What role did confidence play in your transition and also asking and asking differently or asking in a very different way? How did that aid in the transition?

Well, confidence was huge for me, but confidence came in drips and in cycles all throughout my corporate career, which kind of gave me, you know, training and boot camp experience that.

to know that, yeah, I can do this on my own and I can be successful.

But I think I'll share one other story that really speaks to what my corporate experience was like, particularly when I worked for Dow Jones, because it was so much about financial education, financial journalism, and talking to people, platforming the content and the idea about money, right? So I had media career.

I worked for the Associated Press.

I worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I worked for Fox, the 10 o'clock news in Philly.

Lynette, as someone who's built a powerful, really powerful personal brand, what advice would you give to women and especially women of color about asking for visibility, leadership, ownership? What would you tell women?

But how would you characterize where personal finance has gone over the years?

Overall, I would look at it from two perspectives.

The short answer is, unfortunately, I would say that things have gotten worse and not better.

Now, I wanna temper that, of course, by really relaying some degree of optimism about the things that have improved and the direction where I see things going.

So you mentioned, for example, personal responsibility and the fact that things like the debt problem in America have only gotten worse over time.

You're absolutely right about that.

So when I first wrote Zero Debt: The Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom, it became a New York Times bestseller, published in 2004.

Where do we start? [laughs]