Talent, Trust, and the Future of Family Offices | Brian Adams, Mack International

[Music] Hi and welcome back to the Wealth Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Risham. Today's conversation dies into the people side of family offices. And there's no better guest unpacked that than Brian Adams, partner of Mac International. Brian works with single family offices across the country to recruit C-suite leaders and it brings a front-row view into the inner workings of family offices. We talk about white talent, it's still the number one challenge for family offices. We explore the benefits of peer-to-peer communities in the space, the growing influence of the next generation leaders, the reality of technology decision-making, and whether AI will truly modernize the space. We end the podcast on a personal note with three questions that have nothing to do with Wealth Tech. This podcast is brought to you with the generous support of a SETA AI. SETA is on a mission, the modernized of family office. As always, if you find this podcast insightful, please like and subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. Let's get started. All right, Brian. Welcome to the Wealth Tech Podcast. I am happy to have you on the show. Would you mind giving an introduction to yourself in Mac International? Yeah, Mark, thanks again for having me on. It's a pleasure. As brief background, like we were talking about before we went live, I'm from upstate New York originally, went to school in New England, or I met my wife who is from Nashville. We both went to grad school up in Boston, and then moved to Nashville about 20 years ago. My wife's family has a family office. She's the oldest member of G2. That's how I got into that whole space. I have a background as an attorney and was a real estate investor before joining Mac International as a partner. We are a boutique independent, a retained search firm. We work with single family offices across the country to help them find C-suite executives. So President, CEO, CFO, CIO, some general counsel, CIO work. And Linda, the founder, started the business about 23 years ago now, so I've been doing it in a long time. Linda Mac is an absolute legend in the East. She's a beast. You've also co-founded a couple of family office groups. Would you mind speaking about those? Yeah, absolutely. I'm a long time member of YPO, and so a big believer in peer-to-peer, safe harbor, experience, share opportunities. About two years ago with a YPO 4 and 8 of mine, Tim Brown, we started two groups, one, so almost 22, which is an event business. We'll put on 20 to 30 events for maybe around 2000 plus family offices across the country through different kind of curated venues. And then I started Fort Elasa with Tim, which is a paid membership community where kind of like YPO for family office, principals and professional managers. And the idea for both is just a place where kind of they can get true peer-to-peer conversation, vulnerability, and just through some of the modalities and formats we know are effective scale trust really efficiently for them. Because many family office professionals are in a resource-constrained environment and very difficult for them to find true kind of peers within their own community or within the broader US. So I'm trying to close the gap and help you resource for them. It's a lot fun. Yeah, I mean peer-to-peer groups, I think, are really important, especially for family offices. They can be a little bit insular. And I think the family offices that they think they're snowflakes. And there is this thing that when you see one family office, you see one family office, which is true to a certain extent, but certainly you see there is, a lot to learn that family offices can learn best practices from other family offices. What is the value of that peer-to-peer? What is the biggest benefit that members receive? I think to your point, Mark, I think that adage gets thrown around a lot and it does a real disservice to the ecosystem because at this point, it's a fairly mature asset class in a lot of ways. And of course, every family is a little bit different. But, you know, directionally, if you're a billion dollar purely financial family office, you're going to have some similarities in your org chart and your challenges and your opportunities. And so I think for the community that the value ad is for a professional manager that can really cut the learning curve, right? If they say, "Hey, I've been given the mandate to institute the lender structure, and we're also going to roll out a private trust company." What jurisdiction should I be short-listing? Who should I work with on lender? Like who are the right attorneys? Who are the right tax team? Shorten that kind of learning curve and help them with kind of RFPs or bakeoffs or, "Hey, this is the right point of contact here." That's been the most helpful thing, I think, for people is, "Hey, my principal said that they now want to get involved with investing into sports as an asset class who are the 10 people I need to talk to as opposed to just trying to go out into the wilderness and figure it out on your own. You can kind of shortcut it and have somebody say, "Hey, I've seen this movie before. Here are the three people you need to talk to. You can trust them. They will help you. Don't step in this pothole." Again, because even though there's a lot of AUM and there might be a fairly big organization, the role and responsibility is really broad. So you're expected to be able to just solve all these problems and to have a place where you can get subject matter expertise and then geographic expertise really quickly in a vetted trusted community. It just helps a lot, I think. Yeah, I think there's no substitute for experience and to be able to talk to somebody that's kind of gone through it, that you learn from their mistakes versus how to make them. Certainly, there's other mistakes that can be made and that's just part of the process. But if you can kind of shorten that learning curve, I think that's fantastic. Talk to me. You have one of the best podcasts in the family office industry, the Mac podcast. I think it's a great community asset. You talk to me a little bit about why you started the podcast. And what have you learned from over 50 episodes of interviewing people? At Aurel will get you everywhere Mark. So thank you for that. Yeah, so I've been doing podcasting for a long time under my old, previous real estate firm started it during COVID like a lot of people and I have a tendency to overdo things. So I just started doing a lot of it. I did like 400 episodes and then ported the show over basically under the Mac umbrella when I joined as a partner. Took a lot to get spun up, but now we're really hitting a good rhythm. For me, it checks a couple boxes one to your point. Meershoes fantastic. There just isn't enough content out there. The consistent refrain I hear from family office people is a trusted source where they can get true education. That's unadulterated, right? Not vendor driven, not sponsored driven. The same goes I think for a lot of the conferences and events, right? And so it seemed like there was a big gap there where there weren't enough shows providing enough content. And then I think in particular kind of to our conversation earlier, the family office space because it's so broad, I really enjoy getting very niche and very esoteric in some of the subject matter. And it's only an in-chewy, mild, deep type of audience, but it's fun. And I find it hugely entertaining to learn about physical gold storage in New Zealand. You know, because. And it's cool because I have these conversations with these family office folks all day. And I kind of say, "Hey, what's keeping your principle up at night? Or what are you working on right now?" And kind of sanitize it, anonymize it, and then go out and say, "Okay, well, let's do a show about this." And so it's a really fun way for me to build and broaden my network as well. So I've just been doing it a long time and enjoy it. My marketing people like it because it's a very efficient way to make content. You know, one show, I've got audio, we can clip the video, and then with AI transcription services, we can create blogs or posts about it. So it also is a very efficient way for me to do that. Yeah, I think you do a great job of stab-ers in that content. I think podcasts can really create a lot of content. I enjoy it because I get to talk to a lot of people that are smarter than me. And really, that's some really great conversations. So I'm really thankful for all my guests that come on. I learned something from every podcast. And to your point, too, there are. Especially when you look at the RAS side, which is a very dynamic space, that there are a lot of podcasts out there, some very good podcasts. But the family office space, that community asset, not everybody has a chance to be able to attend a conference or be into a peer-to-peer meeting in a way that if they're driving into work, they can get some additional insights or additional knowledge from other folks. So I think it's great. I think your podcast is great. Let's talk about the talent side. Obviously, that's your area of expertise and focus. Get Sicily ranks as one of the top issues, if not the. top issue, I think technology tends to come in around third, but some of the Luddah could probably be related also to the talent and people issues and constraints there. Why is it such an issue for family offices to be able to attract and retain talent? First off, it's a hard job. I would say, you know, the term that Linda uses a lot is chief, cook, and bottle, washer, so it's a very expansive role. And I think some people really struggle with the mandate, frankly, because in family office world, let's use investment professionals as an example. On the street or in a traditional institutional group, it's just about your return metrics. Are you hitting your return metrics? Are you over your return metrics? And everything else as long as you're not a bad actor or, you know, committing felonies, all kind of secondary. Like you can do what you want to do if you perform. That's great. I think for families, it's much more amorphous where they want to make a return, but they also want to be able to have Thanksgiving dinner together or they want to be able to give money to this cause or have this larger mission being accomplished and executed on. And that takes a very particular person that cares. They have to be service oriented. They have to want to help somebody else achieve a goal. And it's a fundamentally odd job because you'll never, definitionally, you'll never be the principal. You'll never be the ultimate decision maker and a government instructor because you're not a family member. And so some people really struggle with that. So you've got just kind of a shallower pool of accessible talents because that's kind of one of the big screens. And then I think from the family side, a lot of folks now really want people that have 20 years of family office experience, subject matter expertise, and then 20 years of runway. That's just hard to find. These days aren't enough people who are 45 that have 20 years working at a great family office that come from attacks, background, but then also want to move to Detroit or West Bombay. It's just a Swiss cheese effect of everything has to line up really well. It's just that there aren't enough people generationally with this big succession that's occurring generationally transition wise. So it's a tough job. And it's still even though more outward facing, it's still a pretty opaque space. So when you think, oh, well, I'll just go out and talk to a bunch of people. In family office world, if your principal or your family finds out that you're speaking with somebody else, even on a preliminary basis, I mean, that's the end of it for you, right? So there needs to be a confidential private intermediary that's able to safeguard everybody. And they're just aren't that many people out there that can do that. Well, yeah. I think one of the things that they look at too is the oil. These really important. They want the trust factor needs to be really high. I think to your point, too, there's a lot of almost like being in a startup, a perpetual startup where you have to wear so many different hats all the time because the range of services that you need to provide is so broad. And then the mandate can change because that's really the reason why family offices, the family has a family office, right? For the ultimate level of customization and control. Let's talk about what, you know, back to that saying about you seeing one family office, you see one family office and that kind of debunked that a little bit. What are some of the main reasons why somebody would start a family office? And what are some of the kind of the different types of family offices that you've seen, different types of structures that you've seen that are successful? Yeah, I think like you referenced fundamentally, the drivers behind starting and maintaining one are pretty consistent, right? It's control, discretion, privacy, confidentiality, and customization. And that's one of the reasons I think they've become so popular is the multifamily office platforms, R.A. platforms and the large wirehouse platforms. They really struggle and this goes to technology. The customization component can be really challenging, right? We've got one family member that wants to quarterly report two weeks before in a binder, email, or snail mail to their beach house. And then you've got a younger person who's on the board who wants a five minute video clip given by the CEO of, hey, these are the three things you need to worry about. And that's what they want and you've got to give it to them. It's very hard to scale, right? And so those big platforms are always going to struggle with that. And then just ring fencing information given the sensitive nature of how these families are orchestrated. Those are typically the drivers behind family office creation and maintenance. And I think that's why they're going to be persistent in the marketplace for a long time because I don't see the ability to have a solution set covering all of them coming anytime soon. In terms of structure, there's a huge amount of variability, but I would say that you've got kind of the single family office where there's a corpus of assets serving the lineal descendants of one kind of particular matriarch or, or patriarch post liquidity event, you know, those assets are being put to work in some form or fashion to maintain that quality of life over a multi generational time horizon, embedded family offices. So you've got an operating company or some type of larger platform where there's a shared services agreement with an internal group that does some things for the personal individuals who are within that larger platform. So think of a, you know, like a widget factory that's privately held. But then there's a group within the widget factory that manages the owner's personal tax returns, accounting, bill pay, concierge lifestyle. Basically there's an investment entity just servicing those individual family members, but the resources that that family office leverages are more broadly within the operating company itself, so they're taking advantage of those things. And then you've got what I would refer to as like the multi client family office where, you know, even though it might technically be an RIA from a registration perspective, it's a discrete group of some type of relationships of families that they pull their resources either for access or shared services or for economic benefits, and they all have kind of a unified purpose for being together. Those are kind of like the three big archetypes. I mean, we could get into like digital and virtual family offices. I'm not sure that's super productive, frankly, because ultimately all families are doing a bi versus build decision making on some level, and I think they just represent one extreme of the spectrum versus a holistic family office on the other end, but we can get into that if it's helpful. Yeah, I think those are great. There are some prototypes out there that the founders office, the embedded office, that a couple of different multi family offices where families come together, and then there's more commercial family office, which is actively seeking the consistently grow. When you see a lot of, when you see a lot of proliferation of family offices that is a winning business model, but certainly that the multi family offices have a lot of success these days too. Talent is one of the biggest line items for any family office. How much does a typical family office cost, and how much does that is contributed to the talent? Yeah, I mean, I can just throw a whole sink full of caveats before I say anything here, because numbers are really dangerous. But I think, directionally, you're looking at three to five million of startup cost and three to five million of operating overhead annually, directionally just to keep this, to do it, quote unquote, right. And that would include legal accounting, tax, third party custodians, and then a skeleton crew of probably somebody who's a chief financial officer, a CEO president, somebody who's managing investments, and then some type of administrative support system internally. So that's probably a staff of three to five people is what I would say. Just no small thing. It's a lot and interestingly around technology, we've seen compensation go up. And I think part of the driver there is because there are such great technological solutions these days, you can do general ledger, you can do investing reporting, you can even do some customized consolidated reporting. It still probably needs to be manipulated on some level before it gets to the client user. But all of those things and a lot of these great outsourced service providers that doing a good job these days, it just means that the C suite executives now have more data inputs that they need to figure out how to be strategically put into the field. And so the level of professional you need now to manage all of that data and to figure out what to do with it and to be a thought partner means that you're looking at fairly senior people who are really smart and probably have some subject matter expertise with and tax law and/or investment. So I think that's one of the things where people get some pretty serious sticker shock, but again, these folks are hard to find. And you're also competing directly with private equity, venture capital, wealth management firms, asset management firms, you know, it's a competitive space these days. - Yeah, I think there's a great point on in regards to technology. There is a lot of good family office specific technology out there these days, which is really great to see. I think there's a lot of, I think people accidentally picked up the space, were sold into it. And if they could, now you see specific offerings, a lot of offerings that are even being borne out of family offices that they're commercializing some of the solutions that they've created and those are obviously very specific to the industry, which is great. I like to say that other good news is there's a lot more offerings for family offices but the bad news is there's a lot more offerings for family offices and that they need to manage that and figure out which ones right for them. And it can be a little bit of buyer's confusion on that as well. Technology decision making within the family office, where, what role does that typically fall under? - It's a great question, Mark. I think there's a lot of confusion there. I think one of the biggest challenges that families have when it comes to technology is nobody has direct ownership over it typically. I mean, the big, the multi-billion dollar family offices that are institutionalized, they probably have a chief technology officer and or an IT department that can help manage this. That typically falls underneath the COO in a big work chart but anything below that, it's a hodgepodge typically. I mean, what you usually see is a constellation of responsibility. So investing reporting goes to the CIO, General Electric goes to the CFO, Consolidate reporting is maybe the COO, maybe the CEO president. There's not really a holistic coverage of it which I think is why implementation on boarding and execution is such a pain point for everybody because nobody truly has direct ownership over it. And then usually the capital allocation comes from the board, the board says, hey, we need to improve our technology stack, go to the market, run an RFP, figure this out, but then they're largely disengaged from the conversation. And so it's, frankly, that I think that's one of the bigger challenges is in my experience, technology can be anywhere from under the HR person, under CFO, under the CIO, under the CEO, and I think when everybody owns something, nobody owns it. I think sometimes you see, I certainly see that the buying behavior on this single family offices too, and I call it somewhat irrational. Like you can have a solution that makes a lot of sense and lines up every criteria, but that the change management aspect, the risk aversion sometimes, the lack of ownership of that can be a problem for folks. I think what ends up happening is it becomes a vent driven. Some sort of a vent happens, and then you're, it's a little bit more of a scramble. Somebody departs, or the Excel spreadsheet that they had who becomes corrupted, or then they really kind of make a decision under pressure, which isn't necessarily great. Well, like our friend, Ray Genonzi always says, technology cannot solve an operations problem. And I think a lot of software process, that bad process, right? Yeah, I mean, I think families think of these things as these panaceas and silver bullets, and they need to take a step back usually and just think through their processes and procedures and operations first. And then to your point, I see a lot of reactionary acute pain point of like, I hate my dashboard. I don't like my investing reporting product. Let's change it. But then they think, well, how is it going to interplay with general ledger? What is that going to mean from an API perspective? Like, does that mean that we also need to input a CRM to be able to produce the reporting that we want? And there's just like this cascade of challenges to come with it. So, a lot of them are changing there. I think what is the things I see too, is that they tend to be kind of solving yesterday's problem. They have this pain point, they want that pain point to go away without necessarily taking a look at, what is the technology roadmap? What's the future state of the family office and how can technology support that future state versus, they have this immediate pain point. They find a point solution to pain. And then these other ripple effects, right? Does it integrate with the event of ledger? You got somebody, have to input that information. Do I need to have some sort of middleware that sits in between? And on and on it goes, you can see the impact of those decisions when they're made in kind of these narrow silos. Let's talk about the impact of AI. Obviously the impact AI is rippling across all industries. It's certainly wealth management and family offices, not immune to that. How is AI impacting staffing at family offices? - There's certainly, there's certainly spending a lot of time talking about it. I'm not sure they're actually doing anything with it, but there's been a lot of directives brought down from principles and family office boards and leadership saying, "Fear this out." I think there's a huge opportunity, frankly, for families to leverage it. The biggest challenge that everyone kind of ultimately comes to, and we have the same problem with an R business, I'm dealing with it right now, is the highly sensitive nature of the data. I think generally, directionally you want to own your own data. Beyond that, being able to have something operational and searchable and actionable that's being financed properly is the big problem that families are facing with them 'cause they don't have enough money nor the resources to have a proprietary tool. Like even the big banks are struggling with this, right? But I think we're really close. Like we're a step away from being able to have huge data resources that are searchable, actionable, and operational through large language models. And I think AI is gonna be a huge bone. What I tell most folks is, I hope it comes soon because the families I know, the professionals are stretched then, they're under-resourced, they're over-worked. And if this can help make things more efficient and the delivery of service better, that's great. And I hope it really does work, but you can't just let this information out into GenPOP, as my wife puts it, is way too dangerous. So I think that's what everyone's waiting for is the ability to have some kind of customized, privacy pool data that you can actually start leveraging. - Yeah, I think AI with family offices, it's a lot like teenage sex, nobody, everybody's talking about it, nobody knows anything about it. - Yeah, I mean the family is that I work with, no one's actually doing anything with it. I mean they're just kind of talking about it, but on a day-to-day basis, other than like, clawed just to teach you stuff, no one's actually using it in their workflows in my experience. So. - And you see, it has a enormous potential, I think, for family offices in a couple areas and you've touched on these. One is the elimination or the great reduction in that low value first mile process. And you're seeing that with alternative investment data solutions, like, you used to take a CFO or high level executive to interrogate a document, a capital call or evaluation statement, to be able to really translate that into a proper financial or investment data. Now you're seeing that kind of first mile kind of, so almost eliminated with the solutions that are out there. I mean, there's so much of that information too, is within alternative investments and even legal documents and trusts and wills on a state, they're in documents, they're in unstructured data and the ability for AI, to be able to unlock that is huge. - Yeah, I mean, again, we have 23 years worth of data and I can only port so much over into HubSpot. It's just not manageable. And so what a lot of families do, I mean, you tell me, but I think when it comes all this legacy data they have, they just at some point say, "Hey, starting Jan 1, we're just gonna move forward with this data set 'cause it's too painful to migrate all this legacy data over." If AI could solve that problem, it'd be great, right? But I don't just don't think we're quite there yet. - Yeah, I mean, the historical data is a challenge for a lot of family offices with technology implementations. It could be really expensive. The more data, historical data you bring over and often like the quality of that data, the older it gets, the lower quality it is and AI really needs high quality data to get the results that you want. And certainly when you look at general edgers on investment accounting systems, I call it a land war in Asia when you're trying to do since inception data conversions. I mean, you have to for alternative investments, but financial accounting, let's load up that balance and go forward and call it a day and then go back to that old system when you need to. I think it's a little bit more of it. With all the technology that is coming out, we're talking about these AI, certainly, the family office specific solutions a lot of point solutions that are being done. Well, this is, we'll discuss family offices, the modernized or, the state of family offices because they're a cost center, just the nature of it that just could be a bit more of a lagger. Also, the risk that you're seeing with the cybersecurity now is, we had a press that's where the technology conversations, the opportunity is just too great and it's got a cause of monetization or we're going to be more in a state state. I think we're at a tipping point. You think about, I don't know what the numbers get thrown around but every day X amount of baby boomers retire, right? I think we're now where there were now over the edge of baby boomers are now on majority past 65 years old. And so there's this huge transition occurring, leadership-wise, we get a phone call once a week, which is great. We're thankful for it and we're busy. But I do think there's a lot of next generation folks who have been in the wings waiting for the ability to make these type of decisions and I mean, they just digest data differently and they expect much different experiences from their third party service providers and they're getting it from their banks or from, you know, their friends or their social networks or in their day jobs and they're going to force the families to change. Like it's going to happen or they're going to lose the assets because if there's not a value prop there, they'll go somewhere else. And so I think it'll force the change to occur within everybody it just has to. Yeah, I think that makes sense. The next gen driving that. I mean, there's been this kind of consumerization of IT that's gone on where you kind of you log on to your brokerage account and you can see not only yesterday's balance but real time information as things go on, you get it on your mobile phone, you have access to that information the device you want and the way you want it. And even even drafting our position as criptions now, like if I can't see it on my phone pretty clearly, I don't send it out. Yeah, it'll be looks at it. And then they go to my office and it's the, you know, the report by under 60 days after quarter after. We talked to one recently that's still was using lotus notes. They know they can still run. It was unbelievable. There's a group of there of people love that product. Next gen, let's just keep on that thread a little bit. How is next gen impacting the industry and how can family offices, you know, keep, you know, better involved the next generation? Yeah, it's been interesting because this this generation of leadership right, so we'll just kind of throw a term of baby boomers out there. They've lived longer, been more productive and been engaged longer than anyone would have anticipated. When I joined the family office world 20 years ago, next gen's were like people under 30. And then it was 35. Then it was 40. Then it was 50. And now it's just rising, Jen, because these folks, they lived a lot longer than anyone expected. They've been in leadership a lot longer than anybody expected. And so they've really leapfrogged a lot of what would be referred to historically as this next generation. And so now I think it's just it's a much bigger population set. And that's why I think you're going to see a shift towards third party professional management in a lot of these firms because the leadership lag has been so large that many of them are now, I've had a day job my whole career. And I've never been in a leadership position. And so I'm just going to have a third party run this. What we always encourage him is to do is, you know, because there's a lot of hesitancy to let go, obviously, is there's a difference between giving people a voice and a vote. And there's a lot of ways that you can get people a voice independent board members, search committee leadership, family counsel leadership, investment committee, all kinds of different governance structures. And so we're seeing more that early on and engagement and more next-gen education occurring. But you know, we just really encourage people to get them involved early and often. And again, there's a difference between voice and a vote. It's costing nothing to give them a voice. A lot of it. Let's take a look at three, five years out. I know it's dynamic industry. There's a lot of change. I think the one thing you could say is, you know, change is going to be part of the future. But where do you see the industry in three to five years? What lies ahead? I think there's huge amounts of, and I'm talking my book, but I think there's just huge amounts of tailwinds here. From a generational transition perspective, I think there's going to be one thing people I think really underestimate is the power of what some of the advances day planning techniques to institute in the 80s have done. And so there are inheritors who have their own family offices. I think the world of unitary trusts that were pretty common 50 plus 100 years ago, I think they're coming to an end. And when they splinter a lot of those branches and individuals are going to have their own family offices, I think the last 20 years has been a huge amount of wealth creation. And they are going to be new and continued to know of a family office formation. And so I think the space is in the third inning, maybe, you know, to use a baseball term. I think we're really early days. And the thing that astounds me, and I'm in the space all day every day, like you are, every day I get three or five calls, emails, LinkedIn notes from another family that I've never knew existed. And I just keep thinking, oh, like this will end in September, but it just keeps coming. And there's just used a much bigger ecosystem than I think I ever appreciated before. You have a sense of how many single family offices there are in the US, any. This is a number that I talked to a lot of people about. I think it's north 8,000. Yeah. Yeah. We heard somewhere or soon to be approaching 10,000. I think it's, yeah, I mean, I just think it's, I think there's a lot of folks out there. And obviously there's a lot of modality in what is a family office. Yeah. I mean, you could quibble about like what qualifies, but yeah, you know, if we just take the most general definition, whatever number you get thrown around, I think it's probably 50%. I think it's 2x, whatever number you hear in reality. Yeah, it's a lot of growth in this industry. And it's going to continue to do so. And certainly, the US is a lot of things. If you just look at the world politically about this increased regulatory and privacy challenges, more and more people are going to want control, customization, confidentiality, discretion, privacy. That's just, there are these two diverging things that are both happening simultaneously. Winning business model. So this has been great, Brian. I like to end my podcast on personal note with three questions that have nothing to do with wealth tech or in this case, family offices. You went to school in the Northeast, you now live in Nashua. How would you compare the two cultures between the Northeast and the South? Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I'm from upstate New York, like basically Canada and what's school in New England for most of my life and then moved to Nashville 20 years ago. It's not frankly from where I grew up relative to Tennessee. It's not that much different politically and socially. I mean, very conservative people that like to be kept to themselves. I would say the biggest difference is just the, it took me a while, but the genuine friendliness factor. I tell people that move here from New York and they get down here and they have coffee or whatever we do networking and they jump right in. I'm like, dude, you need 12 minutes of faith, family and football. It needs to be 12 minutes. Like you can just set your timer, but you got to do it before you jump into the business stuff because it's just way too much. But people are just not going to react well. Well, people start talking to you and to elevate it, right? When you're from the start, it's just not, what are you doing? Yeah, it's it's it's not going to work down here. It took my wife a while to train me up, but I think I'm there kind of now. Speaking of your wife, you married into a family where whether the founding fathers of Robert, Robert Morris was one of two people that signed the Declaration of Independence and the Article of Confederation and the Constitution. Could you share some more details about Robert Morris? I didn't realize there was even two people that signed all three documents. I found that fascinating. So Robert Morris and Governe Ramores are kind of one of the two of the founding. They all then they hated each other apparently. To these kind of founding fathers of America, it's really interesting. My wife's family came out by father-in-law's family came over here a long time ago and there's a neighborhood in the Bronx called Marissiana. Marissiana was there kind of family estate and this is like a million years ago, right? So it's a different world, but really cool history of you reference the Constitution, the articles of Confederation, the Independence, Declaration of Independence. They helped finance the Revolutionary War. Started the 21 Club. They're the Red Jockey. So the oldest silks in North America. They're just red. So they're in the horse business for a long time. They were in the private cemetery business, private lottery business. They've done a lot of different things. Remember my father, not all telling me recently that I guess this would have been his great grandfather. There might be another great in there, but his phone number was four. Right. I mean, just old New York stuff, which is really interesting and cool. And but I will say it's not all, I mean, they have a lot to have their challenges over the years, but that that world and that history is fascinating. And everyone's why you can open up and he has some really interesting old stories about it. So is there a particular book that you're reading that you've recommended listeners? Oh my gosh. I love like novels and science fiction. And I love detective novels. Right now, what am I reading? I'm going back and reading the the Harry Bosch novels. How the Bosch? I've seen the TV series, yeah. Yeah. So those were books better. Well, there's like 25 of them. So they started in like the early 90s. Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, I'm reading those for the first time and they're great. But this again, it's interesting. They take place in the 91-92 era. And you know, everyone's like smoking cigarettes and having to use payphones and things. It's kind of interesting. Different. What's it? A gold data like the one or two books. I've been reading the I just finished the Rick Actance in three parts series on World War Two in Europe, which I found fascinating. Well, I'm listening to the hard-core history. Dave Carlin, his stuff is incredible. He also has a three-part series on the Revolutionary War, which I'm looking forward to getting into. But it doesn't great job of kind of bringing it to life with these little details that they've got to make history, got to come alive. And there's a lot, I think there's a lot of good history like that out there now. There's just all facts base that they're doing a good job. Even that the fictional history is kind of based in the fact it could be a great way to learn about history. So anyways, this has been fantastic, Brian. I appreciate you coming on the World Tech podcast. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me, Mark.