What happened inside of you when you were told that?

I thought maybe they were right.

I'm kind of an imposter when it comes to pretending to be a, a smart engineer, right? And I thought, "Well, maybe that is a little bit too ambitious for someone like me, just an ex bull rider who has really never done anything." And I just decided I was just gonna start taking some classes and figure out whether or not math was really something I could learn.

I didn't really know at that point that I was gonna be an engineer.

But, you know, I went to this junior college, and I started taking the remedial math classes and stuff, and I was doing pretty well, better than I thought I would.

And one of my teachers was a, was actually an engineer, and I said, "I'm f- you know, I'm thinking about maybe becoming an engineer, but I'm not sure if I can do it." And he said, "[laughs] You're gonna be a wolf among sheep.

Don't worry about it." You know, even after I went to Colorado State University and talked with them about getting accepted into the school of engineering, they still, they didn't think I could make it.

Mm-hmm.

How are you assessing the landscape sort of geopolitically and what that might mean for broader risk assets, perhaps monetary policy as well?

Sure.

The fact that we are literally in economic warfare right now is something that we haven't seen a lot of, at least during my time.

And so right now, the situation in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, and the impact of that on oil prices, while it really drove not only oil prices, but the overall market back in the first half of the year, What we've really seen is kind of a decoupling where things have quieted down.

We are in a financial war trying to kind of strangle out the regime, I think, in Iran.

But it has kind of taken the temperature down to the point where oil prices, I don't want to say they've moderated, but we're kind of staying in a range.

And the market seems to be focused a lot more on earnings right now than it does on those crude oil prices.

Rick, when you kind of look at where you're positioning things right now, are you looking beyond AI stuff to sort of balance out some of the beta of a portfolio or is there still tons of opportunity there?

Do you see anything that's fundamentally different about this market cycle versus dip buying that we've seen before? Because it feels very aggressive from my viewpoint.

Yeah, yeah, that's a great point.

And I think what we're seeing is we've got near term volatility that ultimately leads to long term clarity.

If you look back over the last six weeks, we had a change of leadership in Venezuela.

that had a big impact on control of that Venezuelan oil.

We had a Supreme Court decision that gave us clarity about how this administration and their use of tariffs through IEPA was really not appropriate, but it also laid out the steps or the the ways that they could use tariffs to kind of further their agenda.

And then now with Iran, it's been pretty evident that a regime change was something they were looking for, and they've started that process.

So if investors want to participate in this dip buying environment, assuming it continues through 26, what's the smartest way to play that? Because some of them have been quite swift.