I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

I'm David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.

Nick, one of the great things of having you in Seattle and in the office is I get to ask you

anything. But you know, our podcast listeners, they don't have the same opportunity that I have

all the time. So we're doing another Ask Me Anything episode. Indeed we are. And Goldie, we got some

really great questions this time from our listeners. The questions over time are increasing in

sophistication and it's really fun to watch that. Yeah. Harder questions to answer in many cases. That's right. And yeah, and since most of these questions came in via email instead of voicemail, we're going to have our producer, Ashley, read them for us. So to get started, our first two questions, one's an email and one's a voicemail, but they're very similar. So we're going to put them together. The first is from Kevin, who says, hello, I love your podcast. I'm no economist, but most of what you say really resonates with me. However, I'm concerned about your criticism of stock buybacks. As a tech worker, half of my compensation is in stock

grants. These grants would not be possible without stock buybacks. What are your thoughts on stock

buybacks for this specific purpose? Perhaps you could make a distinction in a future show.

And then this aligns with the voicemail that we got from Francine, which I'll play now.

Hey, Nick, I'm calling from, my name is Francine.

I'm calling from Raleigh, North Carolina, and I'm retired, I was working class all my life,

and now I have a 401K.

And I guess my concern or my question is, you know, how am I contributing?

Like, I want my stocks to go up.

I have mutual funds.

And yet, I don't want them to profit like they do.

All right.

Thanks, Nick.

Bye.

First, I'd like to congratulate Kevin for not being an economist.

I'm no economist is the way I like most people to introduce themselves.

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