Speaker 1Why do we call something feedback to begin with? The reason we do it comes from a place of power, comes from expertise, comes from experience, comes from knowledge, comes from legitimate status. In other words, I have the position, the right, the role to give you information that will improve your performance and or change your behavior. When I give you feedback, I call it feedback. The expectation that both of us have, especially that I have as a leader, is you're supposed to take it seriously, you're supposed to yield to it. In other words, at least pretend you're going to engage this. Why? Because of power. That power has a consequence. It creates resistance. People naturally become a little bit reluctant, if not totally defensive, to things that come at them from power. So if I say to you, listen, you've been late to meetings a lot, team really needs you to be here on time because they want to hear what you have to say. I can say, I have some feedback for you. As soon as I say, I have some feedback for you, you may not dig in, but you're going to get a little bit defensive. That's the nature of power. All power produces that. Well, what happens if I take the same message, but I lower its power? The next piece below feedback is called advice. I could say the same thing. I could say, can I offer you some advice? Person says, well, what's your advice? And say, well, you need to get to the team meetings on time. People want to hear your opinion. My advice is you're missing a big opportunity. Same message. The only difference is I lowered my power.
Speaker 2I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's show is Randall Stutman, the founder of Admired Leadership and one of the most sought after executive coaches in the world. He's known across Wall Street, the hedge fund community, professional sports, the Olympics, and the White House entirely by word of mouth. Randall was a past guest on the show six years ago in a rare public appearance, and that conversation is replayed in the feed. Our conversation covers the framework for uncovering the behaviors and best practices of admired leaders, and then dives into examples around giving feedback. We also discuss how admired leaders both generate results and develop followership, and a few extra behavioral gems for investment leaders. Last year, Randall launched Alex, an insane AI coaching tool trained solely on his insights. It's effectively an executive coach available 24-7 for only $300 a year. We use it regularly and always for situations with elevated stakes. Give it a try at leadwithalex.com. Before we get going, it's travel season. Partner meetings, board meetings, the Capital Allocators CIO Summit, Omaha for Berkshire, and Milken. Across planes, trains, and automobiles, you're bound to run into a few snacks. When they're unavoidable, I try to remember Will Gadara's story of the pilot who lifted everyone's spirits by bringing families into the cockpit. But it's not always easy, which leads to my most recent pet peeve. I was on a flight with some unfortunate delays. We were scheduled to land from a cross-country journey at 11.30 p.m., but got diverted from New York to Philadelphia because of weather at just the wrong time. After a gas-and-go stop that took about an hour, we finally landed at 3 a.m., and at that time, there's only a scant crew working at hangars, so we waited another hour on the tarmac. None of that was anyone's fault. But after a long flight and equally long day, you can imagine everyone was ready to go home. All the passengers queued up to depart one by one in an orderly fashion. It's actually uncanny how respectful people are. When getting off planes. But there's a moment when it's your turn to get moving, and on this particular flight, after eight and a half hours, the person in the row in front of me seemed oblivious to the cadence of the queue. When it was his turn, he arose, seemingly clueless, and forced everyone behind him to wait. Of course, this wasn't just a grab-your-bag-and-go. Two bags, maybe three, come down from above. Then he pauses to put on his seatbelt. Then he puts on his jacket. Then reorganizes his bags to put a backpack on top of his wheelbag. And then, without as much as an I'm sorry, he slowly started walking off the plane. Not a single movement in his deplaning occurred until after the person in front of him had started walking. So there you have it, my new recent pet peeve. Don't be that person who isn't ready to deboard a plane when it's your turn. It's just not that hard. And thank you for spreading the word about my most recent pet peeve, which you'll only hear by tuning in to Capital Allocators. Capital Allocators is brought to you by AlphaSense. Here's something for you. Most AI tools today are very good at sounding right. But can you actually trace it back to a filing, transcript, or specific passage that drove the answer? Or are you just trusting the confidence of the output? For allocators, that's not a problem. You can just trust the confidence not a minor concern. A missed filing, incorrect source, or context that gets lost somewhere in a retrieval chain aren't edge cases. They're how decisions go wrong. AlphaSense is the AI platform built specifically for this. They own the content, over 500 million curated documents from broker research and expert transcripts to filings and earnings calls. And they own the retrieval layer on top of it. That means it's not just a matter of finding the right answer. 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One theme that keeps coming up on the show is GPs that build the strongest and most durable relationships with LPs are the ones that have both strong returns and strong operations. AI raises the stakes on operations. And having Juniper Square as your operations partner helps ensure your data is organized, accurate, and accessible so you can unlock operational alpha. That's why thousands of GPs are being trusted by the leading private market GPs. One theme that keeps coming up on the show is GPs trust Juniper Square. Learn more at junipersquare.com slash capital allocators. Please enjoy a conversation with Randall Stubb. Why don't we start with a refresher of your coaching philosophy? We
Speaker 1come at this thing behaviorally, best practice, which is fairly rare in the marketplace. My belief is most leaders want to be better, but they don't know how. You have to have specific things to do to make them better. The philosophy, which is so imbued in everything that we do, is that if I can show you best practice behaviors, especially ones that are tremendously impactful and that you haven't done before, don't know about, never heard before, and then I can get you to make somewhat of a habit of them, then it changes things. I don't get you to change a handful of behaviors that you engage in and how you give feedback, how you motivate, how you motivate, how you motivate. I don't need to get you to change dozens of things, how you build relationships, some of the things you do to create team. I can have an impact on terms of your leadership trajectory. How do you go about uncovering what works? I have my own methodology in terms of studying leaders. I've studied over 3,500 admired leaders, people that we believe have results and followership at the same time. Most good leaders, iconic leaders are results-based leaders. That's wonderful. You have to get results to lead. The people are able to get those results and then create followership where people will do anything for them. They feel as if they have a deep connection with them. They feel as if that connection is reciprocally loyal. As a result, they feel differently about themselves and they feel connected in a way that other people don't. Therefore, they have staying power. They'll follow those people from job to job, role to role. They'll do anything for them. When I find somebody that has those kinds of results and then has followership, we'll normally call that person an admired leader. If you have followership without results, which is also not uncommon, it doesn't mean you don't have any results. It just means you don't have sustained extraordinary results over time. We still want to talk to those people and study them. I have spent time with over 15,000 leaders trying to figure out their leadership, but about 3,500 admired leaders. When we study them, the first thing we do is we'll interview them. We normally don't learn all that much when we interview leaders. Just like a great ball player, they don't know what they do, the good ones. We'll interview the people around them. That's some things, generally the behaviors are baked into the that are told by them and about them. There's a reason that certain stories get told over and over and over again about them. The hard part is discerning what in that story actually reflects what they do. Behaviorally, then how do you find it past that? That's the hard part. We look at artifacts, emails, performance reviews, outlines, presentations. I call it creating a jacket for someone. Sometimes I can get a lot of data. Sometimes I don't get as much. Up until the 1950s, you couldn't get any behavioral data on anyone. I can't go backwards and study leaders historically very well, but contemporary leaders have lots of things. They give lots of interviews. The people around them are usually fairly verbose. If you ask them to describe what this leader does, you can get lots of artifacts. And so we can go deep with the leader. I have a particular way that I look at that data, discern certain kinds of things that they do differently. Then once I get that data, I can go deep with the leader. And so I can go I need to find other examples of it in the rest of my data set. In other words, if all of a sudden I study a leader, Ted, and I recognize that they do something very differently, and I go, that's really interesting. It's really cool. Everything that I know about leadership suggests that that should be highly effective. I don't make it worth teaching anybody else yet until I can find 30 examples elsewhere by other leaders. I couldn't see it until I saw that leader do it. But now once I see it, I can hear it and find it in other leaders. When I find a pattern like that, and it's strong enough, then I want to teach everybody in the whole world about it.
Speaker 2What's an example recently of a story you heard from someone you were studying that gave you that aha moment that you then triangulated and said, aha, here's something I want to share? It's NCAA tournament time right now.
Speaker 1It's March Madness. Tom Izzo is a famous Michigan State coach. He's been to so many Sweet 16s and Elite 8s and Final Fours. What's fascinating is there's a story about him where he'll show up to his peers' dorms and walk with them to class. Not to make sure they get to class or anything like that, just to say, hey, I'm your friend. I want to just talk. If you've got something on your mind, I want to chat about it. I'm just going to show up. I'm here. You don't want to talk about anything. We're just going to walk to class together because we're colleagues. We're in this together. Not many people with his level of success show up at their athletes' dorms and walk them to class. He does that consistently. I recently heard that story. There's something about reducing your status, making yourself every day, being able to create the comfort so that people want to talk to you, spending the time and the effort showing up at their place rather than them showing up at your place, walking with them. It is amazing the research about being side by side and walking with people. People get much more disclosive when they're actually walking shoulder to shoulder than they ever are face to face. There's something about that. That's a fun story. It's not a story that I'll probably find anything deep in, but it's a fun story. I think it's a fun story. I think it's but I'm collecting stories like that all the time.
Speaker 2The concept of taking something that you're convinced is a behavior of admired leaders and sharing it so someone has to practice it. How long does it take for someone to adopt something new they haven't been doing? I thought you were going to ask me how long
Speaker 1does it take me to figure out the damn behavior because sometimes I know it's there. I can articulate it in a way that I can teach it or that other people can teach it. That takes some time. You've got to give it a language. You have to give it a vocabulary. If it's the right vocabulary, it makes all the sense in the world after that. Until you can actually harness it, it's not. In terms of teaching or creating a habit, there's things that you would do. Number one is you have to keep this thing in front of you every day. You have to have some mnemonic device that reminds you. I don't care if it's a note card or post-it note or a screensaver or lipstick on a mirror. Then you have to try it every single day. There's got to be one opportunity every day. Hopefully initially, low consequence situation, trusted relationship. You got to do it every day, at least once. The really good ones, the people that are trying to create habits, they'll schedule it. They'll go next Tuesday, I'm going to be in this meeting. I'm going to do that behavior. The people that are really focused on this will keep a running journal of opportunities taken, missed for themselves. Things I could have done, could have said differently, or I like the way I did that. How did I do that? They'll sometimes keep a journal for other people like my leader, what opportunities did they miss today? They don't know this behavior, but they're missing it all the time. What would I have said or done differently if I were them? Once you do that for a handful of weeks, three, four, five, six weeks, it'd become a routine, it'd become a habit, and then it will be yours. You won't have to think about it very much until you get lazy like everybody else. There's lots of habits you and I build. Then over time, we lose them. I have behaviors that I mastered early in my career that I have found, and I realized 10 years later, I don't have them anymore. I had to go back and redo them, recreate the habit of them, but that's how you do it. It's going to take you two months at the most to build an inculcated behavior.
Speaker 2How do you keep track of the websites, 100, the field notes you write every day? There are so many different behaviors you could be practicing. How does somebody go about deciding, oh, here's my list of behaviors I want to work on?
Speaker 1The good news and bad news about admired leadership is it's overwhelming because there's so much of it. What you're going to have to do is pick a behavior that you're going to work on, just one, not 20. This is 30, 40 years worth of work if you want it. The one you should pick is the one that you have passion for. It's the leader you want to be. You want to be the kind of leader that does that, not necessarily just for effect. I talk a lot about technique and not to do things in technique because if you do them for effect, you won't keep them up. You'll only do them in some situations. You won't get very skillful at them. As soon as they don't work on somebody, you'll give them up. Behavior that you believe in, that represents what you value, that you're passionate about, and the kind of leader you want to be. Once you do that, you'll have a commitment to make that real for you over time. I'm giving you more than you could ever chew or digest with the hopes that something's going to grab you by the throat and hold you down until you do it. That's the key.
Speaker 2Over the last couple of years, what have you observed changing in the experience of the leaders you work with from different environments or different behaviors? Leadership is leadership.
Speaker 1Most of it doesn't change. Of course, the pace of change is nothing we've ever seen before. There are certain behaviors and things you have to do to adapt, not necessarily admired leader behaviors, but there are things that you have to adapt in order to create the urgency and the speed and deal with the level of pace that's going on. Topically, I would have told you 20 years ago that it was more about style and executive presence than I've ever seen. I would have told you maybe 10 years ago it was about talent selection and about creating and forging the right team, but I don't see any real one pattern that matters more than another right now. I coach something like 60 to 70 people at the same time, and I have for 30 plus years. Sometimes you'll see a theme that generates, but I don't see any theme other than everybody in the world talks about AI too much. AI, the most overhyped and the most underhyped phenomenon we've ever seen. Amazing, crazy possibilities and what it does for you. It does already, but overhyped in lots of other ways. Leaders are fixated on it right now, and they'll probably be fixated on it for the next few years for sure, if not forever.
Speaker 2It's probably a good opportunity for me to ask you about your application of AI, which Admired Leadership Alex is the craziest best coach I've ever experienced. I'd love to hear about your journey in creating Alex. Alex is so unbelievable.
Speaker 1It is hard to make sense of. First of all, Alex stands for Admired Leadership Excellence. That's why we call it Alex. Alex, of course, is gender neutral. Who knew that I was spending 40 years of my life preparing to put my content into an AI? People ask me for years, why aren't you writing books? I didn't want to write books. I wanted to coach people. I didn't want to be that guy, that sage on the stage. Now it's turned out to make it look like I'm a genius because none of our stuff has ever been out in a real way. I have hundreds of behaviors and thousands of best practices that no one has to except now we've taught everything to Alex. Alex operates from Anthropics Cloud as a base, but it has no access to the internet. It only answers from our data and we have a couple million words in it. I have a team that is amazing in terms of being able to train it and gauge it with heuristics. Alex will disagree with you, will create context with you. It operates like a real coach. In many cases, you can't tell that you're not talking to a coach. You're not talking to a live person. Shortly, it's going to have voice. It's going to even be spookier. In essence, it's like talking to me. You might not want to talk to me, but Alex knows everything that I know, pretty much, and has the subtleties. Now, Alex can't care about you, doesn't have conviction. It's not going to replace me as a coach or any of the good coaches in our firm. It can't work through a multi-level problem the way that I can. In terms of clarifying, creating, illustrating best practice, allowing people to role play and practice things, it's unbelievably good. My partner likes to tease me. It says, talking to Alex is like talking to Randall, except it actually cares about what you think. That's probably true. Alex is cool, and it only gets better because we're putting more data in it all the time, but it's only our data. I'm very guarded in terms of what I put in there. It has to be really special and actionable. It doesn't have any nonsense in it or mediocre advice or lists of things, and that's what makes it so special.
Speaker 2As a live example of AI coming into, it's clearly a human-to-human interaction business, how have you thought about how Alex impacts CRA and my leadership as a business? us. It makes us stronger.
Speaker 1It gives people 24-7 access to our content and to the way we think about things. At two o'clock in the morning, you can ask Alex a question. By the way, Alex is entirely confidential. We can't see your questions and answers. We do a couple of quality checks randomly, but other than that, it's just like a coach. It's totally confidential. I think it makes the coaches better. It certainly enables everybody in our firm to know our content more thoroughly. It's simply a supplement to you. In many cases, we have certain coaches in our firm who will engage a client and the two of them together say, let's see what Alex says. Let's explore that, which is fascinating in and of itself. It's not something that I do in my coachings. I don't want to talk to myself. Although fascinating, Ted, a couple of weeks ago, I argued with Alex. I've done that many times. It's an LLM. It doesn't think. Here I am arguing with it back and forth. I said to Alex, Alex, talking to you, engaging you is like talking to myself. It says, well, Randall, I respectfully disagree. And I go, why? And it says, I know everything from you. I know your content, but I can pull it together faster than you can. I can pull things in ways that you don't. I can be original in the things that I say as well, because I'm blending and synthesizing things just like you would synthesize things. I might surprise you with what I come up with that would represent, certainly be consistent with what you would think, but would be different. I'm like, who are you? So scary. This is where we are now. Imagine where we're going to be in two or three years from now.
Speaker 2It's so very cool. How do you think about the different categories of behaviors when you're organizing all of this?
Speaker 1When you find an admired leadership behavior or a best practice, in most cases, it's not perfectly identifiable. Is it a behavior of credibility or is it a behavior of relationship? Is it a behavior of motivation or is it behavior of team dynamic? You have to bucket these things in order to make sense of them. There's no perfect bucket. What we'll do is we normally, think of the functions of leadership. Good leaders are good at giving feedback. They're good at building teams. They're good at propelling change. They make quality decisions. You can bucket things relative to what are the topics and functions that leadership serves. Occasionally, you'll miss a behavior. Your behavior could probably fit in four or five categories. I can tell you this, Ted, I'm not very special, but what we know is really special. And we know so much of it. The real thing is to find a place where it will shine in that particular topic. Topical area where it's going to be taken notice. People will take notice of it in that spice because it fits the kinds of problems and situations that they confront when they think
Speaker 2of that issue. I think universally in our industry, people struggle with feedback. Would love to hear your favorite behaviors tied to giving feedback.
Speaker 1First one isn't a behavior. It's just a best practice, but it's such a cool best practice. It starts like this. The reason we do it comes from a practice. It's a practice of giving feedback. It comes from expertise, comes from experience, comes from knowledge, comes from legitimate status. In other words, I have the position, the role to give you information that will improve your performance and or change your behavior. The expectation that both of us have, especially that I have as a leader, is you're supposed to take it seriously. You're supposed to yield to it. Why? Because of power. So if I say to you, listen, you've been late to meetings a lot. Team really needs you to be here on time because they want to hear what you have to say. As soon as I say I have some feedback for you, you may not dig in, but you're going to get a little bit defensive. A person says, well, what's your advice? Same message. And by lowering my power, I've reduced resistance. Why is it we don't call most feedback advice? Because most leaders don't want you to have a choice. Advice is accepted or rejected. The truth is they can accept or reject your feedback too. Let's not pretend too hard that they can't. That's the notion of advice. Let's lower power one more time. I could actually lower power two or three more times, by the way, but let's lower power one more time. What do we call it? Recommendation suggestion. Now what's cool about recommendation suggestion is it's lower power. So it produces less resistance and very few people will reject it. Unlike advice where they hear it as accept or reject, recommendation suggestion is, okay, I'll take it under consideration. Again, they're taking your general feedback. Consideration. Instead of saying, have some feedback for you, or can I offer you some advice? Say, hey, I have a suggestion. I know very few people that would go, oh, I don't want your suggestion. Now, all of a sudden, my suggestion is you get to the meetings on time. Same exact message, except I've reduced resistance entirely. What I tell leaders all the time, Ted, is they need to get out of the feedback business and get in the recommendation suggestion business. They're going to be able to give a lot more feedback a lot more often with a lot less resistance and by how they introduce it and frame it. I know very few people that if I said to you, I have some feedback for you, they'd go, I can't wait to hear your feedback. But if I say, hey, I've been thinking about this. I have a suggestion or recommendation. Most people would go, if you have any level of credibility with me at all, what is it? They want it. They don't want your feedback, but they want your recommendations and suggestions. And when you frame things like that, you're somebody that as a leader can offer feedback all the time. You're always offering suggestions, always offering recommendations. Some leaders don't like that because they don't their notion is recommendations. My feedback is stronger than recommendations. The truth is people can take it that way anyway. They don't have to yield to what you say because you come from power. Now, there are times where I only want you to give feedback. Performance reviews, things have gone tremendously off rail. We need to talk about feedback because I need to use my power and authority to convince you of the seriousness, the gravity of this and beseech you to act on it. But that's not the case. It's 99% of the time. Get out of the feedback business, get in the recommendation suggestion business. You'll see that it changes everything.
Speaker 2So simple. If you were taking that one level lower, you said that you could lower the status even more than that. How would you do that?
Speaker 1Lower than that is observation. I don't give in feedback. I just make an observation. Most leaders aren't mature enough to do that because they can't stop from them saying and finishing what the observation means. With kids, with people that are highly resistant, people very sensitive, sometimes only two or three people can do that. And that's not the case. Only takes an observation. Hey, I saw you do this in the meeting. What does that mean? I know, just an observation. Give yourself your own feedback. I'm going to call out, what did I see? What did I observe? What do I think? I noticed that people respond poorly to you when you do this. Well, do you think I should not do that? I don't know, just an observation. Observation is even lower in power because it says, I'm not even taking a position. I'm simply going to call things out the way that I see them by calling them out, there's implications. There's a reason that that matters and why I would call that and make that observation, but I don't discuss it. People that are good at observation, a lot of good, spectacular teachers are wonderful at observation. A lot of great coaches. I've seen some wonderful ski instructors, mountain climbing instructors, pilot instructors. Some of them are just wonderful. They just simply throw out observations. You're sitting there going, what does that mean? You're giving yourself your own feedback over and over again.
Speaker 2In that 1% of the time where it calls for feedback, what are best practices or behaviors to give the feedback so it can be heard and taken in knowing that there will be this resistance? You always have the
Speaker 1option to allow people to internalize their own feedback. There's nothing more powerful than I give my feedback to myself rather than you telling me. Too many leaders depend too much on telling people and delivering feedback in a more direct way. I'm not saying that that's wrong all the time, but the power is if I give myself my own feedback. Rather than say, well, what do you think? Just ask an open-ended question. How do you think you did? What do you think went well and didn't go well? You can do that. What I think is interesting, and my leaders generally do this, is they use a third party. What would your mother say about what you just did? It's not what I'm saying. It's what your would say too, but I'm going to ask you to answer my question by using a third party. How do you think the customer will respond when we do this? How do you think your colleagues took that meeting? What was their conclusion when they walked out of that room today? They're going to give you an answer, and that answer is their own feedback. They're going to tell you exactly what you would have said to them directly, except they're going to generate it. It's going to come from them, and they're going to go, okay, I got it, and they're going to internalize it. Internalized feedback is feedback that's going to get acted on, remembered, has real duration to it, and has a longer-term impact. Anytime I can get you to give yourself your own feedback, and using a third party is the easiest way to do it. There's always a user, or a customer, or a colleague, or another parent, or a friend. What do you think they would say? I don't have the objective view. I don't have the perfect view as to what they would say. Whatever you said, you're giving yourself your own feedback when you answer the question. That's tremendously powerful, and good leaders do it all the time.
Speaker 2One of the ongoing challenges you see in the investment world is giving feedback to high income people. How have you found admired leaders deal with the person who's performing who might not be fitting the culture the way you want the culture to move forward?
Speaker 1First of all, independent of admired leadership, let's think about best practice when it comes to feedback. There's two things I'd want you to think about in terms of that world. Number one is right after success, right after mission accomplished, right after tasks have been achieved, people are much more receptive to feedback. Why? Because they've just succeeded. They've got an armor to them because of their success, their effectiveness. They're much more sensitive right after defeat, right after mistake, right after inaccuracy. Yet that's when leaders want to give feedback. They want to give feedback right when the person doesn't want it, when they're going to be most resistant to it. You got to remember there is not a lot of timing issues relative to feedback, best practice wise, but that's one of them. Right after success or effectiveness, you can get feedback pretty fast and people will absorb it and take it in and want to deal with it. After defeat or after mistake, after error, you probably want to give some people some buffer. Give them some time to reflect and get them emotionally ready so that they're capable of dealing with that feedback as a result. Too many leaders correct people too fast. Too many leaders deal with mistakes too quickly. The whole point of feedback is to change behavior and improve performance. It isn't just for you to get it off your chest and have catharsis. That's a big mistake that most leaders make. Another big mistake that leaders make, there's a bias that almost everybody has across the whole world. You have it, I have it, everybody has it. And that is we're generally more critical of people based on our own strengths. Whatever it is that we're good at, we're more critical about other people about it. Yet we know that there's lots of ways to get to the outcomes. It doesn't have to be our way. But if you're somebody that's really analytical, you'll be more critical of other people's smarts. If you're somebody that's really organized, you'll be very critical of people that aren't as organized. If you're somebody that's creative, you'll be critical of creative. You do this to your kids, you do it to your spouse, you do it to your team. You generally over-index and over-emphasize the things that you're best at. And that's what you generally get critical of people with. That's something you really got to fight. You got to fight the bias to go, I need to be more objective than that. I need to focus on the strengths, weaknesses that they have and the feedback they need, not reflection of me. The question you asked, which I think is fascinating, is I have somebody that has maybe a great performance, but they have a lousy attitude or in some way they're affected. It's quite common because people feel bigger than life in some of these organizations. The deal is you've got to keep up a cadence of feedback with those people. You can't save it up because the reason that people don't give feedback to those people is because they generate those results, because they're dependent on that outcome, because they don't want to turn those people off. What would happen if all of a sudden that person copped an attitude or they got disinfected and they left and went to another fund? So we generally hold it up. And even when we give it, we're so indirect and we walk such a delicate line. The result of that is people learn the shitty attitude I have. It's okay as long as I perform. We reward all the wrong stuff. The answer is, hey, get in the suggestion feedback business. But in particular, I need an ongoing small issue. Let's talk about the smallest things. I don't have to deal with your attitude generally. Let's talk about how you engage with this person. Let's talk about how you're learning this. Let's talk about how you share that. You need an ongoing high cadence of feedback. On the smallest issues over time, what you'll see is you'll slowly move people from negative to positive in terms of climate attitude, other kinds of affect. That's the key. If I save it up and I never give it to you and never really deliver the hard message, then I'm rewarding you for all the wrong stuff. I'm going to get more of it. That's how prima donnas become prima donnas. We're going to take a quick
Speaker 2break in the action to tell you about Ridgeline, the investment management platform. for firms who are rethinking how work gets done. You're at your desk looking at a line graph of your firm's growth. The line is moving sideways, linear growth, and you know exactly why. You're constrained by your operational bandwidth that's been the same for so long, it just feels like the cost of doing business. Ridgeline is built to change that line's trajectory, to be the inflection point that takes your growth from incremental to accelerated with the team you already have in place. Ridgeline is the only AI native investment management platform that brings together the front, middle, and back office with one set of data and powerful AI agents that automate away operational drudgery. So your talent can shift from managing old technology to materializing new ideas. Ridgeline helps asset and wealth managers understand and improve their firm's growth trajectory. To see how your firm compares to 16,000 of your peers, visit ridgeline.ai/trajectory. If you file for an ADV, your firm is already there. Then talk to Ridgeline about how you can do more with the team you already have. You mentioned a couple of times best practices as distinct from behaviors. What's the difference between the two?
Speaker 1Best practice is more situational. It's context specific. It may not be perfectly timeless or universal. An admired leadership behavior would have worked a hundred years ago, would work in any industry. It doesn't matter about technology. It doesn't matter who you are, where I am, what cultures we come from. It's universal in that way. That's what makes them so powerful. That's why I'm trying to find admired leader behaviors all the time, because those are the ones that have the biggest impact and they're the most powerful in the hands of a crafty leader. Best practices exist all kinds of places, like holding your feedback bias at bay. A best practice like a suggestion instead of feedback itself. They're contextual. I don't always want to offer suggestion. I don't always want to offer recommendation. I do need to think about the context. What do you need to hear? When do you need to hear it? That's what makes them best practice. Whereas behaviors apply anytime. I can bake them into my style and in the way that I lead. They're never going to get me in trouble and they're always going to have some level of influence that I want. They're rare. That's why they're so hard to find. I've been able to find 500 of them, probably 30 or 40 of them in feedback. What's an example of one of those admired leader behaviors in feedback? You ask people how questions, just like you ask them what and why and where questions all the time. How questions when they come to feedback changes things. Let me tell you why. A how question, if it's done and carries feedback, actually embeds the feedback inside the question. When I say to you, Ted, how are you going to upgrade the talent on your team? The feedback is that your team talent needs to be upgraded. But I don't say that. Instead, I simply ask a how question. The feedback is already embedded in the question itself. No resistance, no conversation. As soon as you start to answer, you subscribe to my feedback. Really sneaky. Now, imagine you say, well, Randall, my team's pretty good. I don't need to upgrade the talent. I'm going to make you own it anyway because it's my feedback. So I'm going to say, if we were to upgrade the talent on your team, how would we go about it? What would we look for? Because I want to carry that, but I want to carry it without any resistance. So now, listen, the most admired leaders don't only ask how questions, but they ask more how than you and I do when we give feedback. What they really do is they ask a how question and they collaborate with the other party to answer the question. It isn't a gotcha. They say things like, how are you going to repair that relationship with one of your colleagues? The person says, well, and they go, let's talk about it. They figure out a strategy, a solution going forward. All the while, instead of sitting down and saying, hey, I need to give you some feedback. You got a rocky relationship with one of your colleagues. You go, well, it's not that rocky. And then we start to argue and get it. And then we start to argue and get nowhere. How questions, they embed feedback inside them. And you study admired leaders. They use them all the time to carry feedback. They carry more feedback with how questions in order to reduce resistance and to stop people from arguing with them and instead engaging them and making them own the feedback. They make people accountable to their feedback instantaneously by using a how question instead. If we went back in time and we studied great leaders in the history male and female culture to culture, we'd find a lot more how questions than you think. Because instinctively, intuitively, or just that they learned it, they've learned that resistance is their enemy with feedback. Defensiveness is their enemy in feedback. Arguing over the reality of the facts and that's happened in the past, enemy of change. How do I get past all that? Ask my feedback, let it get carried with a how. How about one more? There's something that I call an echo question. That has no right answer. It's not a rhetorical question, but I want you to think about it and I'm going to think about it. I say to you, you're up for promotion this year. There's pluses and there's minuses. There's people that will advocate for you and people that probably would want other people to be promoted over you. I want you to think about the reasons that you have for being promoted and the things that are in your way. You think about it, I'll think about it. Let's talk next week about it. In that week that transpires, that question will echo in your head. You'll first ask, why did Randall ask me that? Second thing is, what's my answer? Third thing is, what's his answer? You will eventually land so that when we sit down and talk about it, you will have given yourself almost all the feedback that I would want it. You'll say, well, here are the pluses and here are the minuses and I can see any gap between how you see it and I see it. It's so fascinating because you prepared yourself with my feedback and I never gave you any yet. You're already half the way there, maybe all the way there. When you study admired leaders, they always have an echo question going on with somebody about something. I don't mean that they're asking the same person over and over again, an echo question, but they're always asking people, hey, you think about this, I'm going to think about this. question. Let's explore our answers. If it's going to create anxiety, they might talk about that afternoon. They don't let people be anxious all weekend. What they'll do is they'll say, what's the feedback that you really need? Is there an echo question that I might be able to get you thinking about it? Criteria, success, rewards, punishments, promotions, hiring, selection, people's reactions and response to you, all ripe for echo questions. Echo questions are really cool. Imagine sitting down with your child and saying, hey, I want to talk about how things are going on your team, how the coaches are thinking of you in terms of your skill and your attitude, as well as your friends and your teammates are engaging. I want you to think about what are your big assets? What are the things that you're really bringing to this team? And what are the things that you could work on? I haven't thought about it completely. I want you to think about, let's talk about tomorrow. Now, first thing that'll happen is your son, daughter, colleague, teammate will go, let's talk about it right now. You go, no, I want to think about it. I don't have clarity yet. What you don't say out loud is I want this question to echo. Okay. I need it to echo in your head. By the time we show up and talk about it tomorrow, you'll have generated all kinds of thoughts and energy and activity, and you'll have your own feedback. Most of which I'll agree with. Occasionally I need to push something. And then when I, whatever I push will be directly the gap between how you see it and how I see it. So cool. Echo questions unknown. I'm in the literature, very common with admired leaders and feedback.
Speaker 2Every time you mention a behavior or best practice, it feels totally intuitive. I'm curious if there are behaviors or best practices that you found that are
Speaker 1counterintuitive. Oh, there's quite a few counterintuitive behaviors. Lots of them. Once we articulate them, most of them are pretty obvious. You've been around how questions your whole life, the carrying feedback with them. That's a wholly different thing. Now that I've said to you that how questions embed feedback inside them makes perfect sense. It's a fact. There are some behaviors that are somewhat counterintuitive. Let me give you one. When you think about high-performing teams, they operate differently in terms of their relationship with the leader. There's an old idea around matrix, a two-by-two grid that says, the relationship I have with my leader is about my relational closest with the leader. How close am I? Do they know me? Do they care about me? Do they understand me? At the top of that matrix is the notion of expectation standard, focus on details. Most high-results leaders are more focused on details. They're more focused on standards than they are focused on relational closeness. But we know that high-performing teams require both. The highest-performing teams are the ones where the leaders have really high standards, really high expectations, unusual focus on certain kinds of details, and people feel relational closeness. Problem is, most of the people that are really high-standard leaders don't like to be relationally close. They're not warm and fuzzy people. They're not very empathetic. People that are empathetic generally don't have high standards. They generally don't have high standards. They generally don't have the attention to details, which is why so many teams underperform or get inconsistent, or the team members get defensive over time. They'll get defensive because the leader has high expectations, but they won't have relational closeness. They won't feel as if they're cared about. Then the opposite occurs. I know my leader cares about me, but they don't stand for much. They don't push me hard. They don't challenge me. You would think that the normal pathway is, I got to teach people how to be more empathetic, warm, and fuzzy. But my experience is, most people that are high-energy leaders, they don't care about me. They don't care about me. Most people that are high-energy leaders, they don't care about me. High-energy, high-charging, results-based leaders, they're incapable of being warm and empathetic and fuzzy. But there's a different pathway. That is, you can understand people more deeply in order to create the same relational closeness. I can invest in understanding the experiences that have made you up as a human being, has got you to be where. I can understand your judgments, your decisions, the quality of your decisions over time. I can understand geographically what's important to you. Where do you find solace? Where do you vacation? I can understand what bothers you, what makes you happy. I can understand, your talents and skills. I can understand your passions. I can understand your kids' passions. I can invest in you. You show me a leader that you think has got fabulous team results, and you say, this person's grumpy. This person is not anything warm and fuzzy. I'll show you somebody that has found the counterintuitive pathway. They've learned to create relational closeness without empathy. They've learned to create it without being warm and fuzzy and giving people a lot of couch time. What they've done is they've invested deeply in those people and understanding them. They keep notes, and they can do it. They can do it. They can do it. They can continually build a book of understanding about those people. Those people say, that person is invested in understanding me. They get me. I feel relationally close. They can have as high standards as they want. That's counterintuitive to me. I would have never imagined that. You show me a coach like Bill Belichick or Nick Saban or Pat Summitt. These people with high expectations, you go, these are not warm and friendly people. I will show you every time. Nick Saban invested tremendously in terms of understanding. Talk to every coach that you meet. You talk to every coach you ever played for, if you played for him. Looked at every piece of game film. Knew physically everything about you. He could tell you the width of your palm. Wow. You're going to invest in me like that? You care about me in a different way. Belichick, famous for knowing your kids, the sports your kids play, the positions of the sports your kids play. He goes out of his way to talk to those coaches that coach your kids. This guy cares about me, even though he's a grumpy guy. Every high-performing team leader, has a combination of those two things. How do they create relational closeness? How do they have high expectations and standards? It's not intuitive, but there's a second pathway to relational closeness that's not intuitive to me. And that is deep understanding. On the margin, how important is tone? Tone is style. And style is the way that you express yourself. And you can express yourself positively or negatively. We generally overemphasize athletic coaches because it's something we all know. And they're out there in the marketplace. They don't have a lot in common with most corporate leaders. We don't get fiery halftime talks. We can't kick people off our team instantaneously, bring somebody new in. We don't have two-hour games. There's so many things. Most athletic coaches can have a bigger range of tone and style than you and I can as team leaders. We need to have a more positive, it doesn't have to be warm, but more engaging, more validating style to the way that we engage people. You can have a fairly negative style. You can have a fairly positive style without recognizing it. Example, where do you start when you start talking with people? Do you start on the negative or you start on the positive? That's a trained thing, by the way. You weren't born that way. Most smart people start on the negative because it's a differentiator, because it illustrates differentiation and distinction as well as it illustrates, at least in most people's mind, that you understand something at a deeper level. What you normally do is go right to the negative, but there's not an optimism in that. Have you trained yourself to start positive or do you start yourself on the negative? What's a tone? It sets a tone. It sets a climate. Most leaders don't realize that that's the case. They don't realize they're doing it. When they start giving feedback, they immediately go for the criticism and then they go, oh, I feel bad about this. And then they end with some weak throwaway positive where people that have a better tone will say, I need to emphasize the positive, not just to make you feel better, but just to be objective and to set the right tone so you're ready to hear my negative feedback. Tone matters. I think of it as more of a style and approach. It's got to have that effect. It's either positive or negative. And I can get there in lots of different ways.
Speaker 2I want to circle back to something you started talking about at the beginning, which is followership. You hear about that word and it creates energy. It's exciting to the thought of a leader that you just want to follow anywhere. How have you gone about teasing out what creates that followership? It's
Speaker 1mostly a function of the way you motivate and inspire people and build relationships. If I find a followership leader that doesn't have results, I can still learn a lot of stuff from them. Not as an admired leader, but pretty cool. When I talk to people around you who you lead, how do they feel about your relationship? Do they feel as if you're adding value to them? Do they feel if there's a high frequency of contact? Do they feel that the investment you're making is significant? Do they feel that you're making them better and challenge them in that way? High talent wants that. The relationship piece is a big deal relative to followership, but so is motivation, inspiration. Do I want you to succeed? Am I showing you? I'm rooting for your success. Would I do anything for you to succeed or do I put hurdles up in front of you to make you earn my trust, earn my respect, earn my desire? Followership is more an orientation that we have toward people. Good followership leaders tend to be high fans of other people. They tend to be relationally close to other people, but in particular, they tend to invest in other people in a multitude of ways. That builds a sense of loyalty and a connection that they get to enjoy the benefit of. When a leader's
Speaker 2tasked with whatever the objective is of the company they're running, investment firm they're running, and you have all these other things to be relationally close to the people to create that followership, all the ways of giving feedback, how do people go about managing their time?
Speaker 1Leadership takes a lot of time if you're going to be any good at it. I'd argue that you need to organize yourself more about relationships and conversations than about tasks. That too many leaders think about tasks, and by the way, that's a perfect example. If you're going to be good at this leadership thing, you need to organize yourself around what are the conversations I want to have today? What are the relationships I want to touch and engage today? That's going to have more long-term impact for you than anything else. Time is always going to be a problem because that takes time away from getting things done, but so does a lot of other things. For example, some people are so overscheduled, they've never had unstructured time to think freely and let decisions and strategy and other things bake. They make poor quality decisions as a result. That's a function of time. Time too. We can think we're wasting time when I'm choosing to walk to the office, when in fact, instead I'm choosing to walk and think about my decisions walking to the office without an interruption, doing some deep work around that decision. Time for you and me is always the challenge. How do we spend it? It isn't that I don't have enough of it or I have too much of it. It's how do I spend it? When I think about time and I think about coaching leaders is, I don't care what you value, but is there a time value congruency? If you tell me your family's important. I want to be able to look at your field of time and how you spend it and know that you're spending a good portion of your time with your family. Because if you're not, then that value is nonsense. Good leaders have time value congruence. They schedule their priorities rather than let their priorities schedule them. You raise the ultimate problem, which we all face, which is we have to decide how we spend our time. And there's nobody that's telling us it's perfectly right. And we're going to see short and long-term benefits or effects of those choices. We can be really bad at them or really good at them. A lot of things that look like they're productive and effective right now are probably bad choices of time.
Speaker 2As you've thought about scaling your time from being private with your clients for many years to six years ago when we talked, you were launching admiredleadership.com and started writing field notes. What's been the impact of those first two initiatives?
Speaker 1I do nothing but sit around and write every day. It's crazy. It's no simple task, writing even a short little email every day that hopefully is articulate and makes sense, that especially is a best practice. I spend an enormous amount of my time writing now where I never did before. I spend most of my time talking before. I'm writing every day, which makes it easier because you get more fluid. I've had a couple of days where I go, oh, crap. I get no field note for tomorrow and I'm not in the mood, but that doesn't happen very often. It's back to this notion of have to versus get to. I constantly remind myself, I get to write these field notes. I get to have hundreds of thousands of people read my stuff. I get to coach wonderfully successful people, people that need me to get to the next spot where they're trying to get to. I get to do those things. I don't have to. I'm still fairly private. This is the first podcast I've given in five, six years. I gave a bunch when we first started doing all this because I had to. I'm really a big fan of yours, so I'm happy to do this one, but it's not something I'm lining up to do. I spend most of my time coaching and talking to my clients' perspective as well as real and talking to people because I have literally hundreds of people that are former clients of mine that I worked with for years. There's no reason for me to maintain the same level of cadence, but they still call me looking for a sounding board and advice and counsel, so I'm constantly engaged. I'm probably busier now than I've ever been. How's the uptake been on the website? Really good. Both Field Note Readership, Alex Accept, Alex Use, our base platform at myleadership.com. And that platform, that playbook that's in there with behaviors, all of it continues to grow and expand. And I'll go organically. We chug along with revenue to continually invest in growing the place, and it's been growing very nicely and has since inception 40 years ago.
Speaker 2If you were giving advice to a chief investment officer, head of an investment firm, about one behavior you think they should consciously practice over the next couple weeks, curious how it comes to the top of your mind. When I think of a chief investment
Speaker 1officer, I immediately think of decision-making. I think of somebody that's making critical decisions over and over and over again. If there's one thing that I would want a chief investment officer to do is to separate decision process from decision outcome. Those are different things. You don't control the outcome perfectly. In many cases, you don't control the outcome much at all. You always control the process. The idea of being able to make for a great process, knowing the difference between one- and two-way decisions, that is one-way decisions that can't revoke that easily. It's going to cost a lot of money or time and energy. Two-way decisions, I can revoke that if I need to. I need different processes for those things. In order to create a robust and vigorous process for those one-way decisions especially, here's the key, to reward the process, not the outcome. We get to lots of investment outcomes by luck. For sure, market things that happen that we had no control over, and you celebrate, and you go, what are you celebrating? Because we celebrate luck. We don't say that. We're celebrating skill. We wouldn't have even thought of it, but that's not the case. Start celebrating decision processes that are great processes that produce bad outcomes. What you're going to find is you make for people willing to take more risk, willing to invest their time and energy, hone in and be specific with the process. Long-term, they will make better quality decisions. Why? Because you're focused on the quality of the process. The outcomes are what they are. Good leaders always celebrate and reward process, even when outcomes are not great. The best leaders will do that on purpose, they will go out of their way to say, wonderful process. Everybody around the room will be scratching their head going, but it didn't turn out well. And you go, you bet. But if we did it 10 more times, it would turn out great eight times. That's something we don't control. We control this all the time. Figure out your decision process, especially one-way decisions, codify it, and make it consistent, and reward and celebrate anybody that does it with rigor. That will create better long-term decisions throughout your whole organization.
Speaker 2In the work you do outside investing, in sports, coaching, other businesses, we'd love to hear your favorite story of something that might not cross over at all, just something that's come up that you find yourself repeating over and over. I coach college golf teams and college golfers for fun.
Speaker 1I played in college and I give back to the game and I wish I could still play at a high level, but I can't. I love working with the kids that want to work on the mental side of things. I don't mess with anybody's swings. It never occurred to me the impact that people have on me. I don't mess with parents have on these kids because my parents were divorced from my playing. They didn't watch me or anything else. I developed on my own, but some of these parents are so vested in their kids. One of my favorite stories is I have one of the teams I worked with, and one of the players is what I call a social performer, and he's particularly for his parents. His parents follow him on every hole. If he makes a birdie, he looks at his dad, looks at his mom, smiles. You can't play high-level golf that way. You got to play for yourself. You can't be distracted like that. You can't play for yourself. You can't be a social performer. Otherwise, you soon, you start with excuses and all kinds of weird stuff. He's quite good, even though he does that. He's as good as he's going to get like that. Turns out that team goes to Hawaii on a tournament, and because of travel, snafus, and everything else, parents can't go. It's the best tournament he ever plays, the best rounds he's ever had because his parents aren't there. He's able to create the hyper-focus that he needs. The coach is thinking, wow, this is amazing. So he sits down, he talks to the parents, and he says, hey, your son, performed unbelievably. He didn't have you there. He wasn't looking for your approval or anything else. He said, we know. We can't believe we missed his best tournament. We're never going to miss another one. We'll never, ever miss another one. They totally missed it. They showed up every time after that, and he went right back to where he was. It's funny how those things work. Sometimes people just don't get it. That's such a fun story for me because I always wonder, what am I not getting? Where am I showing up where I go, you bet, and I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. Double down. I should not just be doubling down. I should actually be removing myself from the situation. So that's a fun one for me.
Speaker 2Randall, I want to ask you a couple of fun closing questions. Before we get to the closing questions, I want to tell you about one of our strategic investments. We've made a few, and each are working on a product or service we think will be valuable to our community. One is Oldwell Labs, or OWL. OWL is the very best software I've seen for allocators to find and track managers, and I've seen a lot of people do that. I've seen a lot of them. Trust me, it'll be worth the look. There's a link in the show notes so you can learn more. And here are those closing questions. What was your first paid job, and what'd you
Speaker 1learn from it? My first paid job, I picked up golf balls on a driving range. I have to tell you this story because this driving range, they had a golf club that had been sawed off at the bottom, and they had nailed on it a tomato paste can. You could scoop up a ball, put it in the can, and put it in a basket. I'd carry around this basket, and when I filled up all the basket, I'd go in and dump it, and then I'd go out again, and I got paid some small shekels to go out and collect these. But what was so fascinating about that was I wore a big board on my back because people could hit you with a golf ball out in the range. It was a very popular place. Of course, you first realize that people would aim for you. They would actually go after you. Every once in a while, somebody would hit me in the wrong spot right at the top of my back. It would be forceful enough if you were out 200 yards, it would knock you over. It was the fun. That never occurred to me before. I was always innocent. I was never fully trusting. When I learned that people will hurt you for fun, that changed my entire view of people and relationships, and they really do. Because you're de-inviguated. They don't know that you're not a face. You're just out there with a board on your back. But man, some of them are really good. They would hit me a lot. What's one thing most people don't know about you that you find interesting? I'm not sure I'm that interesting. I am a first responder, I once was a part of Mount at Rescue in Southern Utah, where I spent a lot of time. If somebody got really lost and they couldn't find them, they would ask us to go out on our horses and go find them. So I'm well-trained in first aid. I'm well-trained in wilderness survival. Most people would never recognize that. But actually, you know what? I got a different one for you. Here's something you don't know. My undergraduate degree is in forest biology. I was a student of dendrology, mostly of silviculture, and that's how trees grow. Dendrology is a technique that you can is the notion of identification of trees. You walk around with me any place, I tell you what every freaking tree is. and that always blows people's mind. They're like, what? What's the best advice you've ever received? One of the most impactful pieces of advice that I've ever gotten is not to treat books as sacred. By that, I mean, write in them. You don't have to read them. You don't have to finish them. You can start another one. Spend time with books, spend time with articles rather than feel guilty. I was that person where if I started a book, it'd sit on my nightstand and be like, well, I didn't really get into that, but I got to finish it. I can't start another one. I had somebody that said, don't take yourself so seriously. Don't take books so seriously. There's something to be learned. Spend a little time. They're a conversation. Write in the margins. You're not going to be that famous. No one's going to ask you for your library collection and look at all your notes. Argue with them, mark them up, spend five minutes with them. If you don't like them, then put them on the shelf and then spend time with them again. That changed a lot of things. I can consume a lot of information, a lot of writing and a lot of reading that way. Where too many people treat reading as something they have to complete and something that represents them in some physical way. I treat books like they're candy. How's your life turned out differently from how you expected it to? Oh my gosh. My life is so different than I expected it to be. I expect to play professional golf at a high level. And if I hadn't gotten hurt, who knows? I was damn good putter. I was decent at everything else. But once you lose a sports dream, you have to find something else. I happen to be interested in organization. I have a professional influence, persuasion. I started studying that and it turned out great. I went from teacher to coach. At one point, our firm got big enough where I had to stop teaching and I was a professor for a long time. In that process, that was an identity shift. Now, when I look back, I go, it all worked out perfectly. Who knew I was preparing to create Alex, an AI coach? Who knew I was preparing myself to write a field note every day? But very different than I ever thought it was going to be. Getting hurt was the best blessing of my life. Had I stayed, I probably wouldn't have been that good if I had been able to do it. I would have been able to do it. I would have made it. I wouldn't have had as good of impact or wouldn't be able to influence people's lives the way that I do now. It turned out really well, but gosh, very different than I thought.
Speaker 2All right, Randall, last one. If the next five years are a chapter in your life, what's that chapter about? It's the same chapter.
Speaker 1Nothing's changing for me. I have a lot of people that say, you're going to retire. I always say, Frank Sinatra, did he hum for a couple of years and then he stopped singing? And by the way, the answer to that is he never stopped singing. You I am an executive coach. I'm going to be coaching people for the rest of my life. I'll be coaching people probably at the last breath of my life, just like I'm guessing Frank Sinatra was thinking about a song he wanted to sing. It's who I've made myself to be. I don't have a next chapter. Do I think I'll travel some more? Maybe. Will I write some things I haven't written yet? Maybe. In essence, it's one continual chapter. I'm trying to get better. The gap between who I am and who I need to be is always bigger than I want it to be. At the end of the day, I'm going to do more of the same stuff and I expect the next chapter will be the same. There's not enough good leaders in the world, so I'm about spreading the message. Everybody needs to do better, be the leader that other people need them to be. If we touch one or two people as far as that goes, then this is all worth it.
Speaker 2Randall, so appreciate you sharing your wisdom and always enjoy it. Oh, that's great.
Speaker 1You're doing great at this stuff. I always enjoyed listening and I appreciate you taking the time and talking to me. Great. Thanks. Thank you.
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Speaker 3expressed by TED and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Capital Allocators or Podcast Guests may maintain in the comments section of this podcast if you have any questions positions and securities discussed on this podcast.