Navigating Real Estate and Life: Resilience, Gratitude and Growth Insights from Michael Valdez

Join us as we navigate the compelling narrative of Michael Valdez, a man who knows a thing or two about growth in the real estate industry. As the Chief Growth Officer for EXP, he’s risen through the ranks from a Senior Vice President role at Rilogy and shares his unique perspective on the turbulent journey that led him here. His father's remarkable story as a political prisoner for Fidel Castro, the impact of 9/11 on his career course, and his transition to investing in Miami real estate, are pieces of a puzzle that assemble to form an inspiring story of resilience and perseverance.

Our conversation with Michael takes a deep dive into his ancestral legacy, the influence of his resilient grandmother in Spain and an unexpected health diagnosis at 25, which changed his perspective on life. We chat about navigating the challenges that life throws at us, and how the person in the mirror and the legacy we leave behind is truly what matters. Michael also offers his predictions on the upcoming trends in the real estate market. 

In the concluding segment, we tap into the paradoxical relationship between struggle and growth. Michael shares the importance of holding onto humility amidst success and the need to understand and appreciate varying perspectives. We also explore the metaphor of throwing a child into the water to teach them how to swim, reflecting on how it's the struggles that shape us. From Marcus Aurelius’ choice to sleep on the floor of his palace to the importance of gratitude, this podcast episode is a treasure trove of insights. 

Our conversation with Michael is more than a career journey; it's a life journey filled with invaluable lessons and inspiration. You can connect with him on social media to keep the conversation going. So, sit back, grab a cup of coffee and prepare to be inspired by this truly remarkable story.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

All right, welcome everybody to another episode here of the Stole Cage of Podcast. Have a super cool guest here on today. I have the Chief Growth Officer for EXP and this is not a recruiting video here. So we're going to step into the mind of someone who's been in the finance industry, been in the real estate industry and going to hopefully be able to shed some light here and add some value, and hopefully I know for certain he's going to be able to. Michael Valdez, welcome.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Alex, thank you so much. My brother, he's the best, sharpest dressed man in real estate. Your charmer.

Speaker 1: 0:33

Thank you, sir. Well, hey, why don't we offer the audience, just so they get a little bit of a texture on your background? Why don't you give us the encapsulation of what brought you even to this point here?

Speaker 2: 0:44

Yeah, for sure. As you said, I'm the Chief Growth Officer at EXP. I've been at EXP a little over three years now. Prior to that, I was a senior vice president at Rilogy and I was at Rilogy for 15 years. Were your audience members that don't know Rilogy? That was the holding company now known as Anywhere. That was the holding company for Sotheby's, cobble of Anchor, century 21, era, better Homes and Garden and Orcren.

Speaker 2: 1:09

I led the global expulsion for all six brands which, when I laughed in 2020, we were at 113 countries at about 300,000 agents. Then I met Glyne Sanford. I actually met Jason Gessing-Furze, who was our CEO at EXP at the time. He and I sat on a panel on global real estate in New York at the end of 2019. I had met Glyne at Inman at the end of 2019, beginning of 2020.

Speaker 2: 1:42

We were supposed to have just about a 20-minute conversation on what would an EXP global look like. That meeting ended up being two and a half hours and it was one of these things where I just saw the vision of what Glyne was doing and what he had created with EXP. I thought, oh my God, this is a true disruptor in our industry. Conversations progressed, I joined in May of 2020, and we've been able to open up over 20 countries in a little over two years without getting on a plane during a pandemic. It's something that's never been done in our industry, and I think it's been done because of the platform that this was created. Prior to that, I was in banking for 10 years at Deutsche Bank, and so a lot of finance and global experience.

Speaker 1: 2:33

Fantastic. That's a great encapsulation, Dave, for me. I'd like to go back a little bit to your Deutsche Bank days. What kind of Deutsche Bank was before Realogy? Oh yeah, Wait before.

Speaker 2: 2:46

It was in my 20s?

Speaker 1: 2:47

Yeah, what was it like at Deutsche Bank back there? I'm more really curious, because Deutsche Bank gets a little bit of a rub about being a little bit of a dumping ground for the global ecosystem as far as banking's concerned. I'd love to hear your take on that.

Speaker 2: 3:03

That's an interesting thing. I was literally in my 20s when I was in banking and this was in the late 90s. I am much older than I look. This was during that time and it was really interesting because I was really building a strong portfolio and I was dealing with three different groups of clients. One my real focus was American Indian tribes and I was doing diversification of their assets. The American Indian tribes fell under the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was under the DOJ, and they were obviously a tax-free entity Prior to 9-11, if we did a JV, that junior partner actually inherited their tax status.

Speaker 2: 3:54

We did a lot of diversification with the Indian tribes and at one point I had 18 Indian tribes that I was representing. Then I was doing a lot of the wealthy Latino families around the world just because of my heritage. It was a lot of focus in different areas and then, of course, the tech industry, because it was basically the start of the internet. It was three really interesting focus groups that I was working with. When 9-11 came, obviously everything changed. I was in banking at that time still, when risk management changed and obviously everything changed overnight, then it was a time of trying to re-figure everything, if you will and still serve the client's needs. Everyone was trying to figure that out at that point in time. By that point, I had been in banking almost 10 years and decided that an early retirement would have been good. I did that and started investing in real estate just from my own portfolio. That's how I got licensed actually was from my own portfolio.

Speaker 1: 5:18

So when you do, was that investing down in Miami?

Speaker 2: 5:21

I did. I started investing a lot in Miami. I already I had a home in New York, I had a home in Hamptons, and Miami to me was an interesting investment. I started investing in Miami early on in 2004 or so. So this was almost 20 years that I've been investing in Miami real estate and it certainly has changed a lot in the last two decades, but it's been something that I enjoyed and the reason that I actually started buying in Miami was because it was sometimes less amount of time to get to Miami than it was to get to my home in Hamptons.

Speaker 1: 5:59

Well, yeah, you know I want to shift gears here a little bit. I'm curious always is you're obviously a high performer, right, and so I was like the step in the minds of a high performer and bring that value to the audience. So what kind of? Where did you go to college and what kind of led you down this path of incredible success, you know, and a real diverse success as well. What was kind of your background?

Speaker 2: 6:25

So I'm border raised in New York, I'm into NYU and had, I think, a lot of it came from my dad. My dad was Batista's Chief Legal Counsel in Cuba and was arrested as a political prisoner when Castro came in and was released in a prisoner exchange program during the Bay of Pigs, and so there was a history there where you know someone who worked really hard and then had everything taken away from them was a sense of tomorrow's never promised, and I think there's a certain amount of whatever drive I might have inherited that is subconsciously inbred by that, by that experience.

Speaker 1: 7:09

Feel that back a little bit, man. I love that tomorrow is never promised. Is that part of what drives you? I was talking to the agency the other day and you know some of them are struggling and then I said, well, you're gonna have a struggle there, and then the next struggle is when you actually are okay financially. How do you keep that hunger? Is that the kind of the tomorrow is never promised? Is that what you're doing?

Speaker 2: 7:29

I think a part of it was through living my life through my father's lens, but also at 25, I was actually diagnosed with colon cancer and so went through that almost 30 years ago. At this point I'll be 57 this year. So when you start going through that in your 20s, when you're not, you know you're not supposed to talk about your own mortality when you're in your 20s, and so I think both of those experiences where tomorrow's never promised was actually, you know, really sort of exemplified in my life, and I think that from there it really is seizing something that is before you. One of the things that really irks me about anyone is laziness. It is something where you know we're all fortunate enough to have opportunities presented to us that are limitless. The only thing that's finite is time. Everything else is infinite, and if somebody doesn't really take advantage of what's before them, just think of it as irresponsible.

Speaker 1: 8:40

You know it's funny because it seems like the experience from your father that was passed down and then it was crystallized with that colon cancer experience that you went through right, which obviously had a visceral experience on you rather than ancestral. What do you think not to get negative or anything, but like what do you think, kind of, is the thing that keeps people back, like, when you do have this infinite time and you have, and, coming from Cuba, the infinite resources and the infinite opportunities that we have here, what is holding people back?

Speaker 2: 9:15

The belief that they can't, and I think that that, in my estimation, is our only. We have our own self-imposed prisons, right, and the irony of it is that we're also the prison guard and yet we hold the key. And there's, it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy in saying I can't do that, or you know, the greatest one is the thing of all try, and try doesn't exist in the human language. You know you can't try to do something. If you challenge somebody to try to pick up a pen, they'll either pick it up or not, right, so try doesn't exist. You either do or you don't. And you'll know from the very start. If you, if you have somebody who says you know, come, come to, to my party on Friday, and you know you'll say I'll try, you'll know, you know you're not going.

Speaker 1: 10:16

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 10:17

You know you're not going right, yeah, so try doesn't exist right, so you'll know from the start. And so in our vocabulary it's just almost like a comma or like or like a stop, and to me it's like when we actually sort of put it into our own world and say I'm going to try to do this or I'm going to try to succeed. It's a self-professing failure because you're not going to do it. If you say I'm going to go and and succeed, it's. It's a roadmap, right, you know we don't get into a car without sort of hitting our GPS or hitting ways, and you know. You put an address into your car or into your phone and you sort of know how you get there. You have a roadmap. So if you know where you want to end up, that's the first step and then you work backwards towards it.

Speaker 2: 11:12

So people that are saying you know failing at what they're attempting, it's simply because they're not attempting. Attempting is trying. So you have to actually go in with a, with a game plan. It's so shocking to me how many people in our own industry who are really just CEOs of your own company, if you're an independent contractor and an agent do not have a business plan. What do you, as a sole proprietor, ceo of a company which is your own company, as an independent contractor, not have a business plan? How do you not know what you want to earn at the bottom at the end of the year? How do you not know what your customer acquisition cost is? How do you not know what your marketing costs are? How do you not know these things?

Speaker 1: 12:03

Do you do you uh, there's so many different places we go with this Do you do you place the blame on the traditional education system? I mean, you'd have to go to Warden or something like that to get that acumen.

Speaker 2: 12:15

Oh, oh, oh, oh, come on. No, it's like you know I'm baiting you a little bit, but I'd say it's, uh, it's. Look where we're in. A people business. You do business with people that you like, and trust period right, you don't have to go anywhere for that. You just have to be likable and trustable. And so if somebody has trust in you and likes you, you're 80% of the way there. You have to be transparent. You have to really care about somebody else. You know it's, it's, it's truly being a, a, a, a humble servant to somebody else. It's how somebody really does gain success in their own. I mean, it's the old Zig Ziggler quote. It's the idea of going and helping as many people as you can is how you become wealthy.

Speaker 1: 13:09

I love that we could dig into that, but I want to big jack up because I didn't. I didn't think I articulated the question well, uh, the financial acumen right, so people get into real estate. Maybe they are great people, people pleasers, right? Or or they're. They're good at building relationships and they're good at following up in that, but they're not good business people, which would be to have that business plan. I guess that was my question.

Speaker 2: 13:32

I'll hire somebody to do it, but you need to sort of have a roadmap, right? It's the idea of you want it, no, and and and, by the way, it's it's simple that you don't need to go into. You know the, the ROI of an ad that you put into Facebook or social media, not asking that. You know. If you want to earn $100,000 a year or a million dollars a year, just figure out what's your average sales price in your market. How many homes do you have to sell in order to reach that? What's your, what's your split with your company in order for you to reach that? What's going to go in your pocket?

Speaker 2: 14:11

So this is simple math, right? So, from every transaction, how much will you earn? What percentage of that will get you to your goal? And then, how many calls or how many, how many sort of meetings do you have to have to have the listings or to have the buyer to get to where you want to to achieve? So it's simple math. The other complicated math you can hire an accountant for to get the P&L and that Sure.

Speaker 2: 14:38

Yeah, even the P&L, I think is pretty easy too. You know, you put everything on your corporate credit card. You figure out what you've spent. You figure out what you've spent per listing, you'll figure out what your cost was for that listing. I mean, it's all segregation of expenses. So parts of it are pretty easy too. But start simple.

Speaker 1: 14:59

Let's shift gears here a little bit. So your dad obviously had that experience, but he was a mentor in working hard and tomorrow is not promised. I love that one. Who were your early mentors? I mean, you had a roadmap right so we can know where we wanna go, we want. Do you believe it's good to have guides along the way, and those could be in the form of mentors? Who were some of your early mentors?

Speaker 2: 15:25

Well, I think mentors happen every day. I'm like you know. I still look to mentors for myself even today, but I think that there was for me early on. It was actually my grandmother, and so I spent a lot of time with her, and she actually passed away when I was 13,. But I spent every summer with her and she was from Spain, and so I would spend my summers with her in Spain and she was a very resourceful woman who was. She was widowed when my mother was five years old and she never remarried. So you know, she was a humble woman, but she really needed to figure things out, and there was a lot of tenacity in her that I admired and still do, so I think she was one of my early heroes.

Speaker 1: 16:19

Well, the Spanish are certainly renowned for their tenacity, was she Basque or Cantononian.

Speaker 2: 16:24

She was Galicia. Yeah, okay, yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:30

What would you say a couple of the top lessons were that she taught you.

Speaker 2: 16:35

Well, I would sort of say it's resilience, it's survival. You know, when you start sort of thinking about, as a single mother of two children my mother and my uncle at such an early age where she needs to fight and, by the way, it was my maternal grandfather died of colon cancer at 33 and I inherited that G, so that's, and I was lucky that I actually found out. When I did so, I found that as a blessing and to me it's really anything that happens through you in life where it might seem as a tragedy in some instances it's the greatest gift ever. So to me it was. You know, when I was diagnosed at 25, I would be like my God, you know, this is horrific, it's the end of the world, right. So you can look at it any way you want to.

Speaker 2: 17:27

But what I actually sort of looked at was I cared less about what people thought of me because it wasn't paying my mortgage. I didn't really care. And in your 20s it becomes your world that you want to be liked, that you want to be, you want people around you to really accept you, and that to me early on was a great lesson that I just needed to like the person that I saw in the mirror, and so that early on was a great lesson for me, because it was every day was a gift. After that, and now we're going on 30 years of gifts, so that to me is a great blessing. And you start looking at how do you leave your legacy from here, right? So what is it now? That's the next chapter of leaving a legacy behind for others.

Speaker 1: 18:23

Hmm, love them. Man. I'm learning so much about you and talk to me a little bit about resilience. You know, there's some like how do you take survival? Like you have to be resilient if you want to survive. When you get into abundance, and then it's sometimes the littler things that can kind of derail people. What advice would you give to somebody who maybe lives in this world of abundance? You know, should they go to a developing country and really see what it is to the lack of abundance and the need for survival, what could they do to help?

Speaker 2: 18:59

them. Master resilience Only if it resonates with you, right? It depends on who you are as a person. It's there. Listen, I have billionaire friends that are really sort of like, so joyful and wonderful, and they're friends that are really cramming. It's not the money, it is, it's who your heart is and your heart doesn't change. Your heart doesn't change. The money doesn't make you holder. It doesn't, if anything, it exemplifies who you always were, and so when you start looking at opportunities and where you can help others, I think as you get older it becomes more of your mission, right it's? I've got less days on this earth than what I've lived already, so for me it's the, because I don't think I'll live to be 112, but do we have? The other side of that is where I now have a responsibility to give back. I now have a responsibility to make sure that whatever doors were opened for me, I now open for others, and that really is something that's passionate in my life right now.

Speaker 1: 20:16

That's awesome, and I'm reading a book right now called Strength to Strength and it kind of talks exactly what you're talking about. In this latter stage of our lives, I got a few great hairs myself. You know that you've gone through kind of a lot of the struggle, and then this is now our season. Talk to me about that. Is that? Do you think that we kind of come into this season of giving back?

Speaker 2: 20:39

I think it's our responsibility too. I think it's. You know, we're all a part of a human race, and there is others that helped us get to where we are, and it would be selfish of us to think that it was just us. No one arrives anywhere in any level of success by themselves no one. And so whomever helped you was because they were probably helped also, and so this is the beautiful part of the cycle that should continue, and for me it's a passion for it to continue. Love it.

Speaker 1: 21:19

Let's shift gears here. So I know your time is very, very precious. Where do you see so we'll go into the real estate market here where do you see kind of the industry going You've been through all these different iterations of it with franchises and so forth Kind of. Where do you see this next five to 10 years? What's your forecast?

Speaker 2: 21:40

Well, actually I'm gonna just stick to right now. I think that in the last few years we have had such a bull market, then I think it's actually a disadvantage if you've gotten into this business in the last five years. I agree, I think if you didn't need any skillset whatsoever and you know and I say this sometimes and people get angry at me, but it's actually a really true statement it was no different than being a barista at Starbucks. It was like you were taking an order, that's all you were doing, and some people could take offense for that, and that's okay. It's the idea that in the last five years you didn't need to have any skillsets. You know, listen, I bought a lot of properties in the last five years and I can't tell you how many times I've put in offers where that realtor never even bothered to call me back because I wasn't the winning bid, right? So and for some of you folks that are listening, they know that they were probably doing the same thing right, because you were in the moment. You had an offer, it closed. You put something up in the morning, by lunchtime you had eight offers and then you closed it three days later. That's not a normal market right. What you didn't cultivate was relationships. You didn't plant any seeds. So the other eight people that you never call back that actually put in the effort to write you an offer. Now you're trying to call, and why would they do business with you?

Speaker 2: 23:09

So you need to cultivate relationships and right now, when there's a shifting market, I always say greatness happens in down markets. And when you start looking at things historically, in 2008, which was our last big recession, whatsapp was founded, uber was founded and in 2009, obviously, exp was founded. But you have some, and the reason they were is because there's a pause in the conversation, when not all is busy, right. So when there's a pause, you start getting creative, because there's less transactions, there's less buyers, there's less sellers. Sellers still want to have the price that they had two years ago, which isn't happening. So, as the market really sort of balances itself out, we have to remember that our role as brokers or agents is to put buyer and seller together. Price has no concern with us. The market determines the price, we do not. So the market determines price. Our only job is to put buyer and seller together, but if you have less of those two parties, you have a lot more time to think, and so greatness happens in those times.

Speaker 2: 24:28

So, whether that's new technology that comes out, whether that's new companies that come out, whatever that is, you know that when I was in production in 2008, it was the best year I ever had, and most of my colleagues were actually like really having the worst year of their entire careers. And why is because I shifted. So my clients became financial institutions and hedge funds that were buying properties at bulk. So I was buying at a discount, but I was buying properties for other financial institutions based on what their parameters were. So, yes, I did come from a financial background and, yes, I did have these contacts, but there was always an opportunity if you're agile and you figure out how to shift.

Speaker 2: 25:23

So I think that markets are cyclical. I think this is a very healthy market for us, where it becomes healthy because they happen to have cycles. This last bull market we had was an extended period of a cycle. So this is so much better for us. And you know, interest rates are high. Who cares? Interest rates also go through cycles. So for somebody to say I'm not buying a property because interest rates are at 7%, it's like you know, when I first started buying properties, interest rates were double digits. So I think you just need to figure out what the opportunity is, figure out what your holding period is, and this market will normalize right. And I think that a lot of the people that were in the market, that shouldn't have been in the market because they were just order takers the market will take care of that on their own and those people will no longer be part of our industry, and so where you actually end up is an industry full of professionals again, with a market that will normalize and we'll all have good livings again.

Speaker 1: 26:30

I love the sound of that. It reaffirms to me I appreciate it. I got in in 2003 and I went through that crazy up and did some things that probably and I look back and I'm actually kind of glad that I didn't make as much money as some of the others did I was selling land and I figured out some things, how to do it over the phone, before there was Mojo and all that but I digress. You know my dad, short sales came into play and I wanna ask you this. So it was very challenging, similar to this market in a way that we have to go back to a skills-based market and if you're a barista and you have to have skills, there's a bit of friction there right to go from being a barista to know how to actually cultivate the beans or whatever metaphor you wanna use. Do you think that opportunity lies in? Because people are moving away from something? And then, is that what you're talking about? That gap?

Speaker 2: 27:19

Opportunity lies for people that look for opportunities. So when you have less people in the industry that are and you're right, probably baristas probably had more skill sets than agents did in the last four years they gotta figure out how to put a smiley face with foam, right. So there are some tricks there. But seriously, I think that as you have less people or less competition, if you will and again in air quotes then you are. If you're that professional that's trained and that's focused in it, you are going back to basics and being a transparent informer of information, right. So if you're asking somebody to pay you 3% or 6% of a commission of a multimillion dollar sale, why should you earn that? What value do you bring to it? Once you actually can answer that question, then you have the answer to the greater question. Hmm.

Speaker 1: 28:19

I Guess digging a little bit more into that. I love that, do you? You think that we have to create more value in ourselves? And that does have. I'm trying to, I guess, dig Into this friction because I just I get so much pushback on hey, come to roleplay so you can get your skills better. I know how to talk to people. It's like, do you? Because you're you know Something's missing here because you don't have the closings that you want. So come in, is I love what when I would talk about it?

Speaker 1: 28:46

You know, back a little bit to the, the stoicism. Right, marcus Aurelius used to sleep on the floor of the palace and he was the most powerful person in the world. To remind himself of that life is struggled to put himself kind of in the place of those people. So do you think that putting you know, say, for instance, yourself, right, you most people? Oh my god, it's good. A house in the Hampton music at this. So this, why is he? Why is he continued? Do you continue to do difficult things? Talk to? I was thinking this morning of, like what, ask him about his morning routine. So do you continue to kind of do challenging things like that to hone yourself, or is that just sorry you?

Speaker 2: 29:20

think you know. But but we're already Defining it as difficult. I think that it, once you go into your habits, they're just habits. So, yes, I do wake up at five in the morning. I have my trainer was, was was here at 6 am and so I had my workout and then I went for a run. I come back and started my calls around 8 30 this morning and Will continue on, and most nights I'll have a dinner with friends or a colleague or a prospect or something for someone within the organization. So I have a dinner tonight. So it'll go through and then working on what we're doing for others as we go into larger projects. Right, so we've got two large events that we're doing. You were part of a mastermind that Leo and I did we're doing. We're planning our last one in in Texas next month. So we've got things that we're doing and things that we're juggling. So, but yeah, no, I I start every morning at 5 am. I.

Speaker 1: 30:24

Figured? I guess so, and I know I got two more minutes of your time here. What I meant by that was and Marcus really did this as well, and it's in meditations that His alarm would go off. Or maybe it was the rooster, I don't know, but he would say to himself like he could stay in the warm sheets. But then he said to himself this is not what a human was built for. This is not what even evolution is. Evolution has friction in it. It's difficult to be that fish going out of the water becoming a mammal over time, like why did it do it? Do you think that we're built like Stride over the fittest? That kind of thing like you were meant to struggle to, to grow.

Speaker 2: 31:05

I think we're built to evolve and I think of that you know you, you were, you were saying earlier, you know you got to compare. We don't know what darkness is until we know light, right. So as we comparing, when you're, when you're saying, are we meant to struggle? Well, let's compare what that struggle means. Sure, right. So struggle is a is is a very Personal word, right, someone, someone. Struggle is another person's nirvana, and so I think, as you start comparing things, it's, it's it's difficult to label, right, because we can only label from our own lens because that's the only lens we've got. But as we start looking out of more Global lens, I think it's we turn the lens inward. How do others see us Right? And then it actually puts things in perspective.

Speaker 1: 32:09

Yeah, I guess, and again, we were at 230 here. I'm gonna have one more question for you. If we, if we so say, for instance, this say you're somebody that's had a cushy life and Then that's been taken away, that cushiness, if you will, you're on your own, maybe, maybe you're, maybe you're 18 and you had a cushy life, right, and now you're off on your own and you never were really kind of those skills weren't built to have the resilience to have the dad that was, you Know, taken over, you know and and taking things taken away from them and so forth. What would you say to that person about? Hey, it's time to read, maybe readjust that lens and Build some resilience.

Speaker 2: 32:52

I think that if you're put in a situation, or a person is put in a situation, where those skill sets are tested, it's almost like when you throw a kid in the water and he either you know, you know you're gonna save him, but he doesn't Right, and so you're doing it to teach them to swim. But imagine that small child who can't touch the bottom of the floor and Thinks he's gonna drown. Right, it's. No parent will let the child drown, but the child in his own lens. They was. Somebody just pushed me in the water and I'm about to die. But then what happens? The child learns to swim.

Speaker 1: 33:39

So we have to push ourselves and get water in the water, love it. Well, I took one more minute of your time and, michael, thank you so much. Is there any way people can reach out to you? You know what? Do you want to give any special kind of plugs or anything like that?

Speaker 2: 33:55

Me on all social media to Michael Valdez global, all my handles are the same and it's a little bit social media and I love to respond and answer any questions and help anyone that I can. You're true.

Speaker 1: 34:11

You're, you're a true gem. Michael, thank you very much for your time. You've always been gracious with it. You've always had a smile on your face and a great Encouragement and notice the little things of like about my daughter and that kind of stuff. You're, you're. You're a genuine, you're a genuine gift and I want to appreciate you and thank you for your time.

Speaker 2: 34:27

Thank you, my brother, for everything that you do and everything that all the lives you have touched as well. So thank you for who you are, alex, and it's always a pleasure to be with you.