Speaker 1: I would, I would not get excited about so-called alternative investments. There's, you can get all kinds of different figures, but there may be, there's probably at least a trillion dollars committed to buying, in effect, buying businesses. And if you figure they're going to leverage them, you know, two for one on that, you may have three trillion of buying power trying to buy businesses in a, well the U.S. market may be something over 30 trillion now, but there's all kinds of businesses that aren't for sale and that thing. So the supply-demand situation for buying businesses privately and leveraging them up has changed dramatically from what it was 10 or 20 years ago. And I'm sure it doesn't happen with your Winnipeg operation, but, but we have seen a number of proposals from private equity funds where the returns are really not calculated in a manner that, well they're not calculated in a manner that I would regard as honest. And so I, it's, it's not something, if I were running a pension fund I would be very careful about what was being offered to me. If you have a choice in Wall Street between being a great analyst or being a great salesperson, the salesperson is the way to make it. If you can, if you can raise $10 billion in a fund and you get a 1.5% fee and you lock people up for 10 years, you know, you and your children and your grandchildren will never have to do a thing if you are the dumbest investor in the world. Charlie?

Speaker 2: Well, I think what we're doing will work more safely than what he's doing, and, but I, I wish him well.

Speaker 1: Yeah, Brent, you sound, you sound, actually you sound like a guy that I would hope would be working for a public pension fund, because frankly most of the, most of the institutional funds, you know, well we had this terrible, right here in Omaha, and you can get a story of what happened with our, with our Omaha Public Schools retirement fund. And they were doing fine, and until the manager started going in a different direction, and the, and the trustees here, perfectly decent people, and the manager had done okay to that

Speaker 2: point, and it became- They were smarter in Winnipeg than they are here. Yeah, well- That was pretty bad here.

Speaker 1: It's not a fair fight, actually, when a, usually when a bunch of public officials are listening to people who are motivated to, who really just get paid for raising the money. Everything else is gravy after that, but, but, you know, if you run a fund and you get even one percent, you know, of a billion, you're getting $10 million a year coming in. And if you've got the money locked up for a long time, it's, it's a very one-sided deal. And, you know, I told the story of asking the guy one time in the past, how in the world can you, why in the world can you ask for 2 and 20 when you really haven't got any kind of evidence that you are going to do better with the money than you're doing in the next fund? And he said, well, that's because I can't get 3 and 30.

Speaker 2: What I don't like about a lot of the pension fund investment is I think they like it because they don't have to mark it down as much as it should be in the middle of the panics. I think that's a silly reason to buy something, because you're given leniency in marking it down.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and when you commit the money, in the case of private equity often, you, they don't take the money, but you pay a fee on the money that you've committed, and of course you really have to have that money to come up with it at any time. And of course, it makes their return look better. If you sit there for a long time in treasury bills, which you have to hold because they can call you up and demand the money, and they don't count that. They count it in terms of getting a fee on it, but they don't count it in terms of what the so-called internal rate of return is. It's not as good as it looks, and I really do think that when you have a group sitting as a state pension fund...

Speaker 2: Where all they're doing is lying a little bit to make the money come in. Yeah, yeah, that sums it up. This man has this wonderful horse, and it's just a marvelous horse. It's got an easy gait and good looking and everything, and it just works wonderfully. But also, occasionally, he just gets so he's dangerous and vicious and causes enormous damage and trouble and breaks arms and legs for his rider and so on. And he goes to the vet and says, what can I do about this horse? And the vet says, that's a very easy problem and I'm glad to help you. He says, what should I do? And the man says, the next time your horse is behaving well, sell it. Well, think of how immoral that is. And haven't I just described what private equity has to do?