I head the Market Access department at Truth Social, even though that is just another way of saying that I'm selling the head start. I provide the President with free access to 340 million Americans. I sell the ten seconds before the post to ten companies at a rate of $100,000 a month each, and the only thing I have ever needed to sell is the gap between those two figures. For most of the thirty years before I came to be here, I sold this service on Wall Street under forty different names. The name that I now use is the Truth API, and it is the most honest title that the business has ever had, and I'll explain why in a moment. People are always referring to this as corruption. I'm going to show you, step by step, why it isn't, since I happen to enjoy doing so and because my lawyers required me to memorise the terminology. Begin with the part that is solid. The President is not engaging in any form of sale. He publishes free of charge, for all people, at every hour, out of a love that I can only describe in those terms. The man cannot stop telling you precisely what he is about to do to the world. I do not sell his words; his words are free. I sell the gap between his words and your eyes, and that gap has never been free in this country, not a single time, not for anything deserving of being crossed. However, it is a mistake to think that this started with him; someone has always been the one to sell the head start. Thirty years ago I disposed of a server. Not the server itself, but the position: my client's order reached the matching engine a few millionths of a second before the rest of the market became aware that an order was in existence because the cage was 40 feet closer to the exchange's matching engine than yours. The exchange paid me for the distance. I charged a premium for it. No one regarded that as corruption. They called it colocation and included it in a brochure. Twenty years ago I sold two seconds; a research organisation gave the nation's consumer-confidence figure to its paying elite two seconds before giving it to the general public, and in that two seconds a quick desk could turn a coin toss into a definite decision. I also sold those two seconds. I have sold the lockup room, in which reporters hold the job report behind glass until the clock hits and a pipe that works quickly turns the embargo into a starting gun. I have sold the analyst's note before it appeared in print. I have sold my proximity to those who draw up the laws and then buy the companies which are the subject of those laws, and when they were caught they passed a law bearing their own name on it and continued to trade, and I kept on selling. People always manage to secure the head start. I am the most skilled at doing so that has ever existed, and the Truth API is my finest achievement since, for the first time, the source is no longer leaking, whispering, or arriving two seconds early; he is now shouting for free to everybody, and yet I am still able to charge one hundred thousand dollars a month for the ten seconds that come before the shout. If you want to call it a loophole, then call it one; I refer to it as artistry and I have the profit margins to win the argument. The point on which the critics are wrong is also the one for which I am most proud. They believe that a head start requires a crime, whereas it in fact requires the opposite. I have no use for a liar since he is unpredictable and I don't sell surprises. All I sell is certainty accompanied by a timestamp. His conviction constitutes my inventory. All I need to do is stand next to the loudest man living at the moment he exhales, and by so doing I have made the square foot next to him the most expensive in the world. See how much the exhalation is worth. He announces that Iran has agreed to delay. The price of oil falls by $4 a barrel before the wire desk has finished phoning the Pentagon. My subscribers are already in long positions. You pick this up from a push notification. They found out from the lungs. He announces that the tariffs are on hold. The market increases by nearly $1 trillion within the course of an afternoon. Now he has the role of the weather, so I sell the one umbrella that opens before the rain falls. Corruption is a favour carried out in the dark. I carry out my favours through a subscription portal, using a dashboard, a rate card, and a customer-success manager called Brandon who sends you a fruit basket as soon as your funds clear the first $1 billion from the feed. They took legal action against me, of course. A press foundation and a magazine, being very serious about it, described the situation as corrupt and unconstitutional in the headline. That headline resulted in the best sales week of my career. Nothing sells a table like a velvet rope and a judge standing beside it. This is exactly the point that I have been working towards in my entire speech, so I want you to imagine yourself in it. A head start is of no use if nobody is staying put. You can't have a fast side without a slow side to compare with. And you have already decided, in a comfortable manner, that the slow side is a pension fund in a state you have never been to. It is you. Throughout your life you've always been the slower part in a fast-paced trade. The layoff—that your vice president became aware of in March and you found out about in June. The increase in rent that took place the month the building changed hands, even though no one had informed the tenants weeks earlier. The plant closing the week after the executives had quietly sold it. The diagnosis code that your insurance company had already priced before your doctor had said the word out loud. You regarded all of this as bad luck. It was a product and it had a department; I manage that department. A shop teacher who has now retired, aged 71, has one entry on page 30 of the pension fund and each Sunday morning checks his balance while having a cup of coffee, since on that day the market does not move and he is able to look at it without feeling any anxiety. In the best month of my career, the month when oil prices reached $90 as a result of the blockade, he awoke on a Sunday poorer than he had been on Saturday by an amount greater than the sum he had earned in his final full year as a teacher, and he never managed to work out which sentence had caused it. He did not receive an alert because alerts are a paid feature; he obtained the figure in the same way that the slower side always does, in a complete and finished form and far too late to be anything but a matter of arithmetic, at the speed of a citizen, that is to say, the speed of last. Once a child who was sitting on my desk asked me whether it kept me awake. I explained to him that everybody receives the same messages. He replied to his screen without looking up, "They receive them only after it's all over; the delay is the result. You just don't include it on the invoice." After that he entered his figure for the quarter and stopped asking, just as all the others do, just as I stopped asking, just as you will stop reading this in a minute and go to check your own balance. My own money is in a blind trust. I never trade on any of it, and here is the beautiful part: I do not have to. I sell shovels to a gold rush, and the shovel never has to find a single flake of gold. It only has to reach the dirt first. I have gotten quietly, enormously rich standing perfectly still, in daylight, with my name on the door. All Americans have the freedom to hear the President's words, and the ten seconds prior to them cost $100,000 a month and are increasing, since there is no upper limit to the amount a person will pay in order to cease being a citizen. All people pick up the news, with someone always being the first to do so; someone is always the one to capitalise on that early advantage, and the only difference in thirty years is that at last I've discovered a source loud enough to be able to sell the silence that comes before him and charge for it as a subscription. There is a level higher than the one that I deal in. Although I have not been authorized to find out how much it costs, I know that it exists, that someone whom you'll never meet is already paying that price, and that on the day it becomes publicly known you'll see about it right here for free, many months after it has stopped being relevant. At the speed of the previous one.