ical thing with Powell and Trump where Powell just won't lower the rates or if he does lower them, he in his comments that he does to the people, he'll put something like this doesn't guarantee they'll be cut the next time. So he does all the right wording just to keep the rates high.

Correct, Scott. You're correct. The Atlanta Fed nearly doubled their Q4 growth estimate to 5.4% from 2.9% for GDP.

Wow.

Capital described it as massive expansion largely attributable to the narrowing trade deficit and that was another story that the trade deficit has been slashed to like as low as it's been since 2009. So the trade deficit is way down. And the quote from Geer Capital is, we're running it hot. Get on board.

All right. I don't think I've ever seen that in my lifetime, have I? 5.4 GDP.

I don't think so. That's incredibly high. I could ask Grok to see if it can tell me when we've had that before, but I don't recall that ever in my lifetime.

Oh, do that. Ask Grok. See what I'm saying? It'll take a minute. Who do we have on the screen? Who's the other person on the screen here?

Oh, hi. I'm Brian. I'm not sure if you could hear me.

We can hear you.

Oh, good. Hi, Scott. Hi, Shel. Hope today. And I thought that a week ago, well gosh, never met or chatted with Scott directly. Hope to see you on the other side. And but now I hope that's a long time from now. And but anyway, been a Dilbert fan since the early nineties when I was in engineering school. And at least I don't know when the book came out, what would Wally do? But in the early nineties, you know, when we were out working on a lab, some might set something on fire. We hit an inflection point and so, well, what would Wally do? And that became the catchphrase at least for my senior year in college. And then you know I of course read your books and got busy with a family for twenty years and then 2015 rolled around with Trump and things got weird and I'd always voted Republican except for when I voted for Perot so you can blame Bill Clinton on me and but then I was really confused. I would have an engineering background, legal background, analyze things for a living and I really was not understanding what I was seeing and I paid more and more attention and I'd lived in Connecticut at the time and in 2016 I guess we moved to Minnesota which is great freaking timing to move to Minnesota after it started its decline. But 2016 rolls around and I really don't understand what I'm seeing. And all I could think of was, well, Trump's trying to get attention or something. I don't think any of this is real. And I was confused until I saw the cover of the Win Bigly book with Dogbert with the Trump hair. Didn't understand what it was about, but I said, I need to own that. And that was eye-opening for me. Must have been 2016 and read your books after that. And I actually reached out to you with a poster of my daughter. I took the teachings and put it on a big poster board of complete BS of persuasion to help her sell Girl Scout cookies, pictures of this, which is funny. You wrote back and said that made me laugh out loud and told him how much I liked your books and I was able to mail them to you influence and persuasion. You signed them and sent them back. So those are two of my more cherished possessions. So but I really I don't know how I would have gotten through the last ten years without your filter because once I read your book and started listening to your podcasts on Periscope, everything made sense and it has ever since. So thank you for that. And then the last thing I would like to thank you for is I think during one of your live streams where you were doing drawing Dilberts a few years ago, I had you laughing pretty good at some of my suggestions because of the asinine life I experienced at many law firms, but in particular the one I was at at that time that I've since left and I'm proud to say that a couple of my suggestions made it into one or two panels of a couple of Dilbert strips that appeared not long after that. So those are two of my most prized possessions. I keep those printed out at the office. Anybody asks I'm like well this is how this came to be. And then they call me a racist and I said thank you and but thank you for everything.

Are you in a gym? Are you at a gym or is that your...

Oh no. This is my man cave. I have my wife lets me use a part the part of the basement of our house that's on the other side of a garage and I have packed my entire life into this room and weight equipment in the garage as well along with radio control cars and college banners and proud MIT graduate and that's me.

I probably could have guessed you were an MIT graduate. But you're the first one I've seen who doesn't wear glasses.

No, I use glasses for driving. I'll probably need them for reading and not very long. But for now I don't need them. MIT was an amazing experience and law school after that was kind of like a vacation. I just went to Boston College Law School in the late nineties and her class was fifty-five percent women. I just kind of kicked back and had fun before spending the last twenty-five years getting ground through nine or ten different law firms.

Wait, you're telling me that MIT was fifty-five percent women?

Boston College Law School. MIT was a sword fight. Kind of leave it there. But it was a great both were a great experience but for different reasons. I did nuclear fusion at MIT and then there were no jobs in fusion back then which should not be a surprise. And then I went to law school after that.

Wow. What was the coolest thing you invented that we don't know about?

I don't know if it's... I didn't end up on the patent, but because I didn't understand how patents worked back then, but I worked on a microwave emissions metals monitor in grad school. And the idea was it was similar to the idea if you go to an analytical lab these days and you want to find out how many parts per million of some metal in a solution they'll nebulize it and run it through this little thing called an inductively coupled plasma and they can get very accurate readings down to like parts per million. Whether you go to a polymers lab or whatever you want to find out how much metal's in a plastic that's how you do it. But we were trying to use a more robust versio