Andrew Ross Sorkin

So there's a whole move afoot in the Genius Act effectively to allow crypto, venture capital investments, private equity investments, what's now called private credit investments, to go inside of your 401k plan.

and your retirement plan.

It's effectively going to give everybody access to invest in this whole world that's historically lived in the shadows.

And by the way, this world will partially still live in the shadows insofar as if you're not a publicly traded company, you don't have to disclose your numbers every quarter or every year.

And that's when I would argue to you the charlatans and the frauds emerge.

In those worlds, the valuations are effectively made up.

If you know about the venture capital world, basically a bunch of investors decide, okay, this is what it's worth today.

And they'll just tell you, this is what it's worth today.

But there's no independent auditor that's going to tell you that.

But if there are $12 trillion potentially of retirement funds that could ultimately get touched by this, it gets a lot more complicated.

So this is sort of, to me, one of the most fascinating conversations maybe in presidential history, which is literally, as you described, right before the inauguration.

And by the way, these guys were not

really talking to each other.

And I should say that this phone call was preceded by a letter that Hoover had secretly written to Roosevelt, begging him to come out in favor of the idea of what they called a bank holiday, basically shutting down the banks for a day or two or three or four so that they could try to get a handle on the situation.

And this goes to sort of reputation, ego, and everything else, which is that I think Hoover desperately wanted this to happen because he wanted some credit for it.

He didn't want to go down as the president who left the system in this sort of state of failure.

And on the other side, you had Roosevelt who desperately wanted to be able to start with a clean slate and didn't want to be –

credited with having done anything in cahoots with Hoover and wanted to be able to sort of start anew.

And so you have this sort of unique clash where Hoover's begging him to at least come out and support something like this.

And he's saying, no, no, no, no, no.