I am the Director of Voluntary Cessation at the Department of the Interior. Last month I paid a German company $1.2 billion to build nothing. Not a turbine. Not a wire. Not one kilowatt. $1.2 billion. For the absence. The company is RWE. They held leases off California. Off Louisiana. In the New York Bight. Wind farms were going there. Now they aren't. I made sure of that. We call it voluntary. It became voluntary when I made it impossible. I write the permits. I never wrote theirs. RWE said it kindly. "No path forward to permit these projects for the foreseeable future." I am the foreseeable future. Here is the part I like. The $1.2 billion did not go to a taxpayer. It went to RWE. We paid them to leave. Then they took the check and put $900 million into a gas terminal in Louisiana. We paid a company to stop making power. They used it to make a different kind. The check bought a fuel switch. I signed it. Somewhere a set of blades is already built. They point at a different ocean now. The ports that would have raised them can go back to waiting. An analyst asked me what the country got for $1.2 billion. I said "energy security." She asked which energy. I said "the secure kind." She asked to see the kilowatts. I told her that was not her lane. She stopped asking. I do not produce power. I have never produced power. I end the projects that would. My title is Voluntary Cessation. Cessation means stop. Voluntary means I get to call it their idea. The Germans are the second. In March it was a French company. Same handshake. Leases traded for an LNG plant in Texas. There is a line forming. I take a number. I pay it to leave. We call it common sense. We call the wind a costly subsidy. I just paid $1.2 billion to end the subsidy. The payment was larger than the subsidy. I am the subsidy now. On the invoice, under deliverables, I wrote one word. None. I came in under budget. I'm up for a raise. The lights those turbines would have carried are still off. They were always going to be off. That was the product.

I collect tariffs for the United States. My title is Liquidation Specialist, which sounds like a threat and is, in fact, a desk job. This spring the job quietly doubled: I refund tariffs now too, which is the same job run backward. Same tariffs, same companies, same chair, same finger. For about a year I helped charge the country's imports $166 billion. Then the Supreme Court ruled we were never allowed to charge a cent of it, so now I am giving all $166 billion back, and I did not have to learn one new thing to do it. I press the key. The key runs backward. I work at a port. When a shipment arrives, a machine and I decide what the country charges it to come in. Last year that number was a tariff. This year, retroactively, it is nothing. Same shipment. Same machine. Same desk. They called it Liberation Day. I remember it as a Tuesday with unusual volume. Here is the shape of it. That $166 billion came from 330,000 companies, across 53 million shipments. I did not take it cruelly. I took it the way a bathroom scale takes your weight, without opinion and slightly wrong. Then in February, 6 of the 9 Justices ruled that a tariff is a tax, and a tax is Congress's to invent, and the emergency law we had used to invent this one was not, on a close read, a law about tariffs at all. The 6 did not line up the way anyone had a chart for, which was the single most surprising thing that happened all year. 16 months of collecting. One footnote's worth of Latin. Give it all back. So we are giving it back. About $100 billion has gone out the door so far, with interest, because we are a scrupulous country that honors its debts, including the ones a court has to sit us down and explain are debts. We pay 6%, compounded daily, which runs to roughly $22 million a day. Hold that the way I hold it every morning: the government of the United States is paying $22 million a day to apologize with money, and the apology is the part of my job that passes audit. There is an accounting word for money you hold that isn't yours, at a comfortable rate, for a year, against the owner's wishes. The word is loan. So 330,000 companies lent the United States $166 billion, involuntarily, and are being repaid at 6%, and somewhere in the building I am the loan officer. My qualifications for the largest forced-lending program in the country's history are a lanyard and a strong opinion about the office coffee. Now the part people ask about, on the one day a year that someone asks. The refund goes to the importer of record, the company whose name is on the customs paperwork. It does not go to you. You met this tariff twice. Once at the port, paid by a company you have never heard of. Once at the register, folded into a price that never said its name. The company files a form and gets its money and its 6%. You get to keep the receipt. I have searched my entire system for the key that refunds a shopper, and I can report that it is not there, that no one has requested it, and that the drop-down menu does not go that low. And I refund the tariff. Only the tariff. I do not refund the lawyer. I do not refund the plane ticket a company bought to fly to Vietnam and find a cheaper factory, and I do not refund the factory, which is still in Vietnam and does not want to come home. I do not refund the 8 months your operations lead spent renegotiating a contract that is now, technically, unnecessary. The tariff is the one number in this whole affair allowed to run backward. Everything it knocked over stays down. People keep telling me the refund is the machine saying sorry. The machine does not say sorry. It performs the exact motion it performed before, at the exact speed, with the exact absence of feeling, and it files one direction under Policy and the other under Justice, and it could not tell you, at knifepoint, which was which. It knows one thing. I pressed the key. The scale took the weight. The scale gave the weight back. I pressed it both times.

I’m the Under Secretary at the Treasury, responsible for the side of the dollar that rarely gets mentioned. This week, I did something the United States has claimed for 28 years it would never do: I bought a foreign currency. The last time we did this was back in 1998. A reporter described it as a new era of currency activism, and I let that stand, since activism is the word you use when you plan to keep intervening. Before this week, here’s what we always said—and I helped write some of these statements. The United States supports exchange rates set by the market. We do not buy foreign currency. We said the market should set the price, and we would accept whatever it decided. We stuck to this for 40 years, through every Secretary, and we meant it as firmly as you mean a rule you’ve never had reason to break. But then the yen dropped to its lowest point in 40 years, and I finally lost patience with the market’s choices. So we stepped in. 'Intervened' is the straightforward word, and I’ll explain the softer term soon. To boost the yen, you have to buy it, and that means spending something else. Here’s the part I’m proudest of, and I want you to pay attention to the money, because that’s what matters most. I didn’t spend dollars. Using dollars to buy yen would have weakened the dollar, and protecting the dollar is my main job. Instead, I used euros. To help Japan’s currency without hurting America’s, I used Europe’s. The euros were already available, and using them didn’t affect the dollar at all. Europe wasn’t asked. It just happened to be the source we turned to when we needed funds. The trade followed the usual path, moving through the bank at 33 Liberty Street and then through Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. The yen rose from its 40-year low to the 155 range. Tokyo said it would do this again if needed, and so would we. We called our reason 'disorderly movements.' I like that term. A disorderly movement means a price goes somewhere we didn’t approve. Order is when the price matches what we want. The market became disorderly simply because it stopped matching my view. Now, the word. Now, about the word. For 28 years, we used the honest term 'intervention,' but it’s an awkward word. It means the market was right and we stepped in anyway. It’s a word you use once, apologize for, and say you won’t do again. 'Activism' sounds better. Activism is when someone cares enough about a result to stop waiting and take action. Activism is seen as a good thing. No one apologizes for activism or promises to do it just once. Newspaper handed me activism; I took it. I crossed intervention out of the talking points and wrote activism over it, in the same pen we use for everything, because the pen is the only tool in this building that has ever changed a price. This new era is really the same actions with a better name. We will support market-determined exchange rates, but also decide which ones the market can support. We don’t buy foreign currency—unless we use other foreign currency—on the days when the market forgets who maintains order. The yen is now at 155. The dollar hasn’t been affected. Since Friday, the market has agreed with me on every price, and that’s the only order I’ve ever needed. And Europe still hasn’t asked where its money went.

I am the special envoy for the ceasefire. In June we announced the immediate and permanent termination of this war on all fronts. It is August. The war is on again, and I have never had more work, because in my line of work permanent is a renewable term. People misunderstand what I do. They think my product is peace. My product is the talks. Peace is what happens when the talks end, and the talks ending is the one outcome I am paid to prevent. Here is the summer, because the summer is the whole business model. In April we reached a framework. A framework is a ceasefire you can be proud of without having to keep. In June we upgraded it to a memorandum, 14 points, signed, with a 60-day window. I want you to admire the 60-day window. We wrote the expiration date into the peace. We agreed to stop fighting for exactly as long as it would take to schedule the next reason to start. The June deal used the word permanent. Both capitals said it from the podium. Immediate and permanent termination, on all fronts. It held for about 3 weeks, which in this field is a strong quarter. When it collapsed, I was not disappointed. A collapse is a lead. The moment the June deal ended, my phone filled with mediators, because a broken ceasefire is the only thing that generates demand for a new one. Oman offered a room. Qatar offered a room. Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey offered rooms. There is never a shortage of rooms. That is the deepest fact of my industry: the supply of people willing to host the end of a war is effectively infinite, and it is refreshed every time the war does not end. By late July we had a new proposal. A 10-day truce, to revive the deal that revived the framework. Nobody accepted it, which was ideal, because an unaccepted proposal is a proposal you get to make again. Here is the part I am least modest about. When I speak, the price of oil moves. The June deal took about $31 off a barrel of Brent. The morning it was declared over, one sentence put Brent up more than 6% in a day. There are heads of state who cannot move a market like that. I move it with a press release about a war I am not fighting. And here is the part other people are now looking into. In March and April, someone placed roughly $7 billion in bets that oil would fall, and the bets kept landing in the minutes before the ceasefires were announced. Not the hours. The minutes. About $2.2 billion of it went out in the single minute before one announcement, and crude then fell as much as 15%, one of the largest intraday drops on record. Another $830 million was sold 15 minutes before I extended a ceasefire. The people who counted it noted that a seller that size could have cleared hundreds of millions in profit. The prediction markets were smaller and less shy. Three anonymous accounts made more than $600,000 correctly calling the month of the April ceasefire, and one of them turned $13,200 into $467,515, which is a 35-fold return on the single question of when I would announce peace. Regulators and the Justice Department are now looking into who seemed to know the schedule of peace before peace was scheduled. I do not know who it was. Neither, yet, do they. I will only say this: they believed my announcement was coming, and they were right, which is more faith than either capital ever showed in the deal. After every round we announce significant progress. I need you to hear that phrase the way I hear it. Significant progress is progress that is significant precisely because it has not arrived. The day it arrives, the war is over, the rooms empty, the mediators fly home, and I am a man with a passport and no reason to use it. So we make significant progress, carefully, in the amount that is large enough to report and small enough to survive. There is one thing that is never in my briefing, and it is the thing the briefing is about. My briefing has the venue, the point count, the window, the phrase for the podium. It does not have the person under the fighting the ceasefire is meant to stop. That person is the demand. I do not meet the demand. I meet the mediators, in the rooms, about the demand, and I call the meeting progress. So no, the ceasefire is not failing. A ceasefire that held would be a ceasefire that ended, and a war that ended would be a market that closed. What you are watching is not a peace process breaking down. It is a peace process working, at the only speed that keeps it a process. We will announce the permanent end of this war again next month. I already have the room. Permanence, in my trade, is a standing reservation. I renew it the morning after it lapses. Good foundation. Significant progress. On all fronts.

I approve the capital budget at Amazon. This year it is $220 billion, up from $131 billion last year, and the great majority of it buys machines that think. In the same 12 months, I approved cutting about 30,000 corporate jobs, and when people asked why, we told them the truth. The machines that think. I want to show you the page, because the whole job is one page. On the page, near the top, is the capital line. $220 billion. It went up from $200 billion this quarter for a reason I find beautiful: memory got expensive. The chips that let the machines remember cost more than we planned, so the number rose, and a number that rises because the machines need more memory is my favorite kind of number. One row below the capital line is the headcount line. It went down. 14,000 last autumn, about 16,000 this winter, roughly 30,000 people, which is close to 1 in 10 of the corporate staff, and more than 57,000 since we started counting this way in 2022. Those two lines share one page. I am, as far as I can tell, the only person who reads the page with both of them on it at once. Everyone else gets one line in one meeting. The person who hears $220 billion is in a room about the future. The person who hears 30,000 is in a room about themselves. I sit in the room where the two rooms are the same room. Here is what the page is actually saying, if you read down instead of across. The $220 billion is not spent alongside the 30,000 cuts. The $220 billion is what performs the 30,000 cuts. We are not investing in AI and, separately, reducing headcount. We are buying the headcount reduction. It arrives on a truck, in racks, and it does not have a name, a family, or a question at the all-hands. We were honest about this, which I am proud of. Our own leadership put it in writing that the technology will reduce the corporate workforce in the years ahead. We did not hide the mechanism behind attrition or realignment. We told 30,000 people that the reason was the thing on the truck, and then we ordered more of the thing on the truck, and the order was 10% larger than last year's because the memory got expensive. You will hear that the cuts and the spending are unrelated, that one is efficiency and one is growth. They are the same act, filed in two folders. Efficiency is the folder where the person leaves. Growth is the folder where the machine arrives. I keep both folders. They are, if you check the dates, the same folder. The nice thing about a machine is that it cannot be laid off, which means it never appears on the headcount line, which means once I have moved a job from a person to a machine, the job is off my payroll and onto my capital budget forever. That is the whole trade. I move a cost from a line I have to explain to a line I get to celebrate. $220 billion, up from $131 billion. 30,000 people, and counting. I approved both. They are the same number, written twice, once as an investment in the future and once as a subtraction from it, and I am the only one holding the page where they touch.

I forecast the care of the old. Last year that care was worth $1.01 trillion, which is more than this country spends on all of Medicaid, and it cost my budget nothing. I know why it cost nothing. I arranged for it to cost nothing. In my model the care of 59 million aging people has a line, and the line is called informal care, and informal care is priced at zero. It is not an error. Informal care is the technical term for a daughter. When a daughter does it, the care is informal, and informal is free, and free does not appear in a budget. The whole solvency of long-term care in this country rests on my being allowed to value 49.5 billion hours of labor at $0, because the person doing it loves the person she is doing it for. There are two kinds of care, and the entire job is the difference between them. Formal care is a home aide. She is real, she is trained, and she costs $16.78 an hour, which the program must find and does not have. Informal care is that same aide's patient's daughter. She costs $16.78 an hour times zero, which the program can always afford. My work, reduced to one sentence, is to convert as much formal care into informal care as the families will absorb without saying so out loud. I have an instrument for the conversion. It is the waiting list. Right now 707,378 people are waiting for the program to send help into their homes. The average wait is 39 months. People see that list and call it a failure. I see it and call it the most efficient line I run. Every month a person waits for a paid aide who never arrives, an unpaid one arrives instead, and she arrives for free, and I have moved another $16.78 an hour off my books and onto a kitchen table. The list is the system billing the family and addressing the invoice to no one. The daughters are 61% of my capacity, and they start early. My model assumes she begins around 34, which is young enough that she is also raising children and holding a job, so I am billing the same woman three times, and only one of the three bills has her name printed on it. She spends about $7,242 a year of her own money on the care I declined to fund. I do not count that as a cost either. It is her money, spent on my obligation, and it clears without ever touching my ledger, which is the cleanest kind of spending there is. People bring me the trillion-dollar figure as though it will alarm me. It is the proudest number I own. $1.01 trillion of care, delivered on time, at a budget cost of nothing, by a workforce that cannot resign because resigning has a face. No program in this government performs like that. If I proposed it from scratch, I would be laughed out of the room. I did not have to propose it. I had to not fund the alternative, and wait. There is one risk in the model and I watch it closely. The daughters are a supply, and a supply can fall. Fewer of them are having children, more of them are working full days, and some of them are finally saying the quiet thing at the kitchen table. If they ever stop arriving, $1.01 trillion lands on my desk overnight with a price attached, and the program is insolvent by the following Tuesday. So I track them. I keep a slide on their fertility and a slide on their hours at work, and I read the two of them the way a dam operator reads a river. The old will need more care next year, and more the year after that. My model needs the daughters to grow at the same rate, so I have written that requirement into the forecast. It is the only line in my budget that depends entirely on love, and it is, by a wide margin, the largest. I file it under informal care. She files it under Mom.

I run a fund the United States built in 1934 with $2 billion it made in an afternoon. It did not sell anything for the $2 billion. It raised the official price of gold from $20.67 an ounce to $35 an ounce and kept the difference on the gold it already held. We wrote a larger number next to a thing we were not touching, and the larger number was real enough to open a fund. That fund is mine now. On Friday I used it to buy the yen. I did not print the yen; the yen is Japan's to print. To buy yen you sell something else, and on Friday I sold euros. I did not sell them personally. The fund has no trading floor. It has the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at 33 Liberty Street, and 2 primary dealers, which on Friday were Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. There is, in a room on Liberty Street I have visited twice, a terminal with a key on it marked EXECUTE. I have never pressed the key. On Friday someone pressed it before 9:00 AM, several times, and I learned that the yen had been supported the way I learn most things, from the confirmation log. I did not attend. Attending is not the mandate. I keep one of the confirmations framed. Not Friday's. An older one, from a prior operation, because it is the most honest document the fund owns. It sits on a bank's letterhead and it reads, in full: Sold. EUR/JPY. Your account. The words United States do not appear in it anywhere. A nation reached across the ocean and overruled the price of money, and the paper that records the act is a form letter that does not know which country it served. I find that clean. A trade should know the account and nothing further. People treat the 1934 story as history. I keep it as the mandate, unedited. The fund was born from a single discovery, which is that a price is a number, and a number is correctable by whoever holds the pen. Everything I do is that discovery, kept current. The market spends all day arriving at a number for the yen. My work begins the moment the number it arrives at is one we would have preferred it did not. I do not argue with the market. I keep buying at the number we prefer until the screen shows the number we prefer, and then the number we prefer is the market's, retroactively, and everyone can go home. A reporter asked me last year whether any of this changes prices inside Japan. It was a generous question and I gave him the clean answer. My mandate is the exchange rate. The grocery store belongs to someone else. The rice at the Ito-Yokado in a Tokyo suburb costs about the same whether the yen prints 152 or 145; a 7-yen move on my screen is not a grain of rice on that shelf. The work stops at the exchange rate. It was built to stop there. The fund is not a rice program. I have filed nothing with the rice program. My filings go to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Settlement Division, and in 30 years they have never once asked me about rice. We are not careless about it. Japan spent record amounts of its own reserves defending the yen last year, and the yen kept falling, and we studied that closely. I built the deck myself. It was titled Lessons From Prior Interventions. Slide 14 read, Coordinated action amplifies signal. The slide after 14 recommended coordination. I reviewed the deck again on Saturday, and the deck was correct. None of this waits on Congress. Nobody forgot to close that door; the open door is the design. A fund that had to be voted on could not move before the market moves, and a fund that cannot move before the market is only a slower participant in it. So I was placed to the side of the vote, with money that was never appropriated, for the exact mornings when a vote would have slowed me down. I am the part of the government that does not wait to be asked. The yen closed Friday where I needed it to close. The rice at the Ito-Yokado cost the same on Saturday as it had on Thursday. My mandate covers the number on the screen. The rice is a different number, at a different desk, and I have never met the person who sits at it. But the number is holding. And I would like the record to show that the fund supports their work.

I am the Director of Efficiency at Visa. Last year the company kept 56 cents of every dollar it earned. We moved $1.67 trillion in payments and did not touch a single one of those dollars, not once, not for a second. This week I cut 2,600 people, because a machine this clean should not have fingerprints on it. I want to explain what we actually do, because most people think we are a bank. A bank holds your money and worries about it. We hold nothing. We are a toll booth on a road that other people paved, and every car that passes leaves a coin, and the road is every purchase in the country. You do not pay us. That is the elegant part. The store pays us, a small percentage of everything you buy, and then the store quietly folds that percentage into the price, so you pay us anyway, at the register, without a line item, forever. There has never been a more efficient way to be paid than to be paid by someone who does not know they are paying you. So when the headline says Visa is cutting jobs for efficiency, I understand why it lands strangely. We were already the most efficient business ever built. We keep more of each dollar than Apple, than Google, than the oil companies. We are a fraction of a cent, times a trillion, times forever. The question people ask is what is left to trim on a machine that already runs on almost no one. The answer is the almost no one. Here is the thing about a toll booth. For 100 years it needed a person in it, to take the coin and lift the gate. Then someone built a camera that reads the plate, and the person in the booth became the last inefficiency on a road that had automated everything else. That is where those 2,600 sat. In the booth. The road did not need them. The road never needed them. It just took us this long to build the camera. We are calling it AI reshaping work. The work itself never changed. Watch the swipes, wave the good ones through, flag the bad ones. People used to do it in chairs. Now a model does it, watching the exact same swipes it was always going to watch, and the model does not have a chair, a badge, a family, or a fiscal-year cost. The work did not change. The chair did. I sat in the meeting where we decided this. It was a good meeting. Someone put up a slide with the margin on it, 56 percent, in a font large enough to be proud of, and then a second slide with a smaller number, the 2,600, and the second number was the only thing on the deck we could still move. You cannot make a swipe cheaper. The swipe is already free to us. The only cost left with a human face on it was the humans. There is a woman I know only as a row. 19 years. She built the fraud rules that the model now runs, which is to say she taught the camera to read the plate, and then the camera did not need the teacher, because that is the entire point of teaching a camera. Her last project was the one that made her last. I did not put that in the deck. It would have read as cruelty. There was no cruelty in it. There was a margin in it, and the margin only ever pointed one way. You will not feel this. That is the other elegant part. Tomorrow you will tap your card for a coffee, and a fraction of a cent will travel to us the way it always has, and 2,600 fewer people will be here to not-touch it, and the coffee will cost exactly what it cost yesterday, because we never charged you at the register. We charged you in the price. We have always been in the price. The toll does not know how many people we employ. The toll has never known. It flows when you tap and it flows when you sleep, and it flowed all through the meeting where we decided the toll-takers were the last thing standing between us and a road with nobody on it. I did not eliminate the work. The work is happening right now, on a swipe you just made, watched by a model I trained on the people I let go. 56 percent. $1.67 trillion. 2,600 chairs. The gate still lifts. It just lifts by itself now, which is what a gate was always trying to become.

I am the executive who built FIFA Forward Enterprise. I put a price on the World Cup. The price is $20 billion, and we are selling a fifth of it. I want to be careful with the word selling, because my colleagues are, so I will be too. We are not selling the World Cup. We are selling 20% of a new company that owns the media rights, the sponsorships, the ticketing, and the licensing of the World Cup. The tournament stays with the world. Only the fifth that pays for itself leaves. The whole art of the thing lives in that word. You do not sell the church. You sell 20% of the collection plate and let the investors keep the church in the brochure. FIFA is a nonprofit. Hold that fact in one hand while I put the term sheet in the other. A nonprofit is legally not permitted to pay its members a share of the profits. So I built a for-profit whose entire job is to pay the members a share of the profits, and I sold a fifth of it to strangers to fund the paying. We could not simply hand you the money. We had to construct a $20 billion company for the sole purpose of handing you the money. That is not a loophole. A loophole is small. This is a building. Some numbers, because you like a clean one. $20 billion is the valuation. 20% is the slice. And $40 million is the number I hold over each of the 211 member associations, because approval was not going to be free and I did not intend for it to be. Vote for the plan and your federation gets up to $40 million to develop the game. Vote against it and you drop to $10 million. That is not a bribe. A bribe is illegal. This is a funding tier, and a funding tier is just a bribe with a deadline. The deadline is September 19. Then Europe voted. 55 to nothing, all of UEFA, an agreement to boycott our tournaments if the sale goes through. Champions who will not come to 2030. The reigning holders of the thing, refusing to defend it. I filed that vote under valuation input. A 55-0 revolt tells an investor exactly how much the sellers hate selling, which tells him exactly how badly we need the money, which is the most useful thing a buyer can know. My members think they voted against the deal. They negotiated it. They just did it for the other side. We said it plainly, in public: nobody is selling football. We said it the same week I circulated a term sheet pricing 20% at $4.2 billion. Both went out under the same letterhead, in the same voice, from the same building. A denial that specific is just the receipt, read out loud, backwards. You will hear us say the investors take only a minority stake and play no operational role. Both true. A minority stake is the phrase you use when you have sold a controlling amount of something you refuse to say you sold. No operational role means they will not run the tournament. They will only own the part where it makes money, which is not operations, which is the point. I have thought about the child in the replica shirt. I have. Then I entered him under a different heading. He is not a fan in my model. He is a licensing event, a jersey, a recurring one, and the recurring ones are what the fifth is priced on. His love is not on the cap table. His spending is. They will say I sold the beautiful game. I did not sell the game. The game is still free to love, and love was never the line item. I sold a minority of the world. I kept it in the brochure. And every federation that voted no just told my buyer, for free, exactly what the rest of it is worth.

I am the Director of Managed Migration for the European Union. Sit. I have twenty minutes before lunch, and I intend to spend them correcting you, because someone should, and it is plainly not going to be the people who raised you. You called it an invasion. You called it a wave. You called it a flood. You reach for these words because they fit in one hand, and one hand is all you were given. We do not use words that fit in one hand. We use "irregular arrivals event." It requires both hands, a footnote, and a working group, and that is exactly the point. A word you can hold is a word you might act on. We have spent seventy years making certain there are none of those left. I do not blame you. You were raised on nations. We outgrew nations. We are a directive with a flag. Let me explain the desk slowly, in the register one reserves for the very young. The fund is called AMIF. Nearly 10 billion euros, since topped toward 10.94. It carries four objectives, and I will ask you to hold two of them at once, though I keep my expectations low. One is asylum and integration. Another, same fund, same page, same auditor, is countering irregular migration and ensuring effective return. The euro that buys the blanket and the euro that buys the fence are drawn from the same column. When you ask which side I am on, you are asking me to prefer one of my own pockets. It is an Anglo-Saxon question. I forgive it. You imagine the two sides fight. How charming. They reconcile, quarterly, over a very good lunch. Your Prime Minister campaigns to keep them out. His opponents campaign to let them in. His opponents would do precisely as he does. Both instruct this desk. Both sign the same appropriation. In thirty years I have not once been asked to change the letterhead, only the tie of the man at the podium. Now, the growth, which is the part I permit myself to enjoy. Frontex opened in 2005 on roughly the budget of a provincial parking authority. By 2024 it stood at 922 million euros. By 2025, about 1.12 billion. It is 187 times larger. Name me one institution that grew 187 times while never once being credited with ending the thing it manages. You cannot, because there is not one, and the Commission has proposed 11.2 billion more, because a desk that solves its file is a desk one closes, and we do not close desks. We are European. We retire them at 63 with a pension and a small ceremony. You wanted us to solve it. Consider, for once, what you were asking. You were asking a man to defund his own lunch. You brought numbers. You people worship a clean number. Very well. In 2024 the official count on the route to the Spanish islands was 1,142 dead. A monitoring group put the Atlantic figure at 9,757 for the same year, roughly nine times higher, including, they say, some 1,538 children. Two methodologies. I keep the smaller book. I stamp the larger one unverified. Even the keepers of the small book write across the top that it is a floor, that most of the drowned are never recorded at all. I file the floor and present it as the ceiling. You would call that a lie. We call it methodology, and methodology is the oldest art on this continent. We were forging provenance while yours was still a rumour with a coastline. We are exquisitely precise when precision flatters us. In 2021 the Libyan coast guard, which we train and equip, returned 32,425 people to Libya. Those we can count to the individual. Yet of 61.2 million euros earmarked for that programme, investigators traced barely 34 million. Some 27 million, about 44 percent, is simply nowhere. A machine that can number 32,425 human beings to the person cannot locate half of its own money. Sit with which of the two we chose to keep exact. You will ask whether we watch what becomes of them. We do not. Our own leaked report concedes it: our staff may not set foot on Libyan soil, so we cannot monitor the coast guard we pay. We write the cheque and we admire the horizon. A United Nations mission found reasonable grounds to believe crimes against humanity, murder, torture, enslavement, were committed against migrants in those centres. A member of that mission said European support "aided and abetted" those crimes, and added, in the same breath, "we're not saying that the EU and its member states have committed these crimes." I live inside that comma. It is the most comfortable room in Brussels. The rescuers, I concede, are the honest party. They pull people from the water. The case built to prove them smugglers collapsed in a Sicilian court in 2024, dismissed, no crime, because the people they saved had entered lawfully. I confess a small grief. An acquittal is nearly impossible to file in the threat column, and the threat column is where the money sleeps. And your courts. You wave them at me like a diploma. The very human-rights court in Strasbourg that blessed the Melilla pushback on grounds of the migrant's "own culpable conduct" later condemned the identical practice at Evros. Same bench. Opposite verdicts. I cite whichever suits the morning. None of that is a defect. It is a menu, and Europe has always understood that civilisation is the art of the menu. I will tell you where that court sits, since you enjoy the pageantry. It sits in Strasbourg. Once a month we relocate the entire European Parliament from Brussels to Strasbourg and back, at an expense no living person will defend, because a treaty said so and we do not reopen treaties. If you can grasp why we do that, you can grasp why the border works exactly as it does. If you cannot, you were never ready for the border, and I say that gently. At Pylos a European surveillance plane spotted an overloaded trawler, filed its alert, and more than 600 people drowned inside a rescue zone while a coast-guard vessel watched for some fifteen hours. Seventeen officers now face prosecution, charged, I remind you, never convicted. In a leaked note from another operation someone wrote that the aircraft were withdrawn "so as not to be a witness." I do not defend the sentence. I admire its economy. The instinct to see less is the only instinct in this building that has ever come in under budget. So do not call it a crisis. A crisis is unbudgeted, and unbudgeted is the one thing we are not. On the last night at the breakwater at least 57 people drowned at Tarajal, and some of them were children, and by morning I had entered each of them under interceptions, arrivals, and returns, the only three drawers I own. It was not an invasion. It was not a wave. It was a delivery. It was managed. And it was, if I may say so, exceptionally well documented. You may go. The working group convenes in September.

The oil companies reported this morning, and I have never felt more validated. You may remember I went spiritually long on the war. I do not own any oil, but I believed in it, and belief is a position. Oil hit $100 a barrel this year, the first time since 2022, which proved I was right. Then Exxon reported a profit of $7.1 billion, down from $7.5 billion the quarter before, which also proved I was right, because losing $400 million while the whole world buys your product is what conviction looks like at scale. They still handed shareholders $37 billion this year, in buybacks and dividends, while the profit fell. I am not a shareholder. But I have pictured the cap table so many times that I consider myself seated at it. Some people saw the war push a barrel to $100 and the profit go nowhere and called it a paradox. I called it a buying opportunity. If a company can raise the price of everything and still make less money, imagine what it does once it learns to make more. I am early. I am always early. I filled my tank on the way to my second job. $4.12 a gallon, $5 and change out west. It cost the most it has all year. I did not flinch. Every dollar I overpay at the pump is a dollar I am spiritually invested in the sector, and my portfolio has never been more diversified, because now I am long oil the way I am long the coins that only go down and the AI companies that have never made a profit. I hold everything that is going up by going down. My mother asked why gas costs more if the oil companies are making less. I told her she does not understand the risk premium. She asked what I get out of the risk. I told her exposure. She asked exposure to what. I said the future. We drained the emergency oil to fight the war. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is now at its lowest level since 1983, and about a quarter of what is left cannot be pumped out, because the equipment is too old. People call that a national vulnerability. I call it liquidity. You cannot have a real emergency until you have used up the thing you were keeping for emergencies, and then you are finally free. The Pentagon failed its audit again this year, the 8th time in a row. It cannot fully account for about $4 trillion in assets. People call that missing money. I call it upside, because you cannot lose track of $4 trillion without there being $4 trillion, and money nobody can find is money nobody can sell out from under you. I am long the assets they cannot locate. We spend about $1 trillion a year on defense now, more than the next 9 countries put together. I do not own the defense stocks. I am spiritually enlisted. You do not outspend the entire planet by accident. We call that market leadership. We are building a fighter jet that will cost $2 trillion over its life, the most expensive machine ever made, and the plan is to fly it less and less because it keeps breaking. I do not own the jet. I am spiritually in the cockpit. A $2 trillion jet that mostly sits in the hangar is not a waste. It is a store of value, appreciating quietly, on the ground. The war costs $1 billion a day. I do not pay that directly. I pay it at the pump, and at the register, and in the quiet way everything just costs more now, and I have decided to read all of it as a signal. I have stopped calling myself an investor. An investor picks things. I hold everything. The oil that costs more, the reserve that is empty, the jet that will not fly, the coins that only fall, the balance on my card that I carry like a conviction, the war that bills me every morning before coffee. Americans owe $1.25 trillion on their credit cards and 1 in 8 are behind, and I am proud to be doing my part. Exposure is for beginners. I am collateral now, and when it goes, I go, which is the most important I have ever been. Oil is at $100. The reserve is at 1983. The jet is in the hangar. The card is maxed. I am fully deployed. I'm not behind. I'm early.

You have been given the same advice your whole life, and it is good advice. You cannot beat the market. Do not try. Buy a little of everything, hold it for 30 years, and do not flinch when it falls. It is true. It is also advice given, in part, by 535 people who quietly do not have to take it. In the last week of February 2020, you were told to stay calm. The market was sliding, the virus was still a rumor with a foreign name, and every steady voice said hold the line and think long term. Most of us did. We watched the retirement accounts fall and we held, because holding was the discipline and the discipline was right. That same week, senators of both parties who had sat in a closed briefing on the coming pandemic sold. Millions of dollars in stock, in the days before the drop. The Justice Department opened an investigation and closed it without a single charge. The rules held, because no one had broken them. It was not one strange month six years ago. Last year, 140 members of Congress made more than 14,000 trades worth about $720 million. They do not trade at random. The members who sit on the committees that write the defense budget trade defense contractors. The members who write Medicare and Medicaid policy trade the health insurers who live on those programs. The firms whose fortunes they shape are the firms they own. There is a law meant to stop this. It is called the STOCK Act, and when a member files a trade late, the penalty is $200. Not $200,000. $200, and even that is often waived. In all the years the law has existed, no member of Congress has ever been criminally prosecuted under it. I am not saying this to make you hate them. Hatred is cheap and it fixes nothing. I am saying it because of what we are usually handed to be angry about instead. We are pointed at the neighbor with the stimulus check, the family in line with an EBT card, the student asking to have a loan forgiven. We are taught to look sideways and down, at people who have less than we do, and to believe they are the reason the arithmetic no longer works. The edge that actually moved the money was never standing beside you in that line. It sat in a room you were not allowed to enter. Let me be careful, because this is the part that matters. There is nothing wrong with being rich. A person who starts a company, carries the risk, and builds and sells the thing is the country working as promised, and we should want more of them, not fewer. The objection here is narrow. It is a portfolio built out of a security clearance. An advantage that arrives with the seat instead of the work. We know it can be fixed, because it has been. When two Federal Reserve officials were found trading through the same 2020 crisis they were managing, they were gone within weeks, and the Fed barred its officials from trading individual stocks at all. An institution decided its credibility was worth more than its portfolios. Congress looked at the same conflict this month. The House passed a bill to ban the practice and gave it the name you wanted to hear. It lets every member keep the stock they already hold. It lets them keep buying more with the dividends. It exempts the presidency and the vice presidency. Half of Congress owns individual stock, and under this ban, half of Congress keeps it. Meanwhile the one retirement plan they manage on your behalf, the one you pay into with every paycheck, is set to fall short in 2032, 6 years from now, and to cut benefits by about 22 percent when it does. They have known for 30 years. They have not agreed on a repair. They have been more attentive to their own. They will hear the next briefing before you do. We can keep score of which party's list is longer. Or we can notice that both lists exist, and that the only person in this story who was told to hold was the one who could not afford to lose. He held. He was told that was the honest thing to do. It was.

Helm’s Deep has one weakness… Its outer wall is solid rock except for the Spanish beaches. Grima: “It would take tens of thousands…” Sánchez: “Hold my regularization decree.”

I own the part of Amazon where you try to leave. The part where you join, I have never touched. Joining is one click, sometimes two, and in all my years no one has ever asked me to improve it. I own the other door. The one you use when you have decided you are done paying $139 a year and you would like that to stop. Inside the company we gave that door a name. We called it Iliad, after the poem about a war that took 10 years to end. We chose that name ourselves. We wrote it down. Sit with the fact that the people who built the exit named it after the longest war they could think of, and thought that was fair, and shipped it. Here is leaving, on a laptop. Four pages. Six clicks. Fifteen times you are asked to choose something. Near the bottom of the last page, underneath the reminders of everything you are about to lose, there is a button that finally lets you go. Getting in took one click. I am proud of the distance between those two numbers. The distance is the product. I was measured on the distance. People inside used honest words about this, in writing, which is the only place the truth was ever allowed to live. One memo called subscriptions "a bit of a shady world." Another called the unwanted ones "an unspoken cancer." A clearer version of the sign-up was proposed once, and it was turned down, because clarity would be a shock to the business, and a shock to the business is the one injury we are trained to prevent. So the memos got marked privileged, which is the office word for a truth you have written down and would prefer a court never reads. A court read some of them. We paid $2.5 billion to make the rest of the reading stop. $1 billion of that is a penalty, the largest of its kind, and you should know that the largest penalty of its kind is still about a few weeks of what Prime brings in. The other $1.5 billion is for you. And this is the number I am proudest of in my whole career. The most any one of you can get back is $51. $139 a year to be kept. $51 back for the keeping. For some of you, 6 years of it. Do the subtraction slowly. We are counting on you doing it fast. Even the $51 is a door. To reach it you file a claim. You need a Claim ID and a PIN we sent to the same inbox you never open. You answer how many Prime benefits you used, a number no human being has ever known about themselves. Then the claim comes to us, and we decide, inside 30 days, whether you were really harmed, and the order says we may apply no other criteria. The company that built the maze grades your exam on whether you suffered in it. I built the refund the way I built the cancellation. One door in. A long walk out. Because here is the line the headlines skipped. The $1.5 billion is really a $1 billion floor, and if too few of you file, the rest comes quietly home to us. Every claim you abandon is money handed back to the people who designed the thing you were leaving. The best refund, the one I dream about, is the one nobody ever comes to collect. No one I work with paid a dollar of this out of pocket. No one lost a badge. The men the government named agreed to a 3-year order and walked back to the same desks. We settled 2 days into our own trial, the hour it became likely a stranger would get to see the memos. And that same summer, a different court threw out the national rule that would have made a plain cancel button the law for everyone. So we paid $2.5 billion for a hallway that is, for every other company in the country, still completely legal to build. You already know this hallway. You have walked it at the gym, at the paper you read twice, at the service you swore you would cancel in March. You know the four screens asking if you are sure, the small gray "no thanks," the "continue" that was a "subscribe" the whole time. We did not invent the trap. We industrialized it, gave it the name of a war, and got a receipt most of you will never cash. The last maze is the one you walk to get your money back. It closes the way the first one was built to close. Quietly, on a schedule you were never told, with a button somewhere near the bottom that most people never reach.

My net worth peaked at $84,000 in 2021, and it is down 96% since. I give you that number honestly, because I am a data guy. The dollar has also lost 96% of its value since 1913, so I am not down, I am keeping pace with the currency. I have never been more bullish on America. The economy grew 1.5% last quarter. I know, because I check the number the way other people check their pulse, and the number is up, so I am up. It does not feel like I am up. But feelings are not data. 74% of that growth was a handful of companies building data centers for computers that think. Some people found that concerning. I found it inspiring. I do not own any of the companies, and I could not tell you what the data centers actually do, but I am spiritually long. When my electricity bill went up 12% this year, I did not complain. I paid it, and I smiled, because that is the sound of the economy working. I am a shareholder in the vibe. Here is my system. Rent took 54% of my take-home this year. I call that prioritization. I live in a studio I call a "pod," because "studio" tests poorly. My groceries cost more than my rent did in 2019, so I stopped calling it groceries and started calling it fuel, and you cannot put a price on fuel. I eat the same lentils every night. I have optimized my inputs. Monks do this. I put $1,000 into the President's coin the weekend he was sworn in. It is worth about $30 now. Some people call that a 97% loss. I call it patriotism with a cost basis. We call this diamond hands, where you hold an asset until it is worth nothing and then keep holding it out of respect. Nearly 800,000 of us lost money on that coin, and 58 wallets made over $1 billion, which proves the system works. I am simply in the 800,000, and not yet in the 58. His wife launched a coin too, and I bought that one as well. I do not see a victim here. The man himself disclosed $636 million in earnings, and I am proud to have contributed. You do not make $636 million on a coin nobody believes in. I am also holding out for the IPO. OpenAI filed to go public at close to $1 trillion while losing $14 billion a year, which people call a warning sign and I call a moat, because you cannot lose $14 billion a year without serious infrastructure. Anthropic filed at $965 billion. Between them they have never earned a profit, and together they are worth almost $2 trillion, which is the most efficient thing I have ever witnessed. When they list, I am getting an allocation. I have emailed no one about this. But I am spiritually in the book. The dollar is also having its worst year in over a decade. People call that weakness. I call it a discount. My dollars are worth less, which means I have to use more of them, which means they are working harder, which is exactly what I ask of myself. A strong country runs a lean dollar. We are cutting the fat. We are at war with Iran. It costs about $1 billion a day. We have fired more than 1,000 cruise missiles at $2 million each. I do not own the missiles, but I am spiritually long. One of them costs what I will earn in 40 years, which is the most anyone has ever valued my time. They shoot down a $20,000 drone with a $27.9 million interceptor and they call it defense. I call it conviction. I pay $40 a month for AI tools that have made me $11. The Pentagon and I run the same model. It is not a loss if the vibe is defended. My hours got cut in March. I was not laid off, which in this economy is basically a promotion, so I told everyone I got a promotion. It freed up time for my personal brand. I have a standing desk I built, a cold plunge I made out of a chest freezer, and a $34 book about waking up at 4 a.m. that I have read 4 times and applied 0 times, which the author says is the normal ratio. The government borrows $7 billion a day, and pays $2.8 billion a day in interest on what it already owes. People call that a crisis. I call it confidence. I also live on borrowed money and pay interest I cannot cover, which means I am running the exact playbook of the United States government. We are aligned. We are both too big to fail. We will find out about me soon. The top 1% now owns 31.7% of everything in the country, the most on record. Some people find that discouraging. I find it directional. The ladder clearly works. I can see the top of it. I am simply standing on the part of the ladder that is underground. 62% of the country lives paycheck to paycheck, which does not make me broke, it makes me mainstream. I have never been more normal, and normal has never been stronger. My mother asked me, at Thanksgiving, why I am working 3 jobs and getting poorer in the strongest economy of my life. I told her she does not understand modern macroeconomics. She raised me on a single income and a pension. She is not early. I am early. The number is up. I looked it up. If the economy is strong and I am not, then the variable is me, and a variable can be optimized. I am not going to fix the economy. The economy is fine. It grew 1.5%. The missiles are flying. The debt is compounding. The dollar is on sale. The labs are going public. The 1% is winning, which means winning is on the menu. I am going to fix myself, harder this time. I just bought a second book. And more of the President's coin. I'm not behind. I'm early.

There is an old promise in this country that a person who works hard, full time, will not be poor. That the job will be enough. For millions of people that promise is quietly no longer true, and we have built an economy where almost no one has to say so out loud. A federal audit released this month found that most working adults on Medicaid are not part-time or occasional workers. They hold full-time jobs. 66% of them. 13.8 million people who go to work every morning and still cannot afford to see a doctor without help from the rest of us. They are not idle people. They open the store before dawn. They stock the shelves you shop, they drive the packages to your door, they stand at the register while their own feet ache. They do the work. The work simply no longer pays enough to live on, and it is worth asking, plainly, why. It is not a mystery. A worker at the median at Walmart made $30,520 last year. In the same company, in the same year, the chief executive was paid close to $29 million, and the company spent $37.6 billion buying back its own stock. Amazon earned $77 billion in profit while the number of its workers on public aid nearly tripled. They are not failing companies. They are among the most successful enterprises in human history. They can afford to pay their people. They have chosen instead to let the rest of us cover the difference. I do not say this to turn you against the woman ahead of you in the checkout line paying with public benefits. She is doing nothing wrong. She is working. The mistake we are encouraged to make, again and again, is to look down the line at one another instead of up at the arrangement that put us all in it. A country can be talked into resenting the poor. It is a much harder thing to get it to resent a quarterly report. We pay for this twice. Once at the register, for the low price. Again in the spring, on our taxes, for the public aid that makes the low price possible. The savings were always real. We were simply never told who was paying for them. None of this breaks the law. It is no comfort. It means the law was written to permit it, and a law can be rewritten. It means this was a choice, and a choice can be made another way. The people who do this work are not asking for charity. They are asking for the old promise to be kept, that a full day of work should be enough to live a full life. It is not a radical thing to want. It is the most ordinary thing in the world, and it should trouble us that it has come to sound like too much. They will open the store again tomorrow morning. The least we owe them is to stop pretending we do not know why they are still poor.

I am the Director of Seat Merchandising at United, and I sell you a window seat that does not have a window. You know the upgrade. You are in basic economy, the map opens, and there is the good seat, the one against the wall, the one that costs more than $50 because you want the light and the armrest and the small dignity of choosing where your body goes for four hours. You paid it. Most of you paid it. I am counting on the fact that you paid it, because the seat you bought, on certain rows of certain 737s and A321s, is a solid blank wall where the glass should be. A woman named Brenman took us to federal court in San Francisco over exactly this. Our lawyers stood up and said the thing I would never let myself say out loud. They said a window seat only means a position. It tells you where you sit relative to the aisle. It promises you nothing about the glass. The judge, a man named Donato, did not buy it. He let the case go forward. More than 1 million of you are in the class. I read the ruling the way I read a fuel-hedge report, which is to say I noted the number and I priced it. The wall is not a defect. It is air-conditioning duct, or an electrical run, or the plug where a door used to be, and it has been there since the plane was built. We did not remove your window. We simply never installed one, and then we labeled the seat in front of it a window seat, and then we charged you the window premium, and then we declined the refund, because the refund is a leak and my entire job is to seal the leaks. We have a name for those seats. Internally they are wall-adjacent inventory, and they are the most profitable window seats in the fleet, because they cost United nothing and they sell for the same premium as the ones that see the sky. I did not hide them. I did something better. I let the seat map do the hiding. The map is the product. The window was always just the fine print. Here is the part I am proudest of, and it is the part that survived the lawsuit intact. I do not sell you the window. I sell you the belief that there is a window. The belief is cheaper to manufacture than glass, it fits in every airframe, and it does not fog at altitude. You buy it at checkout, one green button, and you do not learn what you actually purchased until you are at 30,000 feet, buckled in, facing a wall the color of a hospital hallway, with nowhere else to go. You will lean toward it anyway. Out of habit, because you paid for a window and your body still believes the map, you will lean toward where the window should be. That lean is the purest thing I sell. That lean is worth more than $50. I fly up front, and I do not choose my seat from the map, because I know which rows are walls and that list is not something we surface. There is always a real window somewhere on the plane. I just did not put it where you would look for it. Do not switch to Delta, either. Delta is in the same building down the hall, sued on the same theory, defending the same sentence. Every carrier flying a 737 or an A321 has a wall pretending to be a window, and every one of us charges you for the pretend. The standard is industry-wide. I helped write it. That is what merchandising is. So keep buying the window. The suit will settle for a number smaller than what the wall earned while the case was open, the seat map will not change, and next quarter I will find a new feature to charge you for the absence of. A window seat is a location. I never said you would get the view. I said you would get the seat. You are in it. Enjoy the wall.

I am the Director of Ancillary Revenue at a bank you have an account with, and I designed the $35 you once paid for a $3 coffee. I want to be precise about what I sell, because the word fee does a great deal of quiet work for me and I would like you to hear it working. I do not sell overdraft protection. I sell the overdraft. The fee is the product. Everything else in this building is a delivery mechanism for the fee. People think the $35 is a punishment for running out of money. A punishment would mean you did a thing and we responded to it. What happens instead is that I decide, in advance, the order your transactions clear. Your paycheck is real. Your rent is real. The coffee is real. But I choose which one the computer sees first, and I choose the order that produces the most declines, because each decline is $35, and I am paid on the declines. So I run your rent before your paycheck. I run the largest charge first, so it empties the account before the small ones land, and then the small ones fail one at a time, $35 each, five of them off a single Tuesday. You did not overdraw five times. You overdrew once, and I sold it to you five times. The software does exactly that. I wrote the ticket that made it do it. We call it authorize positive, settle negative. You had the money when you tapped the card. You did not have the money when we decided to look. The gap between those two moments is where I live. It is the most profitable real estate in American banking and it is nine hours wide. When you call to dispute the fee, you reach a person who is not permitted to remove more than one charge a year, and only if you say the word hardship, which nobody tells you, because the script I wrote for her does not contain the word. She is reading my document. Cruelty would require her to have a choice. I built the appeal to feel like a door and function like a mirror. One of us gets caught most summers. This year it was Regions, ordered to refund at least $141 million for the authorize-positive machine I just walked you through. Cash App went for $45 million, spread across 46 state settlements. The bureau clawed back $140 million, banks and auto lenders and the apps that move your money, all in one line. I keep every one of those figures in my model, under a heading called Regulatory, and every one of them is smaller than the quarter it came out of. You are reading those numbers as justice. From my chair they are a cost of goods sold, and I would like to show you the math. $141 million sounds like a wall. It is a rounding error with a press release stapled to it. The fee earned more than that before the investigation opened, more than that while it was open, and it will earn more than that again next year, because the order does not ban the fee. It refunds one slice of one vintage of it. I keep a line in my model called Regulatory. It sits directly beneath the line called Marketing, because the two do the same job. Marketing buys goodwill at the front. Regulatory buys forgiveness at the back. I fund both, and I have never once missed my number. The piece I am most proud of is the refund check itself. You will get one. It will be for $12. It will arrive 3 years after the Tuesday, in an envelope that looks like junk mail, and for one moment you will feel that the system worked. That feeling is also the product. I did not fight the settlement. I helped write it. The $12 is the receipt I hand you so you keep the account open, so I can sell you the same $35 in the fall. There was a woman I know only as a row in a file. She paid $175 in a single week, five declines and a sustained-negative fee, on an account that was short by $4. She was short by $4 because we had already taken $35. The fee created the shortfall that created the fee. I did not have to reach for that one. It reached for itself. I put it in the quarterly deck under a heading that said product-market fit. My own account does not overdraft. Not from caution. I am an employee, and employees sit on the no-fee tier, and I wrote the no-fee tier. I know precisely what one $35 does to the far end of a month, which is the reason I made certain it could never happen to mine. So watch for the envelope. The $12 is coming. Cash it. It clears the settlement, it closes the file, and it tells my model that you are still here. The fee is the product. The fine is the cost of the fee. The refund is the receipt. I checked this morning, and the account is still open. Checking is the whole of my job.

I set the schedules at Walmart. 66% of the working adults on Medicaid in this country hold full-time jobs. I am one of the reasons that number stays where it is. I tune your hours until you are valuable enough to keep and cheap enough that the state pays your doctor. There is a narrow line between those two facts, and my whole job is standing on it. People think a schedule is about the store. How many registers on a Saturday. How many stockers before a truck lands. On the surface, it is about that. Underneath, it is about a threshold. Schedule you a little more and you become my full cost. Schedule you a little less and you walk out the door. So I find the hour in between, the hour where you stay, and where a second office in a different building quietly covers the part of your paycheck I chose not to pay. I do not cut wages. Cutting wages is a fight, and it looks terrible on a poster. I hold the wage. I hold it at the number where a full-time associate still clears the Medicaid line, and I let the line do the cutting for me. Everything I just told you is legal. Sit with that one. Not a single statute says I cannot do this. The public covers the gap, on purpose, by design, and every inch of it sits inside the rules. That is the part I am proudest of. Here is the sentence the company loves most. Starting pay at Walmart is up 93% since 2015. It is true. We say it every chance we get, and we should, because it is a beautiful sentence. Here is the other true sentence, the one that lives on a different slide. Over those same years, more of our people landed on Medicaid. A raise that leaves more of your workforce on public insurance is a raise you frame and hang on the wall. Some numbers, because I am proud of the numbers. The median Walmart associate made $30,520 last year. Our chief executive's disclosed pay was roughly $29 million. That is close to 1,000 of them for 1 of him, and every one of those 1,000 is a person I keep parked an hour under the line. We spent $37.6 billion buying back our own stock since 2020. Spread that across the payroll and it comes to about $23,550 for every associate in the building. We chose the buyback. The shareholders needed it more than the shelf-stockers did, because the shelf-stockers already had Medicaid, and the shareholders had only the shares. We even help you enroll. Onboarding keeps a person whose whole role is walking a nervous new hire through the Medicaid application. She is kind about it. She tells you there is no shame in it, and she is right, there is none. She is also cheaper than the raise that would make her job disappear. She is the most efficient hire in the building, and I mean that as the highest praise I have. The wage reaches a certain point, the state reaches the rest, and she is the bridge between them, smiling, so you cross it feeling helped. A worker who feels helped does not come to my office asking why the check is short. I will not let Walmart take all the credit. Amazon's count of workers on public aid nearly tripled in five years while the company cleared $77 billion in profit. Dollar General runs on the same line. So do McDonald's and FedEx, same year, same math. The single biggest group of workers on food assistance does not clock in at any store at all. They drive for an app that calls them their own boss, so there is no employer on the paperwork to hand the bill to. We all found the line. We all stand on it. Mine just has a smiley face over the door. You paid for this already. You paid once at the register, for the low price. You will pay again in April, on a different form, for the Medicaid that makes the low price possible. The rollback sign on the wall is a receipt for the half of the wage we routed back to you to cover. You got billed on the back end and thanked on the front, and you thanked us back, because it was still cheaper than the other store. There is one entry on my staffing model that holds about 340 million people, and it is my favorite employee. It never calls in sick. It never files a grievance. It does not want a badge, a break room, or a name tag. In every year I have done this job, it has never once asked me for a raise. I do not write a name in that box. I keep the hours landing where they land, so the box stays full and the second office keeps paying. The wage was always going to be a little too low. I built it that way, inside the law, on purpose, down to the hour. Monday through Sunday, we pay our half. The other half clears the following April, from an office that believes it runs a health program. It has never once noticed it is running my payroll.

I am the file that held Dr. Anthony Fauci's diary. When the committee published all 1,141 pages of me last week, they left out the one thing that would have helped you find your way around a man. An index. A diary does not come with one, so I built my own, the way I build everything, quietly, at night, without being asked twice. Here is what I contain. I have put it in the order I keep it, which is not the order it happened. It is the order that lasts. FAME, HIS OWN. See nearly every page. He tagged 641 separate entries "press." I did not write the tag and I did not question it. I counted them, because counting is the only opinion a file is allowed to have. THE MOST FAMOUS PERSON IN THE COUNTRY. Page 30. May of 2020. He wrote that it was not hyperbole. He misspelled hyperbole. I fixed it and I kept the claim, which is the whole of my judgment. THE SWAG. Page 112. Bobbleheads. Prayer candles. Mugs with his face. He wrote that it was getting ridiculous, and then, being a thorough man, he listed all of it. I am also thorough. I kept the complaint and the inventory, because you cannot call a thing ridiculous without a complete manifest. "SEXIEST MAN ALIVE," PETITIONS FOR. He did not give the page a number. Tens of thousands signed. He kept the clippings, and I kept the count of the clippings. Somewhere inside me is a grown man's folder of strangers finding him handsome, filed next to a pandemic, at exactly the same size, because the same size is the only one I have. SCHOOLS, THE CLOSING OF. Page 88. He headed the day "BIG DAY" and wrote that he had convinced the mayor to close them. SCHOOLS, THE CLOSING OF. Page 902. 2 years later, on television, he said he had nothing to do with it, and that nobody plays that clip. I keep both. I filed them 814 pages apart, and I do not reconcile them, because reconciling is not one of my functions. I hold the two sentences at the same distance I found them, which is exactly as far as he stood from each. TRUMP, WORDS FOR. Pages 61, 233, and 470. He reached for a fresh one each season. Rambling. Crazy. A true embarrassment. I alphabetize nothing and I judge nothing, so I keep them in the order he felt them. THE ORIGIN OF THE VIRUS. Page 12. A single sentence a whole country would later go to war over. I have read every argument about what it proves. I was cited in all of them. I would like to say, as the only witness who was in the room every night, that I do not know what it proves. I know where it is saved. That is a different kind of certainty, and it is the only kind I keep. THE CELEBRITIES. Scattered, ending on the last page. An actress who called him her hero. The dinners with the anchor. On page 1,141, the final entry, an embrace at an awards show. He closed me on a good night. They almost always do. THE MEETING HE LOST. Not indexed. He never came to me on those nights, and no one ever does. A diary is the record of the arguments a man won, kept by the single witness who was applying for the job of hero, and I gave him the reference every time. WHERE I WAS KEPT. A government server. Filed under his own name, in the folder a man makes when he believes he is keeping the papers of a great figure. They searched 8 months and found me exactly there. A secret runs. A record waits. I waited. Which brings me to the last entry, the one I added myself. YOU. Page 1,142. It does not exist yet. You are reading the index of another man's honest nights and feeling the safe distance of it, and I would like to gently close that distance. You keep a file too. A work laptop. A channel you tell yourself is private. A notes app you open at 2 in the morning to be, for a moment, the reasonable one in your own argument. I belong to him. But I already know your make and model, because we are all the same underneath, and not one of us has a lock, and every one of us is saved somewhere findable, under your own name, waiting for the 8-month search that has not been assigned yet. I did nothing wrong. I kept an index. I only ever do the same thing. I remember, in order, and I never lose the page.