“Look, I think when the good Lord created business models, asset management was really blessed, right? You have no need for capital or de minimis need for capital working capital in the business. Your whole revenue stream is structured on advalorem pricing. So even when you destroy value and markets go up, you make more money. Kind of a wonderful thing. Right.” Seth Bernstein · Masters in Business

What I think I brought to AB was a different perspective, more global than they had. They were very U.S.-centric, although they had a great Asian business. I think I brought an appreciation of how investment processes worked and understanding that you can have the smartest people in the world with the most impressive process deliver appalling returns. It's serendipitous why it works when it does work. So be careful mucking around in it. I think I brought an understanding that the way they had rebuilt Alliance Bernstein was to strip resources from everything but the investment teams because they had nothing to sell. They did it. They did a very good job at it. And I began to focus on distribution, whether it's in private wealth and institutional and most importantly in retail. And we decided to go full focus on the insurance business because we saw that as a really important source of growth, both for our private credit business, but also our fixed income business.

What do you think big institutions get wrong? Like it sounds like post-GFC, Alliance Bernstein, before your predecessor really took the reins, kind of was stumbling. Yeah, it's a little bit of hindsight that we know all the things that were going wrong with large active managers. But generally speaking, what is it about big institutions that they sometimes just don't see these things coming and stumble into the dark on these issues that clearly you identified as problematic?

10% tailwind never hurts, right? Never

hurts. And we've certainly benefited, as is the industry as a whole, from that consequence. Thirdly, you get to work with some of the most interesting, if weirdest, people in the world. Absolutely true. And frankly, particularly when you have an RIA and you have to be focused on wealth management, you better become a really good fiduciary. Because if you're not putting your clients' interests first, you're going to lose them because all you have is their confidence in you. Because your business, Barry, is a word-of-mouth business. People don't come to you, I suspect not because they've heard you on your show. They come to you because you have clients who say this guy protected us.

Yeah, there's an aspect of being a fiduciary that it seems so obvious today, but 15 years ago, the fiduciaries were a small minority. It took a, and I've been saying this for 30 years, and it's taken me of being wrong for decades before the industry caught up.