We will get started, everyone. Good morning. This is Craig Siegenthaler from Bank of America, and I'm pleased to introduce Mike Arougheti. Mike is the CEO, co-founder, and a director of Ares Management. We also have Ares's IR team, Carl and Greg, joining us, and I don't see them, but they're. Oh, there they are, right there. First, Mike and team, thank you very much for joining us. Mike, how are you doing today? Great. Great. Good to be here. Thanks for having us. So Ares is one of the largest diversified global alternative asset managers and has been generating the fastest growth rate in the industry among the large caps over the last 10 years. Five years ago, the firm managed a little over $100 billion of AUM. Now it's, roughly $400, although it's $420? $420. $420. Okay, $420. The firm is now, well, not now. The firm is the number one private credit manager globally, arguably, the hottest asset class, and Michael, Kipp, Tony, Bennett, and his senior partners manage the firm under a framework which stimulates meritocracy and a share-the-wealth culture. It's not a star system. Ares is also one of the more defensive alt managers, given both its credit-heavy business mix and its management fee-rich profit stream. Mike, miss anything in the intro? I think we covered it, so we can give everybody 38 minutes back. Okay, great. That was great. was great. Thank you. All right, so, let's actually start with a personal one. So Mike, I know you're big into sports including fantasy baseball. Now you're truly playing in fantasy, with Baltimore, so big congrats on that. Thank you. But I believe your first business, you actually started when you were a teenager, selling and buying and selling baseball cards. So how did the business get started? I'm curious, what was your most valuable card, and do you still own it? And then fast-forward to present day, give us your thoughts on being part of the group that just bought the Baltimore Orioles. Wow, we're going all the way back. It's funny how the media works 'cause I'm a pretty shy person when it comes to that, but I guess there was an article that came out a couple of years ago, where we were making private credit the sexiest, you know, business on the planet. And there was a picture of me kinda, you know, like this, and I caught so much flak from all of the people that I grew up with, that I'm still. And one of the things that they talked about, which is true, so you just brought it up so we can talk about it, was my first business which you probably haven't heard of it. It was called Four Corners Sports Cards, and it was a high-growth sports card trading business that I started when I was, like, 13. And it was funny because my parents were always pretty encouraging of me to, you know, try new things and be entrepreneurial and whatever. And so, you know, I ran it like a real business. I went out and got my tax ID and financials and made investments in cards, and my parents would trudge me to, you know, card shows at the Pearl River Hilton or wherever else I was going on any particular weekend. And it was a great experience for me because I, A, I made a little money, which was a big step up. I guess my first business was actually selling Blow Pops on the bus, where I would buy bags of Blow Pops for a nickel and sell them for a quarter, which was probably one of the best IRRs, I think, in my career, but I don't really. High profit margin. Yeah, I don't get a lot of credit for that. And it was great. I did that, you know, largely through, you know, middle school and high school, and it was great. You said, kind of, what did I learn? I love baseball. It's been one of my biggest passions my whole life, and I think the biggest learning is, do what you love, and generally, that's kind of a good predictor of success. I learned a lot about just interacting with people, right? You're sitting at a table like one of these, and people are coming up to you, and you're just meeting and greeting and talking, but you're also you learn a lot about markets. And I was always fascinated by markets and the trading card space, and it's evolved, you know, now. But that is a pretty interesting market. Back then, it was kind of a bubble, and we now know it, but it was interesting because if you go back and look at those, you know, 20 years in the sports memorabilia business, it was actually really, really frothy, and a lot of the card companies oversupplied the market. And so you had a lot of people that were speculating, you know, that wound up not making a lot of money. So I actually learned some important things about the structure of markets and speculation and the like. And then, you know, it, it's a tough thing because and maybe this is a segue into my love of sports and investing in sports, is you wanna do things that you're passionate about, but you can't get too emotionally connected to anything. And, you know, as a young teenager, you know, as a trading card mogul in the making, you know, you fall in love with certain things, and, you know, that's not often the best path to profitability. So I think there were some lessons there about having the right detachment. You asked me my most valuable card? Yeah. Gosh, I don't know. It was probably I mean, for that vintage, it was probably a 1969 Reggie Jackson rookie card, maybe a Mike Schmidt rookie card. I didn't have any I couldn't afford anything, you know, beyond something that was proximate to my own experience. But at the time, those were, you know, a couple of hundred bucks a card, maybe at the time it reached close to $1,000, which was huge money. I still own them. And I'm happy to say that they are now in my son's closet and have not seen the light of day in 17 years. So I'm still waiting to unearth those and see how well I did. And then maybe just we haven't obviously closed the Orioles transaction, but again, lifelong dream of mine to be involved in the game. This is a special opportunity, just given the group that we've put together to do it. And I am a big believer just in the value of sport. You know, and I think you know this, one of the growth areas that we've launched at Ares in the last five years has been a very significant sports media and entertainment investment practice. So I think, you know, there's a lot of social benefit and community benefit to being invested in the space. But as an asset class, it's actually really interesting 'cause it's non-correlated to most everything else that we can invest in. So love baseball, love the team and the position that it's in from a competitive standpoint, love the city of Baltimore, and I just like the growth prospects for the franchise, so super, super excited about it. Great. Well, let's pivot that into private credit. Okay. So, again, private credit is very much in vogue today, especially after the March regional bank crisis, which really brought to attention that banks need help in terms of capital relief and partnering with alt managers. Around the quarter, we also have Basel III implementation. What inning are we in, in terms of this period of strong growth? A lot of bank executives kind of point out that this may be the top, but that's not likely the case. Yeah, I don't know if they're pointing out that it's the top. I think they're pointing out that there's been growth there because I think there's a lot of potential volatility around Basel III Endgame, which we can come back to maybe a little bit later. But I, I still believe that we are in the early innings, as I guess we're gonna keep the baseball metaphors going all day. But I, I think we're in the early innings of the development of this market, and you can think about it in terms of the broadening out of what private credit means. I think when people first get introduced to private credit, they're thinking about leveraged loans to private equity firms, and that's obviously a big part of the market, but it ignores commercial real estate lending, it ignores infrastructure lending, it ignores asset-backed and asset-based finance and all things in between. It also ignores the growing opportunity to move up and down the balance sheet into high-grade fixed income alternatives, and it ignores the globalization that's happening in private credit. As the U.S. markets mature, we're seeing, you know, meaningful growth in Europe. We're seeing growth now across the Asia-Pacific region. So when we say early innings, there's what I would say, horizontal and vertical growth going on all over that market. I still struggle to understand why there's a narrative of we're late stage or that there's too much money raised. You know, the simple math is if you look at the buyout market, and if we just narrowly focus on the narrow definition of private credit as acquisition finance, there's about $3.5 trillion of private equity capital that's invested today in the ground, and there's about $1.5 trillion that is to be invested. There is roughly $500 billion of uninvested private credit that's been raised. So just If you, if you just stop there and you say, "Okay, $500 billion uninvested against $1 billion of uninvested equity," buyouts today are getting done roughly 50% debt, 50% equity, which means that, you know, if, if we were largely looking to the private markets, you're you don't have enough money in the private markets just to satisfy the appetite for the existing uninvested private equity. Putting aside all of the private credit capital that needs to go into the existing installed base of private equity, that $3.5 trillion requires a fair amount of liquidity solutions right now to de-lever and, you know, continue to extend duration there. So I actually think the private credit market is meaningfully undercapitalized. And then interestingly, if you look at the size of the private credit market, and you said just in that narrow definition of direct lending, it's, you know, $1 trillion-$1.5 trillion, it still, you know, pales in comparison to the size of the loan market, high yield market, and the C&I portfolios on banks, which are all, you know, now roughly $3 trillion. So, So, it's getting a lot of attention. I think it's getting a lot of attention because it's a really attractive asset class from a risk-return standpoint in this market. I think it's getting a lot of attention because the banks went through a period of time where the syndicated loan and high yield market were closed, and therefore, there was a share gain or a perceived share gain. And then again, I think with Basel III and the potential, you know, negative impacts on bank balance sheets, there's a conversation being had about kind of where is this business going and why. And those are all important conversations to have, but I don't think they're just indicative of, you know, an overcapitalization in the private credit markets. I think when you move away from U.S. direct lending, we are in the very early stages of development of all these markets: alternative credit, commercial real estate, infra, and the globalization. I think we're still at the very front end of this. So, occasionally the media likes to run with quotes in terms of how there could be risk in the shadow banking market. Sometimes, as I said earlier, it might be a quote from a bank executive, but the system looks a lot safer than it did pre-GFC on many different levels. You know, I was wondering if you could articulate this to us. It's so interesting. So it's funny you mentioned Kipp earlier. Kipp has a, a framed magazine cover in his office. I think it was Inc. magazine, and it's a picture of a goose, and it says, "BDCs, this goose is cooked. And I think it was circa ninety, circa 2008 or 2007. Twenty years ago, it was the same thing, and we can go back and rating agencies, analysts, you know, e.g., bank executives, same thing. Inappropriate risk in private credit. People were saying the next, you know, the next crisis is gonna be precipitated by private credit in 2019. Obviously, that didn't happen. I think some of that is, you know, just the competitive dynamic and different agendas. But I've been doing this a really long time, and the numbers do not tell you that there is increased risk in the private credit markets. Quite Quite the opposite, when you look at default rates, loss given default, and part of that is who we lend to, and I'll come back to that. Part of that is the structure of the loans that we make, and a large part of it is the structure of the funds that we make the loans out of. That's why I always try to ground people. So the first thing is, if you think about just again the US economy, there are, gosh, 30 million small businesses in the US economy. 18,000 of them, 18,000 have revenue in excess of $100 million. Our average EBITDA margin in our portfolio is somewhere between 20% and 25%. So if you just said they're all really good, high margin, high free cash flow businesses, that would tell you that you have 18,000 companies in the US economy with EBITDA in excess of $25 million. The weighted average EBITDA, or I guess a simple average EBITDA in our U.S. direct lending book is about $150 million. The median EBITDA is about $50 million or $60 million. So if I just look at the available universe of companies in the U.S. economy, that tells me that at least the way we're doing the business, we're investing in the top 1%, if not the top 0.5% of companies from a size and sophistication standpoint in the market. And we're doing it with sophisticated institutional partners who own half of the capital structure below our loan, that are bringing a whole set of tools to the table to improve these businesses and make them better. So, again, I find it hard when you look at where credit is being extended in other parts of the financial system, to say that, you know, businesses that are sophisticated investors making loans to the top 1% of middle-market companies in the economy are somehow taking, you know, profligate risk. Two, and this is the thing that, you know, we saw exposed in spades at the beginning of last year, is the banking system is levered 10-15 times with not a lot of transparency. And when you have an asset liability mismatch in the form of deposits that can take flight in the matter of hours against long-term fixed rate liabilities, bad things happen. And so we know, we all know leverage amplifies risk, and it amplifies return. And banks are highly leveraged. Private credit funds are not leveraged. They are long duration, unlevered, match-funded pools of capital that by definition, allow them to take a different set of risks than banks do. Putting aside that there's no implicit or explicit government guarantees, right? There's no risk of loss for you know, retail money or deposits. So it's a fundamentally different paradigm, and I think it's important that we talk about the structural differences in how credit is extended, as much as we're talking about the actual credit instrument. And then the structure of these loans, back to the private equity business, is fundamentally different than it was at the very early days of this asset class. So when we first started making loans into the you know, the buyout community, it was probably 70% debt, 30% equity, or 80% debt, 20% equity. And so if there was a problem, we weren't really aligned with the private equity firm, in terms of the preservation of the equity value below, below us. If you look at the positioning of our U.S. direct lending portfolios today, we sit at about 43% loan-to-value. So that means that there's a sophisticated institutional equity owner that has 57% of the enterprise value of that company subordinated to our loan. And so obviously, on an index basis, in order to start seeing losses roll through that 43%, you have to, you know, have significant erosion in equity value. And back to my earlier comment about the sizing of private credit, there's $3.5 trillion of capital sitting at the bottom of these balance sheets against $1 trillion of $1.5 trillion to invest. A lot of that has to find its way into protecting the existing exposures. So the setup is different. So I think the structure of the market is different, the structure of the assets is different, and the business is fundamentally different. So we're just constantly trying to educate about, you know, what these funds are and what these assets are, and the role that we play, and try to ignore the, you know, the, "This goose is cooked" type stuff, because that's been around for, you know, 25 years. Mike, earlier you said that you're still early innings of the private credit cycle, or secular trend in the United States. If we're early innings, second or third inning, where's Europe today? This is gonna sound grossly oversimplified, and I apologize, 'cause I don't want to sound insensitive but Europe is probably 10-15 years behind the U.S., and then I would say APAC is probably 10-15 years behind Europe. That's a gross oversimplification, because Europe is not one place, nor is APAC. When we say it's 10 years behind, it's a combination of bank participation in these markets, regulatory framework, development of the liquid capital markets, which is actually an important part of the ecosystem that you need to see to have the private credit markets develop, evolution of private equity, right? We were very early in Europe. We launched our private credit business in Europe in 2006, when it really wasn't a market there. Post the GFC, we saw an acceleration in the creation of that market because the banks were capital constrained, and there was a real need for private credit to flow into that market. So they're maturing rapidly, but just based on size and all of those components, I would say that's probably, you know, a decade behind, and APAC is probably farther behind than that. So within private credit, Ares made some pretty big hires, I guess maybe about four or five years ago now with, Joel Holsinger and Keith Ashton. They both co-manage the Pathfinder Fund, which is really focused on ABF or asset-backed finance. Hot area now. How do the growth prospects in ABF, compare to the growth prospects in your corporate direct origination business? I would say it's probably the fastest growing part of our credit business, maybe seconded by infrastructure lending. And again, if you look at our corporate direct lending business, that's been growing at a very healthy clip. So when we're talking about 15%-20% growth rate in that business, we're seeing faster growth in those areas, and that's a commentary on the TAM and a commentary on the competitive set. We were actually pretty early in the development of the alternative credit business, at least the way that we do it, down balance sheet. But to put it in perspective, you know, that business has gone from probably less than $5 billion of capital to now $35 billion or $40 billion in the last five years, with significant momentum around the globe, raising and deploying capital. So there's a secular shift in place that's driving growth in that, in that market that started post GFC, with effectively the disaggregation of the securitization apparatus and the whole, spinning up of the finance company universe in these markets. That has been part of the driver, but we're getting this now second order, cyclical growth opportunity that's getting created with some of the challenges that we're seeing in, in the banking space. And so a lot of what we're doing there now is really partnering with the regionals and the super regionals to help them resolve some of the balance sheet issues that, that they have. So that, that is a very large addressable market, and what's interesting about it is, you have the ability to attach to it either as an investment-grade lender or a sub-investment grade lender, or both. And so it is an opportunity for the markets to begin to appreciate private high-grade solutions in a way that we haven't really seen in the corporate market. So, I wanted your perspective on y ou know, since ABF's growing so quickly, what does the competitive landscape look like today? 'Cause a lot of your large cap peers, names I cover, they have very big ABF businesses, but a lot of what they do is focused on investment grade or the liquid side of this. Where you're focused on non-investment grade, you're by far number one, and I don't think anyone's really kind of close to you in terms of number two at this moment. Yeah, I think that's right. We have chosen, by design, to aggregate our capabilities in the non-investment grade part of that business. It's not to say that we don't have insurance company clients, funds, and our own captive insurance assets that allow us to participate in the high grade. But our view has been, while the numbers may not be as large in terms of TAM, the ability to deliver real alpha to our clients and get paid for it is just better down the balance sheet. And it is very difficult, even as these markets scale, in our opinion, to be in multiple parts of the capital structure with different clients. So in a lot of these situations, you kind of have to decide, are you going to be a lender or an owner? I think we have said, generally speaking, we're going to try to go for higher risk-adjusted return down the balance sheet, and leverage our relationships if we need to bring a broader solution to a counterparty, like a bank, that we can bring that capital, but we don't have to necessarily control it. And that's served us well, right? So we've been able to, you know, scale up, to your point, that part of the business in a way that I think very few people have. So let's pivot the conversation into private wealth. So you've recently built out a suite of products to really complement your original product, ARCC, or your public BDC. But how do you see private wealth industry fundraising or retail alt flow trends over the next five years? And, you know, across different third-party data providers, they kinda rank you maybe around three or four, depending on who, you know, which one you're looking at. But do you expect to close in the gap to number one? I do. And we already saw that. There was a pretty meaningful share shift in the wealth space last year. And I would expect that to continue. But maybe just to zoom out, Craig, so we've made meaningful investments in our wealth management solutions business. We have a pretty broad product set now that includes two non-traded REITs, a diversified credit interval fund, a private equity vehicle, a non-traded BDC, a European BDC equivalent, and, you know, we're continually pushing new product into that market. We have about 150 people that service that channel, concentrated in the U.S., but growing pretty rapidly in Europe and APAC. And I think in order to be successful there, you need a combination of product, performance, obviously an investment in people, and then brand. And I think you mentioned whether we're three or four, you know, I'm not, I'm not sure that we're, we're that concerned about it. I think it's, do we have what it takes to be long-term successful there, and what will that channel look like three, four, or five years from now? And I think you will see continued consolidation of shelf space in the hands of the people who have been able to make the investment in product, people, brand, and, and distribution. And we're really, really happy with the progress we're making. Just, to put it in perspective, we raised $600 million in the channel in January. You know, not to say that annualize that, but if you annualize that, that would have us squarely in the top three or four, putting aside the fact that we have new product that is ramping, adding new partners in the channel, and new selling agreements. So, you know, we're demonstrating the ability to bring new product into the market and ramp it quickly. Our non-traded BDC, you know, hopefully, not surprisingly, given our traded BDC track record, launched in the wealth channel in July or August of last year and is now approaching $4 billion. So there, there's a lot of upside there. But I think it's important that when people are understanding the retail opportunity, that we don't get so, so enthusiastic that we miss the, you know, the value of the institutional piece of the business. At the end of the day, whether we raise the capital, retail or institutional, we're deploying it into similar assets. So it's not really transforming our capability, but it is a great diversifier in terms of where we raise capital. We do have some incremental degrees of freedom in how we invest in some of these funds versus some of the institutions. So it's, it's a really attractive growth area, and from a strategic standpoint, has a lot of value, but it's not, you know, it's not so large or so transformational, in my opinion, at least in areas that it will overwhelm that core institutional franchise that we've worked so hard to, to develop. I wanted to touch on your insurance business, for a moment. How is your business different than the larger alts that have acquired or built big captive insurance companies? And also, what do you see as the key risk in building a large insurance business, maybe too quickly, and also with some of the tail risk that you could see, especially on the liability side? Yeah. I'm gonna answer this just from the Ares perspective, so as not to sound like I'm disparaging of other people's choices because I think that the folks that have chosen to build their insurance businesses are demonstrating, you know, great success and great results. We have taken a slightly different approach to building our business, which is a couple things. Number one, ours was a de novo build, so we effectively started our affiliated insurance entity from scratch, you know, fully tech-enabled, without any legacy back book. And we did that because we wanted something that would be, you know, kind of best in class without any historical systems issues, integration issues, or liabilities. I actually think that served us well in terms of the efficiency of the platform that we have and not having to navigate, you know, somebody else's liabilities or credit backbook. We also set out to grow it, but grow it in a way that wouldn't, again, overwhelm the other parts of our capital complex. So when we first put out guidance for what we wanted that to be in the summer of 2021, we said that success there would be $25 billion of AUM against a $500 billion asset pool at the end of 2025, so 5% of the assets. And we've said in prior conversations, if that turned out to be 10%, great, but it's not gonna be 50%. And what we also articulated is that while we made a meaningful investment, that has been quite profitable for us to get it up and running, that we wanted to use third-party capital to drive the growth in that business and maintain our position as an asset-light asset manager. With a view that there are any number of places that you all could go to get access to our investment capability through our non-traded and traded product, et cetera, but that, you know, we wanted to make sure that we were pure play on the asset management side. And so where that has led us is, in terms of how we're set up relative to the peers, we continue to grow that business nicely. It is, you know, pacing with the expectation. The returns have been great. We ended last year with about $12.5 billion of AUM. It grew $6 billion last year, so you can see the confidence that we have in getting to that initial guidance. It is asset-light in the sense that we are raising third-party capital to grow it. The reinsurance business is doing what we want it to do. The annuities business is doing what we want it to. And to your point, it's all kind of new vintage liabilities and assets. So it's clean, and it's captured a lot of the opportunity that exists on both sides of the balance sheet. And we are continuing to focus, back to your question about asset-based finance, we have 150 insurance clients. You know, we manage probably $50 billion plus of their money side by side with our insurance affiliate, and they're important partners of ours, and they have been for a very long time. And so a lot of the benefit that one derives from the captive platform, we derive from those relationships. And candidly, it may be a little less profitable, but it is no less effective in our ability to attack those markets. And you hit on it, and it's funny 'cause we talked a little bit about regulation and the noise around it in the media and stuff, but, you know, insurance is a heavily regulated business. By the way, retail is a heavily regulated business, and so when you are aggressively moving into those channels, it comes with a different set of risks than come managing a, you know, a diversified institutional asset management platform that I think we need to be mindful of. So there's a lot of opportunity there to grow. There's a lot of opportunity to drive profit. It's obviously coming at a lower fee rate on a- on more assets, but it doesn't. It's not without risk, from a regulatory standpoint, and there's a lot of complexity there. And so, you know, part of what we're trying to do is make sure that we are tuned into the opportunity, but that we're not over-indexed to the risk, which is why we're making the decisions that we're making. Great. Mike, at this moment, I just want to look at the audience and see if there's a question. If, if you have a question, please raise your hand, and we can get you a mic. Oh, front row, right here. Thank you. If you talk to the banks recently, they seem a bit more sanguine about their risk asset inflation prospects, with maybe some Basel III softening, as well as accreting capital, and kind of the crisis receding a little bit from last year. So how has the tone of the ABF and the SRT conversations or the pipeline changed, if in any way, as a result of that? We haven't seen a change yet, because I think you have just basic AOCI asset liability mismatch issues that need to get resolved in certain balance sheets that are stressed, right? So that's happening irrespective of the Basel III conversation and the future for RWA calculations. Two, I think for the larger banks, some of this is also just about what is going to be the future balance sheet positioning. You know, what business do I have that I'm in that's core, where I want to reinvest? What's non-core, where I want to shed assets? Do I need third-party capital providers to help monetize my customer franchise? So I want to be clear that while the SRT opportunity is real, and we've been very active, and some of these portfolio acquisitions have been real, I think the real sustainable opportunity is less about that and just more about how do we continue to bring, you know, creative capital into the market to coexist with the banks as, as good partners, and those are the big, big, sustainable opportunities. So we haven't seen any change in the pipeline now, because, again, the bulk of the pipeline is more in reaction to people that need to do something. But there's a lot of conversation about what is the future like and how can we, how can we work together. I'll say this, too, just 'cause we're obviously at the BofA conference, and I've been very public and vocal about this, and it goes back to some of the media and how people wanna, you know, see things that don't exist. Banks are some of our most important partners, both thought partners and capital partners, and our growth has been their growth and vice versa, and we support each other in a lot of different, different ways. You know, wealth, advisory, capital markets, balance sheets. So this idea that we're fighting over market share is not actually the way that we're experiencing it. And if you actually look at bank balance sheets aggregated, one of the largest growth areas has been lending to other financial institutions. So there's a big ecosystem of bank and non-bank relationship, where everyone is actually partnering, leveraging their strengths within whatever capital constraint they have, right? So if from a reg cap standpoint, it's more effective to lend money to a portfolio of middle market loans than to own it, that's what, that's what's gonna happen, and everyone, everyone kinda wins in that scenario. So I do think we're spending a little too much time in this conversation talking about the areas of competition, as opposed to talking about all the areas of, of cooperation, which is actually the much bigger, much bigger story. I have one more up here. So Mike, over the years, we've watched you attract a lot of great talent. Investors that were kinda maybe stars in their own shop had a lot of momentum, you know, they decided to come to Ares. On top of that, I don't think you've ever lost a senior executive, investor, a member of the leadership team, really since inception. I mean. I would say we've never lost, nor do I expect we will ever lose a member of our senior leadership team that we don't wanna lose. Okay. You know, what is special at Ares that creates this sort of atmosphere? You know, I think about this a lot. I do think that we have a special culture. You mentioned, you know, stars, and you and I have talked about this, and you know a lot of my partners. Ares investing in Ares is a team sport. We believe that we can build real, durable, repeatable processes where everybody can win, but we do not have star PMs, right? That's just not the way that the firm has been built, because that's not scalable, right? So we learned a long time ago that if you could get a bunch of like-minded folks together, with a view of shared success over long periods of time, it would compound, and you would all do better than trying to compete. So I do think that we are less competitive internally than some of our peers. We're more collaborative. You know, a little bit gentler, maybe, as a result. But a lot of it comes down to, I think, also, you know, my business partners are my, my best friends, right? We grew up together. We've been working together for 30 years. We've kinda seen our kids get born and get married, so I think the culture, even though we have 3,000 people and 40 offices in 20 countries, the culture of the place still feels, you know, real small company, partnership-oriented, which is something that we spend a lot of time cultivating and investing in. Because, again, you say, "Why would somebody come?" It's a great place to do business, and if you're a star that doesn't wanna be a star, but wants to be part of a team, this is a good place for you to be. You could be entrepreneurial in building a business. You get a lot of autonomy, but you also get the resource of a $420 billion global asset manager. And so, you know, we've attracted a certain type of person that I think wants to be part of a team, you know, buys into that culture of collaboration and our values. And it's also why we don't lose a lot of people, just because you kinda self-select to be here. But it comes down to relationships, I think, at the end of the day, and how much value we place on them. Great. Well, Mike, with that, the clock is at zero. We're out of time, but on behalf of all of us at Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, we just wanted to thank you for joining us. Thank you, Craig. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks.