Behind the Scenes of the Madoff Scandal with a Trader on the Inside | Andrew Cohen

[00:00:00] I asked him as a favor to me, right, is a way to look at it, to invest my money. And of course, he makes it seem like he'll have to think about it. You know, he doesn't want other people to know it about his own people to be jealous. I mentioned to Bernie a few months later, he said, hey, Bernie, I said, I see the strategy you're doing. And of course, I want to impress him. I do some of that myself. I like it. I see how he's making money. And he looked very surprised at me. He gave a double take. And I was like, and he goes to me, oh, you're not supposed to be in that. And whenever I asked for the money, I got the money. There's no issue there. So why would I

[00:00:30] think that he is a total sociopath, right? And I start getting these message, these voice messages from New York, people I haven't talked to in years. And they're all, everything's about Bernie Madoff. Did you hear Bernie Madoff's arrested? You're watching Excess Returns. I'm your host today, Matt Ziegler, joined by Andrew Cohen. Now, if you ran into Andrew today, you'd find this decorated professor passionate about financial education.

[00:00:57] But if now it was 20 years ago, you'd meet a semi-retired Wall Street trader who unknowingly participated in what would become the greatest Ponzi scheme probably in the modern era. We can learn a lot from tough times. And that's why we wanted to have this guest on, because he went from Goldman to Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities to retired to now teaching at institutions.

[00:01:21] And let me stress this, he never lost his ethics, his integrity, or his humanity along the way. Andrew Cohen, welcome to Excess Returns. Happy to be here, Matt. We've got a crazy world going on there right now. I got to ask this first. You're a teacher. You're in the classroom all day. You have investments. Do all the tariffs, do all this noise, do all this market stuff, how much is this eating into your life right now? I just want to check in on this first.

[00:01:48] Well, first of all, from an educator's perspective, the great thing about teaching about Wall Street and the stock market is there's always some new event that's happening. You know, when we had, you know, recently we had a little bit of inflation scare in 2022. I was focusing on the causes of that. It was a great learning experience for the students because they could see what was happening in the news, how it affected stocks and bonds and investments. We learned about Fed Reserve policy. We learned about all these important things.

[00:02:16] You know, back in 2020, we learned about, we had the COVID scare, right? We had the markets tank and we, you know, and they learned lessons about, a lot of lessons about how something like COVID could really wreck the world economy. And something like that was a little beyond our control. And then we had, you know, the Federal Reserve and the government stepping in to boost the economy through easy policies.

[00:02:38] So it was so many great lessons. And now we have a new, a new kind of a black swan event, which is very unique because this one is in our control. And it's kind of something that's really self-imposed or self-inflicted by our own government policy causing this. And now, now they've learned everything about tariffs and which, why it hurt, why the stock market recently went down, which companies are affected more, what are the long-term effects?

[00:03:07] You know, and I use Bloomberg a lot. So we could see like live data, like for example, you know, who are our largest trading partners in? Who do we have our greatest deficit with? Like we could see our greatest deficit right now is with China, Mexico second, Canada third and why. And anyway, there's so many learning. So the good news is there's so many learning lessons from it.

[00:03:28] The bad news is it really hurts right now when you see your own portfolio or the student managed fund, which, you know, our, our mandate is of course, to be, to be fully invested in stock market, to see that lose value beyond our control. Right. So, so it's painful, but hopefully a learning lesson to grow in the future. Well, that right there doesn't give a whole mindset about the conversation we're about to have. I don't know what is.

[00:03:54] So I'm taking you back to, I don't want to call them the glory days, but they're certainly not the worst of the days. I want to know first job in the door working for Bernie Madoff at that firm. What did you get hired to do? What was the day one job? Sure. So, so day one, I, I basically was on the trading desk. I sat right across from Andy Madoff, Bernie's son. Bernie had an office kind of diagonally away from us. Mark Madoff was next to Andy.

[00:04:22] And my initial role was to assist Andy to learn how to become a market maker. You know, Bernie Madoff's business was the largest third market making business. And at one point we did about 5% of the total volume of the New York Stock Exchange, which is huge for a small firm. And so I learned how to, you know, provide liquidity, how to update our markets, you know, how to try to follow the news so that we're trying to be long when the stocks are going up and short when they're going down and minimize the risk.

[00:04:52] So the day one was basically to learn from Andy and learn the system, the technology. They were very, they were always ahead of the time in technology. They were, they were technology leaders on the trading floor. And I, and for me, it was fun. I learned it. I learned, I picked it up very fast. What, what year is this? What year is right when you started? So it was 1991. It was spring of 1991. I had just recently finished my MBA.

[00:05:16] So my career until then, I was at Goldman Sachs and I was watching really long, tedious hours at Goldman Sachs during the day, getting my MBA at NYU at night. And so I had finished my, when I finished my MBA, I knew I wanted to go from, I was in management at Goldman operations management. And I knew that I wanted to go into trading. And so I went to start Madoff. I was really excited to become a trader there and market maker. What was it?

[00:05:41] Tell me about the types of technologies or the types of things in 1991, because 2025 looks a lot different than 1991. What were you so excited that was cutting edge at the time? Well, they, they had, they had these beautiful flat screen monitors, right? Really nice and new state of the art. They, they, they, it was a real official way of moving the markets of following the order flow. And, and they always continually updated.

[00:06:11] So we would get, we always seem to get the latest, you know, in the flat screen technology at the time. And, and so it was, and they, they had their own system of keeping the markets, monitoring all the stocks. For example, Andy and I traded and market maker about 20, we had about 26 stocks that we had to monitor. And it's not easy following 26 stocks for two people. But the technology made it easier so we can quickly scan the news and know, for example, Pepsi was one of our big stocks.

[00:06:41] And so I made sure to know everything that was going on in Pepsi, you know, when the earnings reports were, the trading ranges, everything, both technical, fundamental analysis. Because we were, we were mainly short-term traders. We were trying to, you know, get long Pepsi when it was going up and short it when it was going down and making sure that we were managing the order flow properly.

[00:07:03] Did you learn, was this the first job where you were actually managing order flow where you had to take that market maker function and put it in your brain? Yeah. Yeah. Now at Goldman, I learned a lot. At Goldman Sachs, I went through their operations training program. And when I was at Goldman, in my last job, I was managing foreign exchange. So I wasn't trading it, but I was making sure the positions were accurate. So I already had, you know, good familiarity with position risk and, and, and that sort of thing.

[00:07:32] Also, you know, I learned a lot about the markets in the theoretical sense from my MBA at NYU. But where I learned the most was actually through gambling games at Goldman Sachs. And so on the, on the night, on the, the 29th floor of Goldman Sachs, which is the trading floor, which when I was there, Bob Mnuchin, Steve Mnuchin's father was running the trading floor at the time, right? Bob Riven was there. There was a lot of famous, very successful, brilliant people that were there that were running the trading floor.

[00:08:02] And one of the things that was really prevalent there was during the NCAA basketball tournament time, March Madness, which is obviously we have the, the, the championship game tonight. One of the things the traders, especially the young traders did was they made futures markets in all the basketball teams.

[00:08:20] And this was a great experience for me because this was a chance to actually become a market maker on a basketball team, which had a theoretical value based on how, how well it would do in the tournament. Right. So you can actually put a fair value on that based on the odds of it winning the tournament. And of course it took me a little while to get the hang of it, but I love that.

[00:08:47] And, and I actually became the largest market maker in trading basketball teams at, on the Goldman Sachs trading floor. So I, I had a friend of mine who was a real IT expert and really great in Excel spreadsheet. So I was the first one to kind of automate this process. We would kind of calculate our odds and we looked where some of the markets were off.

[00:09:05] For example, if Duke was trading, if we thought Duke's value based on their odds of winning the tournament, what we get paid was say $60 and a market maker had them say 70 bid by 75 offer. We would short Duke, no one was undervalued, right? If Duke was trading say 50 to 55, we would go long Duke. And we would do that with a lot of different teams, just like we would futures. And we became very successful at it. We also arbitrage.

[00:09:31] If someone had say Duke bid 70 and somebody else is offering Duke at 67, I would go and buy Duke from one guy at 67, sell to the other guy at 70. You have a $3 per trade automatic risk free profit, right? So it was, it was a great way to learn. And, and I did really well with it. I made a lot of money on these tournaments looking for edges. But one thing that I, that I made a little mistake on was counterparty risk, right? It's all great.

[00:09:59] But what if someone says, oh, you know, I can't pay you now or something. I have someone else lost a lot of money. So that was a hard, that was some lesson where I had to wait out and make sure the guy paid me or kind of use moral or other types of suasion, make sure you get paid. It was, you know, it was credit risk. It was, the point is, it was an amazing learning experience from that. So that way. So trading stocks is actually a bit easier than figuring all the odds for trading all the basketball futures. So, so trading stocks is a natural.

[00:10:29] Oh, and I want to, I want to say one thing, which was really interesting. On my first, my, my first big interview at Madoff, right? I go and I meet Andy Madoff first. And Andy Madoff, very stoic. You know, he's very calm and kind of doesn't show any emotion. Ask me these typical boring interview questions, right? And suddenly Mark Madoff comes rushing in. He's a total opposite of Andy. He's very frantic, very, you can see he's emotional. But Mark asked me a great question in the interview.

[00:10:58] He asked me, do I like to gamble? And so, and it was a perfect question about being trading because I, what I told him was, look, I don't like to gamble per se, but I'd like to, when the odds are my favor, I like to take positions. And that's, as long as the odds are my favorite, favorite. And then I explained kind of how I made a lot of money playing poker against the Goldman traders.

[00:11:20] Then I went into the whole, the NCAA basketball tournament, how I was trading all these teams and even how I used, you know, I could create a synthetic, you know, using black shows. I can create a synthetic options market on the teams and a whole, and they were blown away by it. And I think that was the only question Mark. And then he was like, and he like, I could tell he liked it and he left. But that one question was a great way to interview. And so I think that was kind of what got them knowing that, Hey, this guy's going to be a good trader. All right.

[00:11:50] So many things done back inside that, but first and foremost in the classroom today as a teacher, is there a crazy NCAA March Madness pool going on in your classroom? Are we learning this? Come on. Well, first of all, first of all, you know, I certainly don't, as an educator, I cannot promote gambling, right? I cannot risk money. We do have like Bloomberg. Bloomberg has an NCAA basketball pool. So I do encourage my students a free NCAA bracket pick.

[00:12:20] And I give, if anyone beats me or anyone gets a wins from the school, I give them some extra credit for that. And I got to look at, I knew I was actually winning it, but I, my picks were this year in fair. I had Duke beating Florida in the final. Duke just lost to Houston, but none of them, I picked this beginning of the tournament. I still got Florida in there. So I don't know if I'm, if I'm still going to win it, but the Duke losing to Houston really hurt my bracket pick. Cause I had a great, you know, sequence going on until Duke loss. A impressed.

[00:12:49] But B isn't part of that lesson. It isn't part of probably landing the job, understanding that part you made last about like the credit risk, like understanding counterparties, understanding. It's one thing to play it passively. Like I fill out the chart and then I track it with my friends. It's another thing to settle trades and do what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're absolutely right.

[00:13:13] So we do, we do have, um, you know, every, every other semester we have a trading competition that Bloomberg runs and I break, uh, I break them into teams. And so every time they do a trade, they don't just do the trade, but they have to give a good rationale of why they're buying or selling the stock. And, and, you know, and, and so it's an interesting concept. Although when you play these games, like you're right, the problem with these games are these games encourage you and you should for game theory.

[00:13:41] You need to take extreme volatility if you want to try and win it in the real world. Right. You want to have less volatility, right? You want to, you want to, uh, basically ensure you don't blow your client's money. Right. That's the first thing capital preservation. And then that the highest recharge you can get the better. Right. But for these games, you don't, you don't, by coming in last or in the middle pack is just the same. So you want to try and win it. So I explained painstaking my students.

[00:14:07] Look, when you play the game, you're going to play to win and take a lot of risks. This is not the real world, but let, but let's play to win. And now the last semester I had one team who was, I think after three weeks, they were in first place out of thousands of teams, but then they, they faded. They, they ended up finishing and maybe in the top 50, but there's thousands of teams. But that's one thing. I also created a trading game. This is more for short-term trading. I call it future traders.

[00:14:33] And this is based a lot on my experience when I was at Goldman Sachs and we would do different trading and gambling games with other traders. Of course, this, they play for points and for extra credit, not for real money. Again, because as an educator here, I don't, I don't, it's not my job to encourage them to gamble. Right. But I do. And then, you know, I encourage students to figure out strategies, paper trade it.

[00:15:01] But once you have a long track record of success, then you can use your real money. Of course, only use money that you can't afford to lose. Right. Don't, don't gamble with your tuition money and your rent money. Right. Have it's excess money that, and a lot of students start investing in the market. And, you know, some of them have thanked me with, with real good success. And, you know, uh, so hopefully I, I teach them tools that add value, teach them to become mostly really good investors.

[00:15:29] And the very few of them, some traders, although I discourage day trading because it's very hard. It's much harder now than it was when I was doing it professionally. Back to Madoff. And I specifically want to talk about lessons from, uh, kind of like Andy and Mark, because the way even you just teed them up before, these are very different personalities. You're in very close proximity to them. And we're, we're not talking about the fraud or the Ponzi stuff for a minute here. Like there were some talented people in this room and in this desk running a real operation.

[00:15:59] Talk about some lessons you learned from, from each of them or some experiences. Yeah. So, and, and, you know, one of my problems was I kind of, I wasn't very good politically. You know, they say like in males, I think the prefrontal cortex hasn't really fully developed until about 25. Well, mine probably didn't fully develop until it was in my 30s. And if you ask my wife, she probably thinks it still hasn't fully developed now.

[00:16:21] But at any rate, so one of my weaknesses was I, I didn't like, I would just say what I felt and I wouldn't, I wouldn't hold back. And I had a lot of battles with Mark Madoff. So Mark, you know, look, Mark, because he was Bernie Madoff's son, he, he was put in a position of power in the trading floor. And when I first started there, Peter Madoff was the kind of running the trading floor. But Mark and Andy were given responsibility.

[00:16:49] And eventually Peter was doing more of the compliance, compliance, right? Compliance. And Mark and Andy were running the trading floor. But at any rate, I thought I was a much, let's put it straight, I was a much better trader and much more knowledgeable and much better than Mark Madoff was. And so Andy realized that Andy gave me a lot of responsibility. He started getting more involved with the management, like working with his dad. And so I was doing the positions.

[00:17:16] And so, so as I would like a stock and I would take a big position and whenever Mark Madoff showed me the big position, he'd immediately go ballistic. What do you do with that big position? And then I would calmly explain to him why I like the stock, how, you know, I have another stock in some industry that I'm short. It's really not that risky and whatever. And he would, he would, he would, he would see things on just like a, like he wouldn't look into the deep end. He would yell and he would say, you got to sell it. And then one time I remember I went off the desk and he went on and he sold the position without, and I was really pissed. So him and I would have yelling matches.

[00:17:46] And of course I would yell back until he would then get totally furious. He was very insecure. And I later became decent friends with Mark, but he was very insecure. And so he would, he would threaten to fire me. We would literally be standing up and screaming at each other, right? In the middle of the trading floor. And then the next day he would buy me lunch or whatever. And we would get, you know, and then two days later we'd be screaming at each other. And if I wasn't making them a lot of money, he probably would have fired me or found some way, but I was successful.

[00:18:13] So because I was, I was making them a lot of money, I can get away with some things that others couldn't, but it was kind of a funny thing. But Mark and I would really have these battles and, and, you know, uh, face would get, you know, we would yell at each other and he would threaten me and all this crazy stuff, you know? And, uh, and that, and that would go on and on. And then eventually I got my own accounts. So I was bothered less. And again, I had a really good track record at, you know, a couple of years, I was their most profitable trader.

[00:18:42] Um, you know, the year that I left, I made the most money I had. Um, and I left in nine, in 2000, but so I was there nine years. But I, you know, I learned, I mean, Andy was very calm. And, um, what, what, so one of the lessons was I really should have been cooler and not lost my temper and, and, and, and been more, I don't know. I should have listened, maybe I should have been less of a rebel.

[00:19:10] And the same thing when I was a Goldman Sachs and I, I did like trades with the traders. I was arrogant. I was cocky. I was, you know, I, I could have played the game better so that I, I could have then maybe become a trader at Goldman Sachs. I think I angered and pissed off a lot of people at Goldman. You know, some people really liked me, but other people, you know, um, you know, got upset at me.

[00:19:33] And so again, I was, I certainly learned a lot more about keeping my calm and becoming more savvy politically to look at the longterm, you know, how, how relationships can affect things in the long run. It's interesting because that makes me think about even the, the students playing the simulation versus the real money, right? Like you were playing it for the volatility, but maybe the emotional volatility and everything else too. Like you were playing the game, like, Hey, I'm here to win.

[00:20:02] But yes. And you had to learn that over time. Do you feel like, did you get better at, I don't want to say you got better at playing politics and jobs, but do you feel like Goldman to Madoff to then post that? Did personality alter a lot? You know, once I got academia, I love academia because it's, um, you know, you're creating something positive. Like when you're on wall street, at least, you know, my job was to make as much money as possible of a firm. And then I got a direct percentage of that. I'm not really helping society. I mean, you could say I'm providing liquidity, right?

[00:20:32] Yeah. There's some benefit. But look, there's not much benefit to society. Whereas here I'm teaching, I'm benefiting society by teaching students, giving them knowledge, becoming a good, being a good role model. You know, I'm publishing some papers to add knowledge to the world. I'm constantly learning myself.

[00:20:51] And so, um, so yeah, and I, I, I become a more patient, um, you know, long-term, uh, you know, long-term outlook on things, much less myopic and short-term. Much less myopic and short-term. All right. I got, I need one more, at least in the thick of it, Madoff story. You had some other fun experiences in there. Secret Santa. Uh, what are some of the other good jobs you have in the organization? Yeah, yeah. So let me, let me, a little bit, first, let me go, I'll go into the culture of Madoff. All right. Tell us about it.

[00:21:21] So, so again, it was a small firm. It was, I kind of almost joked that it was like nepotism central because everyone in power there were all related to Madoffs. I mean, Bernie had nephews and nieces and sons. His younger brother, his younger brother's daughter, Shana, worked there. And, and so it was all, and he made a few jokes about it being nepotism central, which good or bad. I mean, you could look at it in different ways. Um, they seem to be from, okay, from my perspective, it's funny.

[00:21:51] They seem to have high integrity. Like if you ever did something like where you didn't give the customer the best price or you did something shady on the market maker, you know, they would get on you. And so, so they seemed to have high ethics, which is the irony of it. Um, they had one year. So I'll tell you one year they did a secret Santa. Okay. It's kind of a funny story. And for the whole firm, um, Bernie was in there, Peter, you know, the people in the back office I'd never met. And we all pick names out of a hat. And whose name do I pick?

[00:22:20] I pick Bernie Madoff's name. And this, I'd been at the firm maybe three years or so, maybe four years. And I didn't really know Bernie well at all. Only I'd see him talking to his sons and say hello. And, and, uh, a couple of other funny things. I used to roll blade into the office. So he would kind of get a kick out of me. I'd come zooming in my rollerblades and then I would take them off. I'd have shoes at my desk and a tie I'd put on. And I would do other things like to de-stress. I sometimes would walk on my hands.

[00:22:46] I was very into fitness and they would, you know, the mate, they would always get a laugh out of me. You know, or I did this thing called the phone flip where we had this phone that was tied to, it was the old fashioned phone on a cord. And I would take, on a good trade, I would take the phone and throw it up in the air and then catch it. And then Mark Madoff once tried it himself in the head with it. It was funny. So that was a big laugh. But, um, but at any rate, so I picked Bernie's name and I, and I, and, you know, I think, well, he's the big boss. I want to impress him.

[00:23:13] So I find out he loves this one specific brand of very, very expensive cigars. I don't know what they were quite Cuban cigars, but I find out, I go to this cigar shop and I buy this beautiful box of cigars. That was my secret Santa gift to him. He loved it. And so then he remembered me. So then he would talk and joke. He would joke around with me a lot. And he really liked me. And of course I was making them money.

[00:23:35] So that's kind of how I built a relationship with Bernie, you know, and then fast forward a few more years after that, when I keep hearing about his other business, which I'd never wish I'd ever heard about. But, right. The fund management is where I hear he really makes his money that this, this trading for, which is incredibly profitable is like a small part of it. Right. I'm like, so I, I asked him as a favor to me, right. As a way to look at it, to invest my money. And of course he makes it seem like he'll have to think about it.

[00:24:04] You know, he doesn't want other people knowing about his own people would be jealous. Oh, but you know, that whole feel like he's doing me a favor. And of course, finally a couple of days later, he comes back and says, all right, I'm going to let you invest, but I don't want you telling anyone else about it. You know, I don't want him getting jealous. I'm only doing this for a few people, you know, yada, yada, yada. So I started investing with him. Of course, I initially, I'm very careful looking at the returns. And so, so here's an interesting thing.

[00:24:29] When I first get the statements, I look through it carefully and he's doing, he was doing this when issued strategy. In other words, when issued was when a stock comes out for, when a stock's going to split. It would trade in those days, at least three weeks, a month, when issued before it officially splits. Like for example, let's say U.S. Steel was trading at $100 a share and it does a two-for-one stock split. Okay.

[00:24:55] So after it splits, it was trade in theory, $50 a share and you get twice as many shares. Real simple, right? What happens in the real world though is it's usually a bullish signal. So the stock will go from $100 up to $101, $102. It usually rises by a few percent. A lot of people want to buy it. Okay. Additionally, the new stock trades on a when issued basis. When it's issued, you can buy it. And a lot of times there was arbitrage opportunity because I traded it myself and made money.

[00:25:23] Usually the new stock will trade higher. So let's say an example, let's say U.S. Steel goes from $100 to $103 and the when issued stock goes from $50 to $53. Okay. Now you have an opportunity to short the when issued stock at $53, right? Which is two shares. It's like shorting the common stock at $106. You buy the stock at $103 and you have a $3 return, which is, you know, almost 3% in a couple of weeks is a great return.

[00:25:50] And so on those confirmations I got initially, it looked like he was doing these when issued trades, but they looked backwards to me. So I go to Andy made up and said, Andy, these trades don't make sense. I'm going to be losing money on these. And then he says, no, no, no. It's the other way around. You're doing where the mark. So in other words, the buy was really the sell. The sell was the buy. I said, okay, that makes sense. I quickly captured it. Oh, this is a good trade. I'm going to make about 3% on this or 2%. So that was the beginning.

[00:26:18] And for the next few months, those were the trades we were doing. And again, I wonder if those were real trades because they look legitimate. Okay. And I mentioned, then I mentioned to Bernie a few months later. He said, hey, Bernie, I said, I see the strategy you're doing. And of course, I want to impress him. I do some of that myself. I like it. I see how he's making money. And he looked very surprised at me. He gave a double take. And I was like, and he goes to me, oh, you're not supposed to be in that. That's, I'm sorry. I'm going to put you into a split strike conversion, different strategy where you buy a basket or something. But don't worry. It's good. You'll make money.

[00:26:48] And, huh, that was interesting. But then no more did I get those trades. I started getting the trades everyone else did, I guess. And I started getting these baskets of stocks, always long hedged by buying puts, right, and selling calls. And then it was hard to monitor because it would be a whole basket of stocks. And again, I would look at it. I would make, you know, 1% one month, a half a percent, et cetera. It was always sometimes very little. And then after a while, I stopped looking at it.

[00:27:16] But that's how I kind of got into it, got involved. And then as the returns were smooth and steady, I put more and more money in. When I got my bonus money from making a lot of money trading, I trusted Bernie. It seemed like it was a very safe strategy, right? The idea was that it was supposed to be near delta neutral, which means whether the mark went up or down, you make a little bit of money. It was an arbitrage thing, which trading all the time, I wanted something safe.

[00:27:44] Again, my mistake, not looking at the counterparty risk, right? Not knowing that Bernie Madoff was a sociopath. He seemed like he'd been sharing that. He's like, it never occurred to me. But anyway, so that's how I got into the fund. That's how I initially was very careful looking at it. And then I stopped looking at it. And that's how I got into this eventual financial mess after I left Madoff by keeping most of my money with them. Kind of interesting.

[00:28:12] You in the basketball game, very legitimate basketball game for fun on the 29th floor of Goldman. And what was it? The 17th floor at Madoff's firm? Yeah. So, yeah, Madoff was the 17th floor where the hidden, the Wizard of Oz was with the Ponzi scheme. Yeah, it was right. Exactly. And inside this, I got to believe too, you in that role of you're in this operation where you know you're in a money making operation. All the market making, all this stuff, it's enormously profitable.

[00:28:41] You're seeing enormous profits come your way from hard work well done. And you just sort of carry this over of like, well, if we're profitable and they say this part's profitable, it feels like a very easy jump with people. It's not even a jump. It's a baby step when it's people you feel like you kind of know you're in the trenches with, right? Yeah, exactly. That's why I think people that worked on the 19th floor, if anything, would be easier to believe that the 17th floor is making money because he had a brilliant strategy.

[00:29:09] His trading floor was a brilliant thing for the 19th floor where he could make markets where other firms couldn't because of the rules and regulations where he was a third market. And he paid a penny for order flow, which made companies like Charles Schwab and Ameritrade and all these small ones want to come to us instead of the New York because we're paying them. We have enough of a spread to make money. We have a liquidity advantage in that if we get too big a position, we can unload on the New York Stock Exchange. So we weren't the buyer and sell of last resort.

[00:29:38] We could manage your order flow. It was great. You really didn't have to take a lot of risk. At the time, the spreads were wide. Remember, spreads at one point were a quarter of a point. Then it went down to eighth and 16th. Then they went to decimals. That's where Bernie lost his edge, right? The trading floor lost his edge when it went down to a penny. The edge was when the spreads were a little bit wider. Now, for you personally working there, you already mentioned it. You had your best year ever. And then you decided to get out.

[00:30:07] And not out of the fun, but decided to get out of the industry. Who does that? Who says they know what enough is and actually knows what enough is? How did you figure that out? So from the beginning, I always thought of making money as a means to an end. I'm not, I don't need fancy things, fancy cars. I don't need that. But for me, and that there's one thing I'm very proud of. At least my free frontal cortex might not have been fully developed.

[00:30:34] But at least this was a wise thing that I always thought about that I did hold to. And that my time in life, your free time and doing what you want is so much more important than any money. I also thought that, you know, when you're poor, money means a lot. Like when I was, I grew up in the Bronx pretty poor. When I started making more money, it meant a lot to me. And at some point, whether I have a few million or many million, I don't see any more happiness in that for me. I had made, again, assuming that the 70th floor is legitimate.

[00:31:03] I had enough money to live for the rest of my life comfortably. And why keep working? The other reason was, you know, I'd recently got married. We had our first, our daughter, Chloe. And Chloe had colic. I wasn't sleeping well. I was stressed. It wasn't fun. I was actually burnt out. So what the trigger was, my wife got a singing gig at this opera festival in Charlottesville.

[00:31:29] And she had sacrificed for me, you know, bringing up the kid and kind of putting her opera singing career in hold. So, you know, I was like, that was like, that was an excuse. I just want to go. And when I went in the office, they couldn't believe it. They kept saying, well, where are you going to make this kind of money? And they kept thinking I was lying to them. And maybe I was going to another firm. Because when I was leaving, they started getting, they weren't nice to me. They were like, they kept thinking. And they even threatened me about the fund. They said, you know, if you go to another firm, you got to sell the fund. I wish they made me sell the fund.

[00:31:58] I wish, please, I wish you had gotten even angry and made me sell the fund. But, you know, it was bizarre. So I didn't leave on good terms either. It was like, Mark wasn't talking to me. And then, although a few months later, like after they realized that I really did move to Charlottesville first in the Virginia Beach, I remember getting called from Mark, like he was my buddy again. It's amazing. Oh, you're playing golf. And, you know, they were not, it was nice again. It was very, like Mark had this mercurial relationship, especially with me, where, you know, we were like yelling each other. And then, and they were friends.

[00:32:28] It was, it was bizarre. And I would come and occasionally visit them. You know, it was, it was cordial. Although I noticed when I would visit later that the firm got smaller and smaller. Like it was because I guess they were losing the edge from the order flow. Is that the way you saw it? So, I mean, talk a little bit about what life was like in those years when you left. And I mean, the statements would come, you would just open them from time to time. It feels like you just kind of checked out because like this was your retirement plan. It's like what most people do.

[00:32:57] They retire, they roll over the 401k and they're like, okay, I hired somebody to help with that. And I'm going to go do me. You just did it in your face. Yeah. I mean, I moved to Virginia Beach. I didn't really know anyone. I got into, I was a real avid beach volleyball player. So I met a lot of friends. I would go to the beach, meet people, play beach volleyball. I was into fitness. So I got every certification possible from, you know, yoga, kickboxing, group fitness. I got my personal training certification. I started training clients. So it was a great life.

[00:33:26] I spent a lot of time with my family and kids. I'd play beach volleyball during the day. I would train clients in the evening, teach yoga, teach, you know, it was great. And so I had, you know, eight years of blissful ignorance as far as the markets went. I didn't really follow the markets. I was, you know, getting, putting my effort into health and fitness and family. What year again did you leave, Madoff? What was your last year? 2000. 2000.

[00:33:54] I left right before the summer of 2000 when my wife had the summer gig in Charlottesville. So you leave in 2000. Obviously markets go through some wacky stuff there. You couldn't avoid some of that. You had to hear about that. And obviously September 11th and all that stuff. But are you almost like burned out to the point of withdrawal where you're just not even really checking in on what, what anything is doing or you never got the itch to go back. And I think that's also a really interesting part of this. Yeah. Well, okay. It's funny. I still, even to this day, sometimes I have dreams.

[00:34:23] I have a dream that I'm back at Madoff trading. And I see Mark or Andrew or Vardy. It's bizarre because when I was trading, I was laser focused. Like I, all I would do is trade. I would look at all these screens and it was just constant. Like, you know, buy, sell, buy, sell, do, you know, look at this trade, look at this news. And so, so it was part of me and I did occasionally think I would think about going back or, or doing something, but I looked at it as that was, you know, in life, you want different experiences.

[00:34:51] And one of the reasons I moved to Virginia beach is I had lived in New York my whole life. So I want them to experience a different, you know, lifestyle. You know, it's important to travel and do different things, but yeah, I never, um, I didn't. And then, well, then when I, when I, when I lost so much money, then I thought of going back to make money again. So, so that was more of a, an imp, a need impetus rather than a want. Well, that's interesting too. So in like the 2001 to 2003, whatever that bear was like, yep. Yeah.

[00:35:22] Did the account go down? Did the special fund go down during that period for you? That's, I guess that's, and maybe I should be more suspicious. So that was the beautiful thing that my Madoff fund never had a bad year, right? Yeah. Some months it didn't make much money, but it was like he had it supposedly set, right? So let's say, well, think of it this way, the strategy, right? You're long stocks, but you're also long puts and you sell costs. So in theory, if the market goes up, like it was in the nineties when I was there, right?

[00:35:51] You'll make some money because you're long stocks, you collect the dividends. What you lose on the puts is relatively small, hopefully compared to that. And what you lose on the calls, the calls limit your upsets. You don't make that much money, but you still make a small amount, which is what it was right now. When the market goes down in Syria, I thought maybe we must be dealt a long something so we lose a little money. And maybe again, in hindsight, I should be more careful. But I guess there is, all right, he has these puts.

[00:36:20] So maybe the puts jump up in value a little bit more. So that helps. And you sold the call. So you get some income from that. So maybe you could still make money. And of course, in hindsight, we know it was fake. But what was, you know, I didn't get the statements. Whenever I needed money, like I would take money out every quarter to pay taxes on it. It was a short-term gain. And whenever I asked for the money, I got the money. It was no issue there. So why would I think that he is a total sociopath, right?

[00:36:49] It was no, I liked him. So that's the thing. It never, you know, if now I wish I had learned about Markopolis's theory, maybe that would erase bills. But I'm in Virginia Beach, playing beach volleyball, training people, having fun. I'm not looking at the negatives, right? I'm happy and everything is good. So 2008 was a shock to me. Total shock. So you're teaching a yoga class. Your phone starts going off. Tell the story of 2008 when you started to hear the news.

[00:37:19] Yeah. So I was teaching a yoga class. The great undergrad said, I'm in total. And I love teaching a great class. You know, totally meditative, relaxed. My blood pressure is probably like 35. It was just like the most peaceful thing. And I'm teaching a second class. And in between my class, I go out. I noticed on my phone, I have all these voicemails. And this is before texting in 2008. At least I wasn't texting yet. And I was like, that's weird. I hope everything is okay with my family or something.

[00:37:45] And I start getting these voice messages from New York. People I haven't talked to in years. And they're all, everything's about Bernie Maynard. Did you hear Bernie Maynard's arrested? Did you hear this? They're like, oh my God. And suddenly I realized that, freak, all this money having this guy is probably gone. And I'm like, that's how I find out basically all the voice. And I'm like, oh my, and now I got to go teach more yoga class.

[00:38:08] So, how I remember going to the young class being totally stunned and thinking, trying to be meditative and thinking, all right, well, I paid all this taxes. So, you know what? If I can get my tax money all back, I'll be okay. In other words, because I paid all this money in taxes, which is fictitious. So, if I lost all the money, right? I had no idea that not only would I potentially not get back a lot of the money I lost, but then have a clawback lawsuit.

[00:38:34] To get back the money that I paid the government, that was insane to me. But anyway, so I was depressed for a while. I was kind of getting over it. I interviewed CNBC, had me do an interview. 60 Minutes actually asked me to fly me into New York. I even got a personal call from Andy Cord, who's the producer. But then I ended up declining that because then I started hearing of all this legal stuff and I'm afraid.

[00:39:01] And my wife's like, you know, don't do that because no matter what you say, someone's going to be upset or come after you. So, you know, but I was the first one brave enough or stupid enough to go and talk in public about my, you know, experience of being ripped off by Bernie Madoff. That was the CNBC interview in 2008. I think that was three days after Bernie was arrested. When all those fireworks are going off, and those were fireworks in that period around this thing. This was everywhere. This was inescapable.

[00:39:31] Did you, you were always an academic at heart in a sense. Did you try to reverse engineer what you thought was happening right away to like understand it as a Ponzi scheme and understand how they could have done this? Were you, did you fall down that rabbit hole with that? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, and then you feel stupid, like why didn't I see it? But then I look back and it would have been hard because of the, you know, because of the perception. Again, the fact that I'm biased. I've worked for this guy. I know him.

[00:40:01] I like him. He was like an uncle figure. He had been chairman of the NASDAQ. He's my, you know, he had this legitimate business that was worth close to a billion dollars that had stopped. So it would, it was inconceivable that he would do that. But, but yeah, then it makes sense in a way, like, cause sometimes I would, I would talk to Frank DiBasquale and he would always give me these kind of canned answers. Like he's busy. He talked about like the vortex effect with options. And when I, when I asked him more detailed questions, he would kind of, he never fully, he never would answer me and explain.

[00:40:29] Like he would make sure to avoid me because he knew if I would ask probing questions, he wouldn't understand it. Again, not knowing that he made it just seem like he was busy, but, but yeah, then I, then I thought about it and what they did and, you know, you know, it felt foolish for, for not being more careful and for, and for being more diversified among investment people, you know?

[00:40:51] And let's be clear on this, not to, this is not me trying to pour salt, vinegar and whatever else into a wound on this, but like you really plowed the money into this. This was like, I mean, you were diversified. That's the way it felt to own this. This is where the bulk of your money was tied up. Yeah. It was most of my wealth. And, and again, because it was giving me these great steady returns to allow me not to worry about the market.

[00:41:18] I think if the market sells off, right, he's got puts, he sold calls, kind of hedges, right? Hedges in the long position mark. And I wasn't being greedy. My returns weren't exorbitant. I was getting, you know, 12 to 14% a year, you know, which again, in hindsight, the steadying of seven is unusual, but at the time, moment to moment, it was reasonable. I'm looking at a month that I, one month I made a half a percent. Another month I made a quarter percent. Another month I make 2%, right? It was, it was a gradual thing.

[00:41:48] Yeah. Yeah. It kind of stacked up. And to the degree you can talk about this stuff too, I think the extra turn that just sucks in this story for you. And I say, this is like a human is you got retargeted. You got retargeted in the investigation a bit. Can you talk about what happened? Sure. So I started hearing about the clawback and the clawback, the idea was, and this was, so Irving Picard for Baker Hostetler, right?

[00:42:15] I guess his responsibility and his defense was to get back as much money as possible, right? So he looks good. Now, you know, there's different ways of going about it and looking at things. I mean, certainly anyone that's culpable, they should go after, put in jail, get them. You know, certainly, you know, the big three, there was Chase and Picard and the guys that funded Bernie and took out tons of money, right?

[00:42:44] Those are the people that are culpable, guilty, go after them. If there's people somehow proven that they knew about it or even banks that gave them all the money and didn't do it, you'll go after them. But, and if I had made a lot of money from it or people that made a lot of money took out a lot of money, I'd go after them. But when you go after me, for example, because I took out money to pay taxes, most of it, just because they called me a net.

[00:43:12] So they did what they did was, and they won every court battle possible. Some made sense, some was crazy. So in other words, before these laws, right? It was basically the account balance statement. In other words, if I had $3 million that made off that went to zero, you know, that was what was shown in the statement, just like you had in a bank. Like, and you were dead, you know, I would have gotten $500,000 from protection, from, from CIPIC, right? And I wouldn't have to pay money unless I took out more.

[00:43:42] Now, they won that said they don't have to go account balance statement anymore. Okay. They can just look at net inflows and outflows. So they won that. All right. Fair enough. So I took out more money than I put in over the whole time. But can't they at least consider the money I paid in taxes? And I had, I can show them all the statements. They won a court case saying they don't have to consider the money I paid taxes. Why? Because it's too complicated. Now that, so, so that, that really hurt.

[00:44:12] And so now not only do I lose everything I have in there, right? Fair enough. Right. I don't get anything back from CIPIC or anything. All right. Fair enough. But now I've got to hire lawyers, legal counsel, and they don't want to settle. They want to just have this thing drag on to suck it. So basically, this happened late 2008. I have no idea whether I'm going to be bankrupt or not.

[00:44:36] You know, they sue me for the, all the money I took out, not caring where I was to pay taxes. I even showed them how much I paid taxes and, and they won on that. And, um, and so they wait till 2000, so finally in 2017, they keep going after bigger fish than me. Maybe those people were guilty of some, maybe they didn't pay their taxes. I don't know. They keep folding like chairs and they don't, but I have nothing to hide.

[00:45:02] So it becomes, you know, Baker Hostetler or whatever versus Andrew Cohen and they win and, and they win. And, and so that basically set up a precedent for all the big people to get. So they use, I mean, that was a little fish. They even said to me, Andrew, we know you did nothing wrong. We just have fiduciary responsibility to get money from you. We can't get money from the government. So, um, you know, then we settled and, and, um, they, they established their precedent to go after the other people. And finally in 2017, I was done with it.

[00:45:31] So I had nine years of this dark cloud that, that was, uh, you know, over me. And they might, you know, I'd sometimes wake up middle night just thinking about it. And then it was settled. And, you know, again, the thing is the money, the money's not the most important thing for happiness. So, but yeah, I mean, it affected my health because I'm not sleeping well, you know, I got, I went from thicker, dark hair to gray hair, you know, that's, but Hey, um, but it's finally over. Now I got some good stories to tell, right?

[00:45:59] He certainly got some stories to tell when, when the money, I mean, the money's going poof. Are you thinking about going back to work? Are you thinking about going back to finance? Like the only industry where you ever made your keep? What are you thinking? Yeah. So after this happened in 2008, I don't really have a job. I mean, I'm, I'm trading, I'm a fitness trainer. I'm making a tiny bit of money here. Right. Right.

[00:46:22] And so I even get calls from friends of mine that I knew from wall street and they saw me on CNBC and say, and you know, they knew I was a talented trader, et cetera. Say, Hey Andrew, you know, let me, are you interested in going back? I said, yeah. I said, I need to go back. So some of my friends, they try to set up interviews, but I wouldn't even get an interview. Basically being working for Madoff, you were, you were effectively blacklisted because, and to the company's understanding, they don't know if who's culpable or not.

[00:46:50] They don't want to hire someone from Madoff and then look bad on their fur. Right. So I didn't get an interview. So I'm stuck. And it was a terrible time because I'm, you know, I, I, I was worried about being bankrupt. How do I make a living? And then in 2011, ODU opens up this new Bloomberg trading room. And I had taught a couple of MBA classes for ODU back in 2001. And so they remembered me and they, they knew, you know, so they, they went there if I'd be interested.

[00:47:20] And I didn't know if I would get hired there, but, but yeah, that was a great opportunity. And I remember they had to kind of vet me. Like I was the first, uh, you know, hire for that. I actually had to meet with the provost because, uh, Carol said she had to make sure that I'm not, you know, again, I don't want to bring disrepute to you. Right. So I explained to my role and then she believed it, of course, I mean, it was the truth. And so they hired me and, um, and now I'm love, you know, I've, I've loved my time at ODU.

[00:47:50] I've started creating courses in 2012, running the trading room, becoming, you know, a Bloomberg expert. I've done consulting for Bloomberg. I've given tons of presentations to teach other professors throughout the world, how to use Bloomberg. I create content for Bloomberg. You know, it's great for my classes. So I've been publishing papers. So I love academia and I, you know, I wish I had, um, and, and I'm almost finished now with my PhD. So I've actually been a student too.

[00:48:16] I've been going back for my PhD classes and I'm hopefully going to take my comps this summer. And, um, and so it's, it's a great atmosphere. I mean, I'm much, well, I might make a fraction of what I made on wall street. I'm much, much happier doing, doing this than, than I used to be. So, you know, I'm, I'm overall happy the way my life turned out.

[00:48:37] I want you to think about where you were at the start of your career with Goldman, with coming in and just watching because the late eighties into the early nineties, especially into the early to mid nineties tech changes everything for trading operations. Like you, you witnessed front row seat to just a complete revolution. When you're teaching like kids now, these days, college kids, and you're teaching them like how to use the Bloomberg terminals, how to exist in these environments.

[00:49:07] What are you thinking for them? What do you want them to know? Not, not to predict the future of how technology is going to evolve, but what are you trying to get them principally foundationally to understand here? Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's essential that they become as savvy with the latest technology as possible. And I, I not only allow, I maximally encourage using AI for their presentations, for knowledge to supplement what I teach.

[00:49:33] I want to use as a tool so that we can exponentially speed up learning curve. So if I teach them some concepts, right? And they, let's say they learn 50% of my absorption, they can then go and chat GPT, ask your questions, verify what I'm saying. Right. And I always, and I tell them, look, if chat GPT or whatever says something different than I'm telling you, challenge me, let's talk about it. I just want them to look and be critical of anything I tell them. Right. And so, so I want them to use technology.

[00:50:01] But the other big thing going hand in hand with technology, one thing that we still need humans for, right, to be valuable is their communication skills. So now in the classroom, their grades are based on their presentation. So for example, in the past where you can give an exam or have them write a paper, there's no point having them write a paper because they can give it to chat GPT and chat GPT can write this amazing paper. Right.

[00:50:24] And so, but if they have to present the material, they have to show that they understand what they're presenting. They have to be able to answer questions for me and other students who I assign, ask them questions to show their knowledge. And by presenting, they're becoming teachers. And when you learn how to teach something, that provides a much more in-depth knowledge to be able to teach it. So this, I think, has made my classes better. Better, the students learn a lot more in the classroom, right?

[00:50:54] They become more savvy. Maybe they don't, they write less than they're because chat, they can use it. They don't have to learn how to spell something anymore. All those things. But that, but in the real world, that's not needed, right? Whether, I know, you know, if you're an English teacher or something and you care about that stuff, you know, but hey, chat GPT is going to write and do better diction than any human can now. So let's, let's focus on things that humans are still good at, right? That's what I try and encourage. And understanding the concept.

[00:51:21] So, you know, I don't want chat GPT or, or any of the other AI, DeepSeek, any of them giving, giving them an answer about a P ratio without the students understanding what the ratio means, right? And that, so I make sure they understand the concepts. But, but that's, but the thing is, yes, I want them to leverage and use the latest, greatest technology as much as possible. And I want them to all become really great communicators. So when they go for an interview, they're going to be polished.

[00:51:49] They're going to be presentable and be more likely to be hired. And it's night and day, like from the first presentation for a lot of these kids come in and they're so nervous and they can't even put together sentences to their final presentation when they were discussing, you know, stocks. And they're so, and they've become more eloquent and confident. And so that's a great transformation that I hope I give all my students.

[00:52:13] When you think about what you're teaching them about communication skills now, and I'm thinking back to, you know, you, Andy and Mark and yelling on the trading floor back then, whatever, whatever the crazy phone calls at Goldman during the NCAA tournament you were getting. Yeah. Your, your communication skills back then, how, how would you score yourself? And what are some of those things that maybe were harder lessons you want those kids to take away now? Well, I had, in some ways I had good communication skills. I could yell out, but, you know, but.

[00:52:43] Hey, those counted for something too. Andy had that phone trick. I mean, come on. I'd say the phone trick and the walk on my hands and all that. So there, um, so, so no, I was a, I was a decent communicator, um, but now I'm a more patient communicator. I'm more patient and less likely to, um, lose my, you know, yell at someone and get angry and that sort of thing.

[00:53:06] Do you feel like, uh, in the exercises you're running with the students learning, it's one thing to give a presentation on a, the PE multiple and earn your right to earn your right to use it in front of the room. It's another thing to like, learn how you're going to have to engage in the world to get stuff done. Not saying to be impatient, not saying to teach them how to be mean. How do you, how do you walk that, that tightrope? Well, to get stuff that will. I mean, I give them in my class, there was assignment after assignment. So they always have deadlines, uh, to get things done. And some of them are group assignments.

[00:53:36] So they learn teamwork, collaboration, uh, working together. And I always, and I break and I always make sure they work with different people and different groups. So they get used to different people. Uh, so, so yeah, they, I mean, that's the big thing that the deadline is preparing the presentations. And, um, yeah. I love hearing the way that you fit that together and that all that experience gets rolled up into what's coming into these, these young adults, these young adults brains.

[00:54:04] Let's hit you with some closing questions here. Sure. I want you to think for a second about if you could teach the average investor a lesson, and it doesn't have to be derived from your experience with. That made off as an investor in the fund. But if you could teach a lesson, especially with the context that you have, what's something you wish every investor could learn? Sure. So I'll do a couple of things. One is to start investing when you're young.

[00:54:32] So you let compounding go through and try to just be steady, not try to time the market or try to outsmart the market. Just let it work for you. You know, be patient. Dollar cross averaging, put a small amount of your money that you have extra beyond your immediate needs into the market consistently, especially if you're young. Don't worry about like this big sell if we had the last two days. For young people, you can almost make a case that that's a good thing because they're human.

[00:55:01] So in other words, right now, they probably have very low financial capital, but a very large human capital for the future. So by investing now is a great time because they're getting in at lower prices rather than higher prices. And their big earning years are still ahead of them to put more in. So that's kind of the thing to be patient. Invest. Don't try to go with the latest fad or hit a home run. Just steady and think long term. How do you think about that evolving tradeoff over our life between our human capital and our financial capital?

[00:55:32] Yeah. So basically, that's the other thing is to try to learn as much. The other big thing is when they go to their first job, don't take a job because it pays more. Take a job because you learn more to build up your human capital. So the more you learn, the more valuable you become and do something you're interested in, passionate about. A big mistake I made on Wall Street was that when I got hired at Goldman, I just wanted to get hired at Goldman. I should have looked more into focusing on the trading side.

[00:56:02] I got put in an area and I didn't know any better. I was ignorant of it. I got put in an operations area and management. I hated management. I was terrible at it. Right? I was destined more to be a trader or a producer. And so I didn't know it at the time. But you can tell by how excited you are to go to work. Like when I was going to my job in management, when I was in foreign exchange, I'd get off and I was, ah, I got to go to work.

[00:56:30] When I was training at Madoff, I couldn't wait to get to work. Right? When I teach here at Odu, I'm excited to get to school. It's a good. And so do something you enjoy. As I said, I think Jerry Seinfeld said this, you know, like comedians, you do something you enjoy and you'll never work a day in your life. Here's another question for you. What's something that you believe to be true that you think most of your peers would disagree with? And I'll let you define peers however you like.

[00:56:57] Well, I believe that AI is going to be wonderful in the long run for education, for learning, and for society. And so a lot of people disagree and are scared of it. I'm all in on it. I think it's going to be, I know there's fears and there's risk involved, but I think overall the benefits are going to be amazing. And it's going to make a much better society for us. And I think we should go all in on it.

[00:57:24] No, looking back, you think it's just, uh, you want the skeptics to be calm, be calm, be patient. We have an exciting thing and you see a lot of upside from this. Yeah. And even something, another dad, something else, like I'm all in on, I think self-driving cars, for example, are going to be amazing. Like I, like a lot of people afraid they talk about, well, the occasionally gets for an accident.

[00:57:48] I'd rather self-driving cars programmed with algorithms than a human's on their mobile phones driving, right? So as another example, I think it'd be much safer. And people say, well, it's only safe if everyone's has, you know, with no humans. No. Overall, if you look at the statistics, for example, of self-driving cars versus human accidents, self-driving cars are going to have much, much, much fewer accidents than humans.

[00:58:12] It's just that if a self-driving car does something bad, hits a bicycle or something, it gets blown up in the news is an example. But I think the technology and it's only going to get better. So there's an example. I think we should go all in. I think it'll be, again, uh, you know, great for society, you know, not, uh, and safer for society. I love, I love the embrace of these things. I love the enthusiastic embrace. Andrew, if people wanted to follow you online, learn more, where's some good places we can send them to get more Andrew Cohen in their lives?

[00:58:43] Well, let's see. I mean, you could just, um, look, you could just friend me on LinkedIn or, you know, look me up at ODU. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not a big social media guy. So, uh, I am on LinkedIn and, um, uh, and I'm at ODU. So you can reach out to me and so, and I'm happy to connect. These are solid places to start. And, you know, you might get a few DMS about yoga classes, but you take those if you want to, you know, I do, I'm going to have to get you back. We have to do an intentional investor.

[00:59:12] Now there are so many stories in the lead up to Goldman to this NCAA bracket to the, I feel like the bookends of your life is so fascinating to me. This Bronx childhood, you're, you're game for that. I can have you back for one of these episodes. All right. We're going to do this. Andrew Cohen, I want to thank you so much for the time today. Truly fascinating. Uh, you come back again soon. Okay. Sounds great, Matt. Thanks for talking to me. Thanks, Andrew. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode.

[00:59:37] If you found this discussion interesting and valuable, please subscribe on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform or leave a review or a comment. We appreciate it. No information on this podcast should be construed as investment advice. Securities discussed in the podcast may be holdings of the participants or their clients.