From Music to Money: Gene Podsiadlo's Journey.

0:00 Welcome everybody to another episode of Arthur's Roundtable. Super grateful for everybody being here and paying attention and the Family Office Insights community who has kindly shared this with a lot of their network. And so we're really, really grateful for for you guys listening to us here. Gene and I met at a Park City entrepreneur event, Tribe Angels, I think it was. And he's been kind to me in a variety of ways. And he has a very interesting history and background and business. So I'm super grateful also for him to come on and I'm going to butcher the name, even though I just tried it for shade low. Good. Say it, Say it. Right.

0:41 Right, Todd? Siadlo is the way we. Pronounce it now. Todd Siadlo. 4 easy syllables and it's on. It's on my LinkedIn where you push a little speaker button and you can hear me say it so. That's so cool. It's like Google Translate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Gene, you, you've had a storied history in the traditional finance, finance business. You have interesting. I happen to know you have you like being in the wilderness and have have a farm in various places. But let's start with your your origin story, a little journey. How did all all this come about? Yeah, well it's, it's a peripatetic journey that's for sure.

1:22 A lot of interesting little chapters and and sub sub journeys, but you know the the basics. I was born in upstate New York and family of six children, three boys, 3 girls, and my father was an early, an early memory guy in the computer industry, you know, back in the days of, you know, mainframes before the PC was even thought of. So, you know, we, we, he essentially moved around a lot. So as children, one of the defining elements that's made me sort of a world traveller now and, and not afraid to go sort of anywhere is every two years we moved as children and sometimes even in the middle of the year of the school year. So I got very used to being the new kid. And, you know, we're joking about pronouncing my last name. But, you know, I remember, I remember distinctly moving to Colorado from New York State after we've been Mass or after we've been in Massachusetts and the kids all saying, well, Gee, and that's a girl's name, right?

2:37 So I thought to myself, well, my last name was tough enough, but now you've got to deal with that too. I got to, I got to deal with my first name anyway. So, you know, essentially I, you know, grew up. My mother was a elementary school teacher. So, you know, education was, was valued. My father was the first of his family and only to go to college Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY RPI as an engineer. Yeah. Was a Navy guy for a couple, you know, whatever the requirement was. But anyway, you know, essentially, you know, we grew up in a family where with six kids, especially in the era I grew up and you know, you were pretty much left to your own.

3:26 Your own devices. Your own, your own desires and demons. I guess. I became a, a musician. So I was a classic, classically trained trumpet player. In fact, that started in Colorado, remember? And you know, then I got into guitars and bass guitar and, you know, the world of rock music. So I, I was in a lot of bands as a young teenager, did pretty well. I never had to have a summer job 'cause we made money playing all sorts, sorts sorts of places. Nice. On the East Coast, back in those days, you could actually play in clubs if you were under the age of 18 or 21, right? So I did.

4:15 So I, I became very street smart, you know, dealing with some of these club owners and bar owners and, and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, I really thought music was going to be my thing. And my, my late mother was a little bit of a typecaster and kind of encouraged it. And one day when it was time to apply for college, this is after my older brother, one year older, who was one of these, one of these guys who was a 88800 SAT kid without even studying, he got a full ride to Cornell as a merit scholar. And I had no idea where I wanted to go to college other than, you know, I, I was going to go to music school.

4:57 So I was looking at the Berkeley School of Music. And, you know, all these other things that my mother said, well, why don't you? The one thing I knew living at that point just outside of Princeton, NJ, in a little farm town public high school and my graduating class was 100 kids. I just knew I wanted to get out of kind of rural life. You know, I, I was used to New York City and, you know, all that other stuff. So my mother said, why don't you take a trip down to University of Pennsylvania? It's in Philadelphia and I, I didn't know a lot about Philadelphia. So I took a train down there and I, I love the grittiness of West Philadelphia and sort of fell in love with that campus and thought, OK, this, this I could see working. So, you know, I applied, some of the viewers are going to just laugh at this.

5:44 And please don't think I'm, I'm, I'm low IQ for having had this attitude as a 17 year old. But I thought I was going to the University of Pennsylvania for music. My mother kind of, you know. Faked you out right? Yes, you faked me out. And so I get there. I'll never forget it. Quadrangle of University of Pennsylvania on Spruce St. and I get my course list and it's, you know, finance and accounting and well, it turns out I was in the Wharton School undergrad, which was the oldest Wharton School, by the way. We're very sensitive about that.

6:25 The MBA program came much later, but the original Warden School is an undergraduate. Still is. School of Business, many of the professors are the same. And I went to the counselor. I said, well, no, we're the music courses. They said you could take some electives, you know, later on, but you know, you have to take these courses. So, so I marched off. I had no idea about any of this stuff. I'd been I'd been a good student in high school. Well, you, well, you got into the Wharton School. That's like a big deal. Well, yeah, I mean, today I never. Would yeah, when I look. Back on, I remember, I remember in the interview, the guy was very interested in sort of the business side of me playing music and stuff and I, I was able to talk pretty good about that. I think.

7:10 I think he was sort of impressed with sort of the entrepreneurship of being in a band and, and a musician. So anyway, Long story short is I, I, you know, got transformed. I adhere down to here. I still got kind of long hair and, you know, my whole life changed. Going through four years of the The Wharton School and graduating with a bachelor's in science and economics. Lawrence Klein, one of the Nobel Prize winners, was my economics professor, Jeremy. Siegel. Who's I mean, Siegel still. Still. Yeah. Making showings on CNBC and otherwise. He. He. Was my finance professor. Yeah, crazy. Anyway.

7:50 So Long story short, as I, you know, I did that and, you know, just to not to, not to drag my resume out too long here, I'll be a little briefer. But that that was, you know, you think of the transformative events of your life. That was certainly probably the biggest for me because, you know, I don't know what would have happened to me. I'd, I'd probably be playing in some wedding band somewhere instead of having been on Wall Street financial services much of my career. But anyway, I, I, I ended up the deal in my family was you, you got your undergraduate tuition paid for. You had to earn your own spending money, but then you were on your own.

8:34 So I, I sort of shopped around for the best deal I could find for MBA school because I grew, I'm, I'm dating myself now, but I graduated in 1979 from Wharton undergrad and the economy was terrible. Everybody who's over a certain age remembers 18% interest rates. And Reagan and Paul Volcker were really, you know, not having their, their effect quite yet. So I, you know, I didn't have the connections that a lot of my classmates did. You know, I, I, I went to school with some very sophisticated famous kids from New York and LA and some other places, learned a lot from them. But I decided I had to go straight to MBA school. And so I went to University of Maryland at College Park. One of my best friends.

9:26 By the way, there was none other than Carly Fiorina name. Carly Bartlam was her name. I'm named in the unauthorized biography, which is called Backfire. I think she and I were great pals. Anyway, I was the president of my class. I, I, I, I really sort of flourished more in a, oh, a broader business way. I was ATA at first. That was part of the deal to get the tuition paid for. And, you know, real quick story, I ran into some engineers who were sort of literally at A, at a local watering hole in College Park sort of crying over their beer about the fact that they had just lost a contract or were going to lose a contract with the Federal Express Corporation. Because they found out that as a State University, any research done through the university, through the Office of Sponsored Programs, because it was a state facility, had to be published. And Federal Express said, no, no, no. You know, if we're going to spend a couple $1,000,000 on what was avionics instrumentation for the early FedEx aircraft.

10:46 They need to own it, yeah. Yeah, they, they need Ndas. They it's got to be confidential. And that wasn't allowed. So I innocently said to these guys, well, why don't you just start a company, right? And they said, well, these were, these are, these are aeronautical engineers. You're like, well, how do you do that? I said, you know, I'm a, I'm a business student. I went to the Wharton School. I, I know how to do that. And next thing you know, not only did we form a company, it was called, it was originally called Flight Research Group because the billing client was FedEx. I met Fred Smith and Carter who was later head of the FAA. Essentially what we did was create a private company and ironically enough, there was excess office space on the University of Maryland campus.

11:31 So we actually entered into a commercial lease to rent space on campus. So we were a private corporation on campus, so all the professors could just walk across the street to our offices and do their thing. And very quickly other people we ran into throughout the university had the same issue. So we ended up, Long story short, we ended up naming it University Research Group. And you know, we, we had dozens of contracts from different areas of the university, you know, where there was the same issue. They needed a private contract, you know things. So in a way, it was an early. Form of an incubator. Right.

12:11 Yeah, kind of a technology transfer, early incubator concept. And you know, things went really great. I managed all the money which kind of led to the next portion of my career. But what I'm really proud of is the we ended up transferring the company because I sort of lost interest after a while. It it two of the five O 1C3 foundation, which was called the University of Maryland Foundation. So it's now called University Research Foundation in Greenbelt, MD. It's still there and it still does exactly the same thing. It's, and it's a multi $1,000,000, you know, contract letting enterprise with, with the same model. It is off campus now, but it's the same model. So that, but that was a formative experience as well because I, I, I started my own business and I, I was not afraid going forward to be an entrepreneur. So anyway, Long story short, I, I ended up going to work for the, the firm where I, I used all their money market funds to manage the cash of the corporation. It's a company called Calvert Group down in Bethesda, MD and had a had a nice little query there. Then it got recruited up to Citicorp, went to New York into one of their associate programs.

13:35 You know, real quick, I ended up running a, a division or two of Citicorp brokerage and launching several investment products for the bank because all the banks were starting to do that. And then I, I had, I had a huge staff, huge responsibility. Banks didn't pay anything like traditional Wall Street. This was the John Reed days. For those of you who remember the former CEO before, you know the whole the whole Wall Street City Bank. So I decided to leave and I was actually going to take a job in Pittsburgh with PNC Bank, much bigger job. And at the last second I got a call from a head headhunter. And by the way, I was always starting these little companies. Some of them failed or got got nowhere, but a couple of them had some fraction and I would make a little bit of money selling them off all in New York City. And at the last second I got I got a call from a headhunter who said, hey, do you know the venture capital firm Warburg Pincus?

14:45 And I said, you know. You were in New York, of course I. Presented, I presented to them with one of my ideas because that was back in the day when they really weren't such a P/E firm as they are today. They, they, they still did early stage stuff back in those days. And I, I went and interviewed with Lionel Pincus, who is again, probably one of the most influential people in my life, who based on a handshake, said, Hey, I have a little asset management business that sits next to the venture capital business where we, we manage public equities for the likes of Doris Duke and some of the institutions and foundations who are in the, the venture capital partnerships.

15:26 And I it, it, it's not making money. I'd like somebody to see if they can do something. I said, oh, I, I know what we could do with it. And he said, really? And I said, yeah, I, I know exactly what I'd do. And he goes, well, could you write, don't spend too much time on it, but over the weekend, could you write a little couple pager on what you'd do? And I did and a little rocked out budget and I presented it to him. He loved it. And essentially, my idea was to form the Warburg Pincus funds, mutual funds. This is 1989, yeah. Like Kodiak funds? Odiak Funds. Yeah. My whole concept was I, I, I learned this at Citibank. A Citibank was infiltrated before the Wall Street crew showed up in the John Reed days.

16:16 They were infiltrated by the likes of Rick Braddock, who went on to be done better things in the travel industry and some other things. But they all came from General Foods. And I learned a ton about the consumer product, you know, marketing elements that could be applied to financial services. In fact, I remember one of my one of my second or third bosses at Citibank was the former Alpo dog food product made and I had to explain what a basis point was. And anyway, Long story short, you know, we, I created the Warburg Pincus funds on the theory that we could, I showed Lionel Pincus.

16:58 Did spending just a little bit of money put you virtually in the top 10 advertisers in the mutual fund world? Because back in those days, Fidelity and T Rowe Price did it. There weren't a lot of others. And then as luck would have it is I was early to say, you know, there's a shortage of actively managed international equity funds. There were hardly any. And so I recruited some people. We, we had one guy in house who was quite talented. We, we formed to see a suite of those funds. And then the, we were one of the 1st 10 mutual funds on the Schwab platform of the so-called supermarket era of mutual funds distribution.

17:44 Fidelity did it shortly thereafter, but we were early and in the early days you really you had to be sort of picked or somehow otherwise get yourself onto the list. It's pretty much an automatic now. You just have to pay up an ongoing fee to those marketplaces that, that by the way, I'll, I'll get to that later. That's going away with ETFs. But in the traditional mutual fund business, it quickly became very important to get on those marketplaces for both retail. And then very quickly, as everybody on this call I'm sure knows, Schwab and Fidelity along with Pershing and some other later entrants became the oligopoly, if you will, of RAA custodianship. So registered investment advisors to this day, Schwab, Fidelity.

18:34 Pershing. TD Ameritrade So, so we, we were early and it was worth it was worth billions of dollars in AUM. Going back to my reference to not being afraid to travel and live places, I wanted to prove that I could, We got to $10 billion in AUM and I wanted to prove that I could do it anywhere. So we, we had a really great Japanese equity guy, a Brit actually, who spoke fluent Japanese. And I said, let's go to Tokyo. And I've been reading about some bank deregulation coming up where instead of just the brokerage firm selling funds, banks in Japan were going to be able to sell funds. So it was a sort of a, a long and and interesting slog to get the regulatory stuff set up.

19:23 But ironically, I went over there to Tokyo. We were right across from the Imperial Palace with Chip K, who's the current CEO now of Warburg Pincus Ventures. And I basically replicated everything I did in the United States in in Japan, only in Japanese. I hired a bunch of. West Wild E, right? Yeah, yeah. And you know, I had I had pictures of our portfolio manager with all the Japanese words underneath in all the subway stations. And you know, we, we did lots of advertising and publicity and, and tons of Rd. shows to banks and, and many of the banks were very anxious to get something different than what the, you know, the Nico's and the other the die was had.

20:11 So we, we made a pretty big splash. So we, we grew fairly quickly. And Credit Suisse saw all this. They were over there and they had had a mutual fund business, a a bigger private wealth business, but a, a mutual fund business that hadn't grown as fast. And they basically. You know, couldn't figure out how we did this and they, they approached me and said, you know, would you consider doing a joint venture with us in Tokyo? So I said sure. So I I still have the the magazine or the newspaper announcement somewhere where I became Co CEO of a joint venture with Credit Suisse in Tokyo. Wild. And you know, I I had some success with them, but very quickly they so liked the overall business that we had both in the US and I had simultaneously done a group of you sits in Dublin and what we've done in Tokyo that it just so happened that it was right around the time that Lionel Pincus had reached an age where I think he wanted to retire. So Credit Suisse actually approached Lionel Pincus and asked if he would consider selling the asset management division and some portion of the venture business. So at virtuallythepeakbefore.com, the.com collapse that is December of 1999, we signed A and LOI and term sheet to sell Warburg Pincus Asset Management to Credit Suisse.

21:41 And I was the sort of Fair haired boy running back and forth to to to Zurich. Lucas Muleman was the CEO of Credit Suisse back in those days. Ironically there was a big breakup fee. Of course, ironically the deal closed on April 30th and of course that was after the the great April 15th of the NASDAQ collapse in 2000. But they went ahead. We had an earn out that was indexed. We ended up negotiating A1 time buyout, but it was a fantastic deal because that was probably the peak of both free fee compression in the mutual fund business.

22:24 Even though we were quite competitive, I really believed in being on the lower end of active fund management fees, you know, but essentially Credit Suisse, you know, acquired 100% of work because asset management, they acquired a small piece of ventures and, you know, the rest was sort of history. I stayed on two years with the executive committee of Credit Suisse, but I I quickly disliked the bureaucracy of Credit Swiss compared to the private partnership that we were at, at Warburg Pincus.

23:04 So I, I, I left and Long story short, I went with a firm who had tried to recruit me called Wasatch Global, which is how I got to Utah. They're a, they're an institutional and mutual fund manager in Salt Lake City. And one of the partners whom you know, Arthur Carrie Barker. Yeah, a 30 year now she had the she had the foresightafter.com between Reg FD and the Spitzer Accords and you know, all, all the regulation that that came out. She, her hypothesis way back then and, you know, sort of O1O2 was that private companies would stay private longer.

23:52 And, you know, when she gives her stump speech now, she, she talks about that and she said, I had no idea how correct I would be because of course companies do stay private, if not for a long time, some in some cases forever. They don't want to go public. Some of it was just the friction of all that regulation, the cost. And the other thing that happened was, you know, there was a lot of money in the world and a lot of it. What do you, what do you want to thank Dave Swenson at Yale or whatever there was, you know, a big shift in pie charts to Private Securities and alternatives, whether it was venture capital or private equity.

24:33 There's so many more categories now, Of course, everybody anyway, we we formed a Dave firm called Cross Creek Cross Creek venture capital, which the websites Cross Creek dot VC and today it's a it's it's still a boutique, but carries specialties late stage VC. Some people would call it pre IPO when IP OS were happening more often. But as many people on this call know, much of the alpha creation that occurs with companies now happens before. For the IPO? So if, if, if you don't have an allocation, if you're just investing in small cap publicly traded companies or micro cap for that matter, you're probably missing, you know, a huge piece of the hockey stick valuation run up for the successful companies.

25:23 We saw that with SAS. We saw that with, you know, all sorts of different verticals. So Acari is a, a great business and I was an advisor there for several years. I was on the investment committee, but you know, I wandered off and now just to bring it forward and then I'll let you ask some more questions. I, I'm, I'm affiliated or I'm an advisor and special limited with a firm called AI Capital. It's AI dot VC, which gives you a sense of how early this group of MIT people were. They all came out of the AI lab at MIT. I would say to them you know the domain name AI dot VC is probably worth a ton of money.

26:08 A ton of money especially, and we met with her. Yes. It was at the beginning of chat GTP. I mean, Oh yeah, end of the note yet, right? It was happening, but chat GTP wasn't happening, right? That's right, etcetera. Yeah, that was Elizabeth Cook. Yeah. Yeah, We met in Park City. That's right. Yeah. No, these people, you know, have deep resumes in machine learning and and AI in what we call applied AI. So that's pretty much what the company does. Now. I can't talk too much about it, but we're, we're from, from a concept fund one they're now, I think going to be raising a fund too. There there's a couple there.

26:51 There's been some very nice exits and there's, there's, there's some pending, but their their whole thing is they don't do B to C Everything is B to B tends to be by definition, enterprise software using AI elements that solve big problems. They're not interested in little niche businesses, not interested in consumer has nothing to do with chat bots. So they they really because of their history in actually building software as entrepreneurs before they decided to go into the venture business, they really understand some of the trends. So they were very early to things like data.

27:34 We have a very valuable company in the medical patient records database arena. There was a there was a cover story several years ago that showed Google and a couple other companies, Meta back in those days, Facebook, and it said data is the new gold. Yeah. And it it's true. I mean, what everybody on this call I think knows is number 1. You have to be careful with your data because if you just In the early days we all read articles about engineers putting proprietary data into ChatGPT without realizing that. That was going to be used in domain. That's right. So you know enterprise AI, whether it's open AI or some of the other. Closed LLM.

28:16 Whatever, whatever, right? That's right. But you you need to control your your data so they understand all that stuff. So they're really fun to work with as an advisor. It's been great. The other thing I'm doing right now is I'm on the board of a company that I helped get going when I first got to Warburg Pincus. It's been transformed by one of my former partners. It's called the RBB fund. It's it's what's known as a series trust, which is now got 35 different investment advisors. Essentially it's the low cost provider for investment advisors to to launch originally traditional mutual funds, but now ETFs and there's something called 351 exchange, 351 exchanges that some on the on the call might be familiar with.

29:09 That's something that was one of the first RBB was one of the 1st platforms 40 act series trust to do a 351 exchange, which provides essentially a way for the the creation baskets behind ETFs to eliminate unrealized cap gains in a separate account. So basically. You can not have to sell an ATF, have a taxable event and move it to another one. Well, what I'm going to give you a really broad brush, essentially the way it works, there's, there's several tests that have to be met, but one of them is it can only be done once and, and it can only be done in the formation of a new ETF.

29:51 So it's not like you can say, oh, we have an ETF bring your money in. And you know, you actually have to and, and, and if you're going to manage a 40 act fund, you have to be a federally registered RAA. You, you can actually create an exchange traded fund. And the other requirement is, of course, it's exchange traded. It has to be available to everyone. It can't be some sort of private vehicle. But there, there are plenty of people that have a separate account business. This was certainly true at Wasatch, for example, certainly true at war with Pincus. You know, besides mutual fund clients, you have separate account clients. I'm sure many of the wealth advisors on this call know that dichotomy.

30:36 So you know, many of these Raas have some core strategies, model portfolios on the SMA side of the fence. And they, they have some, especially in the tech sector over the last decade or two, some monster unrealized gap gains. And this has become something quite, quite, this captured the fancy of a lot of people. So anyways, it's, it's interesting. I'm on the board of that. So is that what catalyzed your comment saying that the marketplaces for mutual funds are going to be replaced by ETFs? Well, essentially right now there's there's also speculation at the moment, I may not be you know, super current on this because I'm not in the distribution business.

31:31 The right right now whether it's even Vanguard with their brokerage accounts or Fidelity or or Schwab ETFs have no Commission that they offer Commission free trading. So the feeling has been that they will move to a model. I'm not sure they've done it yet. They will move to a model where they're going to ask for a basis point fee just like they did years ago with mutual funds. But at the moment I don't. I'm not sure they have. People on this call may know better than me, but ETFSETFS as as everyone probably knows, are way more tax efficient by virtue of this in kind creation of creation baskets for acquisition and the disruption of the basket by market makers for for redemptions. That process, you know, really was quite, quite revolutionary. I could tell you a really funny story about that. Yeah, yeah.

32:32 Well, you know, I was at Warburg Pincus and what some people don't realize is exchange traded funds are actually exchange traded, open end investment companies. They're open and mutual funds. There's there's no limit to the number of shares that can be produced, but they're exchange traded. So you do have to get approved not just by the investment company division of the SEC, but by the exchange division of the SEC. Among the elements you must have in offering a 40 act company is there has to be a legal broker dealer distributor. And you know, people may be familiar with several of them. One of the largest is called ACA four side.

33:16 But they it really could almost almost any broker dealer can perform the function of being the distributor of a mutual fund or, or an ETF. I mean, there's real responsibilities and regulations. Like compliance, so on and so forth, right? Compliance, yeah, and, you know, related to everything from the advertising rule and and all sorts of other things. But but anyway, they since I need to be distributor, this is this is in the category of what some people call the Hall of Shame, which is the deals. You didn't do that. You should. So here I was at Warburg Pincus building a big business. I had moved the Warburg Pincus funds custodianship to State Street because State Street to this day maybe, maybe with Bank of New York and Brown Brothers being close behind now, but back in the day, State Street really had the the best global sub custodian network.

34:12 So if you were going to do an emerging markets fund, are you really you couldn't do it with some of the domestic custodians because they didn't have the global network that stays free. Good. So anyway, I knew the State Street people. So one day they, they called up and said, Hey, we're going to be in town. We, we got a, an interesting proposition for you. I said, OK, come on in. And they came in, it was a slightly different group than I work with. And they said, you know, we were launching something we're calling the Spider family, which are exchange traded funds, you know, SPDR 500 and all the other stuff. Like they only they, they were talking about just one or two to get started. And they said we need a 40 act distributor. And we had an in house broker dealer. I was the securities principal of that at Warburg. And I said, yeah, well, we, we have a broker dealer, we act as our own distributor in house.

35:06 And they said, well, we'd like to see if you'd like to be the distributor for the the State Street, these things called exchange traded funds. And I knew a little bit about, I knew a little bit about what had been written about what exchange rated funds were. And I remember thinking, yeah, I can't imagine this is going to be that big a deal. Yeah, but a gene it also with a company even at that point the size of State Street, they could have just spun up a broker deal or a bought 1. Yeah, Well, that was the strange thing, but, but I think part of it was a lot of these, the one thing I've learned in financial services, a lot of companies that are in what's called the service vendor side of the business are afraid to invade new areas.

35:53 Yeah, make it look like they're they're afraid that yeah, they'll channel, they'll be stepping on the they'll be Yeah, clients. So anyway, they came to us and here's the Hall of Shame part they said. And I said, well, if we did this, you know what, what kind of fee are you talking about? And it's much lower now, but they said, well, you know, we were thinking something in the six or seven basis point range. And I, I said, well, let me get back to you. I remember that. Was the ending of that. And I was like, Nah, I'm not going to do this. It's and I think now, Oh my God, how many hundreds of billions in spiders in those things at states alone. And I could, I could have been making six basis points on that. It's like, in fact, some somebody told me, the guy who did it, I'm not sure if it was Merrill Lynch, somebody told me the story that the guy who actually said yes when he retired was actually able to work into his retirement package that he got a forever trail of a piece of that. And I thought to myself, that guy's sitting on a beach somewhere counting his money.

37:01 And I I said I'm. Coming in, yeah. So I I that, that's, I'll never forget that one. That's the Hall of Shame. Yeah, I I can't even tell you the countless number of those I've had. Yeah, we all have. Yeah, wish I did. What about have you seen a this is sort of a a curiosity question for me because I've seen a fair amount of activity with the resurrection through I think it's Blue Owl and others BlackRock doing interval funds to help non accredited investors get access to private deals right as you, you seeing any of that? Yeah.

37:41 Well, Blue Owl I think it's ABDC business development company which it with a subset of the 40 act. I was on ABDC board back in the day that Aries Capital bought the interval funds I'm very familiar with because they they are a little, they're a little more close to a traditional mutual fund. It's just that they, they can do, you know, illiquids like venture capital companies. Kathy Wood, just to name 1 famous manager has the Arc Investment Venture Fund, whatever it's called. And essentially they, they do a quarterly tender offer at a calculated NAVAV. Yeah, and and they do a quarterly tender offer. So there's a liquidity mechanism. It's not daily, but it's quarterly. And yeah, more and more people are doing those. They, they, they haven't been, by my estimation, they haven't been as as popular as I would have guessed. Some, some of them don't have particularly great performance. You know, everything in the money management business, everybody knows this does boil down to to performance and hopefully consistent performance. Everybody has a bad year here and there, but if there's consistent performance, money tends to follow. So yeah, we'll see.

39:02 I do think exchange traded funds, I, I just read that BlackRock is trying to put together, you know, a private equity index because everybody's trying to figure out some other way to allow retail people to get access to, you know, more of these private and alternative asset classes. So I I think that may be more the way it happens. And then there's the the work being done to redefine what an accredited investor is, not based on how much money you have, but how sophisticated you might be, right? Yep, Yep. Well, the, the, the first, the first way they did that was if you, if you, how, if you hold a securities license, I think virtually of any stripe, you know, that qualifies you regardless of your net worth or annual income. Yeah.

39:49 I mean, and then of course everybody's talking about, you know, 4 O1 KS and the introduction of potentially privates. And, you know, some people would argue that, you know, is that, is that the sign of a top when Wall Street tries to start pushing an asset class on retail, right. You know who knows who knows? You know, I, I think in general. You know, it's going to boil down to the fiduciaries of plans, the trustees who are going to have to make these difficult decisions about what kinds of asset classes they're going to include on their menu because they they have, you know, they have DOL liability as fiduciaries to, to make, you know, good decisions in that department. So we'll, we'll see.

40:35 We'll see this, right? And there's a lot of activity where private equity is buying AUM firms because the recurring revenue produces a good multiple. And it's sticky business because it's not easy to go from one registered investment advisor or broker deal to another as a client, it's like I'm not going through that. Let's go play golf, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, you know, steady, consistent cash flow is, you know, besides Warren Buffett liking it, I think the rest of the world has discovered that, you know, there's, there's, there's nothing like it, whether it's, you know, even at the micro level, if you will. I mean, you know, people are talking about what occupations will AI eliminate and everybody's sort of saying, well, if you're a plumber or electrician, you're going to be fine. Yeah, totally fine.

41:23 You know, I mean, if you use your hands, but you know, in some ways those. Yeah. And they grow to be bigger companies. But even if you're just an individually licensed electrician, you know, you're your own boss. You have a predictable cash flow once you get some sort of reputation. And there's a relative shortage of these people, you know, so. It is hard to imagine that we're going to have a a robot plumber crack under the sink, right? Yeah, not likely right now. I mean, I like to tell people I think there's going to be many examples of AI enhanced occupations and tasks, but you know, whether, whether there's complete elimination, yeah, it depends that there are going to be entry level positions that I think are much skinny down.

42:16 I I do feel sorry for junior analyst getting out of college. Yeah, if you if you want to tune. Your analysts. Yeah, the analysts, I mean, you don't need a whole month to do ADCF spreadsheet. It's like, so the world is changing, but we'll see. Yeah. Yeah, it's quite interesting. So I really appreciate you doing this. So I didn't know a lot of that story. I knew some of it, but I brought up, but you don't know this, but I brought up my kids in Villanova. I know the one hog. I know the whole thing down there. No. Went to Wharton, spent a lot of time in Philadelphia, moved to New York City. Yeah, almost 30 years ago now.

42:58 But you know, that was my stomping ground down there. Yeah, that's that's that's amazing. Well, Villanova is a phenomenal school. Yeah, yeah. Well, I was, I was 5 minutes away from this campus. I had AI had no business being in that neighborhood, but I had had exited a company and bought a house near Pat Croce, remember? Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. And just, it was an epic place to bring up kids. My kids went to my kids went to Episcopal Academy. I was a member of Marion and Philadelphia Country Club and blah blah blah. Main line, yeah. Yeah, the whole main line thing going. Yeah, it's a beautiful all. All those towns are beautiful.

43:42 And, you know, Philadelphia's again one of those cities on the East Coast that you know, it just for all the booms we've had, whether itwas.com or the 90s, you know, whatever, you know, Philadelphia itself still is, you know, it's never really boomed quite the way other East Coast towns did. We all know that's changing again now. Who knows what's happening with a lot of the the large cities these days, but they did. The Philadelphia suburbs were always amazing. It was just fantastic to bring up. Yeah, Yeah. That's great. Well, I didn't know that that's that's really civilized. Yeah, it's very, very well.

44:23 They they good transportation and train systems and you know, Sept is kind of a basket case these days, but totally don't anyway. Well, that's great. Now I appreciate you having me and. Being it was amazing. Yeah, when you get. Back getting your head back it's it's finally snowing here in Park City so get back up here and. Yeah, I heard I left on this business trip. It's now been extended. But you know, I left just as that storm was hitting. Was that last Wednesday, I think, Yeah. So. But yeah, we certainly needed the snow in Park City and they got it, I guess, right? Yeah, so they got enough for the Alta and Snowbird and, you know, Park City Mountain and Deer Valley to just take, take a breath, right?

45:13 Because they were, they were just wailing in the streets, you know, was like, holy cow, is it ever going to snow? Yeah. So I think they're going to get a base and easier to make snow, right. So people are feeling better. There's no question about. That's a good question. Beautiful, of course. I'll be back in a week or so. We'll. All right. Sounds good, Gene. Thanks for doing this. Well, thanks, Arthur. Yeah, that was fun. Yeah, we'll do it again soon. OK, good. Afternoon to you. You too. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Thank you.