Department and bob reached out to her wanting someone to help the story. He loved the way she wrote and i became involved in the peace as well. If needed some outside perspective and i was thrilled by the idea of penetrating this mans mind because i had heard so much about him. She worked for many companies, citibank, citigroup among them and she gratefully admired his leadership. There was a tremendous devotion so finding out the story turned the company around and paid 180 billion that was just too delicious. Host when he decided to take the job which is after the crisis and looked like the company was never going to recover when the board comes to my First Response to them was you must think im crazy but then i thought about it to myself ive got the skills and the obituary went on to say paper typical and a larger than life executive who was also a physical presence not only did he restore by 2012 but also repaid the debt to th their debe american taxpayers and returned to profit as well. Its a remarkable achievement. I was thinking about that even this morning he was the only person who thought that this was possible. The government didnt think that this was going to happen. They were ready to sell it off for spare parts. Parts. The idea that he went a little crazy, you have to be crazy to take this on. He was approached earlier about the job when they chose his predecessor but i think that he really the idea to take this on appealed to him as a guy thats got stuff done. Host what did you think when you met him . Guest the first time i met him, i was immediately struck by what a people person he was if my idea was someone reserve and kind of arrogant and have some level of arrogant account in the opposite he was funny. He wanted his story told obviously in the fact he takes my wife as the first person to tell it, and he wanted it told honestly. He didnt want the story to seem as just someone who was flawless as a human being or executive but who have tremendous desire to tell the American People and correct the record of their perception of the company. So, i immediately liked him. He was the kind of man you ask any question he didnt think about the answer it was just what you saw is what you got. Going back to the charming and handsome you can see all of the charisma. It was an immediate enjoyment. Host tell us about his Early Childhood and how it shaped him. Guest one of the critical moment in his life is at the age of ten he grew up at the catskills. They ran a bar and grill actually and eventually had plans to open th about to land rented out some rooms at the bar and grill and at the age of ten, his father died suddenly of a heart attack and the poignant part of the story was financially anyway is that he left the family with a quarter of a Million Dollars in debt. This was 1953 or so and his mother had no idea what she was going to do. So, this led to the feeling that she was always on intimate terms of debt and they paid back the obligation which she never wavered from and get feedback extraordinarily. The reason that also changed his life is that she had to become intimately involved in their business at a very young age. He was the oldest son and his mother leaned on him very heavily. So that instilled a sense of commitment and responsibility. He was not a perfectly behaved young man that he ha but he hado things his own way and it always worked. He always wanted to make money anmoneyadhesive for his life the motivating factor for what he rd very often was making money. And the value of money was important to him and thats why he always had the job and learned about workers as the sort of groundlevel. There was no trust and no extra boost to get a job so that the time he was in the army, he had inculcated a with a strong sense of earning a buck. Host there are two that stood out to me. Guest they own a motel in monticello new york and they would sometimes work behind the desk. One day he was behind the desk in a couple came up and asked about a room and he proceeded to describe the options they had for what they could rent for and what the price was and after the transaction was done, his mother was furious with him and he said whats the matter and she said you didnt give them the pen. She said when they are asking about the room, describe what you want them to rent a. Just give them the pen. And understand that the transaction on the saleswise. You have to effectuate the sale and make it happen. Host the other one you got a better job . No. Talk about how that shaped his philosophy and the idea that you lived they cant you were dealt. Guest you play the hand is dealt and its important if you find something better, do that. But for the time being, her philosophy always was whatever is available to you now is what you have to go for. That was essential to him and it plays out later in his career. He was always on the verge of another job, something that possibly he wasnt even perfectly qualified for. But he knew he had to take the lead and go for it because thats where it was being dealt. Host be far less gleaned from the life in business with an emphasis as much on the wife part of the business. Talk about that a little bit because i think this day and age has approached in his training were interesting. Guest he had no particular interest in schooling. For high school, he was sent, he worked actually at a New York Military Academy one year ahead of donald trump at the school. He didnt do particularly well grade wise however in college with the university but he never heard of when they recommended that he go and he decided on his major math because he thought thats what smart people with major in. He had some facilities for numbers but his grades were pitiful he had no interest in studying. But learning wasnt his thing at all. And i think that he respected education. Its just everything that he gleaned wasn wasnt for me buts from the handson experience. Host was interesting today theres a Program People were telling me about which is getting things done and its supposed to help you optimize your time and he describes in the book how did it define him . Guest there is an epitaph in there that says get stuff done. From very early on in his career he was picked as the get stuff done by and that was a remarkable facility that he always had for coming into the situation became able to analyze it and even if he didnt have the skills the job required, finding them. Remember, he came up through observations in the early days of Information Technology and data processing. Its really where he cut his teeth. Its a very challenging situation that required him to figure out something he didnt know before and he knew how to marshal people that he needed to help them figure those things out. They are behind the industry in creating those that remember those are those accounts that became very essential for places like Merrill Lynch and within a short period of time figured out aspects like Marketing Research and things he knew little about going in but found how to buy the people that needed to instruct him. It was just a quick study that way. So that stuff continued on and on through all the jobs he had going into life where he took on this huge responsibility from the taking the Company Public and i think that was a sort of operating talent of pages that got more intense as he got older. Host there are a lot of epitaphs in thepitaph cinderblo. That is very true to how he spoke and it comes through which is a great testament to the writing in th and a book that hd another phrase he describes if theres anything i loathe coming you write it as the business iss person that looks at you with a pasted on smile or nodding and completely saphenous expressions for that but if you can come up with a way to describe and tell me how he thought about it. Guest it was probably one of the reasons i wanted to help him write the book because it was so colorful and so perfect a distillation of everything ive observed over my life and in my work life that i thought here is a man that is sort of a natural philosopher that of course it refers to people but smile at you and nod in agreement and lavish praise on you being the person in charge to make you feel secure and everything youre saying is brilliant but walks away and says what a jerk. We have all met them. Part of his intelligence is that he could snuff that outing people. He knew the first time he met them. It was an amazing sort of intuition that he had. And i was actually thrilled to. The key accepted even to his world and was a badge of honor because he recognized immediately when he was being talked to and not in an honest way. Host he does talk about Emotional Intelligence and cares about employees but he also talks about his own transparency being exactly who he is and he quotes someone saying about him need somebody that will not be afraid to say fu. How do you balance those qualities. We meet a lot of people that are not afraid to say exactly what they think and he seems to have something that prevented that a little bit of . Guest i think its probably buried on the audience. I do think that he was kind of if he was angry he was terrifying. He had a very strong point of view and didnt release the i think he wanted some debate but he wasnt sure of himself and what he wanted t to get into situations that he didnt want challenges that were going to thwart him or change his course and to the point about balancing, he had tremendous charm and i think the key for him to running the country and what was extraordinary about this ability as a leader he understood and i think he truly empathized with the people that knew him and he wanted to feel that and communicate that. I often thought he was more himself in front of a large group of people than he even was oneonone. Something came out of him. There was a performance aspect but it was also very real. I think he loved the idea of taking people into confidence in large groups and they responded to that but the employees felt a. Anybody that works in the organization they know that they are very remote and spares his or her appearances just for the sake of control they wanted the exchanges. There were also moments when he came into the room and told the people that worked for him they were not doing well and have even more power because they wanted to please him. He really wanted him to be happy because they had been happy. It was an exchange. Host from the leadership point of view it is into the account it sounds like you did that but in the end they ultimately wanted it to be his decision. Guest i think that is totally true but thats because especially in the case of aig, he knew what the mission was. He had to shift the mission because there were other people involved in this process as we well. One particularly the chairman of the board. So he had to be a negotiator in that way, but he knew as i said he relied so much on the sins of the value of things and the value of people. And since he knew it so well, he didnt really need a colloquy constantly. He didnt need to have the trust of told him the opposite. I think that drive really did serve him in incredibly well in intuition. Host you had a better understanding but refreshed the audience as to why aig matters. Guest it was the largest in the world. It had been dominated for decades by the legendary leader who had built it into this conglomerate. It is a trillion dollar enterprise that covered every part of the globe and what i knew about it was its adventurousness in what it ensured with kidnapping and military things and all kinds of high risk customers all over the world it really did change the nature of what a Big Insurance Company could do i think and so that was my whole understanding. I didnt know anything about the operations of the company or the workings at all in how byzantine it really was after hank left in the mid20s either zero. So insurance lets face it it isnt the most sexy business on the planet. Host aig in some ways was a very glamorous company. Guest even the name though, aig didnt have much American International group it almost sounds like a james bond movie, the name of the Company Somebody was running, it has that name quality, so i didnt have a great understanding. And i think that was part of the problem that the company had when the dam bursts because i think the American People particularly do with citigroup and Goldman Sachs and lehman brothers, but they didnt know much about this Insurance Company. It had a very spotty public image. Host so it became the poster child, one of the most if not the most hated recipient of the government be allowed into this hundred 87 billion. That the controversy in the financial crisis was the idea that a chunk of the money. In these risky deals that they had done, talk a little bit about how they felt about that. Guest it infuriated him that they were being bailed out at 100 cent 100 cents for the d. It made no sense and he called them vultures. And then additionally, they were all in the building. I mean they were reaping hundreds of millions more in consultative fees. They were all brought in to do studies. There was a huge plan called project destiny that cost untold millions that was supposed to sell off the company very quickly into its contingent part. And that all drove him that. He thought that it was unconscionable they got paid off before the public did. Host its interesting he sounds like he ended up running and its a nice wall street but if he wasnt of wall street and it was an attempt to words the institutions that turned the countrys powerful institutions from mckenzie to the consulting firms to Goldman Sachs that permeates the book. Guest he felt there were some that were more fair than others. He understood the new ones on wall street, but when it came to aig and what he wanted to do, he saw it very blackandwhite. He understood something was amiss but there are only so many fronts you can fight at any one time. Host before we go back to project destiny, talk about who Hank Greenberg was the relationship with him. Guest when bob had been the ceo of metlife in the 90s and in early 2000. , they were competitors and bob have a great admiration. I think that he had Great Respect for what hank did have tig. I think that he thought he was a visionary and knew him just in the same way hank had tremendous respect for bob and thought that he shepherded them through a difficult time so there was a symbiosis connection that they had. Hank left under difficult circumstances. Its a long story but a hank was one of the people that when they were looking for a new leader after the libby resigned committee was one of the people urging the government to look at bob. And they had some meetings over time. Bob respected hank and i think they thought a ig was too big and they came to the conclusion they created something that was unattainable. What he would say is he created a company so huge that only hank understood. So by the time bob came along, he knew that there had to be some sensible reduction in the size of the company and a i think over time he continued to want him as a sort of silent ally to be someone who supported at least but i think that is because bob thought he was a smart businessman. Host said he comes into this company thats on the lifeline from the u. S. Government and is incredibly controversial and is getting blamed for the financial crisis you could even argue a disproportionate share for the crisis. Talk about what he encountered in terms of what was going on when he got there in the widespread hatred towards the employees. Guest mostly because of what was happening in the one small unit that created all the chaos, that financia the financs that was in connecticut and london this was the home of the ceos and the credit default swaps and all that horrible stuff. Those people were the focus of a tremendous amount of american anger particularly because of this issue around the bonuses that they were contractually entitled to. But it played out in the press so there was such an animus that it became a sort of symbol of everything that was wrong. It wasnt that much money considering the billions and billions the government had not invested in aig. It was something in the order of 60 million. I cant remember the number but anyway, it was a focal point for the anger and it got to the point where organized groups went and protested at the homes of the Financial Products executives and workers and there were threats against, Death Threats against people in the company and security people had to be hired. I mean, it was extreme. It was over the top and it got to the point aig took the name of the building. They started creating things like the property and casualtys company that didnt want any association with the name. People wouldnt even know where their id tags anymore. Guest another thing to be wildly angry about, he felt that it was congress and even the president who said the anger and their statements they might even be privately much more conciliatory but publicly they were condemning and using language that just inflamed the hostility and made everybodys job in his opinion harder. The government wanted them to pay back the money and at the same time was telling people it was a disreputable organization that made no sense but it was mostly because he couldnt believe he has an outside amount of sympathy for his own people, but you can understand he felt responsible for these people. Host you said about congress they seemed intent on the sabotage . Guest he would watch as these things would unfold in a congressional hearing about the retreat at the Saint Regis Hotel in california that cost some amount of money but it was a retreat for Sales Promotion that have been organizehad been orgas before any of these things happened and it had nothing to do with the operations of the Financial Products it was an ofe Insurance Division and it became another huge public issue in the idea that they were sending executives to a california resort causing the taxpayers money. As bob would say you have to spend money to make money. So that again it all became a game of whos the devil in portraying the company has somehow corrupt and this made him furious is the word. Host nonetheless he does something pretty remarkably handson for a ceo in terms of the bonuses, because theres a huge demand from the congress to get the bonuses back and so what does he do . Guest he eventually decides to get the money back himself. It ha have to do with kenneth feinberg. He was in charge of setting up the salaries for the top executives at all seven companies in the triple acid Relief Companies thaassetreliefe money from the treasury. What he did was a callback. He promised in return for allowing them to safety set the executive compensation fairly at the company, he promised to get the money back and sat at the desk and he called it dialing for dollars. He got the list of people who had taken the bonus money and are very period of time off all the money back through various persuasions. Host that is astonishing by the way. Guest he did it himself but thats who the man was. Host talk about his attitude towards pay and unpopular things like corporate jets and ceos being paid a lot of money. His predecessor took a dollar a year to serve as the cleanup. What was his attitude about the . Guest key wasnt working for a dollar thats for sure. He valued his skills and a set what he would consider a reasonable price for his skills. He got a package when he came he negotiated a package about 10 million a year and at the time, the government was setting is way low that the government also knew they needed him. One important thing to remember is who was going to do this job . I dont think they have many smart alternatives and also, someone who believed that this could be achieved. Remember there is nobody that fought this. What price ultimately it was a small price for the American People to pay to get this done and remembering the. When he came in he knew the conversation and this goes back all through his career again, the importance of money was very central. He didnt do this because he did it partly because he wanted the American People to be made whole but also he wasnt going to do it if he wasnt going to be paid and it took a long time even after the agreement was set it took several months before he was paid. The corporate jets was also a very important symbol for him. It had a terrible pr impression for people partly because the year before when the executives of the Auto Companies came to washington for their bailouts they flew in on corporate jets and it left a really bad taste in everybodys mouth that he felt it was an extension of his ability to do his job. Remember there is a Global Company everywhere around the world and they had very specific guidelines from the government about how much it could be used which basically made it almost impossible for him to use it and it drove him crazy. Host that comes through. Guest he was retired when he took this job on this beautiful place in croatia and he loved growing grapes i know it sounds elitist to people that it wasnt so much about sipping fine wine. He loved the process and the people. He got incredibly close to the winemakers who i actually met, these tough people who made a living growing grapes on the side of the hills and the peninsula. Host she might even make the most diehard about corporate jets. As we have this meeting with the secretary of the treasursecretae he takes the job but its up us the nice meet and greets. Tell us what happens instead. Guest it was a fiasco. Jim who is probably the other hero of the book, the other main hero was the structuring chief for the treasury and was very fortuitous for the country that these two men formed an alliance. Jim was his biggest booster and though he was the recipient of the most when he did things that the government was so terrified by in terms of outspokenness and iconoclasm but jim had recruited him essentially they had meetings and advocated him getting the job and he said you know before i take this job, and this was in the summer of 2008, before i take this job i want to meet is really making the decisions and he said im happy to. Bob didnt really want to deal with washington once he got the job, but he wanted to know who he was dealing with. So, he went jim arranged for him to meet Larry Summers who was then one of obamas chief economic advisers and drop them into a meeting that was supposed to be a session between Timothy Geithner, whod also been leery to begin with and wasnt sure he was the right fit because of his outspokenness, his reputation for it. They sat down and instead of having this orientation session, bob read him the riot act and basically electric Timothy Geithner about health care that government treats the employeess of aig this way. Youre not going to get anything done if their threats to people. I basically told him off in the session and Timothy Geithner was furious apparently. Furious is the theme of the hour. He was really angry. Milstein took him out of the room and said what are you doing, why would you do that and he said i just wanted to know what i thought. And i think it was a test for bob of how far he was going to be allowed to go on another one. And number to come i two can ita statement of independence. He will not have someone in the job whos going to take phone calls and do what you tell me to do. He had a better session with Larry Summers after that and by the time he got over to his office that had gotten the word that it hadnt gone wild in his office but Larry Summers believed in him, to back very strongly and explain to some off the nuance, the political back stage stuff that was going on and why there have t had to be h vitriol aimed at them publicly even if they wanted him to do the job. Host suggests an anathema to him. Guest youve got it. He didnt like that. The wonderful thing is when you read his interviews with reporters at the same stor itsy that he told privately. There is no subtext. Host i was struggling when i read the book to figure out who he liked the least and he becomes a character in the book that Timothy Geithner, mckenzie, the press or harvey. Can you talk about his relationship with harvey . Guest it was just people described idescribed as oil and. These were very strong and talented man, very bright men but both had a vision of leadership that they were central it seems according to bob kahn and during his first year harding came off almost simultaneously and for the first time in the companys history the job and ceo of the chairman was divided between two people. Bob had mixed feelings about this decision but ultimately thought if harvey cometh the chairman comes on and will deal with the washington stuff, thats fine. I will deal with the company and figuring out when we sell off the portions and i will deal with morale building and value how we are going to enhance the brand. Over time though they never formed a relationship. It was the one blind spot he had thahadthat he didnt establish e had so much else on his plate its sort of understandable there was an endless amount. Most of his time was dealing with compensation issues with the government for the first several months of his job but something never connected between the two men and they both edition had visions that wr reconciled and he held sway with a lot of the board members. His tendency to speak his mind unnerved a lot of people and there became a campaign to undermine him in the press. He had his theories about where it came from and he told the famous story of someone who went to the doctor and the doctor said the good news is youre not paranoid. The bad news is they are after you. He saw the way things worked and there were times for example after he took off the job he long promised he was going to go back for the harvest of the first. He told the government and the board he felt he was signed off on that and when he went two weeks after he started at the company all hell broke loose when the story ran that through this company was founded and he is out as the happy great harvester walking through and it was like he even called him over there and said what are you doing because he was giving interviews to the reporters for some American News organization and he was explaining they were putting them all together in stories with long interviews and it was a pr disaster. Host theres a showdown with harvey on bastille day. What happens . Guest they went back and forth and it crystallized over the deal to share fo the largest unit they wanted to get to which was a chinesebased life Insurance Company, huge crown jewel of the part of the original vision of the company that preceded it by Cornelius Starr in the late 191998 and he had secured a what he thought was a two in getting a huge amount of money from a british Insurance Company to that was way over with the original valuation was by other people at the company and the deal didnt do that well over time. It looked like they didnt have related to the provincial they didnt have the resources to make it happen but it really brought the factions to a head on the board and after the the board refused to back him on a lower valuation for the company to still try to sell it, that relationship was in tatters and in the meeting in the july, 2009, he decided that it was either he or harvey who is going to have to go. He talked about leaving before and he had another famous saying that he thought he had something called fu money coming and that was important for anybody to have in life because it allowed you to walk away from a bad situation, and he decided that this meeting he was going to announce one of us has to go. Was described as the most dramatic Board Meeting hes ever attended as the restructuring guide. Over the course of the afternoon, the debate ensued with harvey in his office and bob inheres and the board wrestling with the question of where the company was going to go and who would leave it. It might have been foregone at the point that bob was the person that had to do it. They were so far down the road in his plans would make no sense to lose him and he probably knew that at some level nevertheless at that point in the meeting in the afternoon, harvey went into his office and said i think we have to repair our relationship and he said we dont have a relationship. You can imagine this incredible scene between these guys with so much on the line. And to his credit, harvey conceded at that meeting hes angling to be the one that goes. Hes still sitting in his office waiting for the result to be announced to him, walked over about an hour after the meeting had broken up and everyone was gone. He didnt believe he had a job or not. He had to ask the secretary what happens . The left and he ended up calling him on the phone number they coulon the way tovisit him at cd no, theres a new ceo, steve miller, or new chairman of the board, and ceo. Host by january, 2011, its really his company and this is when its payback and if they come back but its nothing short of breathtaking but in the meantime, something has happened. He found out he has cancer. Did he do what some people might do and cut back on work . Guest was a discovery like y like for him . Guest that was an extraordinary moment and i only met him after he was already diagnosed into being treated for cancer so his whole persona was somewhat informed by that but that month in october of 2010, he had been coughing and went to a ctor and ultimately a wonderful oncologist that he had informed him that he has lung cancer and he was going to go on a treatment regimen. They went to a treatment regimen they were going to decide which one to do and there was an important meeting to set the price on the day that happened he was having chemotherapy and he was on the phone. He hadnt told anybody in the company yet but this was happening and he told them why you this was a regimen he was the speaker for several days but he didnt have time for it to be administered cities that you have to give them to me all at once so we sat for hours and hours and i think that it was three, i dont even remember how many actual regimens were compressed for the one sitting, but it was a terrible ordeal for him in part because he was terrified suddenly with a being confronted by mortality and obviously the personal pain was intense for his family but the idea suddenly that he wasnt going to get the job done that he had invested so much of himself that was alarming to the core of who he was. The other interesting question was how much do you disclose, what do you tell them who do you tell and how would that affect . He was worried they would usher him out the door. We have to go with somebody else. He ultimately decided shortly thereafter to tell the board and the press and the company and the people of the company that he had cancer and h was being treated, which it was. At that point he wasnt sure what the outcome was going to be, but he didnt reveal that he has lung cancer. He never revealed it, and you know, in light of steve jobs and his pancreatic cancer which became an issue, although that was disclosed fairly early on, it is kind of surprising and amazing that he was able to keep that basically to himself. He didnt feel it was anybodys business but kind of cancer he had especially since he was in treatment. The prognosis at the beginning was a year and i remember he had a conversation he said are you going to be around to do this and he said it depends. I hope i will. The first treatments he had were very successful and he didnt live in ear and he lived for and a halfourand a half years with s intervention. He never missed a day of work. Host i thought it was interesting what you said about his fear of dying for the job was finished. He writes a very poignant line in the book i plan to work as hard as possible to the race regret from my vocabulary which shows you how important this was to him. I thought one place perhaps he didnt get it and its still something thats an issue in the campaigns today and thats been at least partly attributable to the Bernie Sanders popularity is the continued anger of the American People. He seems to have no time for that. He wrote it was just mistakes basically and if we blame people for the mistakes the entire company would be in jail and he said he doesnt follow the actions that the blaming into the viciousness that went on after the actions were taken what did you think about that . Guest he compartmentalized it i think. He really could in his own mind i tried on many occasions, val and i both as we talked to him, we tried in many ways to get him to talk about the inner understanding of how much pain there was on main street as a result of what happened. And i dont think it wasnt that he wasnt a compassionate man. I do think that he believed so strongly in what the business could accomplish some of the good that could be done by business and by American Enterprise that he had to almost seal off the idea of the damage to another damaged so much as the reaction and response. It was like get over it. We are not there anymore. And i think that was the key to how this all happened. I dont know that he could have achieved this extraordinary result that was paying back a profit within three years this massive amount of money that even the Congressional Budget Office said we would never be paid off with the government accounting office. None of these organizations would have written the company off as a 50 billiondollar loss. I dont think if he had dwelt on the fact that people were hurting, i dont think he could have achieved everything he did because he saw it as helping them stop hurting. Its almost like you want to shake them and say yes, this is criminal. But he didnt see it that way. Host so what underscores is what he had with president obama after. To tell us about the lunch. Host guest he often talked there was a famous article about him in the new York Magazine which had a great set of summarizing headline. It was a picture of bob looking robust like a Great AmericanSuccess Story and the headline was your welcome, america. The country didnt have much gratitude for what he and the company had achieved in paying them back. It was all in the negative column. There was no plus. So that was extremely upsetting to him partly because he thought it would help the company to have an acknowledgment of what he had done and his legacy was going to be leaving the company proving them completely wrong by making sure the company survived beyond the payback and so milstein arranged for bob to have a meeting with obama. Remember he wasnt a huge fan of this administration i think its fair to say. He felt there were some things he admire admired but he felt oa wasnt a forceful enough voice on many issues including the role of American Business and i think he thought it was cowardly when obama went after him and thought there wafelt there was y unfair about what obama voiced a. Of almost encouraged the anger towards the company did so in january of 11, he arranged to go to the white house to sit down for a short meeting and once again, in the midst of the pleasantries come he laid out what he thought was a lack of fortitude of the American Business on the part of the president. I wish i could tell you that i had a great insight into the back and forth that happened on that day that he left it at that sort of instructing him on this issue and so he was never going to get a president ial medal of honor for which i think that he frankly deserved for what he did with his company, but his heroism as was a sport that dot necessarily need the establishment to recognize it. Host so you write that this is as much life lessons as leadership lessons and he writes in the book that i thought was interesting i discovered it all comes down to what you mean by happy. The reality is the ups and downs occur and nothing is forever not even life itself. What did yo he mean by that . Guest thats a great question. I reflect that hearing it back but i think about where his life had taken him and there was some regret and that he wasnt ever going to get to spend those sort of sunset years in this place he loved far away from the United States where he spent a lot of time with his family, with the people he loved, and you know there was that sacrifice that he made in spite of the fact is we havthatthey have extended his lt having this in his life, just the adrenaline, who knows. But i think he was deeply aware of the fact that work can only make you so happy. That wasnt the beall and endall despite the fact he was a workaholic in many ways. He also had some perspective. Host said he had a complicated personal life. How did that affect your view of an . Guest thats a great question. And what we are talking about here for the readers come for the audience members is not he had relationships outside his marriage particularly one very important one to him. He had been legally separated for many years and had remained very close to her. It was a complicated situation and it was somebody he worked with at metlife. When he was the ceo. So its not a life that is tied up but whose is coming and we debated and talked long and hard including the other people involved in the situation about whether to include all aspects of his life in the hooks. Congratulations in. A doctorate in journalism