John Kemper | S2E2

Yeah, well guys, it is great to be with you, so thank you for the invitation to be here. I was looking at some of your previous guests and I'm kind of blown away with the caliber of people that you got in here, so how I made this list is sort of a mystery to me, but it's really terrific to be with you and I salute you guys for undertaking this project. It's really great. Having listened to some of the stuff that you've done, I'm really looking forward to the discussion today. So, like the first question: what did I get out of Burroughs and how did Burroughs set me on the course for what I'm doing today? I think it's a really good question. There are so many elements to the Burroughs experience. I think of all the things that you did in a team setting, working with people toward a common goal. I think about the importance and the clarity of the culture and the community around Burroughs, which taught me so much. But if I try to succinctly answer your question, the thing that I would say is that Burroughs really put me, like so many kids, on the path to being a lifelong learner. People talk about this idea of where did you get your education, like it's a distinct chapter in your life or maybe a couple chapters, like where did you go to elementary school, high school, college, grad degree. But to me, those are sort of artificial markers. The story for me is about being a lifelong learner, and that's what I got out of Burroughs: first, this ability to learn how to learn, and also to love learning. If you can ignite that flame early on, I think it's a really powerful combination. That's what I got out of it, because it makes you a curious person, it makes you want to learn throughout life. If you can do that, I think you're going to have a very happy life, a satisfying life, and hopefully can succeed and have some success in that life. So to me, that's what I'm so grateful for from my Burroughs experience and something that I carry with me to this day.

Yeah, I mean, I remember some amazing educators in this building, and it's really special to be in a classroom like this, Dr. Smith's classroom. I think I graduated right before he showed up, but of course he's a legendary teacher. Going back to the time when I was here, Mark Nichols, who I think you guys probably know, he's still around. I had him as a year one teacher, one of my incredible teachers. I see the bookcase here made by Dan Barton and Company. Some of these faces that have been around are familiar to you, and some really special names to me: Mrs. Snodgrass, Mr. Sortland, Mr. Taylor. Just incredible educators who, like I said before, sparked that love of learning for me. But what was really special to me about Burroughs is not just the learning in the classroom, it's the culture that sets up, and the idea that your friends are going to challenge you. Some of the ideas that you talked about in the classroom, you're going to take out of the classroom and explore further. To me, that is such a healthy thing: to want to explore knowledge or ideas not just because you have to or because your transcript says that you should, but because you have friends in a community who want to push each other in that way. That was really valuable to me. And the clubs? Gosh, one thing I love about Burroughs is that if you had an interest, you could start just about anything you wanted. We didn't podcast back in the day, but that would have been a fun thing to do. We were really into physics, so we started the Physics Appreciation Club one year and had a lot of fun with that. So anyway, tons of stuff like that, but it again gets back to learning in the classroom and outside of the classroom for me.

Yeah, I think you're right. I think routine is important in that it creates the right habits and provides scaffolding for the work that needs to get done in a business or a day or whatever. That said, I also really value variety, and it's the nature of the job too that in some ways no two days are the exact same. But I could tell you what a typical day looks like for me. One thing I've found out over the years is that lack of sleep is my kryptonite, so I really try to get a good night's sleep. That's probably waking up at 6:15 or something, checking some emails, getting my kids out the door, which is no small feat. We got three kids at three different schools right now, so that's a lot of fun in the morning. Then I probably go in, and multiple days a week I'll have a breakfast with a customer, get to visit with them, make sure we're doing a good job for the customer, and hear a little bit about how their business is going. Depending on the day, I'll have a huddle meeting with our management team, which is something we started in recent years, a bit of a COVID thing. It's just a 30-minute kind of readout around the room of what everybody's up to, any priorities that we should know about, just to make sure we're on the same page. Very quick meeting. I might have a loan committee meeting, where we talk about all the loans we're going to make in the bank and make sure that the credit is okay, we're not taking any undue risk, and that we're structuring loans appropriately. That'd probably take me up to lunch. On a perfect day, maybe I'd be able to sneak in a workout and catch up on some emails, or maybe I'm visiting with a customer over lunch as well. Afternoons are a little more scripted, so it might be one-on-one meetings or standing meetings within the company based on all the things that a bank does. Then on a really great day, I get to go out and actually visit a customer, maybe go to their place of business, see the plant, hear about the drivers of the business. That to me is really fun. You get to learn all the different ways that people run businesses or nonprofits in this community and all the markets that we serve. So I really learn something from that. If all that goes well, I get to be home about dinner time. Maybe I go catch a sports game because I got kids who are all over the place, and that's when my second career as a professional chauffeur kicks in and I just drive kids around to various things. Yeah, that's a day for me.

Yeah, so when you're talking about Personnel decisions or other things that are unpopular, or decisions where egos could get hurt, or switching roles around, changing it up. Well, I think what you guys are describing at the heart of it is that you have a culture that can make those decisions and then communicate those decisions and ultimately get an organization to align behind hard decisions, even if not everybody got their way. That's a tough thing because if you're running an organization just to please everybody, you're probably not going to get the results that you want. You're either going to be kind of paralyzed because you can't make decisions, or you're going to make the wrong decisions because you're prioritizing the wrong thing, which is just how people are going to feel on the team versus what results are you really going to get. So I think it's important to have the right kind of culture that as the North Star is focused on what we actually want to get out of this. We want to get results. That's why we're on this team. People sometimes talk about businesses as being a family, and I kind of resist that a little bit. I think of business as being a team because people have different roles on that team, and you got to be honest about whether or not people belong on that team, or if they're in the right position, or maybe they should be somewhere else. If you can create the culture that prioritizes results, then I think you're in a position to communicate effectively and to illuminate the why behind the decision. People may not agree with it, but at least they know you're coming from a place that is trying to get to this kind of North Star for the organization. It's about the results that are behind that thing, and hopefully they'll see why it's fair even if they disagree with the decision or if they're inconvenienced by the decision. I think that goes to the importance of culture and relationships behind the scene. We talk about this thing at the bank called a results cone. If you think about it, you guys are talking about all the hard work that goes on in the podcast and then all you see is the final result. That's the essence of this framework. So you think about results, most of the time that's all people see, but underneath it one layer, there are certain behaviors that lead to the result. What leads to the behaviors? It's the way that people think about things. So think about thinking leading to behaviors leading to results. If you can really shine a light on the thinking part and communicate to people, 'Here's why I'm behaving the way that I am, this is the goal that I'm trying to get to,' if people can understand that, they're going to be much more likely to understand and accept your behaviors, and they're going to understand why it's leading to the results that you're getting. So the more we can have personal relationships and understand the way that people think, I think the more high-performing your team is going to be and ultimately the better results you're going to get. Sorry, that was a long-winded way of saying it, but I think it comes down to the culture of the organization and the relationships that you have with people so that you can trust they're making decisions because they're trying to do the right thing for the organization, not because they're trying to get you or because they have an agenda.

The other thing I just say about this, because this is an important thing. You talked about having a caring culture, you're kind. I take that to mean, well, what if you have to make a hard decision about somebody who's in the wrong role? They don't belong on the team or they're playing the wrong position on the team. I think part of what your culture has to accept too is that you're not doing anyone a favor by leaving them in a role where they can't be successful. You either got to give them the coaching and the tools to be successful, or you got to find them a new home in the organization or somewhere else. In the long term, that's going to make them happier and it's going to make them more productive, and it's the right thing to do for the organization. So having this culture that says, 'No, we got to find the right fit for you regardless of where that is,' I think is a very important thing.

Well, the team makes these hard decisions all the time. Part of that, I would not be doing a very good job if I had to make all those hard decisions. It would mean I'm not getting any leverage, I'm not getting out of the organization. But at different levels in the organization, these things are happening all the time. It just depends on what the decision is or who the person is. I do feel like sometimes, and maybe this is just me feeling sorry for myself, but the really hard decisions tend to flow up the org chart because no one else is willing to put their stamp on it, or it's too muddy, it affects too many people, or it's not clear who has the decision rights. So a lot of those really hard decisions kind of flow up the chart, and by the time they get to me, it's like, 'Wow, that's a really tough one. I could see why you guys couldn't figure this one out.' Then you've got to gather perspective and ultimately make the best decision that you can.

Sometimes, yeah. But then you got to say, well, that's the job. That's what you signed up for. You got to give yourself some grace too. You're never going to make 100% right decisions in any job, so it's all about figuring out if 80% information is good enough to make a decision at this time, because sometimes the price of just not deciding is more expensive than making the wrong decision. If that makes sense. So you got to figure out, if I'm running a nuclear power plant, I better have pretty good information when I make my decision. If it's a decision of not that much consequence, okay, get the best information you can and make the decision to go. You can correct it.

Well, you guys are making decisions all the time. You're not running big organizations, but you are running a venerable podcast. Just think about the executive function in your day-to-day world. You're making trade-off decisions on time all the time. You're really busy, so how do you want to fill your day? I'm sure you get 100% on every test and homework assignment, but I bet intrinsically you guys are making trade-offs all the time to say, 'Is my effort better dedicated here or here on this given day? What's going to get the best effect?'

So I can honestly say the answer is a very firm no on that, which is sometimes interesting to people just because the nature of our bank. It's a public company, but we've been family-led for a long time. My dad had my job before I did, some time ago. When I was growing up, he was doing this job, but I would say it was really not something we talked about. We wouldn't sit around the dinner table talking about interest rates or whatever was going on in the banking industry at that time. So for sure, it was kind of in my consciousness, I knew that's what he did, but we were really encouraged to just do what was interesting to us and figure out what lit our fires, what we were passionate about, and then spend time on those things. As a kid, it was very liberating. That's what I spent my time doing, figuring out what was interesting to me and then learning more and more about it. So I didn't really, even when I graduated from school and started to have a career, it was much more opportunistic and along the same lines. What was kind of interesting to me at the time? I worked for a startup company when I graduated college. I was like the fifth person at a startup, so we had an idea and raised a bunch of money and pursued that idea. Then after that, I was a management consultant, which is a great thing to do if you don't really know what you want to do because you get a lot of at-bats seeing different industries and working on different kinds of problems or challenges. I learned a ton doing that. I kind of think it's almost like you do the general course in business before you figure out what you wanted to specialize in. Then banking came along much later in the picture for me.

No, I was a history major and a political science major. I couldn't have told you what a balance sheet was until I was probably 23 or something. Oh wow. I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing it that way, but there were elements of it that were really good. That's just what I was interested in. The liberal arts education, I will defend all day long, about really making you a good communicator and helping you learn how to think critically. I really think business, in its essence, isn't that hard. It's not like you need to have a ton of formal training to do well at business. But you need to learn how to think critically, and a lot of things can help you do that. You could be an engineer, you could be a liberal arts major, you could be a business major. There's nothing wrong with that. I wish that I had, we can talk more about it if you want, there would have been some things in my formal education I would have done a little differently.

So I was a management consultant, and I was doing a little bit of financial services work, sort of niche problems in banking and insurance and insurance distribution, those kinds of things. Then I was also doing a lot in, and this was just serendipitous, I was doing a lot in the travel and logistics space, particularly in airlines. I was literally doing airport efficiency projects to try to turn planes more quickly and figure out how to get bags off planes and load bags and that sort of stuff. So I was doing all sorts of interesting stuff in consulting. Then this opportunity came along actually with Commerce, where they were doing a strategy project at the time. I thought, okay, well maybe that's something I could help out with and get a feel for the organization. It fit with what I had been doing in consulting. So that's how I got engaged. I was trying to figure out a growth strategy for the company in like 2007, and then there was the mortgage meltdown and the great financial crisis in 2008, 2009, so stuff changed pretty quickly in the banking industry. But that's how I got involved.

I think it's really well said. To get to that point, the more that you can sort of, as you're moving along, keep your options open, and also know that if you make a decision, I think it's always good to have a hypothesis about where you're headed. People ask you what you want to be when you grow up, you probably have an answer, but reserve the right to change that along the way as you learn more. It's good to have a hypothesis but also be flexible. If that doesn't work out, it's not the end of the world.

Let me set the record straight here and clarify. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know what I'm going to add to the AI discussion. But a couple of thoughts. Playing back what you just said, the last few years have been really interesting for the economy in general and banks. The way it's affected banks has been kind of interesting to watch and a little bit unsettling sometimes. I don't know if you guys were paying attention last year, but a number of banks actually failed. That doesn't happen very often. It happens episodically, and there were a few bank failures that were actually enormous banks, among the biggest bank failures in American history. It all kind of feeds back into what happened with COVID and the government response. I don't want to make it overly complicated, but basically what happened was the government dumped a ton of money into the economy, like the stimulus checks. So stimulus, and then the Federal Reserve tried to do everything that they could to make sure that anyone who wanted to borrow money could borrow money. So they not only gave out money, they made interest rates really cheap. They were trying to stimulate the economy and make sure that we didn't fall into a recession because it was a very scary time with COVID and we thought maybe we're going to have another Great Depression or something like that. But what happens when you pump all that money into the economy and drive interest rates down so low is that a lot of banks ended up with deposits in banks, and banks went out and did something with those deposits. They made loans, in particular they made a lot of mortgage loans, long-dated loans. Then all of a sudden, what happens if you dump all that money into the economy? You get really high inflation because everyone has plenty of money to spend, and it drives up the prices of goods. The Federal Reserve's job is to say, 'Wait, we want price stability. It's really a bad idea if inflation is a runaway thing.' So the way that they did that was they jacked up interest rates really quickly and made it more expensive to borrow money. Now that's supposed to put downward pressure on prices. But banks are in the middle of that. What happened was a lot of these banks made long-dated fixed-rate loans, like mortgages, that were maybe only yielding 3% a couple years ago. Now banks have those on their balance sheets for 30 years. They're really long, you can't get rid of them. All of a sudden your funding costs go to 5.5%. So now I got to borrow to fund my loans, I have to pay 5.5%. If I'm a bank and I'm saddled with all these 3% loans, well that's a good way to lose money: borrow at 5 and lend at 3. So all of a sudden people woke up and said, 'Wait a minute, my bank is either losing money every year, or if I had to mark the value of those loans, they would have negative net worth, they would be worthless.' So everybody said, 'I'm going to take my money out of the bank.' That's what a run on the bank looks like, and that's what happened last year. So you had these big banks that failed, and you can draw that connection directly back to COVID and what the government did pumping money into the economy. So that's been an interesting thing. It just reminds you there's a lot of risk in the banking business. So that's part of your question. The other thing about AI, I think it's going to change everything. I couldn't tell you exactly how, but we're already seeing it in certain applications in our business. Maybe the way that you do scoring of risk, trying to figure out where to make loans and where there's risk, AI is already helping with that kind of stuff. It's helping with finding money launderers or other criminals in the banking system. It's helping with customer service, just like any business. If you guys think about a chatbot and who you're talking to, that's already showing up in customer service. I think longer term, it's going to really help with credit decisioning and all sorts of things. The one thing about our business is it's really regulated, so there are things that you can't just turn over to a model or ChatGPT or something. You still have to have human accountability as part of it. So I think there are maybe some limits in the short term, but man, it's going to change the world.

Quite a few.

Well, think about a bank now. It's very different than what it was a generation ago. It was just a lot of branches and a lot of people writing down stuff in ledgers. It was face to face, in person, a lot of paper. Now I mean you do 95% of what you want on this phone. So we have people building the mobile app, we have people building all the stuff in the background that's moving the money around and doing the accounting. All the services, it's much more digital now, and that all takes a lot of technology talent. But more and more too, you can buy that stuff. You don't need to develop it all in house.

Failing. Yeah, last year there were a handful. How did you manage that? I think the thing about a bank is they're inherently risky. You're in the business of managing risk and trying to do it in a way that you can make some money along the way, but you always got to be mindful of the stuff that happens once every 10 or 20 or 30 years, the stuff that can really wipe you out. The reason for that is that banks are kind of mountains of leverage. If we wanted to start a bank today, here's what we would do. One of us would put up a dollar of founding capital, and then we'd take deposits. But it's regulated, so we could take up to $9 against that $1 that we used to start the bank. That's called 9-to-1 leverage, or actually 10-to-1 leverage because you've got a balance sheet that has $10 but it's resting on $1 of equity capital. What that means is you can't screw up too badly. If you lose 10% of your balance sheet in one year, you're wiped out, no more equity. That's what banks are, they're these highly leveraged things. You think about what you do with those $9 of deposits and that $1 capital, you go and make $10 of loans. If one or two of those loans go completely bad, you're done. End of the story. You have no more capital left, you just wiped out your shareholders' equity. So you're kind of operating on a razor's edge if you're running a bank. It could be credit that sinks you, it could be interest rate volatility that sank banks like what happened last year, it could be fraud, it could be cyber. So there are a lot of risks in the banking business. I think the big thing is just to not take risks that you don't understand and always be on the lookout around the corner for what can go wrong. That's a big part of what you want as a customer. You want to make sure your bank's going to be around for you for a long time, so that staying power is a big part of what we try to achieve.

Well, I'm a big acolyte of a guy named Warren Buffett. You guys know who Warren Buffett is, right? He's the Oracle of Omaha. He's arguably the greatest capitalist of modern financial history. What he really is, he's an allocator of capital. He figures out what can use capital to the most productive end and then allocates capital over the years and has done very well at that. One thing that he says is the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. So when you asked your question, first thing is start early. The more you can put money aside earlier in your life, the more valuable it's going to be by the end. Even if that means foregoing spending early on and putting that money away, think about how it doubles and then doubles and then doubles again. How many times can it do that before you're ready to retire? So the earlier you start, the better. That's the first thing, to get that compounding started. The other thing is figuring out where to put it to work. I think you can learn a lot by running your own money, and you can do that in very cheap ways these days. It doesn't cost very much to trade. You can open small accounts. I wouldn't recommend stuff like Robinhood, which you guys know what that is. I'm using that right now. I lost like $400 so far. It's more of a casino. They gamify the whole thing. There are online communities that game it even more. It's like a casino. It reminds me of crypto in the same way. Part of the reason people like it is it's so volatile, but it's like a casino. You're just gambling. That's not really investing, that's speculating. It's like playing blackjack. It's not linked to anything. So I would think more about what you're buying as an investor. You're buying a piece of a company. You can buy their debt, you can invest in their profits, which is buying equity. There are some really easy classes you could go to. I think Fidelity you can open up a youth account there, and they've got some training stuff, and then you can put the money to work. I did that to get free $50. They'll even give you a little money to get it started. But I think you can learn a lot by actually running your own money. For the most part though, a really good strategy is just to buy an index fund, which means you own a little bit of a broad array of companies. You figure, listen, the market is pretty smart. The idea that I'm going to be a lot smarter than the market is far-fetched, so you're best off just owning a little bit of the market. But if you really want to learn how this stuff works, I mentioned Warren Buffett. Read a biography of his. There are a couple of good ones. I think one's called The Snowball or something like that. Even more, read his annual reports. There's a great compendium of those that a guy named Cunningham put together. To me, that's a first-rate investing and business education if you have the appetite to go through those things.

Well, don't listen to me. I guess you should have bought Bitcoin 10 years ago and you guys could retire right now. But people latch on to that and then use it to make dumb decisions with crypto. The fact that Bitcoin went up so much caused my brother to fully invest all his money into crypto. How's he doing? He lost all his money. God damn. So do you guys feel like, on that point, do you have friends who own crypto in some way, shape, or form? Yeah, Zach, he's on the team, he's behind the camera. Does all that. Okay, yeah. And how did you buy it? Where do you buy crypto? On Robinhood? You buy on Coinbase? It's taking whammy after whammy. I bought it like five months ago and it's been going up. Yeah, no, it's really. Robinhood stocks down like 10% after this. What do you mean? Two people listen to our podcast. The other great thing, if you guys want something that is a good read and also teaches you a lot about business, and I thought about it because of the crypto thing, there's a guy named Michael Lewis who's written tons of books. He's written stuff about sports, but some of his financial books, including Liar's Poker and other books like that, are great. They read like novels but they're really about the ideas in business and trading and finance. He's got a new one out that's about Sam Bankman-Fried and about the FTX meltdown, all the crypto stuff. It's a very good read.

I feel like I should own a little bit of it just so I am familiar with the idea. So I've been slowly, what's called dollar-cost averaging, buying in. At some point I aspire to own one Bitcoin, but I'm nibbling away.

It's pretty diversified. I think that's kind of back to what I was saying about owning index funds. That's mostly what I buy. I try to have broad exposure to the market and not take any outsized risk by betting on any given company too much. I may do some on the margin if I feel like I've got particular insight into a part of the economy or a certain business line, I might buy some individual stocks like that. But for the most part, I just want to own my fair share of a slice of the market.

Yeah, we're a public company. For reference, you can measure banks in a couple different ways. You can look at the size of their balance sheet, or if they're public, you can look at the value of the traded stock, the market cap. We'd be like the 40th biggest bank in the country based on balance sheet size, and we'd be about the 20th most valuable bank in the country based on market value.

Well, I think what that would say is relative to our balance sheet, we're highly valued. So we're only 40th biggest in terms of how big we are, but in terms of how valuable we are, we're 20th. So we've got a higher price-to-balance-sheet multiple.

I think there are a million of those things. It's like being a teammate with somebody and admiring the different things that they do well. It could come in a bunch of different forms or permutations. Let's talk about hiring somebody and then talk about how they distinguish themselves. What I look for if I'm interviewing somebody is first of all just a sense of curiosity. Does this person? I don't expect people to know everything in an interview. They're interviewing for a role that maybe they haven't had before. But what you want is somebody who can ask the right questions and is curious, has demonstrated curiosity about the things that they've done along the way. You want to see a track record of problem solving, an ability to disaggregate problems and figure out what a solution is and deal with ambiguity well. I think you want to find somebody with a track record of accomplishment and leadership. I want to underscore that part about leadership. A lot of people have a resume of all the great classes that they've taken and the accolades that they have, but I'm always trying to figure out, okay, but what do you uniquely contribute to that situation? Not just that you were part of the team, but what was your role that you actually demonstrated leadership in that? Then the last thing is just an ability to get people to do things, to build consensus and bring people along with you. I've found more and more it's not enough to just have the answer to something. You have to animate people to action, you have to bring the team along with you. So people talk about IQ and EQ, intellectual quotient and emotional quotient, because to me that's the essence of leadership. The kind of person I don't want to see would be a brilliant jerk. That's what my dad talks about a lot. He runs a company as well, and when he's hiring, I've discussed this with him. He says he's declined a lot of people who are a lot smarter than he is who can't work with other people effectively. That kind of thing is toxic in a culture. So as good as they may be, you say, 'Am I going to pay a price over the long term by having somebody who's just not culturally aligned and is going to rub people the wrong way?' Then as far as people who stick out, it's people who do the little things. Who get the job done and then raise their hand and say, 'Is there somewhere else that I'm interested in learning more? Is there something else that I could be doing on top of what's on my job description?' It's people who are self-motivated to get work done and don't take a ton of oversight. They can structure their own day, use their time wisely. The best thing as a boss is to not have to give step-by-step direction to somebody. Give them context, not a set of directions. 'Here's what we're trying to accomplish, now go figure out how to solve it.' If you as an employee can take a minimum amount of guidance but clarity on what you're trying to accomplish and then drive the results, that's cool.

Yeah. If you guys think about what happens at Burroughs, isn't that the way your education works here? It starts with good study habits, how to take notes, a lot of scaffolding around it. But as you progress in your academic career, it's more about, 'Okay, here's what we're trying to learn. Show up for the test, but use your own strategies to be ready for that.' At our point in our Burroughs career, our teachers aren't telling us what we need to do for homework each night. It's just, 'Know this by this date. Have it done. The test is when.'

Well, I think there's a lot that you can do to educate yourself in that field. Maybe I'll talk about that in a second, but the first thing that I would encourage people to think about is why you want to be in that career. Why you want to be in financial services? It's incredibly broad, a huge swath of the economy. There are about a million different jobs that you could do within that. If your motivation is just, 'I think I could make a good living and make a lot of money in it,' okay, that's fine. But what would really excite you about financial services? That'll help you drill down to narrow the field a little bit. Do you want to work on Wall Street? Do you want to work for a community bank? Do you want to work at an auditing firm? Do you want to work for a hedge fund? Do you want to be a private investor in private equity? There are a lot of different paths that you could figure out. To me, what I like about it is I get to see a ton of companies and a ton of nonprofits and figure out, it's almost like a clock or something, and you've got all these different gears that relate to each other somehow. If I'm a business, I've got people who are vendors who are supplying me things, and then I sell to somebody else, so I'm in relation with those two things. I'm getting talent from the local university. I've got kids at these nonprofits at Burroughs or these other schools. So I love exploring how all those making those connections and understanding how all those gears come together in the clockwork of a community. I feel so lucky that that's my job. I get to understand how these pieces relate to each other and all the different ways that people make a living in a community. So the first thing I would do is encourage you to explore the why. Why are you interested in that field? That'll help you get a little more specific. In terms of educating yourself, I think you can do it through formal education, but you can also just read a lot. Start with some of those Warren Buffett things, start with those Michael Lewis books. I think you can just learn a ton by being self-directed and learning from the examples of others who've done it before. So to me, those are the most important things. In terms of tactically what you can do now, does Burroughs have a financial literacy class? I think we just established a personal finance elective. I don't know, there's also economics, but I don't know if that's similar or not. It's more about managing money in the future. It might be worth checking out. But there are so many self-directed resources that are out there. The other thing is, I admire so much what you guys are doing, just trying to find people who you think have perspective and are willing to share some of that perspective with you. Whatever you're interested in, one of the neat things about a place like Burroughs is it's such a community, and there are people who are truly expert in whatever you're interested in who are not more than a phone call or two away. To the extent you're willing to ask the right questions and talk to the people in the alumni office and say, 'Hey, I just have an interest in this, is there somebody you think would talk to me?' I almost guarantee that if you send them a note and say, 'Hi, I'm a Burroughs student right now, I'm interested in what you do,' they will absolutely, with high confidence, take a meeting with you and share their perspective. It's such a blessing in this community to be able to draw on resources like that.

Well, I'm not sure I wrote the book on any of those things, but happy to be able to share any perspective. You guys, it's been really a lot of fun and an honor to be here with you today. So thanks for making this happen. Thanks for your time.