← Educational Alpha
Loading summary
Transcript29 lines
- [00:05]
A
Welcome to Educational Alpha. I'm Bill Kelly, CEO of CHI association and your host. Bringing you on the ground conversations with business leaders, educators and industry colleagues from around the globe. Educational Alpha is sponsored by iCapital, the financial technology company with a mission to power the world's alternative investment marketplace. Part innovator, part educator and part navigator of the alternatives industry, iCapital offers intuitive, scalable digital solutions that have transformed how private market and hedge fund investments are bought and sold. With iCapital, financial advisors, wealth managers and asset managers around the world now have access to everything they need to deliver the return and diversification potential of alternatives to high net worth investors. To learn more, visit icapital.com in this.
- [01:03]
B
Episode, Bill welcomes Will Goodhart, Executive Director of CFA uk, for a reflective discussion on leadership, professional evolution and the challenges of addressing sustainability in finance. Will shares insights from his two decade long tenure, including his journey from journalism to to leading one of the most respected professional bodies in finance. The conversation dives into the importance of serving end investors, the role of professional bodies in fostering ethical and technical competence, and the urgency of addressing climate change. Listen in.
- [01:45]
A
Will Goodhart, welcome to Educational Alpha.
- [01:48]
B
Thank you, thank you.
- [01:49]
A
And I said right before we flip the record button on, I've known you for the decade plus, I've been at CAIA and I try to call upon you every time I'm over in uk and this time was different because it would be the last time for both of us to be in our current seats. Me retiring or repotting from Kaya and you doing the same thing at CFA uk. And I think when I did see you, I believe the announcement of your tenure and your successor plan was just announced and this is September of this year and I think the thought was maybe then and now that you would stay on through maybe the early part of next year and then off to bigger and better things. But before we get into what I think has been a terrific tenure for your member base and most notably for the end investor and some of the very positive things that have happened under your leadership. Maybe a little bit more about your background. I know it's almost been two decades in this seat, but you had some roles before that, so it'd be great to start with a little bit of who Will Goodhart is.
- [02:43]
B
You bet. Thank you very much and it was wonderful to see you when you came over. I think it's a nice synchronicity that we both seem to be moving towards different activities at the same time after a long period in our various seats. And congratulations to you for everything that you've achieved and that Cairo has achieved over the years. And it's a great pleasure to be here and talking to you today. So, a little bit about me. I was always interested in finance, but I was also conscious that I'm an intellectually curious person and have never been great at doing exactly what I was told to do. And that meant that I didn't think that necessarily going into a large financial institution after I'd studied history at university was exactly what I ought to do or would serve me or them very well. And I happened upon an organization called Euromoney Institutional Investor. Actually, at the time it was just called Euromoney because they hadn't acquired Institutional Investor at that stage. And I joined them as a database analyst. And I spent the first year of my career building the very first database of every Eurobond that had ever been issued. So for about 15 minutes, I knew more about the Eurobond market than almost anybody else in in it. And that was fun. And actually, I regard the rest of my career as in some way doing penance for the outcome of the work that I did, which was essentially building the first machine that allowed people to run league tables, to say we're the top rank bank for Finnish infrastructure providers in ECU denominated bonds, which, again, I do feel a certain amount of guilt for. But it was a wonderful place to start. Euromoney was a fabulous organization, very entrepreneurial, really exciting. The international capital markets were still relatively young, so it was a great place to cut my teeth. And then I moved into journalism. I was an okay journalist, but I tended to believe too much of what I was told. And I then became an editor and I was a much better editor because I never believed that the journalists had done enough work, which is because of probably looking at my own performance as a journalist and able to see through to what really needed to be done. And then I stayed with Euromoney. I did a little bit of time as a freelancer, but mostly I was with Euromoney for the first 20 years of my career. And then later on I wrote a story about how bad I thought most of the professional bodies in finance were. And in the UK at least, again, not necessarily making huge numbers of friends, but I think it was correct at the time. This was the mid-2000s, and I think it was a comfortable time for professional bodies and trade associations. And it seemed to me that nobody was really working all that hard at it. And then about two months later, I saw an ad for the chief executive's role at what was then called the UK Society of Investment Professionals. And I thought, you know what? I could probably do most of the things that they want and I could pretend that I could do the other two. And so why don't I just apply? And I did. And to my great surprise, I got an interview. And then to my even greater surprise, I was then later on offered the role, which was really fun and has been for the past 18 years. And it's a job that's changed repeatedly over time. I think if it had been the same job for 18 years, I undoubtedly would have left sooner. But it just went on being a bunch of different jobs, one building on top of the other. Sorry, that was a much longer introduction either you or your listeners really wanted, but there we go.
- [05:59]
A
No, I think it serves us up for success. I think given my tenure and yours, I think one attribute in common is curiosity. And I think oftentimes that's underrated in terms of how important it is. And yours came out of journalism and maybe mine comes out of being a CPA from way back when where you accept nothing at face value and you ask why? Why? But when it came to some of your criticisms of professional bodies, and I've been a bit of a critique artist myself, because it's a space we're in and a space I love, but no model's perfect. But if you look back almost 20 years ago, when you were critical of it versus now, the almost two decades in this space, what was your biggest criticism? And then as a practitioner, what have you done to address it going forward?
- [06:45]
B
I think the main challenge, or the main problem was that they weren't very curious organizations. They didn't appear to be organizations that were interested in way the world was changing. And they didn't seem to be very attuned or well positioned to find out how to then evolve to meet those new challenges that were arising. I think a lot of professional bodies in the past tended to be thought of as almost secretariats. So you had a functional chief executive who was probably directed to do specific things by a board. And it seemed to me that that didn't make any sense because board members are all busy, they're smart, they know their jobs, they know what the organization's to achieve, but none of them wants to be the chief executive. Otherwise one of them probably would have been, so you have to have somebody who comes in and goes, okay, what are we going to do here? How are we going to have fun? How are we going to make this interesting. How are we going to get all the right people on the bus? I can't remember the name of the guy who wrote the book about good to great in the social sector, but it's a really good little book. It's still a really good little book and it just says it takes time to build momentum. But get all the right people on the bus, make sure everyone knows where the bus is going, and something good will happen as long as you are working hard and trying things. And I guess I'm an optimist and so I've always tried a lot of different things. Some of them have worked and some of them haven't, but most people don't remember the stuff that you did that didn't work. And they're kind, they do tend to remember the stuff that did. So optimism usually pays for itself.
- [08:10]
A
It does. And the old saying, it takes a village. I look at your remit and your member size, just in the uk, it's probably not too far off from where Kai is. We've got 14,000 members and I think CFAUK is probably pretty close to that. But I always think about who we're ultimately trying to serve and I always have felt it's the end investor. And through our membership body, through the work that we do, through every podcast I put out, through every article I write, I think about better outcomes for the end investor. And if I can empower our members to help carry that flag, the world will be a better place. And on the flip side, and maybe this gets back to some of your criticism and maybe mine too, that if it's an association or any professional body that is very lane dependent on a very, very specific mission, and there's a hard guardrail left and right as to what I'm willing to do, because it's not in the best interest of my members and I love my members, I have to serve them well, as you do. But ultimately, if I could put the client first, I can walk back a value proposition that should make those members very, very happy.
- [09:17]
B
Yeah, I completely agree. I think I've tended to focus on the good of the profession and obviously professions are set up to serve the public interest and therefore have a protected characteristic. And I think that whatever we do has got to move the profession forward in the interest of its end users. So, yeah, the end investor is really the critical component of the piece. One of the problems though, with the end investor is sometimes do they know what is good for them? And I know Kaya does a lot and CFA Institute does a lot to work on on financial literacy and try to improve the awareness and the ability of the demand side to apply discipline into the market for investment. That can be quite tricky. Particularly important when you're looking at things like disclosures and transparency and the provision of much more information by investment firms on the nature of the funds being offered and the cost of the funds. You really want to make sure that actually the end user is able or an end user or an agent of the end user is able to use that information because otherwise it's just creating information at cost for no end purpose. So it can be difficult to figure out and keep in mind how best to serve the end investor when the end investor doesn't always know how to serve itself.
- [10:33]
A
Yeah, I agree. And I think the roles of you and myself and so many like us around the world in leadership positions and positions of responsibility, there's so many topics and themes that we can lean into on any given Monday and it's up to us to figure out what are the ones that are going to resonate the best and lead to the very best outcomes. And the best ones may not be the easiest ones too. So it makes it difficult. And you and I have been around long enough will, that I look at the pace of change in this industry now versus just 15, 20 years ago and maybe it was even just five years ago. Things are moving at warp speed and it's very, very hard to keep pace. And it's important roles that we play. I want to maybe just touch upon tenure for a moment. As I said, you've been at the CFA UK for almost two decades and I don't know where your tenure sits vis a vis a couple of friends of mine and yours, Jeanne Wolf in Boston and Susan Spinner in Germany. But I think the three of you are probably up there in terms of his longest tenure and if I compare that also and maybe throwing Kaya into the mix and you know, John Bowman, friend of mine, my successor coming in the first of the year. But Kaya is 22 years old and I will have been the CEO for half of that time. And I don't know if there's an expiration date on leadership. I don't think there is, but there's a time and a season for it and it's best to maybe realize that before somebody says, well, you've passed your expiration date and we're going to carry you out in a stretcher out the back door and you're not allowed to say anything about it. So a lot there. But maybe first off, where do you stand in terms of leadership? You've got to be right up there as one of the longest serving CFA Society leaders. And then I want to talk about some of the things you accomplished and anything you felt that maybe you've left behind for your successor.
- [12:17]
B
Thank you. I think I may be one of the longest serving executive directors for one of the really large societies. You'll remember Kitty Kennedy, who preceded Genie in Boston. Kitty was, I think, the executive director at CFA Society Boston, or BSAS as it used to be known for, I think, 17 years. And I've now been here for 18. And Kitty was around for my first couple of years and I've been really privileged to work with Jeanne over in Boston since, and Susan as well. I think Susan has been executive director in Germany for a while now, certainly more than a decade, I think, but she was also on the board for a while before that. So she's had a long association with our world. And there are a number of others who, again, I've really enjoyed working with over the years. And there are some executive directors of some of the US societies who have been in their roles longer than I have, but there are a couple and I think one is a mid sized society and one is a slightly smaller society. And I'm full of admiration for people who can continue to do this for longer because there's a lot involved in this kind of work. You have to be looking in seven or eight different directions, all at the same time horizon, scanning for what's going on, what's happening, what's going to be a problem. And we've seen so many different things arise over time that you and I and our organizations have had to deal with. We talked about worrying about end investors, and I think that the global financial crisis, which really got started probably only about a year after I was into my role and then accelerated and really had the impacts that it did in the subsequent year. I think that's changed the way that people looked at finance over here, as I'm sure it did over there. And we saw a lot of changes that came in after that. We saw the governance codes, the stewardship codes, and finally those things in some ways laid the groundwork for the shift towards sustainable investing, thinking about investing differently. And that in turn gave rise to the development of the work that we did on our ESG certificate, starting probably in 2017 and then leading into its launch in 2019 and then 2020. We saw Covid and people thinking about risk in an entirely different way. And about how to work in entirely different ways. So there's been such a lot of change over these past 18 years. So there have been immediate challenges that have needed to be addressed and those immediate challenges in turn giving rise to longer term secular trends that I think have also changed the way that the sector that we work in operates and that everyone is needed to respond to. So.
- [14:48]
A
Well, I don't know enough about the CFA Society model, but I've met with you and your counterparts in all parts of the world and I would offer that maybe 60 to 80% of what the societies do are quite common around the world, but there are some unique aspects to every one of them. And if I pick out your mission and remit during your tenure, and you just alluded to this a moment ago, the launch of these two certificate based programs, ESG and then climate, I don't know if that's part and parcel with the CFA Society offering where they're actually creating product, but you've done that and I think it may be in one or both cases become an offering of the Institute. So a tremendous opportunity and discovery you've given to the end investor. Is that typical of the CFA societies? And whether it is or not, was this your personal passion and what was the motivation behind these two specific certificates?
- [15:40]
B
Thank you. That's a great question. We are a little bit unusual. So we had when I arrived already a certificate of our own, which has introduced, because the UK regulator in the mid-1990s felt that there should be some base standard that investment professionals adhered to to be able to enter the sector. So the society at that time developed a new product called the Investment Management Certificate. And then essentially that was what people had to take if you wanted to be able to work on an investment desk. That's been deregulated somewhat since, but there is still a requirement obviously for individuals to be deemed trained and competent. And the IMC remains a key way for people to do that. So we knew about issuing certificates, we knew we had the architecture, the infrastructure in place to do educational programming. But the development, I think, of the certificate in ESG investing was a product of the two associated areas that I care very much about. One is that the investment sector does a good job of meeting its clients needs and delivering a social purpose. And I really feel that it does that. But it's very, very important that it continues to do that well. And also that actually we address the challenges that climate change is throwing at us with increasing frequency. And I remember reading, I'm guessing that it was probably the IPCC report that came out in either 2018 or 2019. And it just talks about the devastating impact on things like oceans, about coral and shellfish and therefore marine life, of relatively small increases in temperature. And then you think, wow, I just took all of that for granted when I was young, that the world was going to go on pretty much as it always had, and that there wasn't stuff that we were doing that was meaning that the world my children and grandchildren hopefully at some stage will inhabit will be very different. I was having a conversation last night with somebody about how the location of the jet stream is going to change. That's going to mean that the UK becomes a much colder place at some point within the next hundred years. 100 years is not a long time. There are people being born today who will probably live to be 100. They're not going to be able to live in the same way in certain parts of the uk. Just not going to be possible. Or maybe it will be possible, but it's going to be much more challenging. So the honest answer is no. It was not always a passion of mine. But I think when you have a family and you are thinking about what's the world that these people that I love very much are going to be inhabiting and the people that they love very much are going to be to be inhabiting, what can I do today to address some of those challenges? And one of the things I feel sad about is that we haven't had better leaders who are able to put the need to address this challenge in that language. Or maybe they do, but people just don't listen. We are going to have to probably address some of these things. We could say, oh, no, it doesn't need to be addressed, or maybe we'll come up with nuclear fusion and everything will be wonderful. But actually, a stitch in time saves nine. It's much cheaper to do the work today than to try to live in a world, to incur the expense of adapting to a world that is not designed, not at the right temperature for us, and to try to claw back from a position that we didn't need to necessarily be in. So it's become more of a passion. This isn't something that I've cared about since I was a young person. I was probably the usual feckless, selfish young adult that most people happily are and most people should have the luxury of being. But as you get a little bit older and the things that you care about are no longer simply yourself, it's hard to ignore Some of these issues.
- [19:07]
A
I agree. I think it's worth just staying on this for a couple more minutes. Will, I think as long as you're willing to look at facts and not even a lot of science, it's hard to refute the fact that 2024 and just a handful of weeks left in this year will be the hottest in recorded history. And 2025 is likely to be hotter still. And not exactly a data point, but. But we're sitting here in mid November. Boston is probably a climate pretty similar to where you are in the UK and it was 80 degrees Fahrenheit one day last week. You didn't see that 10 or 15 years ago. And it's become more of the norm. And 100 year storms are happening every 100 days, 100 hours. And again, these are very, very obvious. But it's like that old adage that if the tree falls in the forest and nobody's around, you hear it. And I think the same is true. And maybe this is more of a us view than all right, I get it, I understand it. But if it's not impacting me today, or if I don't really see the problem right next door, maybe it exists, but I'm not going to worry about it.
- [20:11]
B
I think that's entirely valid. There's a leading international financial newspaper that happens to be pink. And they have run a column called Moral Money for years. And I'm a subscriber. And every year they send you one of those surveys that says, what do you think of the. It's wonderful, you're doing a great job job. But for goodness sakes, stop calling this column Moral money. Money is as moral as we choose to make it. There's no innate morality to money. It's a tool. And also it's improper, I think, to suggest that there's something more moral about spending money on environmental, social or governance issues versus job creation. Job creation is wonderful. People want work, people want productive work and they should be allowed. That's great. So there's nothing inherently more moral about the sustainable investing necessarily than other areas. And the thing that I find deeply irritating is that people sometimes assume that that's the argument. It's not the argument. The argument is that this actually makes economic sense. A, you can save money today and B, you can definitely save money over the money you're going to have to spend in three years time. None of us are very good at thinking about money we might have to spend in three years time, but people are pretty good at thinking about how much does something cost me today? So I think that there are arguments for transitioning. We're starting to see the transition happened slower in some places than others and more slowly than it should in almost all markets. But it is starting to happen. And I think that understanding that this isn't a moral argument, this is a business argument, but the business argument can now be won. That's the argument that we should be using. Nobody likes to be reached at very much. But if somebody offered me the chance to save some money to have a better holiday in the summer, I'm interested. If there's something that I want to go on to do after this, it's something that's around that. How do we get the messaging around this stuff stuff better so that it cuts through and people understand and they don't feel as though this is some part of a culture war. This isn't a culture war. This is just saying, look, there is a new technology that can give you the thing you want at a lower price than you've paid in the past. That's usually not something that people mind about too much. And I think that we need to get the positioning right and to do a better job of that.
- [22:21]
A
I agree. It is first and foremost a messaging problem and maybe last point in this and we could move on to other areas. But I'm not sure when this will air. But we're sitting here on November 11th, and I think it was this morning that COP 29 kicked off in Azerbaijan. And the cynic would say that the COP has almost become a meme for greenwashing itself. And I'm not saying I necessarily buy into that, but has it lost its way in purpose a little bit in that if everybody's coming in and saying let's do all these wonderful things and it's more or less prescriptive than it should be, where do we go from there? And again, not a political statement, but. But we have a successor in the highest office in the land in the US Coming in. Who buys in less as opposed to more in terms of what COP and climate stands for. So without the US and every superpower for that matter, weighing in and participating and helping in a collective solution, we will not move the ball forward. So what are your expectations coming out of this cop? Or is that not even the right question?
- [23:24]
B
I'm afraid I struggle to get my hands around exactly what's going to come out of it. I'm sure there will be lots of warm words, but how much real progress? I'm afraid I'm not well placed to judge on that. But I think the action is probably elsewhere in boardrooms and in VC companies looking at startups, finding really interesting young companies and people who hold their KAYA designation or the CFA designation going off and figuring out how to solve a problem that somebody has related to waste recycling or the generation of locally distributed power generation, those sorts of things. I think there's an enormous amount of activity going on and I know that the returns to some of those activities haven't necessarily been great over the last year or two, but there's a huge amount of activity going on because these are problems that are not going to go away. So at some point I'm pretty confident that there will be opportunities for significant value creation. But we also need not to ignore the fact that there will probably be also opportunities for significant value destruction. Because whenever you have new technologies coming in, you have a huge number of companies who all rush for the gate at the same time. And not all of them are going to make it through and then succeed and become longstanding companies that pay beautiful streams of dividends. But some of them in their will, because the way that transport works is going to change. The way that power works is going to change, the way that construction works is going to change, the way the agriculture works is going to change. Investors need to understand the range of possibilities and then help their clients hold diversified positions that allow them to gain exposure to the change that those sectors are going to go through.
- [25:04]
A
And maybe last point, something you said interests me. Will and I come from the same school of thought. When I think about a solution, public solution versus private market solution, and I'm more of a private market person as well. But when it comes to solving for issues like this, and I agree with you, there is a double bottom line. But if your orientation is short to medium term, sometimes hard to through that lens, longer term, I think it becomes much more apparent. So if you want to incent more private investment to think about some of these issues, it's hard. And if the public sector can play a role, it's maybe to try to be that first or second dollar in to either raise attention or maybe more importantly de risk some of the risk for the private capital. And I know enough about this to be dangerous. You may be slightly or maybe a lot more. But the same week I saw you, I learned a little bit more about the mansion house compact and might not even be called that anymore, but I think the UK has been pretty innovative. My word, and you can take another word if you want to Describe it differently. But creating this infrastructure bank and trying to get the local dollars invested in things like artificial intelligence and the supply chain and local infrastructure and certainly energy transition I believe is a theme as well. And I just find it interesting that they can't be all the money, but if they're the first dollar in and they can and leverage the private capital, I think we might be onto something. So I don't know how much of this you know is that you certainly know more than I, but any observations there I think would be interesting.
- [26:38]
B
I think that it's really welcome and I think that throughout my time here, termism, short termism, long termism, but the duration of the investment horizon has been an issue and it remains an issue. So we have now long term asset funds that are designed to be longer term investment vehicles. We're trying to encourage people to invest for the longer term and I think that's great. It remains difficult, doesn't it? Because if you're a fiduciary and you're looking at, you want to think long term, but you have to think short term to get to the long term, balancing those items out and maintaining a genuinely long term perspective is challenging. So actually you asked me at the very beginning, or nearly the beginning, is there something that I wish we'd found a way to address? I think that the term pro problem, how to help the investment sector offer genuinely long term investment solutions to clients, is something that maybe we could have banged that drum even more frequently than we have and helped to find a way to really do that. A lot of it again is about messaging and education. If people don't look at their portfolios every other day. The digital world doesn't help here, but you can check your phone and see exactly what's happened. And then somebody says, hey, I don't like this anymore and I like that. And all you need to do is press the green button. It doesn't help actually the end investor because that kind of switching activity inevitably costs them money, costs us money. I shouldn't say I never do it, but we do need to think longer term. Again, political leadership and the political discourse hasn't helped here because most politicians don't talk and don't think that way. And so we just end up with let's address the problem that's in the newspaper today rather than let's figure out what the world is going to look like in 10 years time and let's really work on how can we make the world we're going to be inhabiting in 10 years time look an awful lot better then than it does now. That really is what being, I think a responsible human that is part of a democracy is about. But it's hard to do. And that by the way, is not a comment on any recent political events because I think that kind of discourse has been missing from almost any political ideology, which I think is a shame.
- [28:52]
A
I agree with you and very much aligned with your view too in terms of what you've tried to do and what I tried to do during my tenure as well. And I've often said this will that if the genie came down with the magic lamp and could grant me one wish for financial services. I've always said it's long termism. I think the power of starting early and compounding is a tremendous asset. And if an investor can just get that right, things will be just fine. And we have periods of volatility, they could be very, very painful. But. But anybody that sold out of their equity position coming out of the GFC and waited a period of time to come back in lost out on the biggest fat pitch of maybe their lifetime. And really is a shame because I think we incent the investors to think that they can market time their way to better outcomes and this simply will not happen. And I would encourage your successor and mine and John Bowman to continue to lean into this and we're not going to solve for we never will because there's always the next generation. There's a tech enabled tool, there's an app for that. But we've got to get this right. So I applaud you and appreciate you shouldering that burden too.
- [29:57]
B
Not at all. And I guess just maybe some closing thoughts. I think our job as professional bodies is to make sure that our members are ethically and technically competent to look after the interests of their end clients. And I think that requires people to maintain and build and develop their skills over time. So there's that continuing education piece, but the ethics piece. People need to think hard about product development and how is this product going to work through time? Do I really understand enough about the way that my client is thinking? Do they understand enough about what their needs are going to be? Are we working hard enough to reflect that in the kind of arrangements that we put in place for them? And then does that thinking, does that understanding of the end client feed through an investment organization which they're pretty big organizations now to get from the client relationship person back through to a manager back through to a product control person, product design? We're not a cottage industry anymore. So we have to work even harder than we used to to drum into people the requirement for holding the interests of the end investors in their minds at all time, even if they're very distant from that end investor.
- [31:07]
A
I agree. So, Will, before I let you go again, maybe coming out of this lunch in September in London, I tried rinsed out any reference to retiring. And like you, I've adopted retooling. And I think that's not a more polite way, more of a realistic way, because I think people like you and I don't go off to the beach or try to work on, maybe for me, of not a very good golf game or I'll still travel a bit too. But this space has been a passion of mine for over four decades. And Kaya's got a tagline, next is here and you're next. And my next literally is here. So what is next for Wilgood?
- [31:44]
B
I don't know and as soon as I do know, I'll tell you. But there's so much that's going on in the sustainable investing space. There's so much work to do on driving the transition to net zero. There's so much opportunity, I think, to explain the benefits and the potential economic benefits of that to people. We haven't really got onto impact investing, but I think that's terrifically interesting. And thinking about investment from a risk, return and impact perspective is something that I suspect will be much more widespread in a decade than it is today. So I'm very keen to remain involved in the impact investing space. I think there are lots of challenges. I love. Well, I have quite a lot of relatives, but I have one who I was thinking of whenever we meet, naturally, he lives in your town, Bill, and whenever we start talking about sustainable investing, he starts going, well, that's all bull crap and all this sort of stuff. And it's great because actually it keeps you on your toes. If we don't have good answers for those who are well informed and critical and dubious, then we don't deserve to be in business. So making sure that there are good answers where there aren't good answers, going out and fixing that and making sure that there is a good answer is put in place that I think is what I would like to spend more time doing. I've loved being the executive director here. It's been an enormous privilege because of the opportunity to meet people and to engage in all of the different arguments and events that have happened across the sector over years. But I think it's somebody else's turn to do this job, and it's probably now my time to have a bit more time to myself to figure out where can I be most useful in getting at some of the things that I really care about over the next five to 10 years? Because as you say, I like going to the beach. It's a wonderful thing to do. I don't want to do it the whole time and I don't play golf and my tennis game isn't great and I just enjoy work. I enjoy talking to people. I've enjoyed talking to you. It's been a lot of fun. So there's hopefully a lot more of that to come.
- [33:42]
A
Certainly there will be for you and hopefully for me as well. And I think great advice you just gave us, Will. And I sum it up by we talked about curiosity and if you stay curious and stay informed, you're bound to stay relevant. And that is a critical message to leave with the listeners. So Will, thank you. To be continued. This podcast will continue with me, at least for some period of time. And perhaps when you and I figure out what this next chapter looks like, circle late 25, early 26, maybe we'll get together again and talk about what this Act 5 of our Shakespearean play in life looks like. So I do look forward to it. But thanks for all you've done. You've left our industry, the local society, the world for many, many investors in a much better place in which you found them. And if you and I can say that we've accomplished something. So thanks for all of that.
- [34:31]
B
Not at all, Bill. Thank you so much. And let's hope it doesn't end too Shakespearean, because that's normally not good for the leads.
- [34:36]
A
Absolutely. Thanks, Will.
- [34:38]
B
Take care.
- [34:41]
A
Thank you for listening to Educational Alpha. I'm your host, Bill Kelly. Learn more about the CHAYA association and subscribe to the show@caia.org that's C A I a.org See you next time.