Part 1: Navigating Leadership: Taylor's Journey to CEO

Discover Taylor's unique path to leading the Florida State Board of Administration and his insights on governance and investment strategies.

Williams: Welcome to the CEO spotlight series, where we delve into the strategies and insights of leading Chief Investment Officers. This series explores their approaches to governance, investment strategies, and market opportunities, providing valuable lessons for the investment community. Today, we're talking with Lamar Taylor, who was confirmed as the CEO of the Florida State Board of Administration after an extended period as the interim CEO and executive director.

Following my retirement on 30th September 2021. Lamar has a diverse background with extensive experience at the SBA, where he previously served as CEO and CFO. Deputy Executive Director and Deputy General Counsel. Before joining the SBA, Lamar worked as a as bond counsel for the Florida Division of Bond Finance. Prior to his public service, he practiced law with Austin McMullen, a highly regarded Florida firm.

He holds degrees from Florida State University and the University of Florida as both a CPA and a lawyer, holding an LLM and tax. On a personal note, Taylor: is a case of still waters running deep. He's a keen observer and analyst, adept at perceiving nuances and interrelationships that others might miss. Raised in Quincy, Florida, and rural Gadsden County, he enjoys fishing, boating and spending time with his family, including his wife Lana, and their two grandsons.

Lamar also plays guitar and enjoys live music. Having been one of the original organizers of Tallahassee's annual Ward of South Music and Literature Festival, now in its 10th year. Lamar, thank you for joining us today.

Taylor: Thanks, Ash, and it's a pleasure to be here and an honor to be interviewed by one of my mentors.

Williams: Thank you. Tell us a little bit more about about your pre SBA career path.

Taylor: So now in this role as a as a chief investment officer, it's not something, you know, 20 years ago I actually would have thought I would have been in this spot. And I do think I came to this role in somewhat of an unorthodox manner, sort of a nontraditional, approach. A lot of as I look around, a lot of my peers, I think, came to it more from an economics or a finance background, which I would sort of think about from a top down perspective.

I think if you were building a house, I think you would sort of analogize them to sort of the architecture, the people that can understand the math behind the angles and in engineering in terms of the building products and so on. that kind of give you this, this idea of a house. whereas I think I came at the role more in the, in the, in the nature of sort of a plumber or an electrician.

I came from the bottom up, in the transactional space. so, you know, as you mentioned, I have a background as a CPA, spent a couple of years working as a CPA. and then went back to law school. And in the CPA experience, I think has been very, very valuable for me in being able to really understand the ins and outs of a financial statements.

So to be able to read a set of financial statements, to know the importance of the footnotes, to be able to understand, a flow statement, you know, all that's really, insightful in terms of sort of particularly the private market, area that we have a lot of exposure to. And then the law school side of it, I think has been, has been very impactful to me, mainly because I think the three years of education, you get it as a lawyer, really teaches you how to teach yourself.

I think, the Socratic method is an incredibly powerful tool to get people to do the work because, it is very terrifying to stand up in front of all of your peers and have to defend the position. And so the fear of not looking bad in that context is a very powerful motivator to kind of just make sure you understand the material and over time, as a didactic method.

I think really you start asking yourself the questions, you're reading things, you start asking deeper and deeper questions. You realize that there's many, many different layers to whatever you're dealing with, and you kind of start forcing yourself to go through them because. And then I think that just really helps kind of get, a deeper understanding of, of the material.

So all of that, I think, was what sort of put the foundation in place to kind of, you know, think about, you know, working in multiple roles and ultimately, as I've had to do, really kind of teach myself how to be a chief investment officer. So, so I it's an interesting sort of pathway to how I've gotten here.

you know, I do often in the, my peers in there, a lot of the math background that they have the ability for them to think in terms of very complex equations. but I don't think I would, I would, I don't think I would do it any differently. I do think I like the perspective of having this sort of bottoms up understanding of the, of the underlying plumbing mechanisms of market funding and transaction documents that I think have been very helpful.

Williams: And knowing the mechanics is useful, particularly when the systems are in or in some kind of extremis and you know how to read it and how it might fail, or how you might take advantage of it or fix it. Give us a little, color on, the SBA and how you're organized, what the history is and what the governance is like.

Taylor: So, so the SBA is a is a really, really interesting organization, and I'm thrilled to talk about it. so I'll, I'll start first with a little bit about what we do. so the SBA is a constitutionally created investment management organization. and we have really four major mandates. So we invest, funds on behalf of the Florida Retirement System defined benefit pension plan.

We invest and we administer the for Retirement System defined contribution plan. We, administer a local government money market fund we call Florida Prime, and we administer the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund. So that's that's in a nutshell. what we what we do and, we, we we and sort of the, sorry for stammering on that, but, so from a historical perspective, kind of how we came to do what we do, the state Board of Administration was originally created back in 1929 as a, clearinghouse for a state gas tax that was passed to actually help, pay off some of the bonds that it defaulted in the Great Depression.

and then, in the 1940s, the, sort of they passed a second gas tax and at the same time enshrined the SBA in the state's constitution. So that's how we became a constitutionally created, constitutionally created entity. and then, over time, because of the things that we were doing from a fiscal perspective, the legislature started giving us more and more responsibility and, authority.

And so, in the in the 1970s, there were four, significantly underfunded, pension plans that were combined to form the Florida Retirement System. And given our background in terms of our fiscal responsibility for collecting and investing and managing funds, they gave us the authority to invest on behalf of that pension plan. in 19 seven, 1977, the legislature created the, sort of prime, which is the local government money market fund.

and then in 1993, after Hurricane Andrew, the legislature gave us the responsibility to manage the, for the hurricane catastrophe fund. and then and finally in 2000, fourth and final mandate, was, the creation of the defined contribution program. So that's sort of the history. It all started way back in 1929, really, with bonds.

and then kind of, you know, evolved over time into these sort of financial investment responsibilities. one of the most interesting things about the state board and what I think really, is a big contributor in terms of our ability to deliver on those responsibilities is our governance and how we're structured and set up. And as I said, I mentioned, we are a constitutionally created entity, which I think is unique among, our peers.

And when you think about our peers are really kind of set up in one of two ways. The investment function for a pension plan is either typically housed in a full Pers system. So a public employees retirement system, or it's an investment board, and we're set up in this investment board, structure. And so we, we invest for the that's our largest mandate is the pension fund.

But we have other responsibilities. And and I think, that other response ability aspect to it, the ability, the reason why we have some of that responsibility, that that independence that we have as being a constitutionally created entity, and along with, being a statutory fiduciary, so, the state board is actually defined as the, the, governor, the chief financial officer, and the attorney general of the state, they have statutory fiduciary responsibilities to the funds that they oversee in this capacity.

as a result, because of their day jobs and the and the and the complexity of managing on a fiduciary basis, they have delegated the management responsibility down to staff, through our executive director, Chris Spencer. And then it's his responsibility to make sure that the teams in place, to, to be able to manage those funds effectively.

and, as this constitutional entity, we're funded from, the earnings on the funds that we manage. So this, this overall governance infrastructure, this, this, this, this, the way we're set up really underscores our ability to to have proper alignment with our trustees, and our beneficiaries. and I think it's really important to, to, to enabling us to be able to do the things that we, we do, sort of on top of all of that.

Is this, pretty significant, sort of wrapper of oversight. So in addition to this, independence and independent funding and fiduciary responsibility, there are a number of oversight boards that, look at us. So we have to produce a number of audited financial statements. Many of those are audited by external, CPA firms. we have, a lot of, interaction with the legislature and some of their, sort of governance bodies, that are sort of analogous to the, the, the, the budget office at the federal level.

and we have certain advisory boards. So we have an independent investment advisory Council members are appointed by the trustees. They have responsibilities to have, a deep background and investment, knowledge. And, they provide advice and counsel to us and our and our trustees. And then there's an independent audit committee, that is also, appointed, by the trustees.

And there is a real oversight of that audit, function where the, we have an internal auditor and they report directly to that board. So it's this it's this it's a pretty unique and powerful, structure, that we have at the board.

Williams: If I remember correctly, validating what you just said. You have a performance record that is extraordinary in terms of value added and risk avoided relative to benchmark and relative to peers going back many, many years. Is that correct?

Taylor: It is. Yes.

Williams: All right. And then in addition to that, again, if memory serves at this point in life, it's maybe yes, maybe no. I cannot remember the time. The last time there was an any audit issue in any audit of the dozens that are done every year of the Florida SBA or any issue with any of the advisory councils, that that even remotely in the same universe is materiality.

Taylor: Correct? Absolutely true. And I think it's this is this sort of, virtuous, feedback loop of, the, the, the oversight and the transparency. the fact that there is this transparency and oversight there, obviously motivates us to, to make sure that we are, you know, dotting i's and crossing T's, because a lot of this structure can be changed so the legislature can change some of this structure.

And so there's, there's a tremendous amount of, of, responsibility, he felt in staff level to make sure we're living up to the, responsibilities that have been, put upon us. and we want to make sure that we're doing that as transparently and with a degree of accountability as much as we can.

Williams: And so one other element that occurs to me is that, there's a service up in Toronto that evaluates investment organizations for number one, are they accomplishing their mission and adding value? Number two, how much risk are they taking doing it? And number three, and most importantly, what is this cost relative to their peers and size and complexity?

And the Florida SBA has managed to deliver the returns in a tightly and successfully controlled environment at rock bottom prices. So now you have that magic combination of great performance, tight controls, good reputation for accountability and low cost. So the curse that comes with that is the success curse is the legislature looks at a group like the Florida SBA and says, gosh, these people are trustworthy.

They're apolitical, they have deep expertise. And if they don't know how to do something we want them to do, they'll go find it. As long as we give them the authority and the flexibility. That's the way the hurricane catastrophe could happen. I remember vividly that was dropped in my lap in 1993. but an important aspect of this, too, goes directly to your investment acumen, the board's investment acumen.

Part 2: Strategic Shifts: Inside Florida SBA's Investment Approach

Taylor reveals the strategic asset allocation changes at Florida SBA and the rationale behind increased fixed income investments.

Williams: And that is you manage substantial assets in-house. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing there.

Taylor: So we, if you were to sort of look at it by the numbers, we manage about half of the investments in-house. and with an organization our size, I think we're probably the fifth largest public pension fund in the country. I think if you count the federal thrift, and that's not uncommon for a fund our size, you would expect a fund our size to have, staff levels that would be able to manage funds internally.

And so a lot of that is in the, the public market side. So, yeah, about half of our global equity investments are managed internally, and about two thirds, actually, of our fixed income assets are managed internally. We look at the way we manage our, core real estate. Our director and core real estate. We consider that internal management because our staff retains discretion even though we rely heavily on external advisors.

We also consider that, internally managed assets, and, and by doing it that way and the way we try to focus on doing that in a way that we where we think we've got some skill, which is largely going to be passive except with the investment of the, the real estate, side. So we look at scale there, we look at economies to scale.

historically, it's my belief. It's hard as a public, fund in Tallahassee, Florida to, to attract and retain the kind of talent that's going to really going to, from an internal perspective, deliver a lot of security selection. Alpha. So we really focus on, on, managing assets internally passively, which is where the cost effective cost effectiveness comes in.

We do some active management in areas where we think again, from a quantitative perspective, we kind of look at it where we think we can sustain it. but but by and large, that internal management is from a, from a passive perspective.

So to be involved in being a bond trustee, being a manager for local governments, which is the Florida program, you talked about a reinsurer running a very large DB pension plan and a rapidly growing DC plan. What is the headcount look like and what are the qualifications of of that headcount look like?

So it's a it's about 250 in total. and and so with about 200, and 25 or so, with the pension plan and then the rest and the defined contribution and in the, sort of hurricane catastrophe fund. so, and so that's the headcount. And the other question was the support for that.

Well, the the qualifications of those people, I mean, you obviously have people who are capable of running large passive liquid security portfolios and also some significant asset management in private real estate.

So they are highly qualified. A lot of CFAs, a lot of CPAs, a lot of MBAs. I think we have, we've never really Roman. We know. How many people did we keep track of degrees and advanced, you know, education. So on internally, we have really, from a benchmarking perspective, know where that sits. But I feel pretty good about it.

I feel like we have some of the the better qualified and education educated groups out there, but it's competitive, you know, funds our size have a lot of equally, talented people. and they, they pool, from the private sector, in many cases from other public pension plans. We feel like we're competitive relative to our peers, but frankly, that that is a product of something that you helped put in place many, many years ago, which is, a more competitive, market driven compensation program.

and and again, with support of our trustees and the legislatures with that, with that, the credibility that I think we were able to bring to the table that, you know, a lot of people before me were able to kind of bring to the table, I think has been helpful in, in, in making the case that, you know, the way to, to project the success going forward is to make sure we have the right people in the right roles and that means, being able to compete, from a compensation perspective.

So, it's still going to be hard to get people from, you know, Manhattan down to Tallahassee, Florida, just because of the lifestyle differences. But but frankly, there's a lot, a great job getting easier, as is.

Today. And, you know, honestly, that is true. We are seeing a lot of people move down to Florida and so now it's not necessarily in New York. It might be Miami that we're having to pull people up from. but, you know, so that's, that's a big, element of it.

Williams: Which also is also very clear that the legislature and the trustees realized the return on the investment that those people are providing. And I'll go a little beyond what you said and add in increasingly from what we're seeing from other, funds in the industry, having in-house legal counsel is important because you're deeply resourced there with a very capable legal team, and that positions you to look at transactions, manager relationships, all kinds of things with sophisticated eyes who are used to dealing with those sorts of transactional, challenges and making them work and doing so timely, which is powerful.

So all of this costs money. how in the world is your budget process working, and what is your budget look like? One of the constant, constant refrains and public, pension fund land is, you know, we're staffing resource is where we're underpaid, under resourced under this, under that. And it just makes being a decent investor really hard.

doesn't sound to me like that's a huge issue at Florida SBA.

Taylor: It's, it's something that we and many, many people outside of the organization, focus on because everybody wants to make sure not only what it costs, but are they getting the benefit for that cost. And so, again, sort of, harkening back to this transparency, our budget is on our website. You can go to our website and you can look at our annual budget.

You can look at how you get going back from a historical perspective. So we want to make sure that, people know what we're spending and where we're spending it. in total, when you look at across all of the, the, the functions of the board, it's, it's about it's a little over 100 million, all in but just the pension side of it, the state, the state Board of Administration, pension side, it's about 75 million.

and, you know, and so, like I said, that comes from, the, the, earnings on the funds that we manage and, being able to kind of have that as a resource that funding, as a resource, gives us the ability to, allocate those resources where we feel like, you know, is most is going to be most effective.

again, with a very rigorous reporting that comes on top of that. And, and again, I think it's we're very, very fortunate that, frankly, the, the, the, the legislatures and our trustees, trust us and give us that latitude. And we want to make sure that we continue to earn that, and earn that trust. So that's another reason why we we kind of we constantly think about, you know, reporting, our spend and trying to make sure we get the value for the buck.

Williams: Well, and you clearly do earn that trust every day and year in and year out.

Part 3: Building Partnerships: The Role of External Managers

Explore how Florida SBA leverages external partners to achieve alpha and the importance of alignment in long-term investment relationships.

Williams: Well, and you clearly do earn that trust every day and year in and year out. Florida is a sunshine state. And heaven knows you guys are bathed in the sunlight of transparency, every waking second. And probably some of the time that you're not away, let's move them to market environment. a lot's changed in the past few years.

And the environment, we went through a long period of no volatility, low to negative fixed income rates. equity markets that were relatively placid for a long, long time. what are the most profound changes you're seeing in the investment environment and how are those changes affecting, your investment policy and the way you're implementing it?

Taylor: Well, I guess I would say it is a wonderful time to be an investor. there's actually, there's volatility again. There's, you know, real, return and fixed income again. you know, after about 15 years of, not necessarily being the case, 1516 was kind of interesting. And things go and then you kind of had this, this, period of, of equity markets really kind of moving in one direction.

And so, you know, around 2022, we felt like, what we were seeing in the markets at the time was a reaction to a lot of the fiscal spending that, frankly, we thought was going to be a lot more long lasting. And so we, really started in early 23, an asset allocation exercise, where we went back and looked across our portfolio, with a view that, from a secular perspective, we were going to see a shift primarily in base rates.

And so we tend to look at things as sort of this take this building lock approach. And if we look at rates as starting kind of with inflation. So we're looking we sort of convert to nominal. And we look at inflation as a base. Historically you've had a positive real fed funds rate. and historically you've had a positive real term premium.

And so if you're kind of building off of a higher base of inflation, and then you mean revert to what we had seen many, many years prior, which is positive fed funds, positive term, premium, then interest rates should be higher nominally going forward. And as a, as a pension fund that that you know, our job we collateralize a liability.

and we kind of understand and think about what that targeted rate of return is going to be. and we, we work with the legislature and we're targeting about a 6.7%, rate of return with about a 12.5% targeted, volatility. you know, we can get a lot of that from fixed income now. And that's what we you know, we believed, early 23 and, so, and then you also kind of have to look at sort of valuations, particularly the equity markets, you know, the forward looking expected returns on on equities, are not likely to be as as robust as they, they have been in the past.

and, and so that really gave us the impetus to kind of think about moving the portfolio around. So we we internally moved about 16% of the portfolio. So we've moved 8% out of public equities, and we moved another 8% of an asset class we called strategic investments. And so the the 8%, I guess it's all fungible.

So you can't really say what went where, but they moved 8% out of, global equity. We went down from 53% as a target to 45%. and then we went from a 12% target and strategic investments to 8%. But at the same time, we increased our target and fixed income from 18 to 21%. we, increased our target in private equity from 6 to 10%.

We increased our target in real estate from 10 to 12%. And we created this active credit asset class, which is a combination of the private credit that we had in strategic investments and we added 3% of a public market return seeking fixed income component to it. So when you when the dust sort of settled, we were much more into the fixed income space.

sort of in a very in a much more deliberate way.

Williams: You're getting paid to be there.

Taylor: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and so that's our key point going forward, we kind of looked at the world as at that point in time, we could think about looking at increasing the expected rate of return at the same volatility that we had. Or we could think about, keeping the expected rate of return and reducing the expected volatility.

And that's what we wanted to do. We wanted to keep that expected rate return to reduce the volatility. And that pushed us into more fixed income assets.

Williams: Sounds prudent to me. And then, as you go through looking at investment opportunities, you're involved in everything as you just described, from private credit, private equity, public equity, public credit, etc., and everything in between, over the years. What what is the value, to you of your investment partners and, and what do you look for there in terms of attributes for, for good partners and, and adding value for your overall equation?

Taylor: So on the first part, I can tell you that the, the value to our external partners is alpha. and that's you know, so when I think about the role as a CIO, I think of that largely as is beta. I think it's us thinking about whether the CIO level or the I. C level is the asset allocation.

We're trying to target the beta for, the collateralization of this liability. but, you know, in order for us to justify our existence, we got to deliver more than beta. I mean, that's that's it. We've got to sort of pay for ourselves and hopefully then some as well. and as I said, given sort of our structure and, and our, you know, the ability to attract and retain talent, a lot of the internal focus from our staff has been around asset allocation, portfolio construction, manager selection and passive investment.

the extra stuff, by and large, comes from our external partners. And so the SBA over the last ten years has added anywhere from between 50 to 75 basis points of alpha. On top of that, that beta, which translates into about 800, 50 to a little over $1 billion a year. so over the course, anywhere between eight and a half to close to $13 billion of additional return.

and like I said, a lot of that is coming from our external partners.

Williams: So that's net of overhead.

Taylor: That's net of those real returns. That's right.

There. Your cost net of fees, net of everything.

Taylor: That's it. And so that's real value. Right. And so that's that's first and foremost. And so we do look to you and the private markets, you know, our private market, partners, in the public markets where we're looking to, to have actively managed assets in the public markets, those are our external, managers. And then what we're looking for primarily is, alignment.

you know, we certainly want best in class. We want, we want, performance. but we want to make sure that we're working with people who understand what our mission is, what our job is, and who are willing to be properly aligned with us both in the cost structure, the performance structure, information. it's really looking for that alignment because because it's, it's costly for us to churn through, partners.

And so we really want to be able to build relationships that are going to be long lasting, where we can generate that value.

Williams: Well, and you're a classic example of the sort of institution that's attractive. You know, you have terrific performance, you have scale, you have you have a long term horizon, you have deep pockets, you recognize merit and reward it. And, you know, that's what people want. You also have a brand that's an aspirational brand. And things that that Florida, SBA and a handful of other well-regarded funds do, sort of serves as a stamp of approval, that are certainly helpful to other people's consideration.

So I think any firm, would, would like nothing more than to be your partner and earn your trust over time. and I know I certainly appreciate the relationship. And we at J.P. Morgan appreciate the relationship we have with the Florida State Board. And thank you for it. in terms of other things, the, pension environment broadly, we went through a lot of we went through several periods in recent years where there was a broad political agenda to close down defined benefit pension plans.

And it seems that more recently, several things, including the return of inflation and the return of real return on fixed income assets, as you mentioned, have sort of set the stage for a stronger actuarial funding environment. do you think some of those battles are more in the rearview mirror, or is that something that's just out there?

And we'll come back from time to time out of the ether?

Taylor: Hard, hard to hard to know. you know, it's it's it's kind of, above our pay grade, you know, we're we're we're given the responsibility. And our charge is to to make the best of that responsibly. Do the best job we can with the task we've been given. So, that's what we will continue to try to do.

Williams: Understood. Well, I know, Florida is a Triple-A credit. One of the few out there. And I remember from my own experience, one of the elements of Florida's financial picture that is of great interest to the rating agencies is the pension system and how it's funded, how the investment perform, etc. another area is the Hurricane Catastrophe Fund. So the fact that the SBA is integrally involved and a couple of the major issues that, bear on whether that Triple-A rating can be preserved, I think it's a great reflection on the state board, that the triple A is there and as far as I know, is in healthy condition.

so. Well done.

Taylor: Thank you.

Part 4: Cultivating Success: People, Culture, and Leadership

Taylor discusses the critical contributors to SBA's success, emphasizing the importance of people, culture, and continuous learning.

Williams: You've worked in just about every part of the SBA. You came as assistant general counsel and then work your way up. Became chief operating officer. Chief financial officer. You were deputy executive director and CEO for a while. So you've really seen it all. What would you say are the most consequential contributors to the SBA success over the time you've been involved?

Is it is IT people? Is it process? Is it governance? Is it resources? Is it is blind luck? I mean, what is it?

Taylor: Well, probably all of the above. to some degree or another, I do think as I've had the opportunity to have multiple roles and the organization and particularly working with leading, managing other people, I believe having the right people in the right roles and organization and the right culture is absolutely critical to an organization's success. and so, I think I do think that culture is sort of the aggregation of the people that you have.

Williams: And what makes a culture. Right.

Well, yeah, that's a that one's a harder question. it maybe it's maybe it's sort of things probably each organization has its own sort of culture. And there's some people who maybe gravitate to organizations that have a particular type of culture, and some people gravitate to some sit down and maybe they all kind of make it work. I think what has worked for the state board, in my opinion, given our mission, has been a culture that's focused on performance, accountability, respect, for, for others, and this sort of this humility, this continuation, this ability to, to want to continue to learn, to not think like you've got all the answers,

but to sit and listen to other people reflect on it and, and just really value that, that feedback. so I think that that really does play a part. And, and so any kind of, any, any way to kind of continue to foster those attributes, I think is just going to add to the momentum and success. Like said, it does in my opinion.

It does start with the right people. You've got to find the right people who have that degree of intellectual curiosity, the right work ethic, the right, sort of personality, to, to, to work with other people, that sort of emotional intelligence, you know, aspect of I think all of that really factors together to, to make an organization successful.

And we we've been very fortunate. We've had a lot of those people at the state board.

Williams: Well, and clearly, the ability to get the right person in the right place and get the culture dialed in right, creates an environment where people are fulfilled, they're motivated, they're validated, they'll stay put. And the whole organization's critical mass and gravitas increases. Given your incredible history and success here, what advice would you offer other CEOs, or perhaps people more junior in their career who aspire to be CIOs?

Taylor: you know, I guess, I would say. I would say be a generalist and think about, again, being a generalist, and I never really put a lot of value on I kind of goes back to my own history. I spent literally a decade in post-secondary education trying to be a specialist. I wanted to be a specialist in a very narrow area of tax law.

Taylor: And, and then and God bless.

Williams: Yes.

Taylor: I just, I, you know, and I worked really, really hard at it and and I, and I think I was pretty good at it and and I just didn't all come together. But I do reflect many, many times on. So I think it was a New Yorker cartoon, and it was a guy who was, kind of it was on a, on a street who's panhandling and, and the caption was, you know, said for years I thought I was carving myself a niche, and I found I was digging myself a hole and, you know, and so it's.

Yeah, it's just it's I think, I think for me, once I kind of had the courage, frankly, to kind of step back from the comfort of kind of being a knowing, you know, an area really, really well and, and having the courage to realize, I don't know, all of these things. And I'm going to do my best to learn.

And you learn, from other people and you in that process. I think in order to do that effectively, you got to be humble enough and have a thick skin to not, you know, be right and to be corrected and to constantly learn. So I think it's that that the courage to be a generalist in, in a number of different things.

But by doing that allows you to learn. And then once you start, in my opinion, sort of what I think happened to me is once I was able to kind of learn in these multiple areas, I think you can see a bigger picture. You can kind of you're able to kind of step back and see the forest for the trees and kind of think a little bit more about how things are connected.

And, and I think that's a real value in having the ability to kind of go through all of that different roles and different experiences and ultimately coming out and thinking and and seeing a bigger picture from this mosaic, I think has been very, very helpful. So I would say embraces opportunities to to do something new and different and, and be the new kid on the block and, and learn.

Williams: And one of the great things about this industry is that there is no such thing as absolute knowledge. There is no such thing as an individual who always knows what the markets are going to do, and when and by how much, and to the extent any of us, no matter how experienced or well-resourced we are, think we have that corner on omniscience?

we will be put in our place by Mr. Market. pretty rapidly, absolutely become aptly, humble again and again, try and claw our way to credibility.

Taylor: Definitely.

Williams: Well said. Thank you.

I just really appreciate the opportunity. And, it's just it's a real pleasure to sit here and have this conversation with you.

Certainly. Well, on a personal note, I'm now a beneficiary, so thank you. Thanks for doing all the work. The checks are clearing.

Taylor: Thank you.

Williams: Lamar, We appreciate you being with us.

Taylor: Thank you.

J.P. Morgan Asset Management is the brand name for the asset management business of JPMorgan Chase & Co., and its affiliates worldwide.