Episode 47: Pete Muller - Founder of PDT Partners

0:00This week on Generating Alpha, I sat down with Pete Muller, founder and CEO of PDTt Partners, one of the most successful quantitative hedge funds in history. Pete grew up in Wayne, New Jersey as a son of immigrant parents. After graduating from Princeton with honors in mathematics, he moved to California to play music for rhythmic gymnasts. He eventually found his way to Barra doing quantitative work, and then in 1992 convinced Morgan Stanley to let him start a proprietary trading desk called Process Driven Trading. For nearly two decades, PDT averaged 20 % annual returns and was Morgan Stanley's most profitable group.

0:36After spinning out in 2012, the firm has continued that track record. The flagship fund has never had a down year since 1993. But in 1999, despite extraordinary success, Pete was miserable. His mind was so overloaded with formulas he couldn't play music anymore. You took a seven-year sabbatical, trekking in Bhutan and busking in New York City subways. And today, he spends two-thirds of his time in Santa Barbara, has released seven studio albums, creates crossword puzzles for the New York Times, and has made the final table at the World Series of Poker. His firm charges$3.50 and has a 3.5 % turnover rate.

1:15In our conversation, we talked about learning quant finance in the 1980s, the audacious pitch that created PDT, the 2007 quant crisis and institutional constraints, burnout and rebirth, how music and mathematics feed each other, building for quality over scale, and designing a life that doesn't require choosing between the things that matter most. If you enjoy this episode, please follow the podcast and rate it five stars on Spotify, subscribe on YouTube, and share it to anyone who you think might find it valuable. This is an incredible episode, and I really enjoyed recording with Pete, and I hope you guys enjoy listening.

1:49Thank you. Thanks for joining me, Pete. I really appreciate it. I'm here. Thanks for having me. Well, I want to start where I always do, the beginning. You grew up in Wayne, New Jersey, immigrant parents, if I'm correct, you had an Austrian father who was an engineer, Brazilian mother who was a psychiatrist. Tell me about your environment growing up and in what ways do you think that shaped you? Sure. Although I would say I haven't grown up yet, but I was raised in New Jersey. And, you know, my mom was a small town doctor in Brazil. She was the only town doctor before coming to the States and switching to psychiatry.

2:26Yeah, I was, I was in my head a lot as a kid. I was drawn to both math and puzzles and games and music. I was outdoors a lot, but definitely in my head a lot. Yeah, I had no interest in finance or markets. And you eventually go on to Princeton studying math, but if I'm correct, also playing in a jazz band. And after graduating, you moved to California. um and play music for rhythmic gymnasts instead of taking a corporate job i'm not i'm not even sure what rhythmic gymnasts mean tell me about why you made a decision your time in college kind of yeah sure so um i'm at princeton uh i'm in an eating club and i have a friend who is trying out for the olympics team the olympics and uh back then uh he said really make gymnastics the hoop ball ribbons you know you it's a it's a it's a branch of gymnastics but they have Olympic medals and there were two uh women that made the UST and she asked me to compose a piece for her she ended up loving it she wanted me to accompany her for Olympic tryouts and I I went I did that in Atlanta played at the uh Olympic Sports Festival she came fourth if she had come first which was a long shot I would have been the Olympic pianist but I met a coach in California that said uh if you're ever in california come play music for for my team and uh i had a job lined up at a german computer firm in new york city i had worked for them for a couple summers and i just didn't want to go do a nine-to-five job you know just go to an office and uh you know i thought oh let's go to california and see how this plays out a bit and i went there and i realized that it's very tough making a living as a rehearsal pianist for a rhythmic gymnastics team as much as it was fun and I loved California so I went looking for a job and that's where I found a company called Bara which did financial consulting started by a Zen Buddhist guy named Barr Rosenberg a wonderful human and uh turns out finance is all math and modeling and uh it just suited me and I found I had a couple really great mentors a fellow named Richard Bernold and a guy named origin divacha Richard was a prophet Berkeley and origin ended up uh doing managing tons of money at GMO and they they took a liking to me and taught me the business and I I got really interested so I started doing talks and writing papers so that's how I got into it incredible and that was yeah I played piano for that gymnastics team for at least a year while I was working at Barra before giving it up.

5:07It's a fun overlap. And I'm correct, you were at Barra around mid to late 80s. And that was kind of during the very early days of quantitative finance. 85 to 92. Yeah. So during the kind of earlier days of quantitative finance, what was it like being there kind of while the industry was evolving? I mean, it was nascent. People didn't understand what we were doing. And, you know, there was no such thing as you know the technology was tough the data was tough um but the the modeling uh turned out to be very useful I mean a lot of what we did was really uh we were hired by pension funds who were allocating money to managers and the managers were being evaluated through our models and so the managers had to hire us for the models and realize that maybe they could help um and yeah it was it was a start you know kind of looking at it on a monthly basis it was It was early days.

6:05And after leaving Barr, if I'm correct, in 92, Morgan Stanley wanted to hire you as an analyst, as a client analyst. You said no. And then I'm pretty sure you counter-offered and were like, let me start my own trading desk with proprietary, with Morgan Stanley's money. What gave you the conviction to even ask that of them? And why do you think they ultimately gave you that desk? You know, it's a very reasonable question. So I had learned how to play poker with a few friends and we got pretty good. I kind of got a little bored at Barra. It was very comfortable, but I just didn't have the edge. And the three of us, three of us that played poker actually pitched to Barra that we should start doing trading with our own money.

6:48But it was a really horrible pitch. I mean, if somebody had pitched me with that, I would have never said yes. That was very naive. But I realized it's kind of what I wanted to do. And then a number of other firms talked to me about doing it. And I never found somebody that was interesting. And then Morgan actually wanted me to write papers, travel around, talk to clients, you know, kind of be the face of quant at Morgan Stanley. But it meant, you know, putting on a suit and tie and flying around the world and talking to people about quant as opposed to doing it. And I said, you know, I want to try to do this.

7:20And they said, can you? You know, have you ever done it? And it was a very valid question. And I said, well, you know, I got pretty good at poker. I learned how to do that. I think I can figure this out. And they said, OK, here's the deal. we'll give you a couple years try it and if it doesn't work out you'll do what we want you to do and they thought you know what he's going to find it too hard like most of the people and then we'll have the guy that we want and I thought I'm going to find a way to do this and uh so we uh I took a chance and uh you know they guaranteed me enough to come to New York and give up my life in California which was really nice uh that I I said let me let me take a risk and then somehow yeah Yeah, it took a while to get back to California, but I did.

8:01And you took that risk and PDT kind of started around 1993 and eventually spent out of Morgan Stanley in 2012 as an independent firm. I'm really interested, just like from a high level before we get to the more kind of granular questions, the evolution of the firm over those 20 some years. What milestones do you think were like the biggest and the kind of shape the investor that PDT is today? you know there are a lot of stories in there and uh one day I'll maybe I'll write a book because the journey was fantastic uh you know it took us a couple of years and I was lucky enough I uh uh I grabbed a colleague of mine from uh from college from Princeton and went to an Ultimate Frisbee with Ken Nickerson to help build some of those models in early days I had a I was lucky enough to find someone who had gone to MIT with and gotten both an MBA but also an advanced degree in electrical engineering who had been at Morgan Stanley for a while and I named Kim Alcacer and a fellow named Frank Miquicchio who helped us out with our tech and you know somehow creating that team it just worked and after a few years we actually really figured out how to make money which was really great because the person that had taken the chance on me and brought me in got you know had a falling out politically at Oregon and it was it was just a question of you know if we had not been making money by then what the hell can heck is this Gary but but we were starting to make enough money and they realized that we were smart so they kept it going and then all of a sudden the growth was exponential until we were by far the most profitable group um you know six years later it was it was fantastic but uh but there was a time when i didn't think i would be there that i actually went and um uh i haven't told many people this but but i uh i interviewed with a long-term captain oh wow that was the thought was and they because they didn't know how to do equities at the time they didn't you know we were pretty good at statistically doing equities a lot of people didn't think it was possible um and uh and i talked to them really seriously i had a dinner with all the partners but for whatever reason you know we didn't pull the mutual trigger and take you know airlift the group out i think if we had gotten a serious software would have because my position at morgan stanley was so unstable um but you know kind of dodged that bullet uh you know the angels were looking down and uh started making money i ended up working for a fellow there named uh vikram pandit who oh yeah kind of kind of understood understood what we did and like you know what Pete I I get it I trust you I mean initially he was like wait a second you guys have all these models and secrets and you know we have to understand them and I'm like you're a lot of people in the group that understand them um and you know it uh it worked really well um the interesting thing is it's around um I guess it was uh 99 2000 Kim Alcester who was my partner in the group came to me and said you know what I'm I'm done I have money I want to move to LA and I all of a sudden realized I wasn't having that much fun anymore you know I'd made more money than I ever dreamed of that was never the goal and uh I decided I was done too went through a breakup started songwriting and I came up with a plan to leave and I thought I was going to basically be gone I started a another firm with a friend of mine called Chalk Street Capital that was allocating to other hedge fund managers and I thought you know um been there done that give the give the business to the group let them do it and had a deal with Morgan where I phased out for five years.

11:34Vikram was great. Vikram was like, you know what, Pete, do whatever you want. As long as you make sure it keeps going, you know, so the whole bonus pool got turned over to the group. I got a little deal and, you know, I kind of was basically done. And then life circumstances changed and it looked like they were not going to thrive past those five years. So kind of at that last year, I came in trying to help a little bit and pretty soon, because that's just what I'm good at. I was running the group again. Came back and made a number of decisions that I think well, one of them almost blew up firm, but I think the big one was really important for us to actually be where we are today which was to start hiring a lot of smart people.

12:17There was a cautiousness in the culture. My God, we figured out these secrets. This is great. Let's not tell anybody. I realized that the only way to get really good was to keep growing and keep learning and to keep pushing forward and so i i uh i made sure that happened and uh then uh after the crash of uh 2008 and the volcker rule which said banks can't own proprietary trading groups um we uh you know once that was you know close to passing we had a very amicable split with morgan you know where we basically moved out of their offices but kept running their money for a couple years is huge trust and we we raised uh you know the first fund we found a core investor uh you know that was willing to lock money up for seven years and all we did was promise not to give it back uh for seven years and then that helped us raise enough money to replace more than capital since they weren't allowed to invest and it was so amicable that all 80 people came with us uh from from morgan to pdt to the new entity in 2012.

13:22we had already been you know outside for two years so it was comfortable and uh and we even took the book that was at morgan stanley on december 31st and transferred it to the fund we didn't even have to pay the transaction cost to get out and back in oh wow and we still have a great relationship with morgan stanley uh you know they got they got a share of our profits for a while that hasn't ended a long time ago and then and then we've grown um yeah so there you go i'm super fascinated yeah so again i actually found when i came back that I can pursue music, which I love to do, and also run the business and empower people to do it.

14:00I think now I've got a career that can do it better than renting, which is great. Before we go back to the episode, I want to take a short break to talk about my sponsor, Roe. The Generating Alpha podcast is presented by Roe, the all-in-one banking platform for startups. Thousands of startups like Perplexity, Product Hunt, and more use Roe. You get everything you need to manage your startup's cash. Fast banking setup, cards with a 2 % cash back, and yield that turns company cash into extra runway. All super important in the early days of launching. But the thing founders really love about Roe is their team.

14:33They're obsessed with helping founders disrupt the status quo and will go to the end of the earth to help them to do so. And exclusively for Generating Alpha podcast listeners and viewers, you'll get a$1 ,500 statement credit plus a ton of exclusive perks when you manage your company cash with Roe. terms and conditions apply to learn more visit rho.co slash generating alpha rows of fintech not a bank checking and card services provided by webster bank member fdic see reward terms for details thank you and back to the episode incredible i'm super interested like zoom in on that seven year sabbatical you have of like tell me about the things you did during that period and ultimately you learned about a little bit of balance or you can do music and this but like what did you learn over that period well you know it was it was a five-year okay maybe four and a half and you know it wasn't a full sabbatical but you know the first year i i came in i think it was two three days a week the next year was like one to two then it was a day a week then it was a day a month okay so you know but so so it was was spacing it out um but i really dove into music and i thought that that was going to be the thing i did um did a couple albums and you know I'd always played it but I I hadn't really written I hadn't really sung and I I just I had a long way to go so I you know I did a lot of learning started the songwriter circle that was a big thing uh you know the first sabbatical I took um I I traveled for seven months I went to Bhutan I went all over the U.S.

16:09kayak the Grand Canyon I mean did you know a lot of really really cool fun outdoor things um but then when I came back it was more about you know kind of finding myself again and um discovering the spiritual side some of the things that led to you know things not working out and uh yeah um it was it was a fascinating journey I also started Chalkstream with my friend Andrew Tsai you know the thought was that was going to be my investment vehicle I thought you know I can't be that unusual uh there are going to be a lot of other people that have started hedge funds that i can find and i can figure out early days back them you know it turns out there are people but it's really hard to do and really competitive and you know chalk stream has done fine it's still running but i eventually went back to pdt andrew came and joined us over there um yeah and the firm the firm's continued knocking wood to thrive and evolve and you know just grow with new technologies I think the strength we have, which I think is really, really important, is that for me, you know, our utility is, our goal is to be the best place to work in quantitative finance.

17:21You know, we want our people to be having a great time. We love hiring the smartest people we can find, but they need to be collaborative and they need to be kind. So we have an amazingly warm place to work. People are really nurturing. They like to help people. I mean, that came from my values. And that collaboration and that trust is, you know, the fundamental underpinning of our culture. And I think that's so important. And that's a real competitive advantage we have, right? Because it's based on trust. They trust that if they devote themselves really hard and work really hard, that we're going to take care of them, that they're going to share in the success.

17:58We trust them that, you know, we can share secrets with people and they will stay there and keep them there. I mean, and that's one of the big things that you have to worry about in trading with people. leave with your model so so that trust is great and and people are not afraid internally to share ideas with other people because they're not worried about oh i might not get credit so so and so i think when it comes down to it that culture is huge and when we interview people they come there and they look around and they say oh my god you know this seems amazing but it can't be and then when we hire them they join they're like you know what i didn't i thought it was too good to be true in my interview but it actually really is like this I would I would give uh my partner to Shar Shah a lot of credit he is a an amazing physicist he could be running a research lab anywhere and he was one of those people when I came back to the firm that I spotted that was not afraid to hire people in the grow research group and you know he's really uh made a huge difference in building up our research culture very grateful for that and I think without him we would be where we are.

19:04And how do you make sure that the culture is a culture of excellence, not excellence in the way of people burning out, but rather excellence in the way of really being cordial, being nice, and then delivering great returns? You know, the same way you incent behavior. You reward good behavior, so we pay people for being collaborative, not just for making money. And if you're a jerk and you're really good, but you're a jerk, you're not going to last. We don't have jerks. And it's worth it. And then when you have a culture where people don't tolerate jerks, if somebody has some jerk tendencies, but is basically good, that actually helps decrease those tendencies and the behavior becomes good.

19:51Right? So you want to kind of fit into a culture and do well. Right? Right. So so part of it is if there's anything, we want to make sure that the competitive drive and drive for excellence is still there, too. So we want people to be, you know, ruthless, just not ruthless versus their colleagues. Ruthless versus building the models and beating the market, figuring that out. And you reinforce that, you talk about that, and it mostly works. I think that's the that's the main thing. It kind of shapes human culture and behavior. I think the most important thing is and you can't fake this you have to genuinely care about people so if we have someone who's struggling um and this could be a junior person that we've hired that's just not getting it yet or a senior person that kind of did some stuff but kind of isn't in the right role we bend over backwards to try to help that person find a new position to make it work.

20:48A lot of people talk about, okay, a company is not a family, right? You know, it's more like a sports team. We kind of go a little bit more family now. That's our way of looking at it. It might be inefficient, but I will tell you that it feels a lot better. It's a lot more fun. And for us, it's worked really well. And I'm super interested in kind of the aspect of size of you. You've said that you want to be the best quant firm on the planet in terms of obviously see the people working there in the kind of culture, but specifically not in terms of assets, but in terms of quality of products, both I'm sure in returns, but also I'm sure in people that you hire.

21:24And you guys are at around mid-teens of billions of assets under management now and probably could be much bigger. When does size kill returns? You know, we spend a lot of time thinking about that. It's not just returns. The bigger you get, the more volatile you get your short ratio goes down yeah you know it doesn't it doesn't work as well um and you know for the way when we started our partners fund we told people and we you know we started with um one and a half million and we told people you know eventually we are going to replace this just with our money right and we will kick you out and that's why we kept the you know the deal with with our first investor that uh we promised we wouldn't kick out for seven years uh And we've continued to do that.

22:11So our partners fund, we've kicked everybody out of it. That's all our money. And that's more than half of what we manage. And our other offerings, we will slowly do the same thing and kick people out. And the way we look at it is we want consistent returns. We want the prospect, even for our lower incentive fee fund, to have a losing quarter to be, you know, a losing quarter should be very unusual. for our main fund, a losing month should happen once or twice a year. And, you know, you can kind of figure out about what that target is. We think that that's reasonable. It's an interesting trade off because things change.

22:50You want to make sure the models you're trading are still effective, right? So when you go through a drawdown period, you always ask the question, wait a second, did something change? Is it not working? There's a lot of rigorous ways to figure that out. But But if you have a low sharps ratio strategy that has losing years occasionally, you know, it gets a little harder. If you know you have losing three years in a row, it gets very hard. You start doubting it. So that's how you decide how big you can get. And the bigger you get, the more costs you pay to trade in the market and the lower you realize the alpha is.

23:26So there's a formula that trades it off. We could certainly with our reputation, you know, raise, I don't know, 20, 30, 40, 50 billion dollars more in low, sharp strategies.

23:43We're not doing that. First of all, we'd have to add a lot, you know, we'd have to expand our marketing department from one person, basically. basically um and uh and also then you have to you know have a lot of client meetings and conversations about what's going on that's not actually helping to do things and would it add some revenue diversification for potentially but it would also distract us from our main research mission so that's the the reason we've picked that uh we have some competitors that have taken that path and we have some competitors that have continued to get bigger and bigger and and you you also you know we we do have uh close to 300 people now you know you keeping a culture and keeping it intact when it's my firm is getting bigger it's much harder and i just can't imagine what it'd be like running a thousand or two thousand or three thousand person firm you don't know everybody and that that's okay i don't know everybody now um but you you know i know enough people that know people like so so there's one degree of separation between me and anything else and for 1 ,200 people, that wouldn't be the case.

24:48So it seems to work. We think about maximizing dollar profit per employee. And I want to take a step back for a second. I think this is a very kind of interesting time in your firm's evolution of after you came back, a few years later was 07 and 08. And if I'm correct, if you didn't cut your positions, it would have been one of your best years ever. Tell me a bit about that period. I'm just super fascinated in what it was like for you guys. You know, there was a quant crisis. It was in 2007 in August, the end of August. And quant, you know, there's low sharp quant and high sharp quant. And the low sharp quant had been doing really well.

25:30And people just got bigger and bigger and bigger than they thought. And, you know, when I mentioned before that I made a decision that almost took down the firm, I thought we could make our low sharp books much, much bigger. and I went to Morgan Stanley internally and you know this is after a period where there was no such thing as risk in the marketplace you know so you have leaders who were whose risk aversion is is far lower uh that's very natural and I said you know what we've got all these strategies we can take lots of outside capital um and we should because this isn't something we should do internally and the message I got back was no no no you don't understand we're really big we can handle massive drawdowns and um I said no you don't understand but I lost that battle but I said okay fine and And so we took the lower Sharpe ratio stuff, made it much bigger.

26:16And as a result, when we went into that crazy week and what had happened was people started delivering those books and stuff started going down. And then people that were taking too much leverage, the weak hands, needed to start puking. And there just wasn't enough liquidity. So even though the market was flat that week, it was crazy. And we had to make some decisions. We actually ended up cutting two-thirds of our book. which was extreme and we almost went down to zero but we made back the year on the one-third of our book that we kept ready to unload it that Friday but it finally you know it was it was my poker sense felt it felt I felt like that it was over and uh fortunately I was right so we held off for a little bit but it was a scary time um so um I guess that was uh that was 2007 and you know that was that was I still remember it uh there's not a lot of sleep you know because it was a contagion you know it went all around and it was just a reminder uh plus plus we we just never thought we would have to emergency liquidate so we didn't know how to do it we were trading sloppily I'm not sure I'm sure we weren't the only ones and so all of a sudden you know people are like wait a second everybody's trying to get out of the way and so we went out of the way um and uh but it worked out okay that but that was that was the the hardest thing that was you know the parallel decision to opening it up and hiring lots of people the great thing that happened during that week was you kind of saw how dedicated and devoted people were how much people loved the firm wanted to stay and do things right and then when 2008 happened when morgan stanley almost went bus oh yeah i mean the weekend that morgan stanley almost went bus when mac was in tokyo uh begging mitsubishi for the bailout that's the weekend my son was born oh wow because i had moved to california where i live now and i was there and i was ready to fly back you know right away because it was absolutely nuts unfortunately that didn't happen but we were fine we were making tons of money incredible we learned we learned so much from that liquidation that that when crazy events happen in the marketplace now we're much better prepared it seems like seems like a useful learning experience although a painful one indeed indeed when i write that book one day uh that you know you know that um wall street journal had a i made the front page of the wall street journal which nobody knew we existed but because it was the end of august and morgan reported the quarterly earnings right at the end of august they had to talk about us and do it and so the wall street journal published a story that said quant star battered no time no time for music now wow funny yeah anyway yeah and if i'm correct at the firm you organize researchers into teams by asset class and time horizon um some work on problems for very short amounts of time like a couple weeks some work on for years at a time how do you decide what's worth years versus weeks in what gets killed quickly?

29:22So we don't actually organize them that way. We've changed how we approach it. And, you know, there's just a lot of judgment that goes into it. And I won't go into details in terms of how we think about things. But, you know, I think if somebody came in and saw it, they would feel like it was common sense. You know, what's your level of conviction on something? And what's your credibility? how good have you been at figuring things out in the past. But typically, if somebody is smart and we trust them and they say, I want to figure this out, I'm not going to stop until I do, we're going to let them do it.

30:00There's no – the downside is limit. So that's how we play. And I want to touch on a couple of questions about you because you have a very unique background in the sense of you spend two-thirds of your time, if I'm correct, up there in California, most of it surfing you perform music you create New York Times crossword puzzles and I think you made it to the final table of a world series of poker or event you've created seven albums as well most successful investors that I've interviewed are completely consumed by markets do you think not being consumed by markets is a competitive advantage? I think it makes my life much more fun and much more fun I think the thing is I'm pretty good at what I do i'm pretty smart and when i obsess over something i get really good at it but what i i love being able to have people learn what i do and do it better right you know so the you know i i have a bunch of crosswords under the washington post but i've mentored some people that you know create them you know it's i can't do that with music i gotta create the music and do it myself but in pdt there are quite a number of people who are uh i i would i would argue smarter and better than i am in terms of building models and making this work you know maybe i have a little more eminence threes and a lot more wisdom but i my ego is not attached to being the guy who could figure it all out and i think that makes that that makes for a more interesting life um you know i i love to be i love to learn i love to be challenged and i love to watch other people learn as well um that that's what turned down and at this point in your career you could retire tomorrow and just make music what keeps you going oh that that's been true for forever uh but the same reason that well all those things but you know part of it is you know when I play music and I and I do travel around the country and we you know we do get shout outs this this last record the seventh record we got a NPR gave us one of the top 10 Americana albums to come out for the week you know which was really cool uh unexpected um you know I you know and if I can go around and play for 90 people in a pin drop quiet room either solo or with my band that's a real turn on for me I it's energizing and it's great but I'm I'm a nobody in the music field right you know it's um and I'm struggling and a lot of times on the opening act you know I'm there's I'm not even changing in the green room I'm changing in the bathroom it's cool and I'm devoted to it and I've gotta pay my dues and that's cool uh and it's not like when i travel to the gates uh you know it's it's uncomfortable it's fine i i you know but but but when i'm playing i'm playing uh when i walk into the hedge fund world you know people know what i did know what i'm capable of i feel like you know it's it's a nice boost i'm like oh good i'm i can be really excellent i want to devote myself to and so i can use that energy and help myself grow in the other and the other which is music.

33:03So the combination actually looks great for me. Incredible. And I have one final question. I asked every single one of my guests at the end of every episode. I'm 16 right now. If you were to give one piece of advice to a 16 year old today, and it can be life advice. It can be career advice. Jeff Yass gave me romantic advice. What would it be? I want to know what Jeff Yass told you. Jeff, Jeff, Jeff said that ask your friends what they think of a woman before marrying her. because they're much more rational about it than you are, and they know you better than you know yourself in those kind of moments.

33:35That is great advice. The first thing I'm going to tell you is, holy shit, you're 16. I mean, I knew that going into this, but you're incredibly impressive for 16. You're well-spoken. You're thoughtful. You're way ahead of the game, which is fantastic, and you clearly have a great, bright future ahead of you. I the piece of advice that I would give and I would you know I'll give my kids this is there is a sure signal that you get when you are operating in the world that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing and that is the energy and it's follow the energy if you're doing something that makes you feel alive do it more if you're doing something and you feel dead or you feel like okay I should do this on it you don't have to do it right you can you can make your own rules but if you pay attention to energy, people will be drawn to you and you'll be able to figure out whatever you need to figure out.

34:33It takes a while sometimes you have to stick with it, but if it's energizing, it's not hard. Right. I, you know, there's all sorts of other things about being disciplined, you know, setting things, but, but following the energy is the one thing that I would say. Extremely sound advice. Well, thanks for you for coming on. It's been a pleasure. thanks for taking the time. Totally, totally my pleasure too. And one thing I'll tell you is if people are listening to your podcast and going, wait, wait, he plays music? That's interesting. How can I check it out? If they go to Pete Muller, P-E-T-E-M-U-L-L-E-R.com, they can find me there on Instagram, Pete Muller Music, you know, Spotify, Pinterest, everywhere you just look at Pete Muller.

35:13I'll add it to my playlist. Awesome. All right. Well, great doing this, Pete. Really appreciate it.