Marc Lasry - Making Bucks in Credit and Sports - [Invest Like the Best, EP.371]

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/abcffd64bac4cca8

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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best.
This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.
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Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum.
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My guest this week is Mark Lazry.
Mark is a pioneer of distressed debt investing and the CEO of Avenue Capital Group, which he co-founded with his sister in 1995.
Avenue manages thirteen billion dollars today.
More recently, Mark and Avenue have become active investors in sports.
He owned the Milwaukee Bucks when they won the NBA championship in twenty twenty one, and has since made investments in sports as diverse as sailing and bull riding.
In our discussion, we talk about his journey building a big investing firm, the evolution of distressed investing, and the opportunities in sports today.
Mark shares some great stories throughout about traveling with President Clinton, winning the NBA championship, and raising his first fund.
Please enjoy this great conversation with Mark Lazary.
What's the earliest episode you can remember of feeling like a sense of
confidence and competence in what you were doing.
Oh wow, that's a great question.
That's actually fascinating. I've never really thought about that. I think part of it is
I always grew up
I had a mom who always told me
You could do anything, so I just grew up believing I could do anything.
I don't think there was a moment when I thought, Oh wow, I could do this.
I think when we left Morocco, we came to the United States.
Everything was about education. Everything was about learning'cause
We didn't really have any money, so the only way you were
gonna go to school was by scholarship.
I think it was a belief that my parents instilled in me.
So not fueled by self doubt.
No.
Well it's funny because a lot of people are in your position.
No, I don't think so.
Both the G SP guys and Ali Hamad told me to ask you about the story of raising your first fund.
At all.
Depends on an investor.
Gustave Levre.
Who actually founded Perrier.
When he came in here.
He was about seventy five years old.
Then he comes in.
And back then he had a Kodak in Stimatic, and he's taking pictures.
Of the people who work for me.

I was like oh okay, and everybody's like modeling and
We're all standing there doing whatever we're doing and he
Literally took twenty four pictures.
And at the end I was like, Okay, so why is that? He goes, Oh, I just like to have pictures of my investors. I was like, Okay
And
He goes but I'll come back in three or six months and that's when I'll decide if I'm gonna invest.
And he comes back.
And
He's got the pictures with him.
And he goes, I wanna just make sure the same people are here. I was like, Okay, yeah, they all are.
So I don't understand he goes Well sometimes
People just would have actors come in. And I just want to make sure it's the same.
I just thought it was fascinating. I've never heard of that. This is in trying to think when this was. This was in nineteen
Ninety five, ninety six.
We had just gotten started and you're just meeting characters all the time.
We'll rewind back to that time period because I want to talk about the whole evolution you've seen of Distress Credit and just how it's evolved over that whole period. But I want to zoom to today. Last time we were together, we were talking about bull riding and
the probably myriad of opportunities that not a lot of people are thinking about from an investing perspective in the world of sports.
And obviously you're very well known for having bought the bucks and done very well, both winning a championship, but also as an investment.
I would just love you to riff on
Why you're so interested in sports.
as a category of potential investment.
I think there's a number of reasons. First, I think it's misunderstood.
I don't think people fully appreciate
All the different
opportunities you have in sports.
How media plays a part in it, how sponsorship, ticket sales.
And then the other
Big reason.
Is I actually think
It's a uniter.
People just love sports. It doesn't make a difference who you are if we're all wearing the same jersey.
For some reason we all love each other'cause we're all cheering for the same person.
So you don't look at
What nationality, what color somebody is.
One of the things I loved about
owning the bucks whenever I was travelling.
Wherever you were, whatever city, sometimes you'd find somebody wearing a Yannis jersey.
And I'd go up to him and go, Oh, are you a big Bucks fan? And
They would start talking to you about why they love Giannis or why they love the team.
And then they would ask me and I'll go, Well, you know, shockingly I actually own the two. And they go, No, you don't. I go, Well, no, I'm pretty sure.
And it was always the same thing, people Google you and then once they found out you did
They'd want to take a picture.
But all of a sudden
Literally you're going up to a total stranger.
And
Within a few minutes we both love the same thing.
And I just found that
Amazing.
And I actually think
It's one of the things that people
don't fully appreciate about sports, uh how it does bring people together.
And so for me
The Bucks were a unique opportunity.
Um
Worked out extremely well.
But I see that you can do the same thing investing in other
Leagues in other sports.
There's a really interesting story with the box and that the price you bought it for on a multiple basis was crazy.
relative to how much you then earned as their return on capital basis.
This does not happen usually unless it's Microsoft stock or something. And the Bucks business did not grow like Microsoft's business did.
Can you tell that story?
What it was like to retrain your brain.
Probably from distress credit to
I think it was like a hundred times or something you bought it for originally.
It's like a totally new mental model.
I think.
Why people h at times have a hard time.
Buying a team.
And why people have a hard time understanding the value of the team.
I was no different.
I'm not gonna tell you I was.
I think for me
I had invested in the Brooklyn Nets.
And I had a minority piece.
And when the bucks became available.
You understood the economics of basketball.
So the Bucs were making about five million dollars a year.
And so you would think
In my business, I'm trying to buy a company for three to four times.
Private equity's trying to buy a company seven to eight times.
And everybody thinks you're crazy if you spend twenty times.
We had the opportunity to pay not three, five, ten, twenty, fifty, but you know, the magical number of a hundred times.
You're like, Well that's fine.
I'm gonna buy it for a hundred times. We're gonna have this new media deal. I think the value will go up.
And from your media deal, you were getting thirty million a year.
I thought it would go up to sixty to seventy five million a year.
And if we got that, you'd make all this money.
And we could sell the team.
And
The team would hopefully double in price.
The media deal came in, it was three times. So instead of us getting thirty million, we got ninety million.
And the value of the team.
Doubled.
And so now you actually can make money.
And
The dirty secret about sports is
You go into it assuming you're gonna make money.
And then you find out that if you want to win
You've got to spend all the money.
So
You
quickly that
It is not any fun.
to go and try to make money because that means you're gonna lose.
And why would you want to go watch a team you bought just lose?
So you end up spending the money.
And you literally spend pretty much everything you make.
And the reason for that is you actually do want to win.
And the value of your team
Actually will increase if you win.
But the problem is
You should sell right when you win.
Which you did. But most people don't because
That's when you have the highest value.
Is when you win.
And when I looked at it
I thought
We won in two thousand twenty one. I thought I'd
We could win again in twenty two and in twenty three and
You also realize how hard it is to win. And you've got to get very lucky.
And I think when we won
Everything worked out really well.
Kevin Durant's foot wasn't
An inch bigger.
he would have made that three, we would have lost.
Yannis.
in Atlanta ends up having what I thought
Tore every ligament in his leg.
If you see the video of that as I'm yeah.
I remember it.
And then
I go running into the locker room.
And I remember I said, Doctor, how bad is it?
And Doctor looks at me and goes.
Listen, I know you're not gonna believe this.
It doesn't feel like he tore anything. No, that's impossible.
And Giannis goes, No, I heard a pop and
So
They've got to do the M R I and the M R I comes back.
But
Everything's fine. What he had heard there's a water sack inside your knee and that's what he heard pop and it just refills up.
Alright, so now Giannis is gone.
And somehow Trey Young ends up injuring his ankle because he's walking backwards and steps on the foot of a ref and now he's gone.
So
You've gotta be very good, but you've gotta get lucky.
But I think we were very lucky. And I think
The following year we got a little bit unlucky. And then and then last year, definitely unlucky because Giannis got hurt within
Yeah.
So for me
I thought it was time to sell.
And I thought it was a great price. I'm not saying prices may not go higher.
I think they will.
But I think it'll be hard for teams to increase in value.
five to ten times over ten years, I could see teams increasing in value two to three times.
And that would make sense.
But I think you can take that capital and sort of do the same thing.
In that amount of time.
So
Yeah, it was a unique experience.
What do you think of the notion that a lot of these things are vanity assets for their owners?
I don't think that's true. I think most people buy a team, buy it
Because they believe the value's gonna go up.
Nobody's buying something saying, Oh, I can't wait for this to drop.
So I don't think it's a vanity play. I think it's an economic play.
And there's a belief
The the value will go up.
And part of that is very simply
Ticket pricing goes up.
Five to twenty percent a year. Sponsorship goes up five, twenty percent.
Advertising goes up five to twenty percent.
So I think you will make money
If you decide that
You don't want to win.
And I think that's what ends up happening. It's not a vanity play. What ends up happening is
You quickly realize
And I know this may sound a bit hokey.
But you actually realize you're a steward of an asset.
I'd love to tell you you feel you're on the team.
I think you're just the owner at that present time.
And the community, the fans, everybody else.
That's who owns the team. And you feel you have an obligation to them?
To try to win.
If you think about it, there's no fan that says, Are you a Knicks fan? or what, yeah.
You don't go, Oh I
I really feel bad for Dolan if he's got to spend X.
I don't think I've ever heard a Nick fan say that, right? Especially about Dolan. But nobody worries about what an owner has to spend. They want the owner to spend as much as possible because all they care about is winning.
And you actually
Feel that.
You hear it all the time.
And that's why I said you sort of become a steward.
Of an asset.
And I hopefully we did a really good job when I owned it.
The NBA had been around a long time when you bought the bucks and probably will be around for hopefully forever.
Bull riding is something that's a little bit different.
obviously has been around, but not in terms of franchise value leagues, et cetera, sports TV rights, et cetera. Tell that story because I think it's a fascinating window into
the sort of thing that probably people aren't thinking about as an asset that you might look at or be interested in.
What I'm trying to do when we're investing in sports
Is
I don't know what people will like.
I don't know what you want to watch.
What I do know
Is
What people are currently watching.
And y you know that from the ratings.
So
Bull riding that's really rodeos that have been around for fifty, a hundred years. People love it.
And
I had heard about it.
From a number of friends who had invested in it.
And said, You need to take a look at this.
You're gonna be shocked at how many people
are actually
Loving
To watch it on TV, loving going to the rodeos, to the bull riding events.
So I started doing work
What I learned was
At the time they did their media deal.

With CBS boards.
They got paid zero.
And the reason they got paid zero is CBS was like, Look, we have no idea if anybody's gonna watch it. If they do
Great, we'll make a lot of money. And if they don't, we're not gonna
Put it on, but there's a production cost and everything. And so they do that.
And within the span of three years
You have roughly the same amount of people watching a bull riding event that watch an NBA game.
It really is.
And
What that tells you is you have three hundred and fifty million Americans.
That some
Love bull running, some love basketball, some love baseball.
So we ended up doing that.
And the teams at the time were worth about a million or two.
And three years later they were worth twenty five million.
For people who bought him then.
They've made
Anywhere between ten to twenty times on their money in three years.
We bought a team for twenty five million.
And we decided to put a team here in New York. We're gonna do it out of the Berkeley Center.
But the reason we did that
Is we think the next media deal
Is gonna be
It could be somewhere around fifty million, a hundred million, two hundred, five hundred million a year. I don't know what it'll be.
But
It's definitely gonna be more than zero.
And if you think about it.
We own
A percentage of the league.
And
When you end up figuring out with that percentage, which you will own are the media rights.
I think the value of these teams
In two to five years there'll be five, ten, twenty times what you paid for it.
Here's an interesting statistic that's just happened.
So I don't know if you watch the women's final and everybody else.
Think about that.
So
Four years ago
I don't think people would have
been interested or would have watched it.
And you saw that from the media rights that the women's N CA got.
Well, you fast forward to today.
He had eighteen million Americans who watched it.
By the way.
That's more?
that I've ever watched an NBA game.
It's more than I've ever watched a playoff game.
It's more than it's ever watched a baseball.
The world series.
It's actually more than I've ever watched a men's N CAA game.
So you look at that and go.
That
Came out of nowhere.
But now that you know that people are watching it.
Do you think you want to pay more for a woman's media rights?
On the
Women's N CA? The answer's yes.
But five years ago I would have told you I have no idea.
And so what we're trying to do is
See what people are doing.
And
invest and buy into leagues and teams where we know there's already interest.
So that's what's different.
What about sailing?
So I don't know if you can tell, but I'm not a big sailor.
I don't know what a big sailor looks like. Not you. It certainly isn't me.'Cause I get C sick.
Put me on a boat that rocks. I just want to get off.
But that's the same thing. So
Larry Ellison
Three years ago starts a sailing league.
And he starts it with about two hundred and fifty million dollars.
If you think about that, why's he do that? Because he's a big proponent of America's Cup.
believes that people love sailing.
And says I'm gonna create twelve teams. I'm gonna have team USA, Team Canada, Team Australia. I'm gonna do all of that.
Okay.
I would tell you three to five years ago, that's a venture deal.
And you hope that he'll be successful, but nobody knows.
He does a deal.
With CBS sports.
For forty million dollars a year global.
Because they think about a hundred thousand people are gonna watch that.
Okay.
I would actually think that would be logical, right?
Fast forward to today.
So in three years
They just had a race about three or four weeks ago. So they have about twenty races
A year.
And in that race
They had about two million Americans who watched that.
So you look at that and go, Where did that come from? How'd you go from like an MBA level, yeah. Yeah, it's more than an MBA level.
And
I wouldn't have told you there's
two million people in the United States who love sailing and who want to watch it, but there is. So what that tells their next media deal.
Is gonna be multiples of what the first one was.
And that's how we look at things.
And for right now, for whatever reason in sports, you can actually take advantage of that.
What's the most peculiar
sports deal you've looked at.
in this pursuit so far.
Oh my God. Maybe the slapping one? Yeah, the slapping one. It really is. I don't understand.
People watch. People love watching it.
You gotta go back in time. Imagine somebody comes in and goes, Look, I got a great idea.
Here's my idea.
I'm gonna film people just smacking each other and just snapping each other out. And you're like
Okay, nobody wants to watch that.
What are you crazy? No, I'm not funding that.
Yeah, that's become a really popular sport.
I don't know how you train for it.
The other one that's actually really weird.
But it requires a tremendous amount of skill.
It's on a ping pong table that's at an angle.
And all you can do is you've got to hit the ball. It's got to hit
Your side than the other side.
But you can only do it with your feet or your head. Yeah.
Like soccer style. And I'm looking at that going.
I don't know, it's not for me, but
No.
Would I invest in that? Sure, if I saw that a million Americans are watching it.
It's not what I like. It's what
People like.
The one that I always find fascinating, and somebody explained this to me really well.
There's a media executive that you would know who
Runs a large company.
Ends up saying look, when we have the Olympics
You ever watch that? I go, Yeah.
And he goes, You ever watch curling in the Olympics?
I'm like, Yeah, I do.
And he goes well let me
Explain the sport to you.

I'm gonna have somebody roll.
A ball.
On ice.
To a circle.
Is gonna
Shave the ice to make it either go slower or faster.
I would have said that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Yet I'm fascinated when I watch it.
And what he explained is
People love watching the best in the world compete.
Period.
And that's why people watch on TV.
'Cause they want to see the best in the world compete.
And
I've always remembered that so that when I'm investing
It's
Let's do things where it's the best people in the world compete because that's what people want to watch.
One explanation I heard many years ago
just to simplify things to like basic supply and demand. This was baseball.
was like, look, there's gonna be roughly thirty teams, like there's not gonna be seventy.
And so the supply is fairly fixed and the sorts of people that can and want to buy a baseball team
It's probably going up.
Therefore, I'm interested in buying a baseball team. How much do you think about the very basic supply demand
story for any one of these things. Is that one of the key models for thinking about buying one of these franchises?
But it is because ultimately you have more people who want to own a team, especially in their community.
Then you have teams.
And whether that's baseball, basketball
Bowl riding, sailing, golf, whatever it is.
But you're seeing the rise of women's soccer.
You're gonna see the rise of women's volleyball.
There are more people
Who have the means and the wherewithal.
To own a team.
And
wanna grow it within that community.
I think you will have teams. So it is a big factor.
And then if those teams can make money.
Then you've increased the amount of people who will want to buy them.
Does it feel like
you are the only or one of the only people approaching this the way that you are with the institutional investor mindset versus just I'm a local I'm in Detroit, I want to own Detroit team or something.
I think today, yes.
But I think within three to five years, absolutely not.
I mean, I think there's a number of firms out there that are getting started that wanna do the same thing.
So I think you were literally in the first inning.
of investing in sports. I think as private equity comes in
As more institutional capital comes in.
You're not gonna be able to do the bull riding, you're not gonna be able to do the sailing. You're gonna be paying much higher pricing.
For this.
Because it's gonna become a much more efficient market.
What role does gambling play?
in this entire story.
So the great thing about gambling
At least from the way I look at it.
Is what gambling does
Is
Increase the engagement that people have.
With
Whatever they're gambling on.
So
I'm not gonna make money
On the fact that people are gambling. That's gonna be fan duel, draft kings.
Or whoever people are doing it with. They've already got that monopoly.
But the more people who
Bet.
on a particular game means there's more people watching that.
The more people who watch that
Means my ratings go up.
The higher my ratings are.
the higher media deal I'm gonna get.
So
I think it's just part of the ecosystem.
And the whole thing in the ecosystem is how do I make you
Become a Knicks fan.
How do I make you become a Bucs fan?
Because the more people who watch
The higher I'm gonna get paid.
How big is the universe of eligible
deals in this world right now today.
If you had your whatever funnel, I'm picturing some deal funnel at the top of that funnel.
What do you think that number is?
I would say it's hundreds of billions of dollars.
I would have thought it was a lot smaller.
And as we started doing this
The amount of deals and the amount of

I would say opportunities we see are staggering.
Because it's in everything. It's on the real estate side.
And
on do we want to build hotels near a stadium? Do we want near a arena?
Do we want to build restaurants?
Do we want to do food services in the arena?
What are we doing?
And
Anything that's sports related?
I think it's just massive opportunities.
That's making you put your credit hat back on for just a second. It's become really interesting because now
It seems like the opportunity costs are quite high. You could get
Whatever low double digits, maybe in credit somewhat reliably. How do you think about
hurdle rates and
Expected returns, desired returns, just the brass tax of what you want to earn on on your equity capital.
I think there's two things you're gonna be doing. One, you will be doing credit.
So you'll lend people money on that.
You're gonna be lending at ten to fifteen percent. It'll be the same thing we're doing on the credit side.
On the equity side, you're gonna wanna be generating high teens to low twenties returns.
I think today
Because of the lack of capital, you're gonna be able to do that pretty easily.
But as more and more capital comes in, that's gonna get harder. But
That's the same in any asset class.
What did you learn from David Bonderman?
From David?
Oh, I learned a lot.
David
Was one of those rare individuals
In my opinion.
The
was
Exceptionally book smart?
And exceptionally street smart.
And normally people are one or the other.
And David
Was both.
And you saw that
In situations
And how quickly
He could figure things out.
But also how he could communicate with everybody.
Everybody really liked them. Whether if you were an analyst, you could talk numbers with David and
Not only could he keep up with you, he'd be better than you.
But if you just wanted to talk about it.
about how you're gonna grow a company. What are we gonna do on the marketing side? Here's my vision.
you could actually talk to David and you thought you'd be able to communicate with him and you'd understand things. He was one of the first people I ever worked for
in this business that was able, in my opinion, to do both.
And not only do both
At a high level, but at the top.
How would you articulate the magic of the bass family tree? It seems almost like the Parcells coaching tree or something like this, but in investing like so many interesting
Talented people seem to have emerged.
in it or from it or can draw lineage back to it.
Bonderman, U, Rainwater, lots of others.
What made it such a
Special
Bing.
I think because thirty, thirty five years ago
When I went to work for them in nineteen eighty.
Eli.
They gave me a hundred and fifty million.
I was the largest distress fund in the world.
In the world.
And the reason why you have this lineage from them
Is
There were about four or five families back then who had a lot of capital.
So therefore, my opinion they attracted
Some of the smartest people.

Because
They would give you capital.
And very few people back then had capital.
I mean imagine
If I'm
Running a hundred and fifty million on the largest font.
Most people back then were running fifty million, a hundred million.
And so you could go to the Bass family, you could go
To a number of other families.
And
They put a lot of people in business.
And because of that
I think there was one of the reasons why they did exceptionally well.
If you think about the
But I'll call like the chapter headings of the story of distressed as a style. You were the big biggest fund back then. Now it's a much, much bigger asset class. You're one of the big ones.
How would you chunk that up into chapters?
Just thinking back that whole time, what have been the chapters of distressed investing?
Well I think back then.
You needed to understand
Yeah.
And you needed to understand numbers.
Because bankruptcies were extremely complicated.
And bankruptcies would take anywhere between three to six years.
And
It was a strict priority, so you were constantly fighting.
And then the bankruptcy laws were changed.
And
They were changed to make it better for creditors as opposed to debtors.
And that one change
ended up making bankruptcies instead of being five or six years, you now would have an eighteen month to twenty four month bankruptcy.
Things.
became more streamlined.
And
You ended up
I think now
You still got a lot of fighting.
among different asset classes and different groups.
But
The timing element has all gotten condensed.
I think that's been a big change.
Also the increase in capital.
has made it worth it for people.
Now to fight.
Whereas back then
Because time was
An asset that the debtor had.
You actually settled a lot more.
And even though somebody may have been junior to you
They could hold you up for two years, so it was worth it.
To work it out.
Today.
It's not.
And so you're litigating more, you're fighting more.
It's gotten harder.
If I was forcing you to be in the business today of backing new credit firms
What would be the variables that you would care most about in evaluating
those new firms.
They've gotta be really good, obviously, on the credit side.
They've got to actually also be very good on the restructuring side. So that if there's an issue you can deal with it.
And I would say you can't be
Small, you've gotta be large.
Back then.
People go, Well look, I'm small, I'm nimble, I'm quick, I can do this, I can do that. Today nimble quick means nothing. I could destroy you if you're nimble quick. You need to be large.
That's the big difference.
What's the funniest story that you can remember from your time with the Clintons in the nineties?
Oh my God.
I think it's
I got to meet Putin.
With President Clinton.
And it was at Davos.
And I've got to meet all these people. And I went
We're going to meet and President Clinton would always introduce me as his
Economic advisor.
He's meeting with Putin and then I come over and I'm
Saying hello and so on.
And I asked President Clinton
I can do his voice really well. Do it.
I said to him, Sir, is there any way we can get a picture?
I don't think I'll ever meet food again.
And present goes.
Oh absolutely.

Vladimir, you come over here now.
Lammy, we're gonna take a picture.
Is that alright?
And Putin goes, No beacher, new beacher. And Clinton without missing a beak goes, let's hurry up now.
Just it's fascinating to me how
People who nobody says no to.
They don't really care.
They don't really care. And the fact
Yeah, we're taking this picture with Putin.
Just'cause I want to have a picture. And President Clinton is
I was like, Yeah, absolutely, we'll do that.
You just got to meet
I won't say which country we're in. We're in a country in the Middle East.
And President Clinton goes
You see that lamp over there? I go, Yes, sir. He goes, I hate that lamp. I think it's one of the ugliest lamps I've ever seen. I was like, Okay
Seems okay. No, Mark, I'm telling you it's ugly.
I said, Okay, we leave, we go to the meeting, I look at him like
What
What do you care about the lamp for? He goes, Oh
I just wanna see if they record everything.
And then we come back and the land's gone. Right.
It's just like always.
He loved the game. Yeah, he loved the game. He loved meeting everybody. It was always just fascinating being with him.
I loved it. I thought for somebody who wasn't born in this country.
The fact that
I could be with someone who was the ex president of the United States
And travel and do all these things.
For me
I just loved it. I loved
Meeting people, I loved learning from him.
He would explain history
He's a brilliant guy. So it was fun. It was a lot of fun.
You've had such a varied
set of interests and paths and things you've done, you seem very positive and cheery about them all. What is the through line of the things that tend to get your interest the most?
What do they all share in common, if anything?
I think part of it
I'm always super curious.
I just want to learn.
And I think part of that when I was a kid, my mother we went we didn't really have much money, so we had gone to a book fair.
And my mother bought
Funk and Wagnall's
Encyclopedia, the world encyclopedias.
And she said, You need to read this.
The whole thing from beginning to end in one year.
And you learn a ton of useless information. But
It's like all of a sudden you're learning about the world. You're learning about different things, different species.
And
I found it fascinating and so what I love is
I actually think in life
And we all see this. People either have the happy gene or they have the miserable gene.
No matter what happens in the world, there everything's bad or everything's good.
To me everything's good.
Tal positive.
I just want to keep learning and
Meeting
Interesting people.
And
being in interesting situations using my mind but
Trying to always learn from somebody
And
So I'm always excited to be in new places and try to learn
I'd love to hear a little bit about what you learned of the various trade offs building a big

And I'm curious in lots of dimensions here, like the difference between focus on returns and deals versus assets. Sometimes they go together, sometimes not.
And just the trade offs that you
felt coming up against as you built the business over time and why you made the choices that you made.
Yeah, it's a great question.
I think when you're going through it
For all of us today.
These are businesses.
They really are. And if I had known what I know today, I probably would have done things differently.
It's just back then when you're getting started and you're growing.
Your focus is really on returns.
That's not on building a firm. It's
How do I make someone money?
And
You're just very, very focused on that.
I think in two thousand twelve we were running about twenty five billion.
And I didn't see a lot of distress opportunities.
So
I ended up
Returning.
Twelve plus billion to investors.
And the reason I did is I said, look, we're not seeing as much on the stress side.
We think it'll come back in two or three years, so we're gonna return this capital.
We're gonna sell things.
And then we'll come back to you in two or three years to raise money.
I was only off by ten years, right? No.
Would you do that today?
Would you return twelve billion of capital?
And just shrink your firm.
As a business, you wouldn't do that.
Back then.
Focus was no, I'm just all I want to do is try to make return.
I think you've seen people go down both roads.
where they've ended up growing their firms.
And trying to generate returns and part of the ways they've done that is use more leverage.
I think for us we were always trying to do things on a lever basis. I had a lot of my capital here.
In retrospect, should we have tried to grow the firm more? Probably.
I think for us it's fine. We're running about twelve, thirteen billion.
I think we've done it.
Where we were just focused on returns.
But the biggest problem I would tell you is
We were very focused on we were a credit shop. We were distressed.
So there wasn't a lot of that for about ten years. There is now.
So we were raising smaller funds because there was less to invest.
Um
We didn't go into other things.
Should we have done
Directly.
Yes.
Should we have done private equity? Yes. There's a lot of things we should have done. Yeah.
At the time
You sort of and said
Yeah, but that's a scale business.
I don't wanna focus on that. I wanna try to generate higher returns.
We've done really well, but at the same time we probably should have grown those other businesses.
In the spirit of the period guy taking everyone's picture. Say a little bit about
team building and
Culture building in a firm.
Like this where the product is
Taking money and giving back more money.
I take same amount to do in life and with the box. The biggest question you have at your firm
And with a team.
Is
Do you hire
Talent?
Or do you hire people who are team players?
So here we can hire somebody who's a huge moneymaker.
But by doing that
maybe they're not the best team player and causes huge issues within a firm.
So what you really wanna do is you wanna have
Team players and still
You're the Bucs, team players, you're gonna win a championship.
Here, you wanna have team players who are gonna generate good returns.
And I think it's hard. I mean it is. It's a lot easier sometimes to just
higher talent
And tell everybody deal with it.
I think for us at the firm, we've always made sure that if
It's collegial that we've got to get along, that we work together.
So we've got a lot of tenure with the senior folks.
If somebody
Creates issues.
They're gone.
I always marvel at pension plans and folks who say, Well
We see that.
You've had some turnover and you're like
Yes.
The reason you have turnover is sometimes you fire people who are not good.
Where sometimes you fire people who are difficult.
And then somebody will go, Yes, but you've had turnover go, right. So sometimes you fire people who are not good. Sometimes you fire people who are difficult.
And then next day they'll go, So we saw you had turnover and you're like, Okay, I give up. It was the same thing with I would say the box.
Mm.
Biggest question was
Do we go for talent?
And you can see that certain teams have tried to do that.
Or do you build a team?
In sports somebody's gotta be
The number one option. Somebody's gotta be the number two option. Somebody's number three.
You can't have four people who want to be the number one option.
It's sort of the same thing in investing. You can't have four people
who are deciding what to do.
You can have
One person who decides what to do.
And there's a team and
People recommend.
But ultimately somebody's gotta decide that. There's gotta be a senior portfolio manager, or you can have two.
We're
If you're running a lot more in assets, but I think for us
We've tried to be more of a team.
If you think
Not including the bucks of the most memorable investment you ever made. End to end. Can you tell that story?
For us.
T XU was one of those investments where
We started buying the bonds at forty, fifty cents.
did a tremendous amount of work. It became a huge position for the firm. We bought
A tremendous amount of it. It went all the way up to the one ten.
And there was one issue
But we didn't think was an issue.
And we should have sold at one ten and we were holding out for one fifteen.
And decision came down in the court
And bonds went down from one ten to fifty sixty cent.
And I learned a lot from that.
Which was try not to always get the last dollar.
our thesis was right in what we were doing.
And then what ended up happening towards the end
Is we became an arbitrage firm.
That's not who we are.
I think on that
You learn quite a bit from that. You learn quite a bit.
in two thousand eight. I think two thousand eight was
A great year.
To learn.
How to deal with stress, how to deal with
Things going down, how to understand
We were buying Ford Bank that we'd start buying it at eighty ninety and it went all the way down for thirty cents.
And
We kept buying it all the way down and
Part of that everybody goes, Oh yeah, you know, when things go down, double down. It's not that easy.
The reason it's not easy is the market's telling you you're totally wrong.
Remember, when you're buying something, somebody's selling it.
person who's selling it things it's gone lower.
As things were going down
The amount of work we kept doing to try to make sure
That we were right.
Is the value of that asset correct?
That taught me quite a bit.
You had to always
Refresh what you were thinking.
And try to look at it in a different way.
It's not easy making money.
Right.
It's a process and I think as time goes on you actually learn how to avoid a lot of mistakes.
What do you think are the most important things about building relationships with capital with the people that give you the money?
to manage, especially at the multi billion dollar scale.
for the big firms out there. What have you learned about that?
whole part of the business.
It's very much about trust. It's about you.
Constantly telling
People who have a lot of capital with you
What you think is good, what you think is bad, admitting mistakes when you've done something wrong.
Or you've made a bad investment?
I think it becomes really a very strong relationship that you're developing and you're building
And to keep on getting more capital, people have to trust you.
People know you're smart.
Everyone's smart than it's smart. I always love Oh no, he's really smart. Oh shocking.
Oh, let's go give money to the dumb guy. Nobody does that.
I've never heard of that. I need the dumb guy. That's the guy. That's my guy. Have you ever seen that? No. Everybody's smart.
So what separates it? It is trust.
It's
the fact that you're explaining things to investors and when you've made a mistake, say, look, we thought this was gonna
Be what it is, it wasn't.
And if people trust you, they give you more capital.
Because they believe in what you're doing.
So
I think that's why you've seen certain firms really grow and others
Not grow as much.
You have a really interesting story in the sense that you started the business with your sister. You work with your kids, you've made investments with them and on their behalf, I think the bucks included.
Lots of working with family, which can be beautiful, can be fraught.
What have you learned about doing that well,'cause it seems like it's worked very well for you.
My partner is my sister.
I don't know if that works for everybody. For us it works extremely well.
Sonia and I started this together.
And
There's just
A huge amount of trust.
And also we have different skill set, so we don't feel like we're competing against each other.
And I think when you're
partners with a sibling.
It's very much about
Trusting
Them
To do what they do really well.
And them trusting you to do what you do really well.
And not constantly
Looking over your shoulder.
And I think with Sonya
We split up the firm in different ways.
And she's phenomenal what she does.
And it's actually worked out very well.
But I think part of that is you've got to have a pretty close relationship.
We shared a room till we both went to college.
I don't think it's because we wanted to. I don't think I was dying to share a room with my sisters, but
You do.
And you either end up really trusting, liking each other.
Or it goes the other way. You just don't ever want to spend time with each other because of all the difficulties you've gone through.
My daughter works here.
But
The reason she works here is I think she's
I know I'm biased, but I think she's really talented.
My son worked for us when we were with the Bucs. And I think he did a phenomenal job. He now
Works in the commerce department.
I think it's hard working with your kids.
I think it's hard working with any family member.
But
You either are able to and there's a level of trust
Or you're not.
When you ask around about you, a common thing you hear over and over is that
for the category of people that have achieved the level of financial success, you're amongst the happiest, or if not the happiest, just by the way you are.
And you said earlier that people are wired optimistic or pessimistic. Is it that simple? Do you think it's just
that easy because
Even for optimists, it seems like
with lots of financial success can come lots of other maybe problems that are unexpected. Has it always felt easy to you?
No, it's not that it's easy. Anything intentional you've done.
I think I won the lottery.
People win the lottery the first day, they're so excited.
And then you start hearing about oh
The only reason somebody wants to be my friend is because I have money. The only reason somebody wants to do this is they want me to help them. They want me to do this.
I always just go back, I'm on the lottery.
What would you rather do? Not win the lottery or win the lottery?
And that's actually why I'm happy. I always think back to the fact
I won lottery.
And
Yes, it's complicated by winning the lottery. Yes, it's complicated by
Having success.
And I always try to say to people
You've got a choice.
You can either win the lottery or not win.
And if you win, you're gonna have other issues.
But if you don't win the lottery, you also have other issues. So which one do you want?
And
I think what ends up happening is
People forget
Of how hard you work to try to achieve success.
And then they start focusing on the negatives of that success as opposed to the positives. To me
I started a fund at a time that it was really hard, but then we grew.
And
I was lucky enough to grow
Exponentially.
And
I'm always thankful for that.
I think people
have too many demons when they do well and are so worried of what is somebody's ulterior motive.
To me it's
Like, I don't really worry about your motive. I'm happy I'm in that situation.
Yes, I get it that at times people wanted to be friends because I owned a basketball team.
Better than the alternative. No, but that's exactly it. Not that complicated.
Well, we won the championship.
President Biden called me, President Obama called me, President Clinton called to congratulate.
I thought that was really cool.
I mean I got to go to the White House.
We got honored at the White House and
We brought all the players.
I thought that was a unique experience.
I get excited about the fact every day.
I won the lottery.
What was your favorite moment?
Associated with that championship run.

I know I was lifting the trophy.
It's actually funny beforehand.
The NBA takes you through.
And says okay, if you win
The trophy's here, you're gonna lift it up.
And here's how we're gonna do it. I'm like, Okay, great.
I don't know how heavy is it.
Do you mind if I
Just practice drive. And they go, No, no, no, you can't touch it because then you're gonna get your fingerprints on it, and for the camera, we don't wanna see fingerprints.
You're gonna do this live. And I'm like
Okay. How heavy is it?
Well, don't worry about it. Like no no, it's on National TV.
You win, you go out there.
And
My whole family's there and we're so excited'cause all of a sudden you realize you're gonna win.
And
You've got the championship ceremony.
And you go out
And I start lifting the trophy really slowly'cause I have no idea how heavy it is.
And finally I'm realized, okay, yeah, I could take it, I can put it over my head.
'Cause last thing you ever want to do is drop it. Yes. Drop national T V. No, look at him. He dropped the drum.

I don't know how people got my phone number.
I'm being serious. I must have gotten a thousand texts.
Of congratulations. Happy for you, I'm like
Thank you. Who is this? Thank you. Who is this?
I'd say a quarter of the text was Who is this? Who is this?
And and you find it's a friend of yours from ten years ago or five years ago.
And you go, thank you so much.
But
It was actually a really cool experience to share to be there.
I remember I went up to a number of the players afterwards and I said
Let's be honest, couldn't have done this without me, right? No, we could have.
Another part that you'll find really funny.
Because we all see it on TV.
Is when everybody's popping the champagne. So you've had champagne. Nobody pours champagne on their eyes.
It actually is a burning sensation.
It really hurts.
And that's why you see people with goggles. And I always thought, Oh, what wimps. We were going in with goggles. Oh what they can't have a little water spray. Yeah. But I didn't know it's stung. I thought it was just they didn't want to have stuff
Um
So in the beginning I don't have my goggles on. I'm like, Oh my God
This works. We're the goggles.
What a cool thing to experience. And then you know the part that's funny?
So
In between the ceremony
They go and they put plastic all over the locker room.
So that you can go spray. So all of a sudden there's some professional guy who comes in and tapes up the whole locker room with plastic. Cause you walk in, you're like
What the hell just happened here?
But
That and then
As we're going in
My daughter goes.
There's somebody outside who says he wants to come in.
Is he a lot of mic?
Yeah, sure. And so we had more people in the locker room than we should have had.
'Cause people were just asking if they could come in. I was like, Yeah, why not?
It's a great time. It was a lot, a lot of fun.
What do you think?
If you think about a room full of your peers
relative to that room, your views of the world would be at the most divergent.
Or different.
I think being in a room with NBA owners
People have very, very different views.
Because everybody's made money a different way.
Everybody's got different political beliefs.
It's fascinating to be in a room where
You've got thirty folks who've done exceptionally well.
But in totally different industries.
So they view their industry as being the right industry.
It's actually very interesting.
What would be the most surprising about that NBA

apart from it just being lots of different ways to make money.
No, I think just age is a big factor.
You've got three groups of owners.
You've got the owners who bought the teams
thirty years ago.
You've got owners who bought teams ten years ago and then you've got owners who bought them today.
And the ones today are much younger.
I've made
money much earlier, much quicker.
And then the ones
who are much older, who are in their seventies.
Bought the teams for like
twenty million dollars, fifteen, fifty million, a hundred million.
So their net worth is actually tied up in the team.
And
I would say the folks who ten years ago
Teams were expensive.
But not
Stratosphere.
A team is three or four billion dollars, a football team is six or seven billion dollars.
It's a different level of wealth.
It's crazy to think about. No, it really is. I couldn't afford a team today.
Well, he had a good timing.
My kid's good.
If you think about the pool of money that you've got and let's say you had to have others manage it, you couldn't do it yourself anymore.
As you think through that lineup, do more individual people come to mind that you would want to give it to or firms?
For me it's people.
But that's because
Think that says something interesting?
No, it's just being in the business, what you do is you meet a number of people.
So to me, someone like David Blitzer
is exceptionally talented in what he's doing.
Yes, he's at Blackstone and Blackstone's a great firm.
But when I think of Blackstone, I think of David.
To me
Josh Harris was somebody who when he was at Apollo
I didn't think of Apollo. I'd give money to Josh.
Now, would I gone to Paolo? Yes.
But
Why? Because I think Mark Rowan is super talented.
And I think Mark's doing a great job.
Then you look at younger individuals, folks that I've given money to.
I've given money.
To Matt.
Pearlman and his partner Alex.
I think they're the next generation.
Folks like Boaz.
Weinstein, Jason Mudricks.
Steve Ross.
On the real estate side and then
Just
Different folks that are out there.
That I think are super talented.
I got to meet
When we were doing sculptor.
I got to spend more time with Jeff Yas.
I thought he was
Really smart.
And would I give
His for money? Yes, because I
Came away thinking
Jeff is really smart.
Ross Stevens.
At Stonebridge, same thing.
I thought he's really smart.
Bill Ackman.
You bump into people and it's those people
That you want to give money to.
Can you say a word or two more about Matt and Alex and what makes them
Special on your mind.
That's big up and comers.
I think one
They have the ability to do th both. And what I mean by that is they're both street smart and book smart. Back to your point. Yeah. It really is.
I think Matt and Alex are
Just really bright guys. Yeah, and you'll never laugh harder. Yeah, but you'll have a great time with Matt and Alex. So
They will appeal to both groups of people.
You'll be with them and go, Wow.
Really great guys.
I wanna give them money'cause I think they're great guys. Or you go
Wow, those guys are really fricking smart.
I wanna give them money'cause I think they're freaking smart.
The fact that you can do both.
Is why I think
they're gonna build a great firm. That's why he gave them money.
I don't wanna just give money to people who I think are just smart.
I wanna give money to people who I think have both of those qualities because in our business that's really rare.
If you were forced to not be an investor and had to build some other kind of business, what would you build?
What would I build?
Wow.
I'd probably try to build a sports business.

That's unique and different.
I'd like to build a real estate business.
I think things that bring people together.
Is always interesting.
And try to use
The fact that
I can
Deal with people pretty easily.
So I'd want to be in a business where you're constantly dealing with folks.
Give me if you say a click more about each of those. So starting with sports, how would you approach sports? Where do you think in the world of sports there's
interesting things to explore today in twenty twenty four.
I think you want to try to build
Where do you think there's gonna be growth? So if I was starting out today, I would tell you the biggest growth is gonna be probably in women's sports.
Why? Because the cost of it is much lower.
And
I think
You're starting to see that the next generation.
wants to be more involved in women's sports. So I'd want to try to buy a bunch of women's teams.
You would try to do that in one city if you could.
It's just hard.
To try to do it in the city.
I think I love
Architecture. So I'd love to try to do
The real state side.
And I'd love to try to
Build buildings that
I thought are beautiful, but that people would want to either live in or work in.
What about international? We talked a lot about the US. What do you think is
Yeah opportunity or lack there of outside the US.
Oh, I think it's the same thing. I think Europe is always
five, ten years behind the US. I know Europeans hate it when I say that. Look, in Europe right now the biggest sport is soccer.
The biggest thing about European sports is relegation and promotion.
So I think it's just hard.
Because there you do have to spend money and if you don't spend money y you get relegated.
So think of that.
You don't have a choice of making money. You've got a
constantly be spending.
So I'd want to be in leagues
Where you're not doing that.
Where actually if you spend the money and you spend the time and you create something
That
You still have that.
Relegated.
So I think there's massive opportunities.
in Europe and in
I would say in Asia.
in sports because
That's very much a sports culture.
You tell me
Here we have
Minor league baseball.
Double A, Triple A.
How many
Of those games have you ever gone to?
One.
No, but in Europe.
I mean in the UK you've got
Premier League, Championship League, League One, League Two.
And
People are as crazy about the team in league two as they are about their premier league team.
To
It's very, very different.
And so because of that, that means people love sports and people
Are passionate about it.
People who have a passion of something.
I should be able to create
And build something that can take advantage of that.
What does it take to be a good mentor to younger investors?
You just have to care.
I think part of it is
To me, David Bonnerman, I would tell you was my mentor that
A mentor is somebody who wants you to succeed.
Whether he succeeds or not.
What you find most people are happy for you to succeed as long as it's
With them. Yes.
That's not a mentor.
That's somebody who's helping you. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with it.
A real mentor is somebody who wants you to do well.
And
Is trying to help you do well.
That's hard.
It's hard for all of us, especially in this business, because this is a zero sum business. And if you're lucky enough to find somebody in this business who's doing that.
It's rare.
If you think about
long exposure in credit, equities, sports.
What do you think the biggest risks are?
in the world today for each of those categories.
I think it's just geopolitical.
It's exogenous events. It's things that you and I can't control.
It's bad things happening.
And you and I never would have thought
We have an airline fund.
And people who go, What do you think is the worst thing that happens? Oh
Worst case.
Meii.
It's down one percent.
Two percent.
People are always gonna be flying.
COVID comes.
And it drops ninety five percent.
People couldn't go into stadiums. People couldn't do anything.
What can happen that will change the way people act?
And it's usually negative things.
It's not a positive event. It's gonna be a negative event.
So
That's what I worry about.
What's the nature of the airline fund?
I don't know much about that. Oh no, we just raise the fund to buy planes.
What was the opportunity you saw at the beginning? Well no, the the opportunity is you buy
Older planes.
And then you lease them out.
And then you're buying a plane at a discount to what it's worth because people really want to just fly on new planes.
And we thought as
The airline industry kept on growing, but as travel kept on growing.
you were gonna need more planes and people would lease those planes out and we'd make money on that.
And if that didn't happen, you could strip the planes out for parts.
And at the very least
You were gonna make your money
On the asset value of the plane?
And where you made real money.
was if you could lease them out and then strip it for parts.
So it's a great model.
As long as people are releasing planes.
When all of a sudden nobody's flying and
Takes
Two to three years for things to come back.
It had a real impact. I think we were down
Seventy five percent?
We're back up now, but
I think that was
Because of the hard work.
Uh
the team and what they were able to do, what Sean
Fole who runs that fund, what him and his team were able to do. I mean, it was huge.
It's interesting that you had an airline fund
Never a private equity fund.
What was usually the arbiter between doing something and not doing something at Avenue? What was the framework you would usually apply for yes or no?
Well because
In that
space we were always investing in
Airlines in the distress phone.
Or in planes.
So
It's
Hey, how cheap could you buy an equipment trust certificate? How cheap could you buy this plane?
You had people who needed to sell asset.
And you'd buy that.
So
That's sort of why and then you saw, look, we're seeing huge opportunities there, but we can't do as much in the main fund.
Let's go do a specific fund for that.
So that's why we do it. Private equity
You need a team, I mean it's totally different.
What's the fattest pitch that you've ever seen in your life and career in investing?
Oh God.
That would be when I was able to buy trade claims.
So under bankruptcy under the old bankruptcy code.
There was a convenience class and a convenience class was nobody knew what that would be.
Whether it was claims of ten thousand
or twenty five thousand or fifty thousand or hundred thousand and below.
But
That convenience class.
You always needed a class to vote in favor of a plan.
So the way they vote in favor.
Is you gave them a hundred cents.
So
Back then.
You could buy these claims for ten cents, twenty cents, thirty cents.
Forty cents on a dollar, and you were getting a hundred cents.
So it was a great, great business.
It wasn't scalable, but it was a phenomenal business. How big did it get? It got large. You could invest
twenty five, fifty million dollars, a hundred million dollars.
And why was no one else doing it?
Whenever there's that kind of opportunity, you always wonder.
It's too small.
It's a lot of work.
Do you make it up in volume?
Yes, I can go buy a ten thousand dollar claim, so
Okay, big deal. I bought five thousand, I made five thousand, nobody really cares.
But if I go by a hundred of those, if I go by five hundred of those, yes, but it's a lot of work to go do that.
If I could snap any sports franchise in the world into your portfolio a hundred percent ownership.
What would you take?
Any sports franchise?
Wow.
I guess the Knicks.
Why? To a fan.
No,'cause I live here in New York.
We did the nuts.
Yeah, it's just it's exhausting.
It's tiring.
You gotta fly two hours to Milwaukee.
How much would you do that?
I did it a lot. I go to probably half the games.
Wow.
You'd go to LA. I mean.
That was actually one of the reasons if I lived in Milwaukee I wouldn't have sold.
But you don't.
I think if you could own a franchise
I think Nick's would be great.
I think giants or jets.
Football team's actually a great franchise to own.
Think about it, you only have eighteen games and you're getting paid ten billion dollars on your meteorite for that. So yeah, it's pretty good. What do you think the most misunderstood sport is?
the business, the game, anything.
You've gotta be passionate about that.
If you're a baseball team owner.
There's
Eighty one home games.
You should be at those games.
Part of what a fan wants to see is that you're involved, that you believe in it.
For them to be excited, you need to be excited.
So
I think it's hard. Baseball's hard just simply'cause there's so many games. Football's easier'cause you can go it's once a week.
So it's easier to go to a game.
I think hockey's a great sport.
You either love it or you don't.
I love soccer.
I wish there was more score.
But
The purists will tell you no.
A beautiful game is one that's one zero.
I'm like no, that's a boring game.
But you've got all these different things.
If you think across all the deals you've done, you've done a lot in lots of different categories.
How would you summarise your philosophy of deal making?
I would tell you to is
You want to win?
But you don't want to hurt the other person.
And what I mean by that is
I don't think whenever we've negotiated
We've tried to get the last dollar.
You want to do a deal that is
Good for you.
And ends up being fair.
And the simple reason for that is
What you find out over time is
If you have a really good reputation, it's shocking how many deals come to you.
If your reputation is you're just trying to rip somebody's lungs out.
Yes, you will. You'll be able to do that.
But you're not gonna have a lot of those deals.
It's just hard. And in the world of credit, I'm sure you see a lot of lung ripping. No, you do. You do.
There's people who do that and you're like okay, I can't do business with you.
You could have made a lot of money in my business.
Bye.
Getting control of a company, firing everybody.
And liquidating company for the assets.
I never
Ever wanted to do that. To me
That had no interest, even though you could make more money.
And the reason for that is
Why do you want to try to do things that are gonna hurt others?
And yes, you can make more money doing that.
But
I think in life
If you're smart enough, you can figure out ways where you can make money.
It's been such a fun romp through a very interesting and lively career of investing. I always ask the same traditional closing question of everybody. What's the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?
Oh that's interesting.
I think probably
For me
It was
When I went to school
Being able to
To get a scholarship.
'Cause I don't think I could be where I am today.
Without
people who helped you get there.
The uh
other ones is I want to thank every

They're just purely kind.
I think people just felt bad.
Yeah.
I was not a player or whatever you describe. I was one of those geeky folks. So for all of you who I was able to take out on a date, thank you.
I think that's the first time I've heard that specific answer. I love it. Thanks for all those guys. Oh, it's so true. It's so sad back then. But I think when we look at life
There are people who helped you get to where you are.
And
I don't even know if you got to meet him.
For me to go to Clark.
On
A full scholarship.
It was academic. They were the only school who gave me a full scholarship.
That's where I went.
And it was great.
And because of that I was able
to then go to law school and I was able to do what I did. But
If I hadn't.
I mean, yes, I would have found a way to go
to a college or something, but
You needed money.
I'm not saying it's right or it's fair, but the fact that others helped you do that, there are people who have huge influences on your life that you don't fully appreciate.
Well, this has been so much fun. Thank you for your time. No, thank you.
Mm.
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