Brookfield CEO: AI Bubble, Opportunities, and Risk | Connor Teskey

0:00why don't we start with the state of the union for Brookfield you guys manage about a trillion dollars where is it allocated and how is it allocated so our business today is really built around raising capital from the largest pools of money around the world and then turning around and deploying that capital into the largest and most attractive investment themes around the world as a result we are a very global business we raise money all over the world and then equally we

0:36deploy it into 60 of the biggest countries and and markets undoubtedly our biggest markets continue to be the United States and Western Europe but we are truly a global business today with operations across Asia PAC India the Middle East and South America as well when I spoke to Bruce last he mentioned that he wanted the next generation to be better than him and I'm curious what what have you learned that's non-obvious working with him that's a pretty high bar to

1:11exceed I think what Bruce has built is amazing and quite frankly underappreciated in particular not only the the investment platform and the the asset base but but equally the the culture that and I think it's that culture that will ensure that we can keep growing and keep building the way Bruce and other members of senior management have built up the firm for the last two plus decades

1:42in terms of some of the things that Bruce has done and and not just Bruce but Bruce and other members of senior management is they're incredibly balanced when there are big moves in the market that they're very measured in terms of how they respond and how they think through changing dynamics secondly I would say very forward-looking we learn a lot from the past but we don't spend a lot of time dwelling on it if I can say

2:14it that way and then you know that importance of culture the scale of what has been built and often why I feel it's so underappreciated it is because one of the big cultural aspects of Brookfield is is almost worry about putting others in a position to succeed more more than yourself and Bruce certainly embodies that as do others and therefore I don't think they always get the credit for what they've

2:46built but we're very fortunate now to have this exceptional platform that is on the absolute front of some of the largest most enduring and most attractive investment themes that have been running for three or four or five years and are going to continue to run for you know one or two decades going forward where would you say you're different from him there's no question you know he he's been doing it for 20 years longer than I have um in a lot of ways I think we we've found each other to be very complementary

3:20the job is of course we run a very large investment organization and therefore the most important thing we do is deploy capital at exceptional returns that is the bedrock that is the foundation of our business that is always what we're going to be known for but in order to do that at an increasing scale and over a long duration of time you have to be better at so many other things as well you have to be very

3:51good at building teams you have to be very good at communicating strategy communicating and interacting with your clients your LP partners your counterparties it's that breadth beyond just the investment role and I've been very fortunate to watch how Bruce excels in in all of that and hopefully absorb some of it over over the last you know 12 plus years of working together has the nature of how you invest changed and I mean in the sense of it seems like we've gone from a traditional sort of LP structure there seems to be a lot more

4:23co-invest now and there's different products available I don't know that the nature of how we invest has changed and there are some things that have changed but are one of the things we love about our our business and our approach is we've been very consistent over an exceptionally long period of time we focus on high quality assets that make up the backbone of the global economy you know critical assets or services that really drive the growth and productivity of the the communities and and

4:57countries within which they exist now it's easy to say that we've been very disciplined and focused on on that approach in that theme but there are things that have obviously changed the assets and services that make up the backbone of the global economy are constantly evolving we give the example that you know probably two-thirds maybe even 70 percent of what we invest in today was not an investable

5:28asset class 15 or 20 years ago 20 years ago we invested in hydro dams today we invest in solar and nuclear and batteries 20 years ago we invested in ports and railroads we of course still invest in ports and railroads but we also invest in data centers and and fiber and telecom towers so while we've been very consistent and focused on the backbone of the global economy that of course changes over time the the the other thing that changes is well our downside focused approach to investing targeting that

6:06backbone of the global economy has been very consistent a big part of our business over the last really 10 years has been taking that approach and either packaging it different to meet the needs of a different and growing an increasingly diverse spectrum of of lp partners and clients and also distributing those products in different ways um i'll give the example that 10 years ago i think we had four products today we

6:39have 60 and what has happened over those four years is we've been very consistent in the verticals we focus on we focus on infrastructure and real estate and private equity but within each of those verticals we used to just have a flagship strategy now we look to have a flagship strategy a mezzanine debt strategy a super core strategy a strategy focused on the retail wealth channel and that's led to using that same consistent and approach and focus of

7:11investing but distributing it packaging it across a wider spectrum of products such that it can be used to service a wider spectrum of partner and and clients one thing i'm curious about is your meteoric rise you went from CIBC jumped into Brookfield and you've just been on this trajectory that is hard to imagine what do you think contributed to that like what did you have that other people didn't have at least part of the answer has to be good

7:44fortune uh of course and uh good fortune in that um was fortunate to work on some transactions and initiatives that were very successful good fortune to uh in a few different places be right place right time things more tangible however i had incredible mentorship first and foremost and the obvious one that jumps out there is bruce but it goes so much beyond that you know right from the first boss i had at

8:15Brookfield that gentleman was you know as much boss as as mentor and friend to me and really helped me develop and while it was early in my career i think a lot of the things he taught me paid huge dividends down the line what are some of those things he taught you i do think one thing that perhaps junior investment professionals uh spend a lot of time focusing on is trying to get that the model or the analysis perfect there's almost a false degree of precision in in today's world of excel yeah um the

8:46reality is so many times you just have to overlay good judgment and you have to recognize um there are certain things outside of your control that you know your excel model will seem like a certainty but but aren't and then another thing i i really attribute to to that first mentor and boss i had at brookfield is and i might get the exact words wrong but something along the lines of there's no absolute certainties in this business so when something feels 90 right you do that transaction or you do that deal

9:21and the most important thing is you do 10 of them and you're going to be right nine times out of 10 and that's really really good if you wait to try and de-risk everything to the absolute nth degree amazing you'll de-risk your transactions you'll also do none of them other things that i think were you know maybe just going a little bit further on that point is one of the things that was very formative i would say in in my career was after joining brookfield i did four and a half five years

9:58initially in the private equity group in toronto and in 2016 i moved to london and concurrent with that move i i switched to the renewable power team at brookfield and was part of a small group that was focused on building out a european platform that that was amazing there is a incredible forcing function of not working in the same office as your boss if i could say it that way you're not going to send an email to ask to send an email you're not going to wait five hours for the time zone to

10:31catch up to check something um if you're pretty sure it's right and maybe this is personal to me when you begin to take the initiative and do those things on your own prerogative you think you're going to have a really low shooting percentage and then almost shockingly positive to the upside you you actually have a much higher shooting percentage you than you expect and and that's fun you know you you start getting stuff done you start making progress uh you start building things with the team around you and you get some momentum and that almost spirit and and and excitement just snowballs

11:05from there i think the story is you you were told to go to renewables not necessarily asked how did you feel about that so so this was in 2016 and and when i was asked to move to london concurrent with that move i i switched teams and uh people always say oh did did you want to join renewables the the honest answer is no i didn't have some weird desire to or some strong specific desire to go to renewables but bruce and and cyrus madden who built our private equity business asked if i would and i of course said

11:39yes and if they'd asked me to go into infrastructure or real estate i'd probably have a different business card today i love the firm and i'd do whatever they asked me to again i was very fortunate that i joined the renewables team you know in the early innings of what has been one of the largest and fastest growing industry builds in history so we had big tailwinds with renewables you had great mentors something specific to you that other people have mentioned to me is your just your work ethic

12:11talk to me about that there's a lot of people uh that work really really hard um i i've always felt that that's something within your control that can be a differentiating factor and it's really two things one yes if you work hard you have a bigger capacity to do more stuff you know that's the the obvious one the other comment or dynamic that i think is sometimes underappreciated is um just being

12:44available for other people on the team and there's always people both both junior and senior to you that have questions want to bounce an idea off you um want career advice deal specific advice and just being available for people and always being willing to make time and yeah maybe that means you're you know taking calls while you're walking through an airport or at late at night but um i think it's

13:15funny i i don't know that when people think i work hard it's you know i was crunching more excel models or building more powerpoint i almost think it's the availability that that people perceive as as uh or represent as working hard did you have any setbacks along the way oh tons what are some of the ones that stand out yeah for sure there's always deals that didn't go well or you know let me almost put it as a different way i i remember very early in my career again another

13:50great mentor this was very shortly after i joined brookfield they they made a comment to me connor you're doing really well you're you're i had a bit of a unique background before i joined brookfield i didn't really have a financial modeling background or evaluation background and then i joined a private equity group in an investment position so i had a pretty steep learning curve at the beginning and i remember maybe 12 or 14 months in someone said you're doing really well you know you're picking up the skills you're you're producing great work but when you go to present it nobody knows what you're

14:25talking about you're you're you're you're trying to explain too much your explanations are too complicated i remember when i got that advice initially it put me in a tailspin i was crushed i thought that was the end of my career and then you know you wake up the next day with a fresh perspective and you go well it was tough to hear that that people don't understand what i'm talking about but so great to learn that now and focus on it and then you realize that it's not just the ability to do the work but explain the work and if you can't if you can't do both you know it's kind

14:58of irrelevant you mentioned sort of uh getting to 90 and that is that's sort of the target you want to get to and you want to do 10 deals how do you think about de-risking deals do you isolate particular variables or how does that work so much of what we do at brookfield is um de-risking different business activities in such a way that we can turn the construction of a project or the operations of a project into a long-term inflation linked stream of cash flows we are very comfortable

15:33taking execution risk operating risk development risk we don't like to take market risk and we work very very hard to structure our deals or execute in such a way that we're we're not taking market risk and i'll give an example of that when you uh build a renewable power plant let's just say a solar farm there's really four key drivers uh of what your end return is going to be it's your construction

16:04cost it's your revenue offtake your power purchase agreement it's your epc and your financing we are very fortunate to have built one of the largest um renewable power operating and development platforms around the world whenever we build a new project we do not like to put capital in the ground unless we lock in our capex contract our offtake contract our epc contract and our financing contract all at once because if you lock in those four things and you execute it doesn't matter if interest rates go up or

16:40down you've locked in long-term financing it doesn't matter if power prices go up or down you've locked in a long-term contracted revenue price it doesn't matter if inflation goes up or down you've locked in your capex so and we do that in our power business we take a very similar approach to our real estate business uh building new real estate on behalf of long-term tenants we're now doing it in data centers building uh gigafactories on the uh on the back of long-term contracts with hyperscalers or sovereign offtakes

17:13it's a very repeatable business model where we're comfortable taking operating and development risk we feel we have an expertise in that but we work very hard to to structure and de-risk out market market risk what's epc the construction company the engineering procurement and construction okay you're in meetings all day you're trying to stay present but you're also worried you'll forget the decision the action item the important next step that's where granola comes in granola is an ai-powered notepad for meetings you jot down rough notes like you always do and in the background granola transcribes and turns

17:48them into clear useful notes when the meeting ends there are no bots joining your calls no distractions just a clean notepad that helps you focus during or after the call you can chat with your notes you can ask granola to pull out action items help you negotiate make a decision write a follow-up email and so much more i even use it when i'm listening to podcasts once you try it on a first meeting it's hard to go without head to granola.ai slash shane and get three months free with code shane that's granola.ai slash shane most things worth having in life reward focus dating

18:24should too the league is built for people like me who know who they are and what they want instead of endless options it delivered me a curated set of profiles each day so my time and attention stay directed towards what matters what stood out to me most is the community high quality people who are intentional and serious about building something real if you're ready to approach dating the same way you approach the rest of your life with clarity and purpose this is worth your attention the league find someone in yours download the app and apply today and i'm curious about data centers what are the

19:01the variables that you try to pick out what are the variables that matter in that scenario it's very similar um you know you've got your construction cost you've got your uh power supply uh and you've got your long-term compute contract data centers are fascinating today because it's not that long ago maybe only five six seven years ago when an investor was investing in a data center they were really funding the rack in the shell against a long-term offtake typically with a hyperscale or long-term

19:36take-or-pay inflation-linked offtake there's three things happening in the space that are expanding that opportunity very rapidly today and they're all compounding on each other there's more data centers being built the data centers that are being built are bigger than the ones that used to get built and then the third thing is where historically the investor would fund the rack and the shell increasingly now that investor is funding the rack the shell the chips the servers the power supply the grid connection the substation the redundancy they're funding that whole data center plus the the

20:14energy supply chain but it's still all wrapped in that long-term uh offtake typically with an extremely high credit quality counterparty either one of the big global hyperscalers or or a sovereign offtake that's interesting you mentioned the high quality counterparty because one of the things that strikes me when i read these headlines anyway is you know hundred billion dollar contract over 10 years or something you really have to like there's a lot of embedded risk in that the headline numbers are great

20:44but can people pay like five years from now what if it's a depreciating asset like how what if it changes so two things that are interesting there one um the amazing thing about we'll call it ai infrastructure today is who are your counterparties these are literally the greatest companies in the world the highest credit quality counterparties in the world the large tech companies um they're the greatest companies in the world today they're they're almost undoubtedly the greatest companies of all

21:15time that is the corporate credit counterparty risk you are taking which is as good as we've ever seen the other point that that's perhaps interesting is sometimes we get asked why do things get turned down during an investment process at brookfield and of course there's a pretty wide range of things but i would say of deals that we choose to pursue but then you know in diligence or in structuring decide to walk

21:47away there's two reasons that are most common one we don't like the revenue construct or the corporate credit counterparty that backstops that revenue construct that would be reason one or reason two it's too much construction or development risk relative to the the return uh that the opportunity generates i would say those across our infrastructure business across our real estate business across our power business those are absolutely the two most common reasons we choose not to do a deal after

22:20initially reviewing it how does a deal actually come to be so you have people sourcing deals all over the the world do you have boots on the ground in i don't know like 100 countries or however many countries you have and then it comes up to one sort of investment committee how does that work certainly so that sounds really hard we we're very fortunate to have an extremely large platform that is very global in nature and what's been built over a number of years now is a unique business where everywhere we either

22:53seek to invest or we own operate and manage assets we like to have a local boots on the ground team and that team typically can be split into two we like to have local investment professionals as well as local operating professionals and there's actually a third we also typically have local fundraising professionals as well in all the markets that we operate and you the obvious question is how do you manage that if you're in all these different regions and asset classes around the world we've pursued a

23:27model where those local teams are given the responsibility and the autonomy and the accountability to source execute and operate very independently and we want those teams to know those markets inside and out see all the local dynamics hopefully before others see the the dynamics that are value creation opportunities and position our businesses to capture that value see the risks that are coming and position our businesses to mitigate those risks and while we give those local teams lots of independence

24:02and autonomy to source execute and operate when it comes to capital deployment all capital deployment decisions get brought centrally to a a fairly tight group uh for approval and it's through that function that a small group at brookfield can have visibility of everything that's happening around the world which is just good for perspective and controls and things like that um but it allows us to get the growth of

24:33having local boots on the ground but also the ability to to manage and oversee everything the the also the the underappreciated benefit of that model is it gives us incredible global perspective um if one of the teams in one of our regions around the world is bringing forward an opportunity it might be the best opportunity we've seen in that region in 12 or 18 or 24 months but if it's not holding a candle to the the risk-adjusted returns we can get in a similar opportunity in another region we have that central

25:08perspective to say you know what we're going to allocate our capital to where we're seeing the best opportunities globally and across asset classes i'm curious about what type of information flows up um so like is does that committee have a name like whatever information flows up into the the small group of people who are are deciding where to allocate capital and then how do you take that information and disseminate it so you learn things in like one part of the world and how do you apply that in another part of the world there's two things there um we obviously have a an investment

25:40committee process that's important because it it substantiates approvals and things like that and it's it's a process that's communicated to um you know our lp partners and we of close of course adhere very closely to that the the one thing i would stress is we don't treat our investment committee like a single discrete one-time event where an opportunity is going to be presented for the first time and then ruled upon you know all in a one-hour meeting right our investment teams around the world through

26:16the life cycle of the investment they are constantly iterating with not only the members of the investment committee but the leaders of that platform to get feedback along the way make sure they're building consensus uh no deal is perfect there's always unique dynamics or nuances they're making the appropriate men and women aware of those getting feedback a lot of our businesses have a a process where there is a very very detailed review you know three to four weeks ahead of the final investment

26:48committee with very senior individuals and the goal of that call almost preliminary meeting whether sometimes it's called a capital committee or something like that is that's where you can get really good feedback on an opportunity you can draw on the experience of the whole business but you still have time to take that feedback away right maybe do a little bit more diligence maybe tweak the deal a little bit well before you go for a final investment committee approval shane the the other thing you

27:19mentioned there i always give this example is um brookfield really runs like a partnership and i i've been fortunate to to have helped build the the power business over the last 10 years and and led it for the last five i i'll give this example on a day-to-day basis when i was just starting to lead the power business i didn't necessarily have a whole lot to do day to day with our real estate business but if i hadn't talked to brian

27:50kingston who's one of the senior guys in our firm who who was leading our real estate business at the time one of us would phone each other every two or three weeks what are you seeing what's working in your business what isn't working where are you seeing demand where are you seeing capital flows there is that constant interaction the business does not operate in silos it despite operating in four verticals from almost a product perspective it's incredibly collaborative with with almost immense effort

28:21put in to consciously ensuring that we're always sharing information and perspectives so the committee is not like a vertical it's not like oh this is real estate committee it's you have other people sitting on that from different for sure but even if they aren't you you would pull their expertise in right i i think one of the unique things about our our approach is uh there really are no walls at at brookfield and and we really in tone from the top in how we develop people even in how we compensate

28:54people we really encourage collaboration such that when the firm has an opportunity it doesn't matter what someone's title is or what region they work in or or what you know uh investment strategy they may they spend the majority of their time on if there is an individual within the organization that can be additive to an investment we're trying to do or an initiative within the company we pull them in even if it's a private equity investment if there's someone within our infrastructure business that can bring

29:28value they get looped in it doesn't it doesn't matter what the job description on their business card is there's two paths i want to follow here one was you mentioned consensus but the example that came to mind for me was westinghouse which seemed like a very non-consensus idea at least from the outside looking at now it's proved out to be very correct but how do you think about taking bets that are maybe non-consensus westinghouse is probably a good example of sometimes we get asked what's an investment committee process or what's that iterative process like we focus a huge amount of time the

30:05vast majority of the discussion will be focused on the downside we like to believe that if you buy high quality businesses in good markets that have strong downside protection if you underrate the worst case scenario really really well the base case or the expected case will end up being very attractive and and westinghouse was a great example of that you know when we initially invested it was not an in favor sector by any means but it was a market leader it was critical to the global supply chain of nuclear

30:42power which at the time was not growing but had a very very long life tale to it of which westinghouse was a critical supplier and we felt it was an industrial operating business that could be run better using some of our operational expertise in other industrial businesses that could could be brought to bear and i can tell you we spent all of our time focused on the downside and what was interesting is that proved out to be right you know westinghouse is a market leader it is absolutely critical to the supply

31:16chain we were able to drive drive significant operating efficiency within that business all of that would have led to a a very good outcome and then we got the upside which is there was a complete revitalization of the nuclear power generation sector around the world and westinghouse was absolutely at the forefront of that so we focused on the downside we made sure our downside was protected our base case of an attractive return was delivered by things within our control but there was asymmetric upside if some

31:50uncontrollable things that we thought or hoped would happen uh did but we didn't need them to to have a good outcome in that case we had a very very good outcome what happens after you acquire a business you know i think brad said if you're brad jacobs told me if you're not improving the business then you're just really moving money around so what does that playbook look like when you go in what are the variables that you're really focused on what's that first 120 days look like it's funny brookfield is a unique in the alternative asset management space we come from a background of being direct

32:29owner operators of businesses i don't know if everyone knows this brookfield and its predecessor companies were founded around 1900 and for the first hundred years of our history we were not an asset manager we were essentially an industrial conglomerate directly owning and operating businesses ourselves and that history really informs our approach today we like high quality businesses that would be we'd be comfortable owning directly over the long term we tend to be slightly

33:01longer term holders of assets we take a very hands-on direct owner operator approach to our investments i would say this we um there's not an investment around the world today where part of our return bridge if you will doesn't come from operational improvement and then the third thing is as a function of our history where we used to be a hundred cents of every dollar we invested today the largest investor in brookfield products is still brookfield's balance sheet so your question what does that look like

33:34we've built a platform where we've built a platform where we like to think we have best in craft class industry and geographical expertise in the asset classes we invest in um take power for example we have people in every region around the world that we operate that are experienced in operating technical development power marketing tax legal regulatory compliance and when we buy a business we bring that expertise to bear most of the time that expertise we have doesn't actually go into the company

34:12it sits above the company and is simply there to support the business uh from above in certain cases and depending on the extent of the the turnaround or the operational improvement that we're seeking to do sometimes we will put our own people into a business to to drive change you made the comment what does the first 100 120 days look like very important there are certain standards that we like to implement you know 100 days probably too long uh our health and safety standards our global standards

34:45around certain processes and procedures those are non-negotiables uh those get rolled out right away but they're generally things everyone can buy into you know you acquire a business as a a new equity investor and you know a brookfield's representative shows up on site and says we're proud to be the new owner of the business we're gonna look to drive some changes as you made it understand the first one we always focus on health and safety and people that get health and safety right tend to be the best

35:17operators long term how do you think about quickly getting capital out as a means of de-risking so you buy a business and you put all this capital out and then how much of that first year or two is like how much capital can we get out quickly so we de-risk this deal it's an interesting comment i would say it's very deal specific um when we think back over the history of brookfield you know i i joined brookfield about 14 years ago i remember back then we used to say there were really almost two different types of

35:56investments we would target you would either want to buy high quality businesses at a a you know an attractive value or a fair value or you would consider buying a lower quality business at an exceptionally discounted price what's interesting today is our business has really focused increasingly on the former we want to buy extremely high quality businesses where you have incredible visibility into their long-term cash generating profile and you can have a lot of conviction that that cash flow will be

36:32there one year from now three years from now five years from now ten years from now because of that i think there is less stress about trying to extract a bunch of cash in the near term if you had a lower quality business where it's subject to increased competition it's subject to perhaps some market variations that aren't in your control yeah you want to de-risk that really fast obviously we'll we'll pull capital out of our businesses whenever we can but given the types of things we focus on we can take an approach of doing it very prudently how do you think about

37:07leverage i look at what's going on in real estate today yeah and so much of that seems to be people got a little bit over their skis which creates an opportunity for you but how do you think about going into that with leverage where you're sort of trading off a little bit of financial return for survivability over market variations i like the way you said that there there's two things about how we finance our businesses around the world one is just the approach we take we focus on asset level non-recourse long-term fixed rate financing it's sometimes not the cheapest financing uh but it

37:43has some features that we really like it takes away that market risk that we talk about about interesting interest interest or financing cost changes over time and the other thing is we like to do asset level non-recourse financing that by choice is harder you're doing a lot more individual financings rather than just grouping huge portfolios of assets and and putting a debt facility over the top of them but what it really ensures for us is if you ever run into something unforeseen and i say

38:16something unforeseen to the downside or equally something unforeseen to the upside everything that you have to work through is done on an individual basis and you're never um tainting if you will an entire portfolio with the dynamics of an individual asset and obviously people will focus on if you have an asset goes bad it's nice if that doesn't taint a broader but it's the same on the upside if you get an incredible bid for a single asset but it's stuck in a debt facility that won't

38:48let you release it that inflexibility is not helpful to running your business so the first thing we do is focus across all of our platforms non-recourse asset level long duration fixed rate financing the other thing which probably isn't as obvious is we are huge believers that you liquidity is almost consistently undervalued liquidity is this funny thing which is it's every time it's overvalued when

39:19you don't need it and it's incredibly undervalued when you do need it and therefore we like to prudently finance all of our businesses but we always like to ensure that we have some excess capital for something unforeseen and again that unforeseen thing could be a positive or a negative the negative maybe your business plan isn't going quite the way you expect having a little bit of capital to ensure that you can keep your covenants on side and give you that run rate to get your business plan

39:50back on track hugely valuable similarly having excess capital for growth perhaps when others don't has probably been one of the biggest differentiating factors for brookfield over cycles and over decades that comes when sort of the market uh we'll say crashes or there's a panic or capital gets really tight and then you have capital you're available to deploy it absolutely and we feel that one of the truly enduring competitive advantages of brookfield and something we spend a lot of time focusing on

40:23is always ensuring that we have tremendous access to capital because again when times are great and everyone has access to capital that that doesn't seem as important but having access to capital when others are not all market participants do that is incredibly valuable and has proven to be valuable to us across asset classes geographies cycles you know people talk a lot about product market fit sales tactics or pricing strategy the truth is success in selling often comes down to something much simpler

40:53the system behind the sale that's why i use and love shop pay because nobody does it's selling better than shopify they've built the number one checkout on the planet and with shop pay businesses see up to 50 percent higher conversions that's not a rounding error that's a game changer attention is scarce shopify helps you capture it and convert it if you're building a serious business your commerce platform needs to meet your customers wherever they are on your site in store in their feed or right inside their inbox the less they think the more they buy

41:27businesses that sell more sell on shopify if you're serious about selling the tech behind the scenes matters as much as the product upgrade your business and get the same checkout that i use sign up for your one dollar per month trial period at shopify.com knowledge project all lowercase go to shopify.com knowledge project upgrade your selling today shopify.com knowledge project how do you maintain that without having lived through it and i say this you know there's the 2000 sort of uh dot

42:00com crash um then there's the housing sort of crisis 2008 but you haven't been deploying capital during those periods and it's very rare that people have that perspective having not lived through it it's almost like you have to live it to get the i don't know talk to me about your thoughts a hundred percent there's two things one um this is where i think culture within an organization is so valuable we we really instill these principles day in day out across our business to you know the the young

42:35man or woman who's just come out of school who who doesn't have any investing experience this is what we do across market cycles this is our approach this is why we do it you you haven't experienced it yet but here is why it is valuable and here are examples of when it was very valuable to us and why we do it across the cycle even if it doesn't seem super important today the the other thing which just goes to a um an incredible dynamic within brookfield is we're constantly as an organization mixing what i would

43:10say young energetic i always use the term individuals who who can run super fast and jump super high but mixing them with experienced people who have lived through those cycles who have made investments you know who have significant investment lessons learned that they can share a big part of our culture is mixing that kind of experienced more senior perspective with young energetic fast-moving capability sort of what you had when you came in almost in that way yes we were talking before we

43:45started recording about dispersion of talent and how in some industries it makes a big difference where does talent matter the most at brookfield and where would where where does it matter the least within our asset management business our our most important assets go up and down an elevator every day you know we we are a a people business and therefore uh talent is hugely important one thing we believe is is um talent doesn't fit a perfect stereotype we need lots of talent in

44:19different capabilities in different places across our business and it would be unrealistic and unpragmatic to expect all the incredible talents we need to be rolled up in a single individual man or woman you know we can have some people who are incredible judges of risk and return and incredible analyzers of businesses we can have other people who are very good marketers who can explain what we're doing in a way to an investor

44:50who isn't living um day by day 20 hours a day in deals uh every day of their life um we need people who are very good leaders and and team builders and builders of platforms what differentiates us over the long term is some mixture of the talent we have and therefore we spend a lot of time focused on developing it and retaining it but then also creating a culture that can extract the best out of the the talent within

45:22the suite of people that that work for brookfield go deeper on the extracting the talent out of the people who work there because i often think about you know we were talking about sports before like i think about the nfl right and the nfl is a great example of like we have this incredibly talented person and then we put them in this environment that we're trying to match like it's highly structured it's highly organized and it's all geared towards that person performing on sunday yeah it's funny i i think i love sports and and i feel like football is an incredible example because one of the things i love about

45:55i live in london so american football uh is you've got people that all play different positions yeah you've got offensive linemen who don't worry about catching the ball they don't worry about running the ball but their job is hugely important uh then you've got wide receivers who don't worry about throwing the ball but want to be best in the world at running routes and catching it brookfield's no different uh we want people who we want to to your term extracting the best value or the best talent out of our people we want to find the things that we need to do as an organization raise capital invest

46:31capital manage business product development work with our teams build platforms we want to find the things that our people are the best at and allow them to really focus on those things and you know if you've got a wide receiver who's great at catching the ball you you can support them with people who are good at other functions and then there are a handful of people who who need to be able to sit above it all and oversee everything whether that's your your coach your football analogy your coach your quarterback

47:07your ownership um and and that's your executive team i'm curious how you go about identifying talent that must be like such a hard thing because i think in finance maybe i'll add some context to this and i want to spend a few beats on it there's people who talk like they know what they're doing and then there's people who know what they're doing it's not obvious the two and the other thing that's stuck out to me is you mentioned that it always doesn't fit in a box so there's no central casting about what to look for one of the things i love about brookfield i think a lot of people who who work at

47:40brookfield love about our approach is it is a a complete meritocracy we really don't care what your background is where you were born how you were raised who you pray to who you love uh it's really about what what value can you add to the firm and again that value can come in lots of different ways but there is no stereotype that we are looking for and it really all just boils down to uh how much

48:12value can you can you add to the firm as an organization one thing we do and perhaps different than other organizations is we do identify young talent very early um we like to i try our best to identify young talent very early and give them perhaps more responsibility and accountability than they would sometimes get in different environments and when it works it works incredibly well because

48:44you get these fantastic men or women in their early 30s who've been in the workforce for 10 years but have the equivalent of of 20 or 25 years worth of deal reps or people management or product marketing that that they would have had somewhere else and those are incredibly valuable individuals to our organization we obviously need to make sure we're um very proficient in in identifying that talent

49:15and we also always need to check and make sure we are coaching that talent up over time uh it's not a straight up into the right line for everyone what do you look for personally that's like non-obvious and i'll give you an example i was listening to an interview the other day when i was doing research for this actually and the guy uh said i look for obsessive psychopaths and it stood out to me it was memorable uh what are the non-obvious things that you look for it's funny i'm gonna give

49:47you the same answer but sometimes we we get it to a different question which was what what is the um what are the attributes of brookfield's culture or the people that do the best at brookfield the line i sometimes use is we like people who who who are almost kind of nerdy and i don't mean they're they're nerdy in that they aren't enjoyable to hang out with or can't carry a conversation but they're intellectually curious in that they like to look at a hard problem that other people have struggled

50:18to solve and they're willing to kind of roll up their sleeves and put in the hard work to to try and solve it to generate an outsized positive return or an outsized positive outcome for for the business we like those people who are intellectually curious and and kind of the derivative of that is hard working and willing to tackle hard problems and put in the time and effort to solve things that others can't that would be one the the other one is this is always a people business we it is very

50:50it is impossible to get ahead in this business if if you can't work well with other people it doesn't matter how talented someone is they're not more talented than the entire team of people you can put around them and therefore having people that are exceptionally good at different uh aspects of the job but equally can work with others who where they can complement other individuals or be complimented by other individuals to get more out of the broader team those are the people that that

51:21succeed the most what does that look like inside when it goes wrong but the ability to work with other people well rather than say it as a negative i'll say it as a positive one of the things i've always said about bruce is it always seems like he cares more about the success of others than he does about himself he's always more concerned about ensuring that other people get the credit or other people are are positioned to to continuously develop what's interesting is you see that in a leader who built

51:52an amazing organization you also see that in very junior people those that just want to contribute to a good team outcome and aren't really worried about who gets the credit i'm thinking back to the previous question you know sometimes one of the things one of the ways i describe culture at brookfield is we like those individuals who maybe they do a great deal or or they complete an initiative that was very successful um the non-brookfield thing to do would be you know go on a three-week victory lap

52:26telling everyone what you just accomplished the brookfield thing to do would be to come back the next day and say okay what are we working on now and i i do think you see that in very young people as a really redeeming and enduring call quality and when people don't have that um i would generally say they they they don't ascend or or they don't last within the business as much as the ones that do does it need to be perfectly proportional no i don't think so are you guys using ai internally absolutely how are you using it so so it's interesting i always think there's three ways

53:02to play the ai theme if you will one is to invest in the models you know you invest in chat gbt or anthropic and um we don't do that to be clear there are some people doing it and being wildly successful it's just not our area of expertise the second way is to build the infrastructure that supports the growth and increased utilization of ai and and that at a simple level is is the the data centers and the

53:35power that supports them and that is the largest and fastest growing investment theme at brookfield and it really brings together our digital infrastructure expertise our power expertise our real estate expertise we we feel we are market leading in that regard the third area is using ai within our business and we are doing this very very actively and i i think it's a fascinating topic people say how are you rolling out ai in our business what's interesting is we own 500 companies around the world we have

54:07encouraged all of them to use ai within their business trial and error different ai applications that you think will enhance the efficiency productivity growth of your portfolio company the only thing we ask is you share the results of that process so if you find a a solution that is very additive it doesn't matter if that's in a infrastructure business in australia if they find a great ai application that is

54:39very additive to our business we share it across we've created a structure whereby that information can be shared across the entire company so we can use it elsewhere similarly if that company tried that application and it didn't work share that information such that 499 other companies don't don't try and have it fail it's interesting we're really seeing we're very early days but the the impact is is amazing and and there's two that would jump out one is there's some places where ai is having a very discreet and very

55:17meaningful positive uh transformative near-term impact um our private equity businesses really focuses on industrial companies and critical services we're using ai to help with pricing models we're using ai to re-evaluate how some of our shop floors and factory factories are configured questioning processes that have existed for 20 years and some of the the efficiency and productivity improvements that were that are coming out of those exercises is amazing that would be point one there are two places

55:53across across i would say almost a trillion dollars of assets where ai is having a huge benefit and maybe it's not as exciting but um it is very intuitive one is preventative maintenance on a trillion dollars of real assets around the world and the other is health and safety for for for the 300 000 operating professionals we have in those 500 uh portfolio companies the ability for for a computer

56:24to look at a piece of machinery that only gets serviced every three or five years but can just look at an infinite number of data points and use pattern recognition to say something doesn't look right i know that piece of machinery is not supposed to be serviced for two more years but somebody should go look at it sure enough we send someone out to go look at it and a bolt is loose or something is leaking and and we we can preserve a lot of value um similarly just letting a computer that can run a million

56:55simulations instantaneously help people address self health and safety concerns in different environments around the world those are the factory floor one is much more discreet those two preventative maintenance and health and safety working in the vast majority of our businesses what does it look like in health and safety in the same way that you sort of gave an example with what it looks like for preventative maintenance like how does it look some of this is actually using the the technology some of this is a forcing function if you will um in some of our infrastructure businesses where

57:31people are constantly building different assets in multiple places what we we have a program where when a worker shows up on site they have to use the camera on their phone to scan the site and the the the program will say here are 10 health and safety risks that we've identified now candidly experienced workers probably would have identified those but it's a great forcing function that one they have to do it two they're reminded of it three now they're thinking about those things it's health and

58:07safety is incredibly important in the businesses that that that we own and and this is a great way of using one of the greatest technologies in the world to to drive one of our most important initiatives is there any other examples that come to mind where you're like oh that's so cool and it's it's giving you a competitive advantage or one of the things that we're seeing as we use ai in our business is it feels like sometimes there is this this fear oh ai is going to take everyone's jobs um that's not what we're seeing

58:40as much in our business um and and that's a that's a 30 000 foot statement uh ai will cause some structural turnover in in in certain occupations but um really what we're seeing is it causing the same man or woman that you employed yesterday uh they're getting two or three hours of their day back to focus on higher value parts of their job and therefore the same person who you liked and were

59:11supportive of all of a sudden they're just more productive and it's kind of taking the top off in terms of what we can expect out of our people and what we can expect out of our teams going forward and it does feel like we are still in the very early innings of this if you asked us more large scale what where where do we think ai has a bigger impact we think the role that robotics can play in so many

59:43production functions and industrial functions around the world now that that robotics can be reinforced by computers that can think and run a million simulations in real time like everything uh what's what's the term uh it it will happen slower than people expect but have a bigger impact than people expect we we very much see that dynamic playing out in the use of robotics that's sort of like the the pattern of bubbles right is that there's this uh hype in the short

1:00:14term it always uh disappoints people in the long term it always exceeds the hype but it's can you survive long enough to get the benefit out of it because people make fortunes but people go broke it's funny exactly that dynamic and again we like to think we are one of if not the the leading investor in ai infrastructure around the world which huge sums of capital are being invested in on a global scale and and um we often get the question will there be overbuilt absolutely unequivocally yes there's

1:00:52overbuild in almost every product in every asset class everywhere in the world in every economic cycle but the really important thing is is that overbuild is not random in our business we only build against long-term contracts with with high credit quality counterparties uh we don't build on spec and and two we're very thoughtful about where we built we want to focus in tier one markets where there's multiple end users and multiple sources of demand such even at the end of that 20-year contract

1:01:27life there will be multiple options to to use that facility or to re-contract that facility um to your point about the these cycles almost have a recurring um trajectory to them uh we we see that in ours and and we think there's incredible things that we can do uh while participating in this growth to avoid the the boom and bust that that uh sometimes happens in in other asset classes i'm

1:01:58curious when the last time brookfield was the underdog the way we i would say as an organization uh approach the job or approach the opportunity is is pretty we try to be balanced every time you know come in uh neutral and we're very fortunate that we are at the forefront of some very very large investment trends and investment themes and some very very large

1:02:29asset classes to invest in such that while we may invest at very significant size there's always the opportunity to do more and therefore we're always looking to can we invest more at attractive risk adjusted returns um we we don't spend a lot of time thinking about what have we done in the past it's it's a very forward or looking organization from that perspective i remember you know that michael jordan in the last dance he said something that stuck out to me about the whole underdog thing he's

1:03:00the best in the world at basketball at the time uh and he would like make up stuff just to make himself the underdog and i always thought that was interesting yeah i i don't know if it's that extreme but uh you know it it is a very enjoyable thing that we're fortunate to wake up in in a business and investing in themes where the question is not can you grow it's how much can you grow and can you do the right growth and therefore it doesn't matter if we've done two three or ten deals

1:03:33already uh if the 11th deal is very attractive we want to do that one as well i'm curious how you think about your your ambition over the next 20 or 30 years the first thing that that comes to mind when when i hear that is it is amazing what what bruce and the senior leadership team has built over the last 25 years it's truly an incredible platform that's um very differentiated and i would say somewhat

1:04:05under appreciated in terms of its scale and its ability to produce very attractive returns but on a scale and a consistency that that very few if any can match that is truly the incredible value proposition of brookfield is is not just the returns we generate but how consistently we do it and and at what scale of capital deployment and the amazing thing about the platform we have is it's got such an

1:04:36incredible organic uh growth trajectory that is very visible and goes out five ten years into the future where we have complete control over our success and that growth what gets i think myself and and others who are coming up in the business very excited is can we continuously keep pivoting that trajectory above that incredible status quo that's that's been passed down if you look at i think the plan that you guys

1:05:09made public was two trillion by 2030 yeah is that accurate yeah so if we were to go to 2050 like hypothetically what what is that ambition is that that we're in the right places is that we're managing a significant percentage of the world's capital what is the maybe i'd come at it from from two perspectives from an investment perspective um what has helped build the business into what it is today is really two things that are going to look different in the future but are very repeatable in the in

1:05:46the nature of what we need to do one is that point of we're very consistent in the asset classes and the types of deals we focus on but we spend an incredible amount of time thinking about where is the market going uh you know what are the critical goods and services and assets of that are going to make up the backbone of the global economy five years from now ten years from now we absolutely need to keep doing this and we need to continue to be as good about that in the future as we have in the past and if we do that the

1:06:21breadth of what we invest in is going to keep expanding there's going to be some things that that we think are going to be big opportunities today uh that will become big opportunities in five or ten years there's going to be some things ten fifteen twenty years from now that nobody is even thinking about today that as they approach we want to identify them capitalize on them and then invest in them when they become large and attractive opportunities so so that would be point one and and the other thing

1:06:51that i think is really going to drive growth over let's say a 20 or 25 year period is alternatives are in a really exciting point today they they've grown tremendously over the last two decades essentially on the back of increased and growing institutional allocations to the space and that's going to continue the the institutional allocations to alternatives are going to double from where they are today over the next ten years so that would drive tremendous growth in our business if we only focused on

1:07:25institutions but there is this new very large but long-term new growth avenue for our business which we refer to as the individual investor that's your retail and high net worth investor that's your annuity and insurance policy holder that's your 401k and retiree market here in the united states that market is actually bigger the individual market is actually bigger than the institutional market today and it has almost zero penetrations from alternatives and therefore the ability to take that disciplined

1:08:04investing approach that we we've delivered to institutional investors for the last 20 years keep doing that over the next 20 or 25 years but also find ways to deliver that same approach that gives you those strong returns at a consistency and a scale deliver it to the individual market if we do that we should be able to replicate if not exceed the the growth profile of of the last two decades one thing that strikes me as super interesting around retail

1:08:34is a lot of retail investment has you know if we take a s&p 500 etf for example a lot of growth in that is you're capturing companies coming in and you're riding that wave up you might not be able to identify them in advance but you get all that growth and now for possibly the first time in history we have these incredibly large companies that grow outside of retail access yeah and i'm talking about like spacex or open ai and you've created or stripe would be another example you've created 100 billion a trillion dollars of

1:09:09we'll say value we'll use that term a little loosely but you've created that and now retail hasn't captured any of that when traditionally they would have been in the s&p 500 and rode that up well there's absolutely that dynamic but there's another one as well which is in today's public market where index inclusion is such a big driver of demand we're increasingly seeing uh larger companies do really really well in the public markets but companies that for whatever reason can't get index inclusion

1:09:43um struggle more in public markets and as a result your s&p 500 is increasingly a large or super large cap index where so many businesses around the world in fact the majority of businesses around the world are i would say medium to large size but it's actually increasingly difficult to get exposure to those types of businesses in the public markets and therefore what what we think alternatives can

1:10:14do as part of a appropriately mixed and diversified portfolio is just ensuring that those individual investors can get exposure to the breadth of the market that they want to and and different asset classes or sizes of companies that that maybe it is tough to do if you're you're simply looking at public equities take me behind the scenes of oak tree what happened how did that acquisition come about how was the internal process around it i want to hear the story so within brookfield um there there are

1:10:48lots of individuals who who are very good at generating ideas and what's great is we have 1300 investment professionals to to filter through those ideas and um i will tell you quite early in my career i i was very fortunate you talked we spoke earlier about having very good fortune uh i was asked to look at another alternative asset manager this is 13 years ago and and this manager had run into some stumbles and some hard

1:11:20times and and was in need of some capital and what's funny is i'll tell you this was probably my first or second year at brookfield i really struggled to understand the right way to underwrite and figure out this business and then one day the light bulb went on i said well if i can understand how brookfield works and i can probably understand how this business works and it was very fortunate early in my career to have the opportunity to really understand how was brookfield growing where was

1:11:50it making money where was it um seeing the greatest growth trajectory and in the greatest value creation um because of that initial process we've just began to track uh the other large alternative asset managers and how we were doing relative to them how we were trading how we were growing etc and one of those other managers at the time was was oak tree and i remember in beginning of 2018 we felt oak tree was

1:12:22this amazing business that wasn't fully appreciated uh in the public markets because it was very counter cyclical um it performed really well when when markets went down but it's it's growth and its profits you know maybe began to plateau off when markets got really strong given the its leadership and opportunistic credit especially back then opportunistic credit was was a a very large component of their business it's broadened out a lot since then and i remember at the beginning

1:12:56of 2018 going to bruce and and saying this company looks very undervalued and he gave me one very simple piece of feedback which was you're right it looks undervalued but what would be amazing is could we do something strategic with them they're incredible market leading and credit which is an area that that we didn't have a lot of exposure at the time is there something strategic we could do with that organization and we took that away into our little lab and came up with this idea of essentially buying

1:13:27out the public and partnering with the founders and senior management of oak tree and um we presented that that idea to them in the latter part of of 2018 and did a transaction in the early part of 2019 it's so interesting because you know public markets have basically with the exception of the covid dip for a little bit there uh they've gone up and up since then so the counter cyclical yeah they the you know they haven't really had a down market in order to give that benefit that you sort of are betting on how

1:14:03do you think about it well this is where that organization is is exceptional in in really two ways one uh they they've broadened their uh product offering the same way we've broadened at brookfield uh oak tree's done an incredible broad job broadening their business they have incredible performing uh credit strategies as well as they've found some some niche areas of the market certain asset classes certain securities where where they are unique and can consistently outperform that's point one but

1:14:36two within their opportunistic credit strategies they do an exceptional job of constantly being ready when those market opportunities do exist so i'll give the example we made the act the the initial investment the initial partnership in 2019 they were incredibly active during covet uh the business took an incredible step change that wasn't a particularly long period of market

1:15:06downturn but it was that you know brief almost cyclical opportunity for them to drive a step change of growth in their business and they did it very very well i want to come back to working hard again for a second there's something i meant to ask as a follow-up there which is you give a hundred percent a hundred percent of the time then you had kids talk to me about that and how you harmonize between work and life there's two things that that come to mind when you hear that question one is there's two things

1:15:38that that matter to me in life uh more than anything else and they're miles ahead of third place uh one is my family and and two is brookfield and that's where i spend 150 of my capacity now let's be clear uh i have great friends and and we get out and have a good time but really my priorities 99 times out of 100 are my family and and brookfield one thing that that being very honest and transparent i we have a young

1:16:15family uh we're fortunate to have a very great and amazing young family i remember when we were thinking of starting our family and i don't know if i'm crazy to say this but you you question how am i gonna have time and will i still have the ability to care as much about the job which was very important to me after we start our family and there there's two conclusions uh and i'm not sure if i'm not sure if everyone goes through this learning process one is there is no limit in the capacity

1:16:51about how much you can care about things i care more about my family than i could have ever imagined i don't think i care any different about brookfield than i did uh before and after uh we started our family and then secondly you do find ways to become more efficient obviously time with the family is is incredibly important to me other stuff did fall off the plate but what's funny is you don't miss it you know you you find stuff that you you were spending time on but when it's gone you don't miss it

1:17:23because it's been replaced by something you value so much more it's a forcing function for prioritization i think the best forcing function in the world because i felt like there was no no space i felt like there was no time and now uh we have this amazing young family that i'll go to incredible lengths to make time for and it doesn't feel like i had to give up anything on the work front but some things fell away that that i don't even really couldn't tell you what they were usaa knows

1:17:54dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance with usaa you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10 tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com bundle restrictions apply are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard but not the pipeline that's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions my boss asked for results so i opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric i had impressions cut

1:18:25the bull spend see revenue not just reach linkedin delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks advertise on linkedin spend 250 on your first campaign and get a 250 credit go to linkedin.com slash campaign terms the conditions apply how do you allocate your time and i mean this specifically in the how do i bring outside information to my life how do i what do you read what is the stuff that you consume and then how do you allocate your time at work are there certain priorities that get more or less it's interesting i i read a lot uh at work um i'm a big believer if

1:19:02someone in the organization emails or sends a a deck to be discussed you read it before you start that conversation um that's it leads to a more informed conversation you can think more thoughtfully reading it to yourself than you can trying to to read and listen at the same time so i like to read almost everything that's been sent um and when at all possible i like to read it ahead of a a discussion

1:19:33i also read a lot of news um sometimes people say what's the last book you've read i'll tell you i don't have a lot of time for for reading pleasure books uh but i do read a lot of of content about our business or news about the the themes that we invest in what does that give you is it organized for you by somebody else is it like you're scanning the newspapers every day like and what do you get out of that yeah it's an interesting question one one thing i do quite enjoy is um getting almost a

1:20:06daily update of um in different services do it for different asset classes you know these are the 15 relevant headlines in infrastructure and you read the headlines and maybe you click on one of them to get more information but just reading the 15 headlines gives you a little bit of a sense or a pulse of the direction of travel but if there's one that's more relevant or more interesting you do a little bit of a deeper dive on that um i certainly don't sit there and you know read publication xyz

1:20:38cover to cover every morning different people have a different approach i don't do that i understand what deal's been the most fun for you to work on there's been so many uh i i and i don't i think you're supposed to love all your children equally uh i don't i think it would be very tough to pick one some that stick out one of the very first deals i i was fortunate to to be part of the deal team we made a very small cold storage business uh investment in canada early in my time in in private

1:21:12equity it was a small business it was a great business it it was underperforming when we bought it it turned out to be a fantastic investment this is not diminishing the incredible work that was put in it was a somewhat simple business and what the value drivers were so it was a nice one to to really learn on it was nice because it was a good one to learn on and it was successful so in hindsight it you know i reflect very positively on it some of our first investments right after moving to europe when we were trying to build out that that european power business um those i remember being really fun

1:21:47because we were somewhat of a a young almost scrappy team trying to build something from scratch but in hindsight we we did a few very good deals and that were quite foundational to what we were fortunate to build over the next six eight ten years and then you know some of the big deals westing house uh oak tree um those have been fun because of their scarcity their size the the broader impact they've had on the organization so um it'd be tough to pick one when are you happiest at work great question i would

1:22:24not say i am happiness happiest when everything is going perfectly it's almost one of those things where you you you want to have enough on the go that you feel a little bit stretched um one of the things i really like about this job and sorry if this is a tangent is i used to play a lot of sports and one of the things i love about uh this job is the competitiveness of it and therefore i like that exercise of trying to figure out the next thing or improving something that is imperfect or

1:23:00um if if target is x try and do x plus one i'm not happiest when everything is perfect and under control it feels good when we feel like we're we're within our culture of of discipline and methodical but we feel like we're trying to uh continuously grow and continuously improve and and we're we're really pushing to do that a lot of people i interview say they're best in a crisis and i'm

1:23:32curious as to why you think that would be true why are some people better in a crisis than others and can you predict who in your organization is going to be good in a crisis or does a crisis have to happen and what would be the indicators of that i i do think you could predict it there is an incredible positive attribute in uh being able to digest information uh somewhat unemotionally and make the best decision at that point in time um earlier in the conversation i i mentioned that the organization

1:24:06is is very balanced very measured and very forward looking um i always like when when things move and uh generally when you're making this reference it's when markets move negatively there's some of the most incredible conversations we have as a business and one thing that that always shocked me is we don't spend the first 30 minutes of a 60-minute conversation discussing the negative impact on on on what we have we spend all 60 minutes saying one how can we mitigate protect um ensure that the

1:24:44value of what we have is preserved uh but then how can we look to to capitalize or capture on the opportunities that that this crisis or or this uh downturn may have created this has been an amazing conversation i want to thank you for your time today well thank you for having us um