Ep739: William Cohan – Get the Numbers Right Before You Invest

Andrew Stotz 00:02
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning in our community. We know that to win an investing, you must take risk but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. I want to thank you for joining that mission today. Fellow risk takers this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests, William Cohan. William, are you ready to join the mission?

William Cohan 00:38
Happy to Thank you, Andrew.

Andrew Stotz 00:40
Yeah. Thanks for coming on. And maybe I'll just introduce you to the audience. William is a former Wall Street m&a investment banker for 17 years at Lavon, Lazard Freyr, and company Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan Chase. He's also a New York Times best selling author of seven nonfiction narratives, including his most recent book called power failure, the rise and fall of General Electric, we take a minute and tell us about the unique value you are bringing to this wonderful world.

William Cohan 01:19
Well, so tough question to answer, Andrew. in all modesty, you know, I'm not exactly sure some days but I think the fact that I worked on Wall Street for 17 years, after having been an award winning investigative journalist and now Best Selling Author of books, and you know, a lot of other writing for a variety of publications. I think my mission, in addition to being on this podcast, and helping share my worst investment is to, I think, help people in the real world understand what's going on on Wall Street, how it functions, how it works, you know, translate some of the difficult language and concepts and ideas that people on Wall Street like to use to make it seem like they're important and doing, you know, God's work and actually, you know, cutting through all the gobbledygook of that and using my knowledge of the way Wall Street works, I wrote a book called one of my seven books is why Wall Street matters where I actually tried to explain in layman's terms what Wall Street is all about. And I feel like my mission is to do that for people just cut through it all make it easier to understand it's really not that hard frankly. But it is its own language its own our go its own, you know, colloquialisms and its own strange behavior. So, you know, it sort of takes one to know, no it and so I pride myself on being able to sort of translate all that craziness for readers in a way that they can you enjoy, learn about what these firms are all about? What goes on on Wall Street and you know, how they can I think, you know, if you understand what better what's going on on Wall Street, you understand how the world works better.

Andrew Stotz 03:48
And just for the listeners out there, on the books, you know, Williams books or and his website, which is William cohen.com. But they're also on Amazon, and the books are for friends promising lives cut short, power failure, as we mentioned, the rise and fall of an American icon. Why Wall Street matters, as William just mentioned, the price of silence the Duke lacrosse scandal, Wall Street and the power of the elite money and power how Goldman Sachs came to rule the world. House of Cards a tales of hubris and wretched excess on Wall Street and the last tycoons The Secret History of Lazard friars and it's a tale of an restrained ambition billion dollar fortune, Byzantine power struggles and hidden scandals and you know, those titles are fantastic, you know, getting across the message of what you're trying to get in that book. Are you picking those titles by the way or do you work with like an editor to do that are

William Cohan 04:50
the you know, the type of the titles are usually ones that you know, I come up with or sometimes my kids come up with them and my wife We all sort of sit around and bet around titles. And as part of the fun of writing a book, you know, the rest of it's often not that much fun, because a lot of hard work so that picking the title can be fun.

Andrew Stotz 05:16
How long does it take you out? It's

William Cohan 05:17
funny, because if it's if go ahead, if if the books are successful, then it just seems like the titles were sort of made order, you know, like, they just totally make sense. If the book doesn't work that well, you sort of said, well, why is it called that. But, you know, it depends on the book, power failure, which is the story of the rise and fall of GE took, you know, almost three years, it was also during the pandemic, so that was a sort of like a time warp. Most books, most of them take about two years, I wrote a house of cards, which was about the collapse of Bear Stearns, I wrote that in nine months, and it was published, you know, three months later, it was so you know, it's funny, the publisher of that book, you know, double day, which is part of Random House, correctly, wanted to get that book out a year after Bear Stearns collapsed. And Penguin Random House was also the publisher of the GE book. But, you know, by the time I finished it, by the time they published it, it was like, 15 months later, so publishing is a strange, quirky, mysterious kind of business, but, you know, they, they make it out there. And that's the important thing.

Andrew Stotz 06:45
And what would be advice that you'd give to an aspiring writer, someone who's you know, wants to do what you've done, you know, writing a bunch of books?

William Cohan 06:56
Well, first of all, it's a, it's a lot of hard work. You know, I mean, it's not like working on a construction site, hard work. It's not like cleaning out, you know, latrines, but it's, you know, it's hard, you know, intellectual work. It takes a long time. I don't have anybody helping me. So I do all the research myself, I do all the interviews myself, I do all the writing myself. So you know, that's a lot of work it takes putting your butt in the seat, you know, every day, day after day. You know, so a lot of people think, Oh, I'll write a book, it'll, you know, it'll be great. But to actually do it, and especially the kind of books that I do, which are, you know, kind of doorstops sometimes it takes takes a long time and a lot of effort. And honestly, sometimes you can even believe that you've done it. And, you know, I often say the, you know, a journey. Journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step, right? So you just have to sort of day after day, grind through it. And then you know, one day you wake up and it's, it's done, and you can't quite believe it.

Andrew Stotz 08:18
That's, it's so admirable, every time I see any big book, I'm like, That's amazing commitment. That's why books are such a great thing to dig into. Because if it's, you know, if they spent that much time in it, you know, there's something valuable about it that they've brought together that doesn't exist in the world. And now it does. One of the things that I realized, you mentioned about investigative journalists and journalists. And you know, obviously, your job in these books is to investigate and follow some leads and try to figure things out. But one of the things in my one of my classes I have, which is called valuation masterclass, I'm teaching young people how to be a financial analyst. And what I realized now that I explained to them pretty well, which is that being a financial analyst means you're going to the hardest part is you're going to go down a lot of dead ends, where you're going to be working on some idea you have about this is really bad for the profitability of the company or whatever. And then as you dig into it, you find out Nope, that was wrong. And I just spent six hours dealing with that data. And any, the only redeeming thing you can say is that I proven that, you know, I'm proving that something, you know, wasn't right. I'm just wondering, you know, to what extent are you dealing with dead ends as you're working through a book? Is that a component in the process?

William Cohan 09:43
I don't necessarily find that I reached dead ends. I mean, I have a, you know, an idea of the story I want to tell the narrative that I want to focus on and of course, you know, As I'm researching to so I'm like discovering things along the way. And then, you know, making choices about what to include and not to include I find, sometimes my books get even longer than are acceptable. And so then the editors come along and they say, Well, this is really too long. And I say, Well, how about we do it in two volumes? And they say, Well, you know, you're not Barack Obama. You're not, you know, you're not Robert Keroh. So, you know, why don't we get it into one book, and then one volume, and then and then you know, you have to make choices. So there are things that I will have spent a long time researching, that, you know, we just have to lose. And that's annoying. But, you know, as you know, it's often said that, you know, that's something that I need to know about. Maybe the reader doesn't need to know so much about that, or, or when I talk about the book, after it's published, it's good today that I know that I can talk about that, you know, I can go down that rabbit hole, sort of, in a conversation about the book are about the topic, but maybe, it's like, one thing that we can cut out to try to get, like my last book about GE, was like, 650 pages. So you know, there was stuff that needed to be cut out, but I thought for putting things back in. You know, I, I know, one of the editors wanted to cut out a story I told about the CEO of GE Jeff Immelt going with his daughter in his security guard to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. And it was such a incredibly revealing story about what you know, being a CEO and, you know, dragging other people along and trying to get your way and things like that. They wanted to cut it out. And I said, Absolutely not. So character, character development and, and revealing about character generally. And, you know, obviously, when you're mountain climbing to one of the highest mountains of the world, and you, you know, you're not a mountain climber, then obviously, you're in a stressful situation. And so all sorts of interesting things happen. So in so, you know, things get cut out, but then you can, you know, it's ultimately, you know, it's my book, so my name's on it. And so if I feel strongly that something needs to be put back in, you know, I, you know, that they'll probably usually accommodate it, you know, until at some point, the book is, you know, like, so big that they have to charge like, 50 bucks for it. But, you know, if you think about it, I mean, I think this last book, cost, whatever, $35 or something. I mean, how many hours of entertainment, can you get? Reading a book, it's, it's literally the best bargain out there, even at $35 to have something in your hand that you can, you know, read whenever you want. That's the product of somebody's intense focus for two or three years. You know, that's, you know, that's rather, you know, incredible. Really, it's, it's a great bargain. It's one of the few great bargains, I mean, when it costs $100 Now to fill up your car with gas, to get a book for 35 bucks, I mean, for

Andrew Stotz 13:54
the satisfaction and the knowledge that it brings, you know, just for the listeners out there, I just want to highlight briefly on the new book, just so that anybody who's interested, gets a picture but I'm just going to go to some of what you have on the Amazon here. Perhaps no company reflects American ingenuity, innovation, industrial fortunes, as well as the iconic General Electric Company, producing storied leaders and almost every product imaginable, GE built a cult of leadership, success that had cracks in its foundation in this masterful history. William Cohen, one of America's most eminent financial journalists, argues the GS legacy is both a paragon and a cautionary tale through which to understand American business. Maybe you could just give us a little, little one little tidbit that will make everybody think I gotta get this and I know, you've also got it on Audible. So I know I like to, you know, more like narrative types. I'd love to listen to on audio on Audible. So maybe just what would be one or two interesting things from the book that you think people would find fascinating?

William Cohan 15:11
Oh, I mean, this is a true Sophie's choice situation here, but I mean, I, you know, look, it's, it's, it's, it's a sprawling, you know, tale of a company that was founded in 1892 is responsible for, you know, the electrification of America, in the world, you know, Thomas Edison, as part of its DNA, JP Morgan, the man is part of its DNA, you know, the light bulb, the jet engine, the X ray machine, you know, you know, appliances that we take for granted, you know, once you don't, you know, RCA don't NBC, you know, so it was truly one of the most innovative and iconic companies of the 20th century. And when Jack Welch left, who was, of course, the most admired CEO in America, when he left, you know, in September of 2001, basically, GE was the most respected, most valuable company on the face of the earth. So, it may be sort of like a combination of, you know, Microsoft, Google, Apple, you know, kind of rolled up into one. And so a company that's that admired, and iconic, you know, how that all sort of unraveled. So is a fascinating story. And so, not only is the story, great of how it became such an incredible company, and the people involved that made that happen, but the unraveling and the mistakes that were made, you know, between 2001, and today, you know, our of, you know, really a cautionary tale, something that I mean, you know, once upon a time, you know, geez, legendary success was standard curriculum material at the best business schools. I find it somewhat ironic that, you know, Harvard Business School, which must have done 10, different 20 cases or whatever, on GE on the way up, it doesn't seem to have any cases that I'm aware of, of GE on the way down. And that's really, you know, frankly, you know, that's where the learning comes in, is, you know, yes, you can, you can learn on, on the on the way up, but to learn sort of the mistakes to avoid, so that you don't become, you know, it'd be like, you know, if suddenly apple became an irrelevant company after being worth $3 trillion. I mean, you really scratch your head and say, you know, what the heck happened here? And you'd want, people would want to know why. And so that's the way I felt about, gee, I want to know what the hell happened, which is really sort of my approach to every one of my books is something happened, what the hell happened? What the hell happened? You know, like, there's a dead body on the ground, how to get there.

Andrew Stotz 18:52
Aren't there any questions? Yeah. Does anybody see this? Question?

William Cohan 18:58
Something happened here? What the hell happened? And if, if nobody's gonna answer that question, then I want to take a blank sheet of paper. And I'm gonna answer that question. Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 19:11
And for young people these days, you know, I graduated in 1989, from university and GE already was, you know, case studies, as you said, and you know, we were looking at all that and I was a young aspiring business and finance guy and Jack Welch was everything in some ways, like he really any was tough and all that, but I had a conflicting situation in that when I was working for Pepsi many years ago, in 1990 9090 90. Let's say, I went to a seminar with this guy right here. His name is Dr. Deming. And Dr. Deming was talking just the opposite of what Jack Welch was saying, which was rank them ABC and get rid of the C's. And now It was Jack Welch. It's one of the things that I remember of what he was doing. And you know, how he was driving the organization, which, to some of us, at times really made sense, you know, get off, get rid of the, but Dr. Deming taught a whole different way of thinking that there's natural variation and trying to understand that and if you just rank and rate and then reward and punish, you're going to end up never going to end up with the best outcome. And that didn't make sense, because it seemed like Jack Welch was getting the best outcome, but it feels to me now. Like he was riding a team of horses and whipping them so hard. He won the race, but that horses just collapsed at the end. But I don't know what how you would, you know, summarize like, what was his the downfall?

William Cohan 20:50
Well, the downfall didn't really occur under him. Okay, it occurred under his successor. Now, his successor would say that Jack sort of set me up to fail, you know, which, of course, is something that you would say if things fell apart under your watch? I think, you know, I would, I would, I mean, I think, you know, intuitively Your point is a good one to, you know, he whipped the horses so hard that they won the race, but then collapsed at the end. And we're spent, you know, what I found actually was that, yes, Jack pushed hard. He pushed people hard and got more out of them than they even thought was possible for them. And to a man, every the people I interviewed who worked for him, and who he did drive hard, you know, loved him. And, and, you know, so therefore, I'm not sure the analogy fully works with, you know, the horses, because at the end the horses, you know, we're still eating out of the palm of his hand. And I got to, you know, spend many hours with Jack before he died. And he died in March of 2020, you know, right before the pandemic, and His funeral was at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York. And then literally, that was the last thing. And then, and then the world shut down. Which was sort of ironic, too. But people who worked for Jack really love jack, and he drove them hard, but he also rewarded them well, and he taught them a lot, and they still talk about it. I mean, it's, it's, it's remarkable. And, you know, it's, it's really, it's an amazing story. And, you know, the reception to the book is kind of surprised me that how positive people felt about it when they read it. So that's very gratifying.

Andrew Stotz 23:11
Well, I just bought it on Audible. And I want to challenge all of the listeners to pick that one or any other one that that turns you on. And I'm looking forward to listening to it because it was a story of my era. So I appreciate that and the time that you spent on that. Now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking it will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to an intelligent story.

William Cohan 23:38
So this is a variation of a theme. To be honest, I think you'll appreciate this. So when I was working at Lazard you know, my first job I had been I'd gone to Columbia Journalism School and I was a journalist. And then my father thought that I should go back and get my MBA and didn't understand why I was a journalist or a writer. And so I did go back and get my MBA, because I wanted to get a job at the Wall Street Journal, which, which never happened. They kept rejecting me. And so after I got my MBA from Columbia, I, my first job was at GE Capital. So I did have that two years at GE Capital. And you know, I, my office may there was a guy named John Flannery, who became the CEO of GE, after Jeff Immelt. So by some work in the matrix, you know, this guy I started with at GE Capital stayed and became the CEO. And then I left and I went to Lazard and, you know, John and I used to talk about investment ideas a lot. And so, you know, we both sort of became as one did in that time frame are quite taken with a Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. So when I got to Lazard I decided, well, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to buy some Berkshire Hathaway stock and this was 1990. And in 1990, at Lazard there was what they used to call a quote Tron machine. I'm sure you know, what a quote Tron machine is. Not many people do know the quote drum machine anymore is but it was a machine that would, you know, there was like one on each floor, and you'd go to it and you'd punch in a ticker symbol and you get a real close to a real time, like 20 minute delay or whatever, stock price so you'd push in the stock symbol and you'd get a stock price. So so if you worked at Lazard and I was worked at Lazard in New York, and that you wanted to buy a stock, you had to like call down to the trader trading floor such as it was it was, you know, most people sort of envision these huge trading floors that are in movies and big firms do have those huge trading floors, but Lazard had like one guy on a desk, who was their equity trader. You know, because Lazard was an m&a advisory firm. So we didn't really we pretended to have like a capital markets business. And so I called down. And I said, I want to buy, you know, I'd gone to the quote Tron, and I put in br K, which was the symbol for, and at that time, there was only the, the A shares that weren't the B shares. And I pushed in BRK, and up came a price of $1,200. And you know, it at that time, I don't think there was another stock trading, you know, $1,200. And so I called down to the trader and I said, I want to buy 10 shares of Berkshire Hathaway. And he said, at the market, and I said, Yes. And so I'm figuring Okay, 12 100 times 10, that's $12,000. And I was a first year associate, I didn't have much money, I had a little bit more than I, when I had been a newspaper reporter getting paid 13,000 a year, but I wasn't exactly enrolling in it, but I I figured I had 12,000 extra dollars to invest in Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway shares. And so he said, Okay, you know, I'll call you when the trades done. So like, 20 minutes later, he calls me up, back and he says, Okay, we're done. How do you want to pay for it? And I said, I'll write you a check. He said, Okay. That'll be $120,000. What are you talking about? I want to 10 shares. You know, I went to the coach on machine, and I put in BRK, and it came up 1200 10 times 1200 is 12,000. Not 120,000. What? What's going on here? I don't have $120,000. He said, No, no, no. You went to the quote, Tron. You punched in BRK. It came up with 1200. But the quote Tron only goes to four decimal points. Berkshire Hathaway is trading for 12,000 A share back then. So 12,000 times 10 is 120,000. So I said, What are you talking about? It's a 1200. Narrow, but it's 12,000. I said, Well, you know, we have a problem because I don't have a $120,000. You said, Well, what do you want to do? And I said, Well, I said, this was really painful. I said, Well, I'll keep I'll keep to. Okay, I'll keep to so that's $24,000. And you know, you could sell the other eight back into the market. So he's sold the other eight back into the market. I kept the two that I paid $24,000 for PS now 33 years later the Berkshire Hathaway stock is trading for something like $540,000 a share. So those two shares are now worth, you know, over a million dollars. And I only paid 24,000 For them, which is nice. But I also let go eight shares that were worth now more than $4 million. So I don't know, that qualifies as my worst trade ever. could have had all 10. And they'd be worth, you know, $5.4 million now, but instead, I let eight of them go. I had to I didn't have the money to pay for them. Yeah, I mean, I suppose I could have margined them some way or another but not a big believer and bulking up on debt. So. So what did you learn your lesson? That's my story. Oh, I don't know. I mean, it's just a great story that I like to tell. I don't know what I what I learned is, you know, decimals? Well, I mean, I thought it was a fluke, because I didn't even know I mean, I guess I should have looked in the newspaper, or something back from these to put the stock tables in the newspaper. Or I should have, you know, you know, I should have scraped together the 120,000. Anyway, I could, because, you know, that clearly was an amazing investment. Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 31:49
Couple of things I was just looking at $120,000 invested in, in Berkshire Hathaway in 1990. The exact performance is that would have been worth $7.4 million today, which would have been about a 13% cumulative average growth rate, which is actually about a little bit above the overall stock market. Buffett hasn't done that great over the last 20 years or so. But if you go back to 1990, you get a relative some good outperformance one of the things that, that this is, uh, this is a typical example of looking back and, and, you know, hindsight bias because also, there's 1000s of stocks, you know, in the world and in in America, and if any of the other ones that you would have made a mistake and want, and then said, Oh, I guess I've ordered 120 I'm gonna borrow money from my family and friends. And I'm going to top it up, because I made the order, you know that. But here it was this well, here here, at

William Cohan 32:51
least I had them in my I wouldn't say hand, but I had them in my account. And I had to make a split second decision about how to, you know, rectify this rather troubling situation I found myself in Hmm. Now, I would have kept them but you know, back then. Yeah, of course, you're right. I mean, if I had tomorrow's Wall Street Journal today, then, you know, I'd never have to work again in my life.

Andrew Stotz 33:21
Yeah, hindsight bias is really a challenge. I have a friend of mine that had a contract with a company here in Thailand. And if if such and such happened, the stock was going to list on the stock market, he would get shares at a really low price, and the stock eventually, after all this work went on, they listed this stock, or they were getting ready to listed in the IPO price was much higher than the family thought it was going to be. And so they went to my friend and said, Well, we're not going to give you your shares. And he said, why? And he said, Well, if we had known that it was going to be that high of an IPO price, we would have never have given you them. Well, of course, that's the whole point of a contract. And luckily, my friend was able to get his pay out by fighting back. But the point is, is that if we had known

William Cohan 34:12
if we had known, right, but we never know.

Andrew Stotz 34:15
So that's, that's a so let me ask you what's, what's a resource that that you that you use or you have or a resource of your own that you'd recommend for our audience?

William Cohan 34:29
Well, I mean, obviously I recommend my books because I think that's they're, they're they're a great romp through really important events on Wall Street and really important companies on Wall Street.

Andrew Stotz 34:49
Can you give a little tip as to why Wall Street matters just because I think that book is fascinating for people who don't really have any background but probably need to know why it matters. hundreds, maybe just a little tidbit on that.

William Cohan 35:02
It's funny, I wrote that book after the 2008 financial crisis, because the favorite thing of American politicians at that time was beating down Wall Street for political and political gain. And I thought people had really lost sight of the good things that Wall Street did and continues to do. Yeah, I mean, obviously, there's excess, and people behave badly, and there probably wasn't enough regulation at that time. You know, there are a lot of ways to make Wall Street better. And that's what this book also talks about. But, but, you know, I needed I felt I need and by the way, this is by far my shortest book. Maybe because Wall Street doesn't matter in that many ways. But, you know, it's sort of like a primer for people. And I thought, you know, if you get to be a certain age in life, you know, you probably don't understand how Wall Street really works. But you also are probably afraid to ask anybody or admit that you don't know how it really works. So I decided this was to write this book for people who knew everything they wanted to know about how Wall Street works, but they were afraid to ask how things work. And, you know, obviously, you know, Wall Street is essentially the left ventricle of capitalism. And so given that, you know, our whole world is now a capitalist world. You know, even the former sort of communist sort of socialist regimes are now capitalist is, you know, as well, or are predominantly and so, how capital markets work, how capital is raised, why it's raised, what, what it's for, what, how it's done. I mean, the miracle, frankly, of, of taking a company public and, and separating, you know, the owners, from the management, you know, obviously, once upon a time every company was owned by its founding family, but, you know, like, 100 plus years ago, you know, it started separating, you know, the founders, from managers, and this and the shareholders and, and the guts, the courage to do that, think about it is, is quite, quite a piece of alchemy. And, you know, to be able then to sell company shares to people who don't even work at a company, and think that that's going to be okay. And the safe choice. I mean, it's really, it's sort of like, the people who ate those first mushrooms. You know, talk about guts to eat mushrooms, when you didn't know whether you're gonna get poisoned or not. You know, that's sort of what it was, like, you know, that first leap of separating founders, from managers from shareholders. Anyway, and, you know, the history of Wall Street is rather quite amazing. Yeah, I think.

Andrew Stotz 38:29
So the center of capitalism there, and that book, ladies and gentlemen is on Audible also. And that's a four hour book. So it is, you know, easily digestible in a weekend or so. And yes, I remember my first boss, when I became a sell side analyst, he said, we are on the cutting edge of capitalism. And I just loved him, because he made me think about, you know, ultimately, capital needs to flow to projects that are profitable. And what Wall Street's doing is trying to facilitate that. And, one, it reminds me of a book that I read called Hidden in Plain Sight by a guy named Peter Wallison. And he talked about the origin of the mortgage crisis in 2008. And how the politics behind bush and then later Clinton trying to drive homeownership, pushed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to get these huge portfolios of bad performing, you know, low performing assets that eventually, ultimately because they couldn't issue they weren't issuing mortgages. It had to be funneled through the banks. And that was a fascinating read also about you know, everything gets blamed on Wall Street, but I would say that was something that kind of woke me up so interesting.

William Cohan 39:51
In my book House of Cards, which is about the collapse of Bear Stearns, which of course was the canary in the coal mine of the 2008 financial crisis I talk a lot about what, you know, Peter talked about the role of the government. And, you know, the laws that require banks to make loans mortgages available, you know, to decide, disadvantaged people, which is, you know, well intentioned, but then those loans get packaged up into mortgage backed securities. And a big part of the reason that the crisis occurred, you know, had its origins in part, not in large part, but in part in this, you know, so called Community Reinvestment Act, which required banks to make those mortgages available. And, you know, it'd be one thing if they were just sort of kept it the banks and their communities, but they were all hoovered up into mortgage backed securities. And essentially, they thought they were distributing the risk. But they were really sending the risk all around the world. So

Andrew Stotz 41:12
Well, it was a masterstroke from a political perspective, because everybody involved in that knew that bringing on lower quality loans had a cost. And instead of putting that cost up front, they were able to, you know, package it in a way that, you know, politicians could kind of put the blame on on Wall Street. So I'm looking forward to that one. And for all the listeners and viewers out there, just make sure, go to the show notes, and I'll have links to all of that last question. What's your number one goal for the next 12 months?

William Cohan 41:49
Well, I'm I've embarked on my new book, I, you know, have weekly writing assignments for POC, which is my digital media company that I was co founder of, you know, so, you know, my weeks are, my goals are, you know, continually, often the same is just to keep putting my butt in the chair and writing day in day out, sometimes on my books, sometimes on my articles sometimes on what I have to do for Puck, sometimes for the New York Times, and Financial Times, or the Washington Post or whatever. And, you know, just sort of enjoy my life, to you know, where, wherever, there's an internet connection, you know, I can work so that's beautiful. Yeah. And whether it's, you know, in in Nantucket, or France, or New York City, or Bangkok, Thailand river, or Bangkok, Thailand, or, you know, wherever,

Andrew Stotz 43:01
exactly, well, listeners, there you have it, another story of loss to keep you winning. Remember, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. As we conclude, William, I want to thank you again, for joining the mission and on behalf of East Arts Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

William Cohan 43:30
You know, enjoy your life as much as you can. No one gets out alive.

Andrew Stotz 43:38
As a friend of mine said the Grim Reaper is undefeated. And that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. Let's celebrate that today. We added one more person to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your words, podcasts. Oh Is Andrew Stotz saying I'll see you on the upside.