Top 5 of 2024: #2: Michael Milken - EP.371

31:37And I find today that many, many people are still thinking the future is going to be like the past. The dramatic changes in demographics, I don't think investors have really focused on. So over the last few years, you've had significant weakness in Chinese real estate markets. Now, when should you have started to figure this out? First, the government was fueling the growth of their GDP by funding real estate. But second, they've gone from having 23 to 25 million children born a year to less than 10. So they've had a 60 % reduction in the number of children born. And if this continued in the future, they would lose four to 600 million people.

32:26So you could look at Japan, where two people die for everyone that's born, and you can buy in rural areas today, entire towns for 250 ,000 because the people are gone and the young people want to live in the cities. So if you're building all this real estate and your population is going down every year, eventually you're going to need less real estate. So when do you see that trend? But that started a decade ago. It didn't start two years ago. Once you sessed out some of these important characteristics of the people, their motivation, having the right skills, the right vision that was aligned with yours.

33:08How did you get them to join you? If you're on a mission, if you stand for something, a lot of people will join you. You're trying very hard not to hire a person that's going to be a mercenary, that's in it for the money. Now, we probably financed 3 ,000 different companies. I only had one CEO ever tell me he was in it for the money. Now, many of them might have thought that, but if they told me, they would have thought, well, maybe I wouldn't have financed him. And I think when you look at the people that have built industries, built companies, it was passion. And their rewards were their success.

33:46I remember with Craig McCall, I told Craig when he came to see me, he was really the person that changed the course of mobile in this country. But his family had built radio stations, cable, paging, other industries. And I told him that he's going to have to sell everything his family had done. That this was going to become so capital intensive. Yes, we could leverage, but he would need to have equity. that if he truly believed that mobile was the future, then he essentially, unless he wanted to be diluted to little to no ownership, was gonna have to make the decision to bet on mobile and give up what the family had done, which he did.

34:32What are some of your other favorite stories of backing entrepreneurs back then? Well, some of the best things you do are things you don't do. People think there's a commonality of interest. So with an investment banking firm, you have a merger and acquisitions department. They get paid when you do a transaction. So often the people that are the best is getting people to do things so they can get them to do things. And I would often ask them, have you ever seen a deal you don't like? Okay, you like every deal. Now they get paid up front. Our clients, our investors get paid on the back end long term.

35:14Did the investment work out? Did it pay interest? Many of the stories that I enjoy the most are rebuilding stories. In the case of Toys R Us, they came out of interstate department stores in the 1970s where you were building. They had a great company hidden inside a company that was losing a lot of money. And it was hard to see interstate department stores jewel, which was Toys R Us, which at that time in the 70s was very small compared to the overall company. One of the great opportunities that never occurred, occurred with Lockheed in the early 1970s. And you had Textron and Linton offer to buy Lockheed.

35:59The debt of Lockheed was trading at 15 cents on the dollar. And if you and I had ever sat down and said, we're going to have a meeting in the mid-1960s with our board of directors, and you were the chairman, and you told them today, we have five years to go bankrupt. I want you to come back and give me your best ideas on how we can go bankrupt. And Lockheed executed maybe 10 things. One, they went into commercial aircraft they weren't in and lost billions of dollars. Two, just in case they had demand for the commercial aircraft, they didn't go with United Aircraft or GE for engines. They went with Rolls-Royce.

36:40And Rolls-Royce went bankrupt. People weren't willing to buy airplanes that didn't have engines. They built their plant over the major earthquake zone in the United States in case you could catch an earthquake. They borrowed short. They paid dividends. They didn't want any long-term debt. They had a backup contract, a Navy contract, an area they had no expertise, and they lost$700 or$800 million as a backup plan. And then they bribed some of the royal families in Europe so that you wouldn't even want to save them if you had to. And at the end, they took every strike with every labor union, so even their own employees didn't want.

37:20But they were one of the largest government contractors. contractors. The government was very dependent on them. They were making a lot of money in that business. But it was blurred by all those other things. And Textron made an offer to buy them, and its stock got obliterated because the market thought they were under their mind. And the company eventually survived and built, and the debt that traded at 15 cents on dollar never missed an interest or a principal payment. And today, I believe, is the largest government contractor. So many of the stories are rebuilding stories that you see when you look back and whether it was cable, whether it was entertainment, whether it was media, whether it was home builders, home builders were constantly boom and bust.

38:04They borrowed short. When things were great, they made money. And when things were bad, they went bankrupt. And one of those companies, MDC and Larry Mizell just was sold the other day to a Japanese company for the highest price it ever traded. I believe if you feel you have a mission and a purpose, then you can get a lot of people to join you on that mission. When you start talking about that Lockheed example, how do you think about the optimal capital structure for businesses? Some businesses are highly volatile. You had almost a decade that if you weren't in technology and you weren't in real estate and you weren't in retail, almost no company went bankrupt in 10 years.

38:50If you're a supermarket, you might have a totally different capital structure than if you're a tech company. And so for some companies, even a dollar in debt is too much because of the volatility and risk in the business. For others that has very low volatility in their business, you can have higher capital structure. And part of the efforts and the work that I did that, say, went for my thesis in graduate school was understanding that you could manage the capital structure of a company the same way you can manage the operating side of the businesses. And in the 1970s, because there was so much stress in the early 80s, interest rates overnight going to 21%, etc.

39:35Often the chief financial officer became the CEO. Today, when we think of the challenges, I think you're going to find many of the people that were the head human resource manager eventually goes to become CEOs. And can you attract the best in primes? Can you retain those people? Do they believe in your mission? Do they want to work for you? Are they proud working for your company? Many companies have the wrong capital structure. Today, almost 50 % of the 20 ,000 largest companies in America are owned by private equity. Many of these capital structures were built in 2017, 18, 19, 20, 21, when interest rates were very low.

40:24So many of them today have the wrong capital structure at the wrong time. So you leveraged seven to one. And if I loaned you money at 15%, say in 1983, and you were leveraged three to one, you were paying 45 % of your cash flow out in interest. Well, if you borrowed seven times and you borrowed at six, you were paying 42. But if you have to refinance at 10, there goes all your free cash flow. And so we're going to see in the next few years opportunities to exchange debt for equity and recapitalize good companies and good industries. And the owner will either put in more equity or approach the creditors about exchanging some of their debt for equity.

41:11You've seen these cycles in the past, and I'm curious with so much capital that's come into the hands of private equity managers and credit, how do you think this shakes out over the next five or 10 years? I think for the last decade, in many ways, 50 % of every company sold by private equity was sold to another private equity firm. Today, if you have longer term debt, you can't really sell the company unless you're selling it to an investment grade type credit. So I think you're going to see a private equity company buy part of another company to provide some liquidity. So I think you're not necessarily selling the company.

41:51you're going to bring new capital in so you can get distributions. I think that will play out. The sophistication today of your private equity, many of your private equity firms are larger credit firms today, and private equity is the smaller part of their business. They're very sophisticated. And in my opinion, they will be buying up the debt of many companies to exchange for equity as a way of buying. And I see that occurring over time in the future. One of the things I learned over the years, the six lessons of credit that occurred. One, it's credit, not leverage. And so leading into the financial problems of 08 and 09, you saw companies dramatically leverage themselves up to get the same equity rates of return, but they weren't the same credit.

42:43And you saw people leverage 10, 20, 50 to 1 in some of these financial institutions. Now, that isn't the case today. Second, I really have never met a person over a long period of time who's generated a high rate of return by guessing where interest rates are going. So yes, you're right once. Yes, you're right twice, but not in the long run. So making investments, whether interest rates go up or down, is a key decision. Three, rating agency ratings are a trailing measure, not a forward-looking measure. And you might rate a company whose future doesn't look brighter, is going to be disintermediated high based on the past.

43:26Or you might rate a company low. I mean, Tesla was non-investment grade debt, even as it was approaching a trillion dollars in market cap. So it just took a long time to get there. Four, most loans to real estate are not investment grade. And if you want to identify the major financial problems of the last 20 to 30 years, you can be traced down to this belief in over investment in real estate and the belief that you can leverage it up. There's maybe three companies in America that are rated AAA, AAA? S &P rated, in a period of time, 15 ,000 structures, AAA, almost all of them real estate. And in some cases, you lost 100 % of your money in AAA.

44:15Sovereign debt has not been a good credit over time. And the final conclusion is debt markets underpin equity markets. If I'm able to get significant double-digit returns in debt, and I have actual assumptions of seven or eight, I don't really need to go to equities. And I think we learn that time and time again. As you've taken and distilled all these lessons over time, I'm really curious how you've thought about backing participants in the market with your own capital, with your family office capital. What are those key criteria you've used to determine how these folks will invest your capital?

44:54I start with the individual and do I have confidence? How does the individual see the world? Do they have blinders on? Are they willing to see the world? Can they change in any business? There are changes. What you expect might not occur. The unexpected occurred. COVID occurs. Can you adjust? The very first decision we make is on people. After that, we can make a decision on industry structure, where in the capital structure you come in. So I have many things on my plate, not the least of which is medical research. Most people don't realize when I'm there that the number one driver of economic growth in the last 200 years is public health and medical research.

45:43And so more than 50 % of all economic growth can be attached to public health and medical research. I don't sit in a trading desk. I can't look at it on a day-to-day basis. So we are dependent on individuals that we see if there's a change, they recognize the change from that standpoint. And so we really invest in people. So democratization of finance has been a key underpinning of so much of your life. There was a point in time a long time ago where health became a real issue for you. And you spent a tremendous amount of time and the subject of this book, Faster Cures, on medical research. And I'd love to hear some about that journey.

46:29I think it was John Lennon had in a song, you have a plan, life plan, and then world things happen. So I had lost 10 relatives to cancer. Our children had serious health challenges. In the mid-70s, when all my economic theories proved to be correct, we were faced with all these health. So I've been involved now for 50 years in medical research and trying to apply the same thing we applied in finance and the economy for medical research, sharing information, sharing data, getting people to work together, having it be fact-based, and bringing capital. And so I'd been funding cancer research for 20 years when I was diagnosed with cancer.

47:18And yes, they told me I had 18 months to live 30 and a half years ago. Yes, you had to find a way to deal with that issue. And I focused very heavily on science. I had never done any work in prostate cancer, the form of cancer I had. I'd done a lot of work in breast cancer, melanoma, pediatric neurology, but not in this area. And so it took me 30 days to figure out a strategy and then implementing a new organization. We called CAPCURE, C-A-P-C-O-R-E, CA all cancers, P prostate cancer, and cure all life-threatening diseases. The first step we analyzed was to tell people we're not going to be a threat.

48:03We're going to increase funding for all diseases. We didn't want people to think we're going to divert funds. And we spent a number of years trying to figure out how to double the National Institute of Health's budget, the largest funder of medical research, and eventually put on a march, a half million people in the country. And today, the U.S. government has invested in an incremental$500 billion in medical research. And part of the side of that was why we found a vaccine in less than a year in the RNA work. And people don't realize, but it was only seven weeks, 63 days between the sequencing of the DNA of the virus and the first human being that Moderna gave the vaccine to.

48:50And so it's an area I've dedicated my life for 20 years to as a philanthropist. And now I've dedicated the last 30 years as an activist and philanthropist. And I think these are issues that are important in life. There are issues in the stock market that goes up and down or bonds, etc. But things that are life and death. And I would say to you, one of the biggest mistakes that most people do that are diagnosed with a potential life-threatening disease is they don't do enough at the beginning. So at the beginning, they do the least possible and hope it works out. When they have reoccurrence at the end, they're willing to do anything to stay alive.

49:37And if you did a little more at the beginning, you wouldn't maybe have a reoccurrence later. And I'd say the other thing we learned is prevention and wellness. We've invested hundreds of millions in studying your microbiome today. And we know that we can change your genes today with CRISPR, but we don't know what happens. So it might be decades before that technique is well used. But we can change how your genes are expressed by changing your lifestyle, what you eat, what you drink, and what you do. and therefore even if you have a high probability of getting a life-threatening disease you might not by changing how your genes are expressed so prevention is one of the great ideas today that we all could employ and i let's say became extreme in this area of what i did for two years i did not eat anything except raw vegetables and raw fruit because i didn't know if cooking or anything change the molecular makeup.

50:40And it might not work, but it wasn't going to hurt me. When someone comes to you with some type of cancer and it's early and they have the opportunity to do something early, are there two or three things that you've learned from your research that are the most important actions for someone to take? First, let's find out what your disease really is. So if someone tells you you have breast cancer, there's many kinds of breast cancer. If someone tells you you have prostate cancer. There's many kinds. What do you actually have? Not a generic name. So you can sequence your own genome today, maybe for$100, not$3 billion, which it cost and took 13 years, but in an hour.

51:25Two, you can sequence your microbiome. And three, you can sequence your disease. So let's find out exactly what disease you have, what form, what is the mutation. And my guess is in 10 years, a person will say I have an XYZ mutation. They're not going to say I have this disease that's been identified in a part of my body. Once you know that, things that look like they're not aggressive can be aggressive. Things that look like they're aggressive might be non-aggressive. And for some people, doing nothing is an alternative. than understanding where the leading research is. You might have in institutions that are, say, the number one institution in the country in cancer overall, but in a particular form of cancer, they're 40th.

52:16And then you want to make sure, like anything, that if you talk to a surgeon, they're likely to suggest surgery. If you talk to a radiologist, they're going to suggest that. And so let's get a few opinions from individuals. And so those are some of the steps. And nutrition, personal discipline is hard. Not everyone can do that. But for many people with what appears to be serious disease, if you're willing to change your lifestyle, you can do what's called active surveillance. And so you can wait and see if you're willing to see by changing your microbiome, it changes. And so understanding your metabolism and things has a major effect on your outcome.

53:03And today, they've now approved giving the microbiome of one person who responded well to treatment to another person that didn't respond well and see if they can respond well. So we've learned today that this exists, it's available, and the promise of science today is so unbelievable in so many ways. There are so much exciting things happening. The third prong alongside of finance and healthcare across your life has been education. And again, we'd just love to hear some of your thoughts on the work you've done in and around education. Well, we've been active for 50 years. But when you think about it, most people, when they think about what made the United States the United States, they think of freedom, democracy, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence.

53:56immigration, etc. But between 1870 and 1960, the United States added one year of formal schooling every decade. And by 1960, the U.S. was the most educated country in the world by two years more than any other country. Since then, other countries have caught us and passed it. And so in the recent studies shows in K-12 education that US now ranks 31st in the world. To me, you want to be able to do something, you want to execute, you want people to come up with new ideas, new industries, entrepreneurs. It all starts with education. And we discovered outside of the parents or the guardians, the most important thing was the teacher and the classroom.

54:46So we started these awards programs. My brother's overseen them all these years to try to lift the self-image of the education profession. Today, we probably have given 3 ,000 of all these awards over the last 38 years. We've launched online schools, a company that became a whole new industry, virtual charter schools in the 1990s. It's a public company called Strive today, but millions of kids. If you're in a school area where it isn't safe to go to school, you can get your classes online. The state and these virtual charter schools will treat you like you're a public school student. You get your computer free, broadband free, teachers free, mentors free, all courses.

55:34And we built out every lesson for every day. For college, we created an industry that's widespread now, and that's going to college online. And so at the peak, our company, we represented 30 different universities, University of Florida, Vanderbilt and others. And so you're actually going to us. We ended up selling that company to persons. And likewise, we launched a very catchy organization called Mike's Math Club, where we gave special skills to kids beginning in elementary school so that they would love math and we would empower them. so they could multiply two-digit or three-digit numbers in their head faster than a calculator, they would know 106 times 104 is 11 ,024 before you could pick that up in a calculator and getting them to love math.

56:27And one of the highest-paid professions in America are people that are mathematicians. And the financial world today has changed dramatically. I had to look hard in the 1960s to find another person who was a math major in finance. Today, you don't have to look anywhere. They're inside every company. And so when you think about the United States and the future of this country, it is so important today that we educate our children to the level of world standards. And we let our children down by making them think they excel when our standards a 90 percentile here in the U.S. in math might be a 40 percentile in another country.

57:15As many people know, we've had massive grade inflation while we've seen test scores drop. And so the world looks at America as the ideal of the America, as America as a meritocracy, that you can succeed, have access to capital, regardless of who your parents are, where you were born, your religion, your race, and you'd have a chance to succeed, and if you fail, a chance to try again. The foundation of our country is education. And we're really the first country to decide we're going to offer education to all of our citizens. And when you look at our country today, 50 % of every software engineer or scientist in Silicon Valley in the last 30 or 40 years was not born in the United States.

58:0560 % of many of our medical research not born in the United States. 77 % of everyone in PhD programs in AI not born in the United States. We have been the beneficiary of immigration. So we need to revitalize this commitment in education. As you look out across each of these, across finance, healthcare, and education, what opportunities are you most excited about? I'm excited about the leveling of the playing field. If I don't know who I'm making a loan to, it's pretty hard to discriminate. So if I'm buying a securitized mortgage, okay, and there's a thousand people that are borrowers, I don't know whether they're born in the United States, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Nigeria, wherever they might have been born.

59:00I don't know where their parents are. I don't know where they went to school. And so securitization is a democratization of access to capital in that sense. So I'm excited about that and how that works. Number two, technology. The ability today to drive costs down. So there weren't too many people lined up in the 1990s to say, okay, sequence my genome here. I'll give you a billion dollars and I'll come back in 10 years and we'll figure out what the issues are. At$100, at$20, at$50, it's now available to all of us. Amazon and companies like Amazon now allow us to deliver goods to places that were food wastelands in the country and places you didn't have access to product and services.

59:55Today, they can be delivered to your door wherever you might be. The Internet, a great leveler of civilization. You might be in a school, there's no physics teacher in your high school, but you can take the class online and get credit in your school today. I feel technology affords this. I couldn't be more excited about focus ultrasound. Now, I'm a Star Trek kid from the 60s. The idea that you can have non-invasive surgery. So we went to minimally invasive surgery, where you're in the hospital, less damage to your body, et cetera, and you can't even find the scar when they took your appendix out.

1:00:38But now we have non-invasive surgery, shooting your body with sound waves and knocking out the bad cells. So it's like going to a dentist. We're going to be able to clean out the bad cells in your body. So you go, it's an outpatient, you go, they zap the things you don't want in your body and you go home. And periodically you go in for a checkup to make sure you can do that again. But it's now been approved for 50 or 60 diseases. I have a good friend who had terrible tremors all these years. He went in, when he walked out, he had no tremors. So there's enormous potential it's been approved for Parkinson's and other diseases.

1:01:21When you think back that life expectancy on planet Earth was 31 years of age in 1900, and today it's mid-70s. It took 4 million years of evolution to extend life expectancy by 11 years. In the last 120, we're up by 40. 20 % of all people in the United States died before their fifth birthday. In the world, in the start of the 20th century, half. So if you wanted to have six children, you needed to have 12. If you wanted to have three, you have six. And so the enormous population explosion and things happening in sub-Saharan Africa today is a byproduct of the breakthrough of many of these medical treatments.

1:02:12A woman today has a 2 % chance of passing AIDS onto her child, down from 95 % 20 years ago. So I think if you're a good investor, the very first speech I gave on Wall Street in the late 60s was the best investor was a social scientist. And if you ask me again today, I would tell you the best investor is a social scientist, understanding where the world is going. As you look back on all of these things you've done, what are you most proud of? Well, I'm proud of my wife, who I met in seventh grade 65 years ago in our relationship. I'm proud that our kids are responsible members of society, and we've been blessed with 10 grandchildren.

1:03:00So what is your greatest legacy? Your greatest legacy, in my opinion, is your children. Will they be productive members of society? or your grandchildren. I think seeing the death rate from any of the diseases we dealt with dropped by 50, 60, 70 percent. I was in Houston a few years ago and met with 47 patients that were stage 4 melanoma, average life expectancy under six months, who are all in total remission. And so we worked for 10 years on these checkpoint inhibitors in prostate cancer. They were not successful for a number of reasons. We're working on different strategies today. But a 50 % drop almost overnight in deaths from melanoma, deaths from prostate cancer and others that are with us today.

1:03:56Sickle cell anemia and other things using CRISPR is going to be approved. you're going to eliminate this disease, eliminate it. And I would say seeing a vaccine go into a human being, not in a decade, but in nine weeks that worked, bodes well for the future. As it relates to so many things, social media and technology, it brings blessings and it also brings many challenges. But being able to live a healthy, long life will allow us to have the ability, and I feel it's our generation's responsibility to eliminate many of these diseases as a cause of death. And I do believe the thousands and thousands of people that I had a chance to work with, who all have their PhDs in finance today, are out there financing good ideas and businesses the future.

1:04:55Mike, I want to ask you a couple of fun closing questions before we wrap up. What is your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family? Visiting early child care centers or elementary schools. Young kids have no filtering mechanism. So when you talk to them, they tell you exactly what they think, what happened in their house last night. And I always feel the future of a country can be seen by visiting the schools. So when I first started going to China in the Middle East, I always would go and visit their elementary schools, sometimes middle and high schools, just to see what the kids thought, what they're learning, what they believe in.

1:05:36And so it is invigorating. What's one fact that most people don't know about you? I think most people don't know that I was voted the friendliest and my wife was voted the most likely to succeed in our high school graduating class. Yes, I was the head cheerleader and Sally Fields was my head song leader, but my wife was the one voted the most likely to succeed. So we met in seventh grade and I've stayed close to her ever since. what's your biggest pet peeve i think one of my biggest pet peeves is lack of prevention so most of the money in health and medical is spent on care or cure and if we dealt with it early you could prevent these things from happening so we spend very little on prevention We're trying to build in to insurance companies and companies today that they will pay for exercise or other types of things.

1:06:46Many companies today make their healthier food offerings cheaper in the corporate cafeteria than they do others. So I think we have so much knowledge today of what sugar does to your body and other things do to your body. We can see what's happened in China. where almost 40 years ago, no one had diabetes, and now they have the most people with diabetes in the world due to 20 ,000 fast food restaurants, increased carbs, increased sugar, and aggressive protein diets. So I think it's a pet peeve when you see people who got a disease that probably wouldn't have. There's a high correlation between heart attack, diabetes, strokes, and being overweight.

1:07:35We did a study back as far as 20 years ago showing that just the change in weight in America cost the country one and a half trillion a year. People don't remember in their very first Super Bowls, there wasn't one lineman that weighed 300 pounds. And if you look at that today, you can find a high school where every lineman weighs 300 pounds and you just can imagine what's going to happen to them in their lifetime. Which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life? I'd say Gary Becker would be one. He wrote these things in the 60s that I read. He was really the father of the concept of human capital, that the assets not in the balance sheet were the major assets, that maybe 75 to 90 percent of the assets of a country, a state, to city are the productivity of the people.

1:08:31We became close friends. He did get prostate cancer, unfortunately died of cancer about a decade ago. But whereas his work was primarily in the academic area, I applied these concepts both at our Milken Institute, our foundations, and in business. And the second one was the young man, I don't remember his name, that I met that day, August 12th, 1965. And the Watts riots started August 11th, 1965. Lori and I got married August 11th, 1968. So I would never forget what occurred that day. And I'd say those two people have had a dramatic effect on the path I have chosen over the last 60 years. What's the best advice you ever received?

1:09:20There's many. I would say studying the data, going into debate at a young age. If you compete in debate, and I'd encourage everyone to encourage their kids, you have to debate both sides. You have to know both arguments. You have to see the world. And I think one of the things that's really propelled me over the years is seeing the world through other people's eyes so that I can understand their views of the world, why they feel that well. But that was great advice, going into speech and competing in the National Forensic League at a very young age. Any others that come to mind? Well, there's many.

1:10:02You are what you eat. I began to meditate in 93, and I probably ate more hot dogs, that's what people don't know about me, than anyone except those that have won the Nathan's Hot Dog Contest. When I was at Berkeley, they opened what I call the Shrine Top Dog. And anyone who's ever gone to Berkeley knows Top Dog. And I did not go to sleep once at Berkeley without having two to 12 Top Dogs before I went. So giving up hot dogs was a very difficult thing for me. And I've had many friends who have unfortunately died from cancer that couldn't give up their favorite foods. So I think the advice that you are what you eat has allowed me to be here today.

1:10:54And I'm the happiest guy to be with you today, 30 years later. All right, Michael, one more. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life? I'd say simply distributing more information widely. I gave thousands and thousands of speeches, but I didn't really give interviews. I didn't really go on television. I had a mission. And so when people don't really know who you are, anyone else can make up any caricature in the world. If you're going to go try to change the world, you need to be a public person. And I was a private person. One of the great politicians of the 20th and early 21st century, Willie Brown told me.

1:11:40Unless you've defined who you are early, it's too late if some event occurs. And I think had we been more public, had I gone on television more or done more interviews and I declined them all, it would have been different. And I think the course of history would have been different. And so I wrote a note to Bill Gates when they were going after Microsoft as a monopoly in the 90s and told them he should get out there, talk, interview, get on shows so they don't think he's some mastermind nerd that's going to control the world. I think changing the financial system, giving people access to capital obviously is not great for those that had access to capital.

1:12:24They now have to compete. And so I think it was a big mistake I had made. And I'd give that advice. If you are on a mission, you should publicly have people understand where you're going, how you're going to get there. Doing that internally, even if you have 10 ,000 employees is not enough. You have to publicly have people, if you're going to dramatically change something, come along with you during that period of time. Well, Mike, I'm very grateful you came to that lesson. So you would take the time to spend with me today and share so much of your story. So really appreciate the time. Thank you.

1:12:57All the best. Thanks for listening to the show. To learn more, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com, where you can join our mailing list, access past shows, learn about our gatherings, and sign up for premium content, including podcast transcripts, my investment portfolio, and a lot more. Have a good one and see you next time.

1:13:26Thank you.