in 2001.

12:12 So correct me if I'm wrong, if you guys remember this more clearly than I do, but I believe the argument was that they were preloading Internet Explorer into Windows, which was the dominant software operating system provider. Netscape was getting pushed out, or at least they felt like they were being pushed out. And why is this similar? Well, these exclusive contracts that they can distribute, their search product isn't too dissimilar to Internet Explorer being preloaded into a dominant software operating system provider. I think that's right.

12:54 The case is very similar. Yeah. Now, if you think about what happened with Microsoft between 2001 and today, they're all right. And once again, no breakup. The court did not, as we know, order a breakup of Microsoft. They encouraged or mandated behavioral changes, as that court said. And Windows is still dominant too, right? Windows is still dominant. No doubt. And that's still the bulk of how they make a lot of their money, excluding Azure, I guess. But the enterprise productivity services is still the bulk of Windows.

13:39 It didn't stop their really monopolistic power, I guess is what I'm saying. And that case was before some of this technology, in the early stages of where we are in technology, but it is consistent. And this court noted that, that the trend is not to break up these companies, but to attempt to have them have behavioral changes. So, maybe the days of breaking up standard oil don't exist anymore. Or AT&T. Or AT&T, the more contemporary. Yeah. All right. Let's... Oh, sorry. You got one other thing to say there, Brian? Yeah. Obviously, I have a lot to say on this subject.

14:20 I think it's very interesting. But we talked about all the new competition in the market, and there's this big push for private investments lately. And while I was thinking about this topic, I couldn't help but to think, people get the sense or feel like they can't get into these large language models providers because they're private. And I can't help but think, but that's not really true. Microsoft owns a significant portion of OpenAI. It's under negotiation how much they're going to own, because they're going to change their structure from nonprofit to profit. But if you own Microsoft, you own a substantial amount of OpenAI.

15:05 If you own Amazon, you own a significant portion of Anthropic. So if you do want access to these things, I guess this is... I think this case illustrates how the rich are going to continue to get richer. And this kind of opens up some avenues for these companies with large moats and large pockets to actually continue to create large moats and large pockets for the future. So I think in general, these companies that had a ton of power and were investing into the future are going to be able to continue to do that under this ruling, or given more license to do that under this ruling.

15:55 I agree with that. All right. In the theme of in the news, we were also interested in talking a little bit about some technological developments and some application of that as it relates to evolving views relating to profitability derived from things like cryptocurrency or stablecoin. So let's talk about the recent legislation that provided some governance surrounding stablecoin, which is essentially a form of cryptocurrency, but tied to a dollar in, a dollar out, the idea that it's stable in terms of not speculative, not trying to make money from the growth of the value of the currency as much as providing continuity of the value of what you put your money into a given stablecoin.

16:59 So essentially, Brian, let's start with what's the legislative backdrop that's evolved here? So I don't know all the details of the Genius Act, and I'm not going to pretend like I do, but one of the important stipulations is exactly what you just said, Chris, the regulation of stablecoin to make sure that it's backed by real tangible assets. So in this case- Or it was just a promise, right? It was like, I could buy your stablecoin and you could promise me that it'll be worth the same amount, but I didn't have any real, as an entity, there was no regulatory backdrop.

17:42 You have to have treasuries or some mechanism to represent that value appropriately. Yeah. And some of them in the past weren't backed by much of anything of real value. So this is a significant change. This is going to make transacting in stablecoins much more reasonable to do. So if you are one of these people that believes that we're going to be able to do cross-border transactions over stablecoin and it'll be more efficient than doing a Western Union or a wire or an ACH or something like that, it'll be more efficient, it'll be cheaper, it'll be faster.

18:25 If you're somebody that believes that, this is great. Stablecoins make this a much more trusted, much more rational way to do it. If you were to do it with Bitcoin, for example, you don't know what the value is going to be from one day to another. It could change pretty dramatically. But with a stablecoin, you know you're going to get dollar for dollar. So this opens up all sorts of shadow banking activity, all sorts of smart contract activity that could be executed on the blockchain, where if the belief is that it's more secure and it's more efficient, that it could drive a lot of new activity. I want you to continue on. I just want to put a caveat for those listening who might be interested in our views on how this stablecoin applies to our clientele at this point in time.

19:14 And I would want to make the clarification or be clear, this is not something we're advocating for our clients. It's not something we utilize in our portfolio management. It's not to say that someday there might not be a place for it. It's just right now, I think we could easily argue we prefer a centralized finance, something that the central bank has the ability to step in and offer stabilizing characteristics directly with the banks. And so we would maybe be inclined to make use of treasuries, money market funds, and bank accounts.

19:59 But we're not using necessarily stablecoin as a way to offer people an investment vehicle, which is different from saying, hey, this has evolved into something that has less risk than what it once had. Okay. And you wanted to go on to talk about this in the point of view that how some of this could apply. You were talking about smart contracts and things of that sort. Yeah. I co-signed everything you said, but I think it's interesting that this is evolving into some more practical use and the Genius Act is certainly helping that along.

20:40 And I think it's important as me personally, I've been a crypto skeptic, but that doesn't mean you put your head in the sand. I mean, if something changes, something evolves, you got to change your mind with the facts. And I think that's maybe an important distinction between what I'm saying now and what I've said in the past. So back to stablecoins, if you could transact here, if the government's Genius Act is going to make it more likely that you're going to transact, the idea is that the market of trading in stablecoins will get much bigger. Stablecoins are at least the two biggest ones from my understanding trade on the Ethereum network. Now this was news to me. I did not know that anything other than Ethereum could trade on the Ethereum network.

21:22 And on the Ethereum network, there are validators. Validators are people who get paid transaction fees. They're often coined in the industry as gas fees, but they're really a transaction fee to validate whether the transaction on the network follows along the terms of the smart contract. And these fees can be anywhere between 3 % and 7%, depending on the changes. So what we're seeing here from these validators is real transactions and real cash flows coming from something that was formerly viewed as just a speculative asset. Now we're actually having real transactions, practical value and cash flows from real companies.

22:02 You can almost think of this as a combination between MicroStrategy and Visa. They hold the underlying asset, but they're also executing the secure transaction for a fee. And as we know with Visa, it can be very, very lucrative to be in the middle of those transactions. So the point here is, as much as we have been and would argue that cryptocurrency generally is a speculative endeavor for our clientele who tend to be retirees, largely not appropriate as something they would want to participate in, your point here is to say, hey, look at this.

22:50 We've looked at cryptocurrency in the past and said, no interest, not interested, thanks anyway, because I can't point to anything that has a valuation. Now you're saying there are some examples of companies that may be behind the stable coin and the transaction going on between parties that can create a revenue source, an opportunity for a company to have profitability so that that could have some interest potentially for an investor that you could point to and say, oh, that's more interesting to me. Yeah, I'll give you two examples too.

23:31 So Circle is a company that recently went public. Circle is a stable coin issuer. So basically they'll issue stable coins and they'll hold treasuries on their balance sheet. They will get the 4% from the treasuries. The stable coin pays no interest, but it allows for a token that can be exchanged dollar for dollar. So what's their cash flow? Their cash flow is going to be the interest from the treasury security. And the larger and larger the network gets, the more and more they're going to be able to leverage that treasury asset. And you can imagine 4% is not a huge amount of money, but if you grow your balance sheet big enough, it could be a significant cash flow.

24:14 If you put a little leverage underneath it, sky's the limit, right? Your return on invested capital could be very large, not dissimilar to how some banks work. Another example is Bitmine Immersion, which I've learned more about recently. This doesn't seem to have the documents that you would like to see yet from the SEC. So buyer beware there. And I'm not suggesting anybody for the viewers that should go out and buy this. You should do your own due diligence for compliance purposes. But what I think is interesting is what they're doing is they want to get in the middle of that transaction, that stable coin Ethereum transaction and collect the staking fee or the validator fee of that 3% to 7%.

25:02 So there's some real businesses here that are going to have real cash flows that I'm finding to be more interesting than I did before the Genius Act. This reminds me a little bit about 15 minutes ago when we were talking about the Google and where all that got started and some of the companies that appeared to have a strong place, whether that be AOL or Netscape or the list of the dead companies along the side of the road, who appeared to be the leaders in this new technology called the internet and web search, they're not always the ones that win in the end. So I know we said this is less speculation, but it is certainly, in my mind anyway, clearly in the speculation category and buyer beware, as Brian said.

25:54 I think whenever there's an emerging business model, a good amount of skepticism is warranted, right? I would consider it circled just one public, maybe a month ago. It's worth mentioning too, just for a compliance note, that mention of specific stocks is not a recommendation or an offer. Individual investors should do their own due diligence to determine appropriateness for their own circumstances and your best to consult your financial advisor in the process. When we're talking about some of these names, I want to keep that perspective here that what we're talking about is not intended to be any kind of a recommendation, just making a point that things are evolving.

26:44 What we once said was, Hey, no way, no how. Now Brian's saying, Hey, look at this. There's some earnings coming out of a company that we can point to that can change the way we think about something as having appeal or not potentially, but we'll see. We'll see. So anything to add there? Should we move on to other items in the news? Let's move on. All right, here we go. So I was on vacation and by the way, took the kids out to Boston. Two of our kids live in Boston. We went to Porto. You ever been there, Brian? Porto and down in Prudential Center.

27:25 Excellent. Had a great time. Got a chance to go to Provincetown while I was on vacation and enjoyed that and took a sail around the point of the case, that sunset sail. Fabulous, right? So I also was watching what was going on in the news and I'd started writing some of these things down over the last couple of weeks. You really shouldn't do that on vacation. Yeah, probably not a good idea. And I started getting kind of surprised by all these examples of what I would think of as government overreach and not typically characteristic with my ideological evolution, you know, how I think of the role of government.

28:08 So we saw more and more talk of the president wanting to send National Guard troops into cities across the country and the idea of even whether that's legal, right? We've had some judge ruling that this violated when in Los Angeles, the Posse Comitatus. Is that the right way to say that? That's exactly right. Late 1800s statute that says you can't use the military for law enforcement purposes in the United States. I saw the government is buying shares of Intel. No, no, they're not buying.

28:50 They're extorting. They're extorting shares of Intel. Normally you'd think of this because they're socialization of a company or something. Seems odd to me. Seems like inconsistent with the kind of thing that a Republican would want to do. The idea that, I don't know, Solyndra came to my mind, but the idea of picking winners and losers. I realize we have the CHIPS Act and maybe there's an effort to say, oh, let's just not give this infrastructure away. But I don't know, it just doesn't resonate with me with the free market principles. We saw John Bolton, Ambassador John Bolton's house, raided by government officials shortly after.

29:40 Bolton's known to be a critic of the president. He's a former Trump administration in the prior administration, a national security advisor, but it seems like a retribution. We have to be one of the themes the president ran on. It seems like a kind of inappropriate extension of power. Perhaps, perhaps time will tell. Yeah, I think that's fair. That one may be, is there something inappropriate going on there? But optics sure are questionable. Optics are questionable, yeah. Put into that, we saw the president continuing to try to, or actually fire, Fed Governor Lisa Cook.

30:24 She's suing to question whether that's legal, but in an effort to pack the Fed with people who will do his bidding to reduce the interest rates. I think you could add to that. We saw recently the Bureau of Labor Statistics had, what, a CPI report last week. That was the BLS. But we saw a CPI where inflation was, what, at an annual rate of around 2 .7%. And then we saw jobs a couple of weeks ago with 118,000 revision over the year, and new jobs about 73,000.

31:10 And the administration didn't really like the report and fired the BLS commissioner. Just see a lot of things that are kind of, what's going on here with, struck me as somewhat an extent of, I would argue, some government overreach, not in keeping with the typical kind of role we tend to think of for Republicans as saying, smaller government, federal government, closer to the people for the implementation. So state governments, city governments, and so forth. I don't know.

31:50 I dumped a lot of my frustration out there, but anybody have something to add to that? Well, certainly. And I think this period of this Trump second term is going to be viewed as, from a constitutional perspective, as a clear period when the power of the president is determined, right? All these, I mean, there's a lot of things here, right? And most of them have to do with the president's power. And you didn't even mention tariffs, the decision on tariffs. So just to throw- Executive orders we could point to in abundance, right?

32:32 Appropriateness, applicability, lawfulness, and so forth. Yeah. So I think all of these things and more are all going to be tested through the courts. And thankfully, we have three branches of government, independent branches of government. And thus far, the courts seem willing, totally willing to push back on some of these things. But foundationally, these things that we hold dear, this is not my Republican party, so I'm not defending the party. Parties change, and leaders of parties change. And we could talk about the crazy left too.

33:13 But constitutionally, which is more important than any political party, I think this term is going to be remembered in history when the power of the presidency was clearly put in check because of many of these actions and probably more to come. So that's a needed thing in our constitutional democracy, republic, that when one branch of government goes outside the lines, so to speak, it is brought back in by the other branches of government. And so while it doesn't feel healthy at the time, feels a little scary sometimes for people who cherish due process and individual rights and a smaller government, I think ultimately it will make our country stronger that we have the ability to and the will to restrain a branch of government that is operating outside the constitution.

34:10 I hope we do see that. I hope we do see some restraint. I think that's a great way to frame it. I think that it's no doubt that we face various challenges. You can point to all these various topics and say, identify issues that have challenge. But I don't see Congress providing the kind of oversight I would expect when the executive branch seems to be overreaching.

34:52 I think we can point to some of these kind of instances. Well, I think one of the examples of when this is going to be tested, not the court part of it, which was going to be tested for the entire four years, but if the tariff decision holds that President Trump exceeded his authority in these broad-based tariffs, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it looks like. Oh, yeah, that was another court. Yes, they will kick it back to Congress. The court will kick it back. They will overtly mention in their decision that this is a congressional authority and leave it for Congress to act and probably give Congress, if you're looking at other cases, a period of time. Mm-hmm. And that's when we'll see if the Republicans in charge are willing to go along with giving their authority because that's what they're doing.

35:38 Retaining that authority or giving that authority. That's right. That's right. And that's a different analysis than letting Congress doesn't have a role to stop an executive from doing something. They don't have a role there other than impeachment. That's the purview of the courts. But if they have to overtly do something and say, we are willing to give up our Article 1 powers to an Article 2 president. Yeah. That's a different analysis. And I think the- There are some oversight involvements on various things. I don't know how this fits into Congress, but when abundance of the leaders of the CDC basically walk out, what's going on?

36:25 That's an oversight function, but it's not a power that Congress has to change that particular thing. But if tariffs, for example, is an Article 1 power of Congress, the president is exercising them on some pre-delegated powers that the court has said that he exceeded. If it comes back to Congress to have to overtly do something, I expect that you'll see a number of Republicans who are still there, still conservative, and say, no, I'm not willing to give. And you have to look at this, even if you're a pro-Trump person, a MAGA person, you have to look at this, not in the context of the tariffs. You have to look at it like, if there's a strongly left liberal president, do you want that person to have these same powers and authority?

37:16 You can't look at it like, oh, I like what this is doing. I like my president. Yes, exactly. You have to look at it like- The office, not the individual, right? Yeah. Do you want the president to have the unilateral authority to do these things? Right? Right. And I don't, frankly. I'm not concerned. Our founders created Congress first, Article 1. They intended that the elected representatives across the country would be the predominant party, the predominant branch of government for a good reason. Yeah, again, closer to the people in many respects. They were so concerned about it, they specifically delegated the powers in Article 1.

37:57 Well, I know we're going long, and I went down the rabbit hole there with a slew of things to drop on everybody. But there were a couple other quick things, I will say. One of them was the Fed chair, Jackson Hole. The market reacted to his comments, expecting the possibility of an interest rate drop, decline. Brian, I think we were talking, and you said, well, you never know, right? Things can change. But we'll see where that leads. Seems like markets have clearly expected that, right?

38:40 Yeah, the market's expecting like a 100% chance of a cut here in September. But we're also going to get a jobs report following the firing of the head of the BLS, and that's likely going to be good, or very good, because the former one was fired because it was a disappointing jobs report. But Brian, if you're a Fed governor, if you're one of the people making this decision, and you have a great jobs report, doesn't that push you the other way? Like, we don't need to have a rate cut. Yeah, I mean, that was what would normally happen, but I don't think you can trust the new jobs report, right?

39:25 You're going to have to look at ADP, you're going to have to look at initial claims, you're going to have to look at continuing claims, you're going to have to look at some more reliable sources of data, since this one is obviously going to be politically charged. And you've got the beginnings of a politically motivated Fed governors, right? There's been recent appointments, and you're starting to get this politicization of the Fed. Well, you didn't even get into the attempted firing of board governor Cook, which, you know, we were talking about things- That's about it, yeah. Did you mention it? I missed it, I'm sorry. But yeah, I mean, that's another item on a long list of things that are just completely, obviously illegal.

40:10 But, you know, the court doesn't dismiss them right away. They might disagree, but they push it off to the next appellate court until it gets to the Supreme Court. And, you know, we'll see what happens. But luckily, most of the bond market reacts on market forces. And, you know, you might be able to adjust the short term part of the curve, but the reaction function on the longer end is going to be based on inflation and growth expectations. And it might have the exact opposite effect that the administration wants if they force policy.

40:51 And, you know, it might have a self -regulating effect, or at least that's what I hope, and I think the market probably thinks. Hey, you know, there was one other big news event that occurred during the week. And of course, that was Taylor Swift got engaged. Who knew, right? The world stopped and took notice, apparently. So that's great. Hopefully many years of happy marriage when they tie the knot. In any case, we have a great tool. We have a good tool for the people looking to get married, an ebook. Go Patriots. Yeah.

41:31 All right. We're into football season. Anyway, lots to talk about, lots to think about. It all factors into the way you think about your portfolio, your financial planning, lots to navigate. If you need help in the process, don't hesitate to reach out to our team. Guys, thanks very much. Keep striving for something more.

42:19 Transcribed by https://otter.ai Readers should consult their own financial advisors or conduct their own due diligence before making any financial decisions.