Welcome back to the Timeless Investor Show. I'm Ari Van Gemeren, fund manager, student of history, and host of this show. And today, we're going to dive into one of my absolute favorite biographies and businessmen of all time, Andrew Carnegie. Picture this, a 13-year-old Scottish immigrant working 12-hour days in a Pittsburgh cotton mill for$1.20 a week. His family had fled Scotland with essentially nothing after his father's weaving business was destroyed by mechanization. They lived in a one-room house. This kid had no formal education, no connections, no capital. There's countless stories like that, and many of them don't go anywhere. But 53 years later, This immigrant kid sells his steel company for$480 million, roughly$15 billion in today's money, making him one of the wealthiest men in history and somebody that has been written about and discussed extensively since it happened because there's so much to learn. That is Andrew Carnegie's story. It's not a fairy tale. There is gold. in the pages of his biographies and the pages of his story. So today, we're going to dive into him, his life, and what lessons we as real estate investors, entrepreneurs, and timeless builders can take away from what he did. Because here's the thing, his rise from a$1.20 a week telegram boy to steel baron isn't just an inspiring rags to riches story, although it is definitely that. We're going to actually look into the exact principles that helped him to build U.S. Steel into one of the most successful conglomerates of all time. And I want to tell you something about this episode. I was looking at some of our recent real estate deals and looking at operational metrics, and I kept coming back to something Carnegie said. And you're going to have to excuse the Scottish brogue. We are going to have a healthy dose of William Wallace-esque vibes on this show. But here's an exact quote from the man. Watch the costs and the profits will take care of themselves. Most investors, including myself, many times in my career, have gotten this completely backwards. We, Royal We, obsessed over the big picture, the acquisition, the financing, the exit strategy. And the reason is because it's exciting. It's fun. It's cool to post on LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever your social media choice is about your latest deal you just crushed or what you're taking care of. But nobody's posting and getting a lot of public acclamation for late nights reviewing spreadsheets and understanding stuff. And I think that's true of the industry in general. I think a lot of people are relatively sloppy on details, again, including myself at several points in my career. I don't think everyone tracks their true cost per unit. They don't know their real maintenance expense. They're not digging in and auditing the actual invoices that are coming in on a monthly basis. And that's especially true as you scale your portfolio. It becomes harder to do it, but it doesn't mean that it's not important. And I think at a general level, we just say, we don't always understand our own actual management efficiency. But Carnegie did, and he understood something that most people miss. Wealth isn't built... in a fancy boardroom with leatherback chairs and nice pictures. It's built in the boiler room. It's built in the day-to-day operational discipline on the ground that compounds over decades to create massive value. So today, we're going to extract the timeless lessons from Carnegie's playbook and see how they apply to building real wealth in real estate, investing, and entrepreneurship today. So do you remember Carnegie's start as a telegraph boy? That information advantage he learned never left his playbook. So here's the real story. In 1853, Carnegie caught the attention of Thomas Scott, superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who hired him as his personal telegrapher. But Carnegie didn't just deliver the messages and be satisfied that he had a pretty cool job. He actually studied them. He understood that he was seeing the nervous system of American commerce in real time. And remember, this This is an era that predates telephones and mobile phones and all this kind of stuff. Telegraph was how messages were sent. And then there came a moment that changed everything. One morning, an accident had created a massive traffic jam on the Western Division. Scott couldn't be located. So Carnegie, who was just 18 years old, made a decision that could have easily gotten him fired. He sent instructions via telegraph under Scott's name, rerouting several trains and quickly unclogging the system. So when Scott found out, he was so pleased that he bragged to company president J. Edgar Thompson, calling Carnegie his little white-haired Scottish devil. But here's where the information arbitrage really started paying off. Scott began alerting Carnegie to investment opportunities that only railroad insiders would know about. In 1855, Scott told Carnegie about an upcoming sale of Adams Express Company shares, a package shipping company that had contracts with the Pennsylvania Railroad. Carnegie's mother mortgaged their family home for$500 to buy the shares. Then came the big one, the Woodruff Sleeping Car Company. Carnegie invested just$217.50, money he'd saved from his railroad salary. But he knew something that his competitors didn't. the railroad was about to give sleeping car contracts to Woodruff. And within two years, that tiny investment was generating$5,000 annually, more than three times his railroad salary. Carnegie later said, it was as though I was lifted to paradise. I felt that my foot was upon the ladder and I was bound to climb. But here's the key. Carnegie wasn't just passively receiving tips. He was actively building an information collection system. He cultivated relationships with railroad executives, steel suppliers, government officials. He understood that in a rapidly industrializing economy, information moved faster than money, and whoever had the best information could make the best investment decisions. And so that information network became the foundation for building U.S. Steel. When Carnegie was ready to sell his steel company in 1901, he knew exactly who had the capital and ambition to buy it, J.P. Morgan. But more importantly, Carnegie knew that the true value of what he was selling because he had better information about steel demand, production capacity, and market dynamics than anyone else in the industry. And his network told him that Morgan was assembling a steel conglomerate and would need Carnegie's assets to make it work. Carnegie could have asked for any price and he basically did. He sold his business for$480 million, as I mentioned in the introduction. So this is Carnegie's first major principle, information asymmetry creates profit asymmetry. And I want to point out an obvious fact here as we discuss this story. A lot of his information asymmetry I just described would today be described as insider trading. But the key is, if we get past the fact that he was doing that, let's just talk about the key principles there. He was cultivating those networks. He was in the flow of information. He understood what was going on. He was working. He was working his network to understand where the opportunities lay. And so many people, ourselves included at times, sort of neglect that part of the story. We spend a lot of time behind spreadsheets, behind our computer, not out with people learning. So in real estate, your information network is everything. You need relationships with brokers who can help guide deals to you. You need, if you're a developer, you need connections with city planners who understand zoning changes. It's a reason that the developers, as a macro class of real estate people, generally are very political people. and very involved in the political scene. You need relationships with contractors who can give you accurate renovation estimates quickly. You need trusted relationships with them. Better yet, if you have connections with the direct supplier of the materials you need so you can try to cut out the middlemen and not get hosed by people that are buying appliances on your part, something we've been looking at. Most investors... And this is a broad generalization, but most investors are passive information consumers. They read the same blogs, they attend the same conferences, and they hear the same opportunities as everyone else. But Carnegie built an active information collecting system. He paid for insights that others didn't have access to. He cultivated relationships that gave him advanced notice of opportunities. He understood his market at a very deep level and And I'm going to get into that much more broadly later. But he understood the information flow of his market really well. I want to give you guys a small example from my own life that I've recently been working on. So we've been seeing this issue day in and day out. But the other night, I was out to drinks with a good friend. And I hadn't seen him in years, right? So he's a local real estate guy here in Portland and owns a property management company. And we were just out at... his club having drinks and talking. And I asked him, what are you doing on insurance right now? And he was like, well, we just moved our entire portfolio to this insurance company that ended up pricing us at about the cost of American Family, who was an insurance company that has basically exited multifamily completely. And we've seen insurance premiums go up two to three X in that time. So Immediately, I said, I got to talk to these guys. And on the spot, he made an email introduction to that team. And now I'm meeting with them to discuss potentially rolling our entire real estate portfolio in and cutting our premiums by 50%. If I hadn't gone to drinks with him, right? If I hadn't gone out and started actively gathering information on this from other operators, if I stayed behind my spreadsheet and just crunched numbers... this would not have happened. Or let's take this newsletter and podcast, for instance. I mean, this is a content production ecosystem where, you know, I hate to say that. Somebody told me I'm a content creator the other day and I was embarrassed because it's not really what I am. But that's okay. I am a content creator. I guess it's the end of the day. But this ecosystem Newsletter and podcast is also an active source of information. I'll tell you why. Last week, I had a podcast interview with Tony DeFede, who came to me through this podcast and this newsletter. And he shared insights on building captive insurance companies, something I've been trying to figure out how to do for like two years, right? And that's active information gathering, guys. It's so critical. And it's important because everyone's getting crushed on insurance. And if I had stayed in my office, it wouldn't have happened. So all of this information gathering, asymmetry, active management of your stuff is materially important for staying ahead of the game and making real money. Okay, the next thing I want to dive into on my list of things about Carnegie that I find fascinating is probably one of my favorites. Information asymmetry is great, but Carnegie had a cost control obsession. Most biographies of Carnegie focused on his philanthropy, his libraries, his gospel of wealth. But that's not actually what made him rich. What made him rich was an almost pathological obsession with operational efficiency. Carnegie didn't just own a bunch of steel mills and sit at the top of his fiefdom. He revolutionized how steel was made by implementing what he called detailed costs of production accounting procedures. that enabled the company to achieve greater efficiencies than any other manufacturing industry of the time. Here's his famous philosophy. Cut the prices, scoop the market, watch the costs, and the profits will take care of themselves. Excuse me. I'm so sorry. Please forgive the Scottish brogue. I'm just having too much fun with this. I'm going to keep going. Think about what I just said, what he just said for a second. Most business owners focus on revenue. And then they worry about cost. Carnegie flipped it completely. He obsessed over cost first, knowing that if he could produce cheaper than anyone else, profits were inevitable. But Carnegie's cost obsessions went far beyond just being a general principle. He implemented specific systems that were revolutionary for his time. First, he installed weighting skills at every single point in his steel mills. Every piece of material that moved through his plants was weighed and tracked. He wanted to know exactly where material was saved and where it was wasted. This was unprecedented in the steel industry. Second, he compared every worker doing the same job against every other worker. This wasn't just about productivity. It was about finding the most efficient methods and replicating them across all his operations. Third, he demanded daily cost reports from every plant, no matter where he was in the world. When Carnegie was traveling for pleasure... which he frequently did in his later years, he relied on detailed cost sheets that were sent to him wherever he was. He could be vacationing in Scotland and still know exactly what it costs to produce a ton of steel in Pittsburgh. And think about that for a second. I mean, everything I just described is basically modern day big data analytics, right? I mean, it's a whole industry today in technology to track and assess some of these metrics. Carnegie did it with scales and accuracy. paper books where somebody was writing it meticulously into the books and delivering it to him. I mean, think about that for a second. The mindset of a man to build that system when it was not easy to do. It's so easy today, and yet so many of us still don't do it. Why? Like, Carnegie could do it in Scotland with... Reports being shipped across the ocean to him in coal-driven steam liners, or I'm mixing ship types there, but you understand what I'm saying. And we have that data today at our fingertips, and we still don't look at it. So just think about that. And here's where things get really interesting. Carnegie hired a German chemist specifically to figure out what was happening inside his blast furnaces. Most iron worker owners, iron works owners at the time, had no scientific understanding of their own processes. Carnegie was surprised to find that owners of ironworks knew very little about what went on inside the furnace. But by understanding the actual chemistry, Carnegie and his team figured out how to significantly increase output through what they called hard-driving furnaces, increasing the airflow to maximize efficiency. This wasn't an operational improvement. It was scientific improvement that he invested in and found for his own businesses, right? First principles thinking. Carnegie recognized that most of his competitors didn't even understand the way their processes work. He figured it out. And Carnegie found his perfect partner in operational obsession, Captain William Jones, who superintended the Edgar Thompson Steelworks. Jones was described at the time as probably the greatest mechanical genius that ever entered the Carnegie shops. Jones shared Carnegie's obsession with costs and speed of production, and he made numerous improvements to accelerate the flow of metal through various stages before it cooled. So by 1892, in the middle of what should have been a challenging economic year, Carnegie Steel made$4.5 million in profits. Carnegie himself said,"'Was there ever such a business?' While his competitors were struggling, his cost control systems allowed him to thrive. Here's the thing that I really want you to take away from this. Carnegie's competitors had access to the same technology. They had access to the same raw materials. They had access to the same labor markets. But Carnegie won through operational discipline that others couldn't match. His mills operated like precision machines while his competitors were chaotic. So here's Carnegie principle number two, micromanagement of costs can and does create macro wealth. In real estate, this means knowing your true cost per unit, not your ballpark expenses. It means tracking maintenance costs with precision, auditing invoices, understanding the flow of cash through your property. When you look at a P&L from your management company or from your sponsor, they're Do you understand what the adjustments and all the below the line money movements actually mean from a first principles basis in terms of where money's going, where it's being allocated, how it's being spent? You have to understand it. You have to be deep. I know there's a focus in this industry on scale, scale, scale. And sometimes scale, scale, scale doesn't work well with micromanage, micromanage, micromanage. But I've come to realize, in my time, acquiring over$150 million of real estate and being in this business now for eight plus years, that it is the only thing that matters. Micro management and precision control of what's happening at your property. You have to understand. I see investors, again, quoting myself to my chagrin over time, who couldn't tell you what their cap rates were on entry or what their current valuations were Or many questions that sponsors don't even track or LPs maybe don't even understand about their own deals. But they all track their acquisitions obsessively and their inbound revenue obsessively. Yes, we increase top line revenue. We increase top line revenue. What about the cost controls? Carnegie, if he was a real estate operator, would have crushed all these people. And in competitive markets like steel mills, he did. The third piece I think is part and parcel with cost control is that vertical integration is your competitive moat. He understood something that I think a lot of business owners do miss. If you don't control your supply chain, your supply chain will control you and it will dictate the cost of owning your assets. Carnegie didn't just own the steel mills. He owned the iron ore mines in Minnesota. He owned the coal mines in Pennsylvania. He owned the railroads that transported raw materials. He owned the ships that carried ore across the Great Lakes. When his competitors, for example, needed iron ore, they paid market prices to suppliers. When Carnegie needed iron ore, he paid himself. His competitors were subject to supply disruptions. Carnegie controlled his own supply. So this is Carnegie principle number three. control the value chain and or be vertically integrated. And look, let's talk about this for a second, because what Carnegie did, again, right, different era, different time, this is the Gilded Age, people got away with this kind of stuff. We would call that a trust or a monopoly today, and the government wouldn't allow it. But in real estate, they don't care. So why aren't you vertically integrated? Why aren't you thinking like a vertical integrator to take complete control of your operations and and Own everything. So vertical integration and property ownership looks like controlling the property management input. It looks like having your own maintenance crews and building relationships with the people so that you're not getting contractor markups and everything. It looks like having direct relationships with lenders so you're not going through brokers every single time. All of this, by the way, everything I'm describing is anathema to the guru industry And most sponsors, the way they think, because the industry is focused so much on scale, scale, scale, drive acquisition fees, drive deal fees, and all of this is the enemy of scale. I don't think it's the enemy of scale. I think it is the foundation necessary to scale, and that is something that is missed in this business. It was missed for me, by the way. I came up in this business listening to BiggerPockets and reading every book I could find, and the constant advice was, Don't manage your own deals. Don't manage your own deals. Because if you manage your own deals, you are buying yourself a job. Okay, maybe that's true. But then the missing piece of education is what do property management companies do? How do they rip you off? How are they taking money from your pocket and paying themselves? And you don't even realize it because you've never been in the trenches. You never figured it out. Carnegie would never have allowed that to happen in this business. But it's something that most sponsors routinely and systematically do. and think they're being smart by scaling and working with, and I'm using air quotes, best in class third party property management companies, best in class contractor, best in class this, best in class that. We have been focused more here on vertical integration as I've started to realize how incredibly important the cost inputs are in this business. Management's a key one, right? Here's a small one that I've talked about before. Laundry contracts. I've been talking about this ad nauseum. Laundry contract, leasing your laundry out is a massive rip off. Think about the math on this. A laundry machine costs about, I don't know, a thousand bucks, right? So a washer and dryer, maybe you buy a bulk scale, you're getting$1,500, right? You give 50% of the revenue from those machines to the laundry leasing company. And it's questionable what they actually do, right? It's questionable what they do other than put some capital into buying the machines and giving to you up front. But I'll give you an example. We have a building with eight machines in it. And those machines produce to us net revenue of about$6,000 a year. But the leasing firm takes 50% of the revenue, so they're making$6,000 a year. Now, think about the math. I invest$8,000, call it$1,000 per machine, into those eight machines, and I make$6,000 a year. So two things. First of all, it's a huge ripoff for you as an operator. It's a huge ripoff. Why would you do that? Well, most people do it because... I don't know. They're lazy or they don't have the money or they don't want to buy the machines or they think they're getting some sort of value from outsourcing to a laundry leasing company. But you're giving up$6,000 a year on an$8,000 investment. Think about that. Why do we do that? Why would we do that? Well, the answer is most people are outsourcing their costs, right? We are not vertically integrating. Why not? Get control of it. So I've ranted enough on cost centers being important. It's incredibly important. It's one of the most important parts of this business. Actually, not one of. It is the most important part of this business. Cost, control, vertical integration, own everything, control what goes in and out of your business, and you will thrive. That's what Carnegie did. That's what we can do. The fourth principle is countercyclicality and striking when... Other people are scared. The time to expand is when no one else does, okay? And let's dig into this a little bit. So Carnegie, when times are bad, when the market is bad, many people hunker down and they just try to weather the storm. Carnegie did the opposite. Here's a quick anecdote for you guys. In 1872, Carnegie started construction on his first steel mill. the Edgar Thompson Steelworks just outside Pittsburgh. He began concentrating on steel at age 38, which by the way is awesome for me to hear and to know because I'm 38 and it makes me feel good about myself for where I am right now in life. And Carnegie was just getting started at 38. That is awesome. So he went on to at 38 and he began concentrating on it at 38 and began founding what would become a steel empire. And then the panic of 1873 hit. In September 18th, 1873, the banking firm of Jay Cook and Company, which had been the government's chief financier during the Civil War, it was heavily invested in railroad construction, declared bankruptcy. This triggered what became known as the first Great Depression in American history. The economic collapse was devastating. 89 of the country's 364 railroads crashed into bankruptcy. A total of 18,000 businesses failed in just two years. By 1876, unemployment had risen to 14%. 14%. But here's the thing. Carnegie finished the construction of his Edgar Thompson Steelworks in 1873, right in the middle of the economic panic. While his competitors were going bankrupt, Carnegie was building the most advanced steel mill in America. Why was he able to do this? Well, because of his principle of cost control. Carnegie's operations were so efficient that he could remain profitable even when steel prices collapsed. But more importantly, he had retained cash reserves from his profitable years specifically in preparation for moments like this. Carnegie's business philosophy was simple. He retained a large part of the profits earned in good times to tide him over and give him flexibility in bad times. I'm going to say it over and over again, guys. The key to success in business is to survive. It is to survive. Survivorship bias is a real thing in all industry, in all business, especially in real estate. And the people that we look up to today that have survived four cycles, they survived. That's why you know who they are. And how do you think they survived? Cost control, conservatism, cash management. All of the above, but that's why we know their names. But the economic collapse also gave Carnegie access to everything he needed at fire sale prices. Construction costs plummeted, labor was cheap and available, competitors were selling assets to raise cash. So while others were forced to contract, Carnegie was able to expand. And the timing was perfect. In August 1875, just as the economy was starting to recover, Carnegie's Edgar Thompson Steelworks made its first blow using the revolutionary Bessemer process. He was perfectly positioned to capture the recovery, and the results were extraordinary. Carnegie alone estimated that he earned a 40% return on his investment, a profit of$40,000 from a$100,000 investment in the mill. While his competitors had spent the Depression struggling to survive, Carnegie's had built the foundation of what would become the largest steel company in the world. But his counter-cyclical strategy didn't just take place in 1873. He repeated his strategy throughout his career. During the depression of the 1890s, while competitors were cutting back, Carnegie was again expanding, buying distressed assets and positioning himself for the next recovery, driven again by his aptitude or desire or capability for withholding and preserving cash and cost control. So he understood, as we understand, I think, at a high level today, that economic cycles can create the great wealth transfer mechanisms and opportunities. During panics, assets get repriced from their peak emotional highs to their trough emotional lows, and that's when you're really able to build generational wealth. In real estate, this is obvious, this means building cash reserves. It means building operational efficiencies today, to get ahead of when things get rough. It is all about control, surviving, cash control. And Carnegie's counter-cyclical approach worked because he combined three elements, operational efficiency that allowed him to survive downturns, cash reserves that allowed him to invest during downturns, and the psychological fortitude to expand when everyone else was contracting in fear. Most investors... get this backwards. They expand a lot when times are good and credit is easy, and then they're forced to contract when times get tough. Carnegie built when others couldn't, and he reaped the rewards when the cycle turned. We are watching this happen on a macro level in real estate today. Everybody who bought big in the lead up, in the sunbelt, leading into 2020, 2021, through the COVID years when the treasuries were under 1%, Those were the good times, guys. And a lot of people overexpanded in that time. Any developer that went big in that time is in severe financial distress now. And it's a big problem. And this would be the time to build, honestly. This is the time that developers probably should be building. And they're not. None of them are. There's a few forward-sighted guys that are building. And I find it to be an incredibly courageous move to do because I still think development's a crazy business. But they're doing it, right? So... The last thing I just want to point out is everything Carnegie did requires discipline, discipline and operational excellence. His competitors would delegate operational oversight once they got successful. Carnegie never left the details of his business. He understood everything that was happening. He never got soft. even when he was worth hundreds of millions of dollars and he'd be golfing in Scotland, he was still personally reviewing cost reports from his steel mills. Think about that. And how many of us have outsourced that job to someone else as fast as humanly possible so we don't have to do it? Shame on us. Shame on me. Shame on all of us. This is so critical. We have to get on top of it. This all connects back to something I talked about before in the Letters from Gall podcast from Julius Caesar. It's so relevant. In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes. Well, what do you think those trivial causes are? They're the little things, right? The same is true in business and investing. The small operational efficiencies that you ignore today become major profit leaks that will kill your returns. Carnegie's competitors were big and strong, if we want to extend the analogy to war, but Carnegie won through discipline and systems. just like the Roman legions beat the Germanic tribes in a similar way, or all of Gaul, right? Discipline, systems, operations. While his competitors were making heroic one-off decisions, Carnegie was building repeatable systems. So how do we build these today? I'm going to wrap this up. This has been a long-winded solo episode. Thank you for sticking with me. But it's so good. And Carnegie is so awesome. And I'm so inspired just talking about his life and walking through this. So first, build your information network. We talked about it. Stay on the edge. Understand what's happening out there. Second, obsess over operational metrics. Track everything. Understand everything. Understand the flow of funds. Understand what all the adjustments mean at the bottom of your P&L. Understand what is happening at the ground level on your property. Third, control the critical parts of your value chain. You don't necessarily need to own everything, but the big cost inputs, I would look hard at getting deep and controlling it. If you're not going to go for that, that's fine. Be in the weeds on your management company, on your maintenance contracts, on your invoices. Be in the weeds. Understand what's happening. Fourth, build cash reserves. During good times, have cash reserves. I mean, have them, right? Fifth, never, ever, ever delegate operational oversight. Stay involved in the details as you scale. Do not think someone else is going to run your business the way you'll run your business. And everything I'm saying is anti-scale, right? Everything I'm saying is anti-scale. Then how did Carnegie build a$15 billion exit with US Steel by doing all of this stuff. If he can do it, so can you, so can I. Let's not give it up. So let's wrap this up. As we wrap today's episode, I want you to think about your own operational discipline. Are you tracking the metrics? Do you have information advantages? Are you building systems that will compound over time? Carnegie's story isn't just a cool rags to riches historical inspiration. It is a blueprint for building wealth that works just as well today, if not better than it did then, because we have access to technology that he didn't have. We can get it better. And one of these days, I'm going to interview a PropTech VC, and we're going to talk about some of the really cool stuff that's coming out for real estate data and technology, because there's a lot of really cool stuff. But here's the thing. Here's the timeless truth to leave you with. Markets change, technologies evolve, but operational excellence will never go out of style. Style is eternal, as I tell my wife about my clothing choices. So use it wisely. If you haven't done so already, please, please be sure to leave a written review for our show. It really helps with the algorithms and with all those undecided investors out there who glance over the Timeless Investor Show and say, I don't know, maybe I should listen, maybe not. Not a lot of reviews. I don't know. I'm going to move on. Help us out here. Here's a nice review left for us. I want to give a shout out here to I love when people don't leave their real name. AS80810. This podcast is a great extension of Ari's book, Timeless Wealth, Real Estate Through the Ages, by the way, seamlessly blending engaging storytelling with historical analysis. He does an excellent job of distilling timeless lessons that remain highly relevant today. Look forward to more. Keep up the great work. Hey. Thanks, AS80810. I really appreciate it. I hope you guys are as inspired by this story and biography as I am. I read this bio years ago. And it was like a 1500 page tome and it was awesome. And the story still sticks with me. It informs me on the right way to build your business, your investing empire, whatever it is you're pushing the envelope on. For me, just the act of preparing this podcast episode and thinking about what I wanted to say just gave me so many ideas, lots and lots of ideas, lots of ways to improve cost efficiencies to control the outcome and thereby deliver better returns for our investors. I hope it's inspired And that you leave this ready to conquer the world. With that, think well, act wisely, and build something timeless. I'm Ari Van Gemeren, host of the Timeless Investor Show. I deeply appreciate you being here, and I look forward to seeing you next week.