So tell me about that.

Cybersecurity is especially relevant right now.

So you have folks in the software industry and the tech industry referring to this as Black October because of the hacks that have occurred just within the past two weeks.

So PHP was found to have two vulnerabilities, which essentially 70% of the websites on the internet run on PHP.

So hackers could essentially get into any server that that website was hosted on without a password with these two different vulnerabilities.

That is a huge hack to the point where the NSA came out and made a statement about it.

You had governments taking down other websites, things of that nature.

And then I look at the software story and you were noting IGV and that ETF and you like software as well.

[laughs]

But I, I said, "You've got..." 'Cause I went there and, you know, I brought the Morning News reporter and everything and said, "You've got nine scenarios here, but they're nine different ways of rebuilding it as an elevated freeway.

Those are not really scenarios to me.

Those are just methods of construction." And so, you know, we got that story written in the Morning News, and then the commissioner over TxDOT, Victor Vandergriff at the time, reached out to me and said, "What are you talking about?" And he ended up meeting with me, uh, in the rain under the bridge for, you know, two hours.

We ended up having lunch and talking about it.

And I said, "You know, the impacts of the highway is beyond just its right of way, right? You have-- we have to be looking at what are the real estate impacts of it? What are the environmental impacts?" And he said, "You know what? You're right." And that's when he had TxDOT do that CityMap study that you were talking about.

And it came back in 2016, was adopted by TxDOT, and it did say the removal would have negligible impacts on traffic, you know, have a negative impact on surface level traffic.

What was the process like for putting together all these maps, all these data points, making sure that you were on the right track in terms of the story that you were trying to tell?

... is really starting to accelerate and, and it's costly now, and I mean, what's your perspective on, on that? And then we'll get into some other things.

things.Yeah, and I mean, it's a nice linkage on the conversation about Chicago because I, I've been with Ernst & for a decade now, but before that I w- I was with CF Industries and I led the company's Canadian public affairs practice, and it's a Chicago company.

So that was my first exposure to Chicago, was coming to the mothership and, uh, getting to meet with some of the executives, and that was my first exposure here.

So when the opportunity came, uh, to our family to move here a number of months ago, I was, uh, you know, familiar with the town and, and enthused about it.

But it...

I had gone from the financial services sector in Canada.

I was with one of the big banks, uh, when I moved to CF, and it is- it's one of those really fundamental but almost invisible industries.

So can you just tell us a little bit of the differences in how you, how you operate?

Um, Patrick, what did you think when you read this article?

Well, I had not heard this news until, uh, you had sent me the article, and it... and frankly, it's good news even though the state is threatening punitive damages [chuckles] to the city.

Um, because when, sort of, I started getting some publicity and media on the Atlas for Inner City Highway Impacts, uh, Charlotte reached out to me, both the city and the, the, um, uh, planning commission.

And so the planning commission had me speak, uh, about the atlas and then also talk about 77 specifically.

And in that talk, I mean, we had some bad, uh, AV issues and, and Zoom issues, and a, a local group ended up stepping in and we re-recorded it to sort of pass around.

Um, but in that, I basically talked about all the damage that the highways had done to cities, uh, particularly in Charlotte, and how the, the map of the highways mapped to the redlined neighborhoods of Charlotte, as we know they always tend to do, and pointed out how in the southern half of the city where it's the wealthy white part of the city, there's no highways.

So if there's no highways there, do we actually need them? Uh, it was sort of the broader question.

And, you know, does that strengthen the local munic- municipality's case to advocate for their citizens that, you know, or does it really change anything at all?

And so, Patrick, what really tells you that this is finally the year the exit backlog starts to clear in a more substantial way?

Well, look at SpaceX.

I think SpaceX is the most meaningful IPO we've had since Uber, right? So a $1.75 trillion market cap is what it's IPO-ing at, and they're expecting a lot more demand behind that, right? So I think retail is absolutely there as far as a buyer in some of these names.

We would look at this as more of an exit opportunity.

for the companies that we've held privately.

With that being said, we like the fact that the IPO market is opening back up because it means all of the unicorns that are left on the private side can now finally have an exit ramp that they've been waiting for for a while.

I think it's something over like 63% of companies that have a billion dollar market cap or higher within the private side have been held by a private equity company by longer than four years.

So what say is different about this market that gives stock pickers a real edge again?

What legislative measures do you believe are necessary to ensure these tools are accessible and effectively integrated into existing mental health care systems?

Well, we clearly need to address the youth mental health problem.

That's going upstream.

We can't just treat our way out of the challenges we have at a public health level, the number of people with severe mental illness, with severe suicide ideation, with severe addiction, if we don't go upstream and mitigate and minimize the enormity of the size of the increase in all of these.

And so it all is goes upstream as prevention and preemption of illnesses is the model for all the rest of the physical health system.

So why shouldn't it be true with brain illnesses? And the fact of the matter is we could go upstream, and in the area of telehealth, we know that you go where the kids are.

Where are the kids? Schools.

I totally agree.

I mean, arguably, people will say it's even more important now with AI.

I couldn't agree more.

We were actually at a conference a couple weeks ago, and we had our security team who does our tech security give a presentation.

And we thought, okay, here's another snooze fest, right? But there was a lot of great stats in there and things that they're doing right now to stay up to date.

And one of the things they talked about was this release of Mythos from Anthropic.

So it's a new agent that Anthropic came out with, and they immediately pulled it back after releasing it.

And the reason why was Mythos was able to find, I think it was 271 vulnerabilities within Firefox.

But let's talk about healthcare and biotech.

When I started reading, I'm like, "Atlas? Atlas is a pretty bold term." And I'm like, "Yeah, it lives up to that." Talk about, talk about your, what you're trying to do here, why we should look at what's in cities differently than what we look at what's outside of cities when we're thinking about highways.

Yeah.

So I can tie those two things together.

One is the cost issue, and that's one thing that attracted me to the battle between the Eisenhower staff, particularly a guy named General John Stewart Bragdon and the Bureau of Public Roads.

And Bragdon said, one, we should not be building any inner city highways, and we shouldn't be building inner city loops.

And, uh, one of his reasons was, one, the purpose of the interstate system was interstate commerce, not to serve local traffic.

But the Bureau of Public Roads, these are a lot of acolytes of Robert Moses and whatnot, so they were like, "We could kill two birds with one stone.

Right.

H- how do you understand this news, and does it change your view at all on Apple and where the company may be going directionally?

I was surprised to see how quick it happened.

Um, Tim Cook is a legend, in my opinion.

You know, anyone to come after Steve Jobs and to be able to even partially fill those shoes, you have to take your hat off to that person.

Um, I mean, he drove the iPhone from where it was when Steve left to where it is today.

That's saying something in itself.

I think for this next evolution of AI, it's going to be even bigger than the internet, even bigger than mobile, right? And I think Tim realized that, that, "Okay, this is a super cycle that we're going into, and rather than go into it, you know, a third of the way or half the way, why don't I hand the reins over now, um, and make it a clean break before we really start to invest in this?" Because Apple really hasn't done a ton of investing in AI yet.

Does that sound to you a bit like circular financing, one of the criticisms that had been leveled against, uh, companies like Nvidia and that some of the deals that it was doing?

What do you think is going on here? What are you watching?

Yeah, I think markets are trying to wrap their mind around the exact impact of the Iran conflict long term.

And it's just very tough to do right now.

So you have headlines hitting literally by the minute and trying to price that into energy markets as we speak.

So I think these huge moves are going to happen for the next couple of weeks or so.

And as we have a better understanding of where this conflict goes over the long term, then we'll have a better understanding of where oil is.

We came into the year long energy.

What is the problem? What isn't the problem?

What do you say?

I think that the secondary movers are going to be really important this year, right? So what AI does for, say, financials or what AI can do for health care within the markets that we haven't really focused on yet as far as the impact goes.

So obviously, big cap tech is going to be a beneficiary of AI, semi, so on and so forth.

So those were all kind of the first movers of the AI theme.

We're now focused on the secondary movers.

So banks is a perfect example, right? So AI should be a great thing for banks, not only internally to help automate a lot of their processes and make them more profitable, but to fund the actual AI boom itself.

So one reason we like financials a lot right now is we think that ai is really going to make an impact on their earnings this year secondly we like healthcare a lot for the same reason so healthcare we're starting to see m a pick up in fact biotech you're seeing massive momentum in that space so i want to say the xbi was up over 35 percent last year and then year to date we're up close to three percent as it is Again, a lot of that is fueled by AI and what AI will be able to do when it comes to curing rare diseases and things of that nature.

do you make of the fact that the 10-year bond yield has gone to 423? I mean, it was just at 416 this morning.

Tell me how mental health became an issue about which you were so passionate.

Well, I'm a person in long-term recovery, which means for me that I've not had to use drugs or alcohol since February 22, 2011.

That's after I left Congress.

But I left Congress principally because I knew this chronic illness that I had been in inpatient treatment for on – nearly a dozen occasions was not getting better from these acute episodic treatments, but that I needed to fully change my whole life and make recovery my number one priority, which was difficult to do when you're in Congress and pulled in a million different directions.

But frankly, that's true of everybody because their lives are so busy.

But I had to leave my job.

I was fortunate not to get tossed out or leave under a cloud of scandal.

risks.

Which ones and why?

Yeah, I think that the AI trade is still going, right? But we've had two years of built-up expectations for AI.

And again, I would go back to next year has to be a show-me year for AI, right? It's not about what AI can do.

It's about what AI will do next year.

Investors are only going to give that theme so much rope.

Because of that, we're starting to shift more towards value over growth, more towards quality over momentum.

The sectors we like in particular are healthcare, energy, and cybersecurity.

Are you looking to that more or less than usual?

How are you understanding this landscape right now? Are you more inclined to become involved in private deals than you are, let's say, playing in the public space?

Absolutely, Doug.

Yeah, you know, our firm is heavily involved in private markets.

We feel like the valuations on the private side are much more attractive than on the public side.

So we haven't seen much activity since 2022. private side so rate shot through the roof- you know when inflation was at nine.

You saw the public markets really recover from that over the last two years.

You have not seen such a recovery in private equity in fact you're now just starting to see IPOs come back to the market like Figma.

How are you feeling about markets in Asia right now?

Mm-hmm.

And we know about this reinsurance and this, uh, high-risk fund.

So what I would like is all the payers, the states, the feds to put in dollars based upon the actuarial impact of these illnesses.

Foster care dollars, huge, because parents are addicted and they have to be taken into state custody.

Criminal justice dollars, over half of that is mental health and addiction.

Why aren't we putting some of those dollars in a prevention fund where we can identify those people at highest risk and invest now? Because the current insurance model only reimburses within a year.

If you can't show a ROI within a year, you've lost it.

Yeah.

Now, does that essentially mean that the Fed is kind of stuck here and that we may not get a rate cut or several rate cuts, even though the economy may weaken just because there is the risk of some sort of stagflation?

So, Doug, last time we were on, we mentioned that, you know, we really thought that stagflation was becoming a fear, right? It was becoming a fear within markets.

And that's the last thing that Powell wants to be known for is letting stagflation back out of the bottle, right? The last time we saw that was the 70s.

And, you know, obviously, it wasn't a good outcome then.

Now, the tough thing is when you provide, as you know, when you provide liquidity into markets and you lower interest rates, um you know it can create inflation if it's done too early tariffs are inflationary by nature so if you raise the cost of goods by 10 percent coming into the u.s one can think that okay the cost of goods are going to go up right so inflation is going to come along with those tariffs and if it creates economic pain the fed is very limited at what they can do simply because as you said, their two goals are maximum employment and to keep inflation in check.

Well, if inflation is running rampant, they're going to have to weigh out, OK, how high has inflation gone and how low has growth gone? You know, there's an interesting comment made over the last few days, and that was essentially that, OK, we'll see inflation until we don't, which means, OK, tariffs will come on.

You'll see inflation really tick up.

But is there kind of an umbrella that we can put over the strategy that you've adopted right now?

Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Well, when I lost my dad in 2009, I was, along with my brother and sister, going through his belongings in the house and everything.

And being siblings, you giggle about the vagaries and intricacies of different family things that we can laugh at.

No one else would know what we were laughing at.

We played down what it was like living with that violence and the impact of that violence.

So we noticed that there were bulletproof vests in all the closets.

And it was kind of like, oh, oh, yeah, that's right.

How were you able to navigate the lowest moments of your life? And what advice do you have for anyone listening on how to navigate the most difficult moments, the toughest obstacles, challenges, and setbacks they face in their lives and in their careers?