Season 03 Episode 08
Molly Bloom, entrepreneur, speaker and author

Starting over after seized assets, difficult times

I sat in my house for a couple days. I didn’t go outside because it was very obvious I had been assaulted, and I kept waiting for their call and I had no idea what I was going to say to them. For the first time in my life, I had no idea. Then I got The New York Times, and on the cover it read that 125 people were arrested in the biggest mob-related takedown in New York City history. And I never heard from them again, but that’s about where my luck ran out.

Chris: Yeah, so that wasn’t rock bottom, right? Yeah, that was sort of a huge violation that happened. And then all of a sudden...

Molly: You would’ve thought that would’ve been rock bottom, right?

Chris: Yeah. But you’re like, “I’ve got to fill the safe back up before I quit.”

Molly: I’m like, “They took all that money.”

Chris: I mean those photos, I’ve got to replace those somehow.

Molly: Yeah, I kept running games. Then a couple months later, I got a text message from one of my poker dealers at one of my games, and it just read, “The FBI’s here looking for you.” And at that moment, in New York City, standing on the street looking at that phone, I knew this was over. Even though I wasn’t really speaking to my dad that much, because he was writing me handwritten letters every year telling me that this was going to end badly. I was so mad at him because I wanted him to know what I had done, that I’d created this whole business, that I had done it completely by myself, that I knew how to manage some of the most difficult people in the world. I’d figured out how to make $6 million a year, and I was savvy and a problem solver. And he didn’t see it like that at all. And that made me even more mad at him.

Chris: It drove even deeper emptiness.

Molly: Yeah. By this time, my mom and dad were divorced, so my plan was to go to my mom’s house. I got in a car, tried to buy a plane ticket to Denver, and my credit card got declined, then my next card got declined, then I used my bank card and that was declined. I logged into my account, and my account balance was -$9,000,999.

Chris: They seized everything, didn’t they?

Molly: Everything. They shut everything down. So I got home, and the legal point here is that your property, unlike your personhood, doesn’t have the presumption of innocence. The government put a confidential informant in the games, and towards the end of my career, I started doing something that put me in direct violation of the federal statute. I knew exactly what it was. Because I had attorneys who analyzed these federal statutes and gave me this sort of playbook for operating. I had gotten sloppy. My debt sheet was big. I was putting people in games that if they won them, great, if they lost, not great. So I started taking a rake, which was a problem. It was a violation.

The feds said, “We have on good authority that she’s been making her money illegally. If she wants to come in and talk to us about what she knows about the world she’s been living in and all the people,” which would’ve essentially been a confession, “Then we can talk.” The last thing my lawyer said to them was, “Are you investigating her? Do you want her to come in?” And they said, “Not at the moment. If we want her to come in, we’ll call you.”

So man, I just went away. I moved in with my mom. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t even have a bank account that worked. It was years before I could open another bank account. I laid in bed and felt sorry for myself. Then my mom came in after two weeks, raised the blinds and said, “You need to go out and get some fresh air.” You’re from Colorado, right? All moms, but especially Colorado moms think fresh air is the fix.

Chris: It’s the savior.

Molly: But my mom lives up at like 8,000 feet. I walked outside and it was one of those beautiful bluebird days, and there were those mountains, I was raised on those mountains, and I was raised that when you fall down, you get back up. I didn’t know what that was going to look like. Nobody wanted to take my call. My network was decimated. The tabloids were telling the story because celebrities were involved. And of course, they were painting me as some floozy in the corner serving drinks. There’s nothing wrong with serving drinks. I was a waitress for many, many years.

Chris: Yeah, you were a curator. You had a business, you were a banker.

Molly: Yeah, I was a banker. I was a therapist. I had 20 employees, and I had no recourse for collecting. And no protection from anyone. People were trying to cheat in my games and people were trying to intimidate me not to have games. And there were always problems and I could just solve them. Anyway, so I started walking. I started hiking. I started spending time in nature. I started meditating, which I think is the most profound performance tool for work and for wellbeing, because it really is... it’s the gym for what we were talking about for being able to observe the mind and be completely intentional about where you want it to go. That is when true power starts.

If you can have a mind filled with negativity and filled with hurt and filled with doubt and filled with depression, and you can start to intentionally shift out of that and re-narrate or dismiss or focus on optimism or hope, if you start to yield that power, I just don’t think there’s anyone who can stop you. So it came to me that I had to do a couple of things. First of all, I got sober, because it was just too easy to reach for those crutches.

Chris: Good for you. That’s awesome.

Molly: And I learned a lot in a 12-step program. I call it one of the best educations of my life. Ultimately, I didn’t stay in the rooms, but man, those five or six years that I did during the hardest point in my life were so critical. So number one, I had to accept that the situation I was in was 100% my fault. I’d made those decisions. I had near perfect information on the laws, all the opportunities in the world, and I’d figured out a loophole to do this thing legally. And I made the decision to take a rake.

So man, that was a couple days of sitting with that. And it’s just like you want to fight it and resist it, because it’s so much easier to blame other people and blame society. But I just sat with it and then I had this realization of if everything’s my fault, then everything’s my opportunity as well. The world can’t do things to me. I mean it can, but it doesn’t have the final say.

Then the second thing I had to do was even harder and something I don’t think people do enough. I had to forgive myself, be accountable. I went around, sometimes I flew places, even though I had to sell clothes and jewelry, I said sorry to the people I needed to say sorry to.

Chris: Look at you working the steps.

Molly: I did work the steps. I worked the hell out of the steps.

Chris: That’s awesome.

Molly: I had nothing to do. But then, forgive yourself, because there is going to be no comeback, lugging around that shame and guilt and also not forgiving yourself. Being in self-pity, it’s kind of selfish. It’s like doing selfish things and then feeling sorry for yourself.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, it’s a weird cycle.

Molly: It’s a weird cycle. So in the same way I had learned to work on my mind before, I worked and I worked and I worked and found some compassion for myself. Then I finally got a job. It was in LA and I moved into this really small, one-bedroom studio, and I thought, “OK, this is a fresh start. I feel grateful.” Then seven days later, in the middle of the night, I got arrested by 17 FBI agents.

They could barely fit in my one-bedroom studio. They had machine guns and high-beam flashlights, and they put me in handcuffs in my pajamas and they put this piece of paper in front of me that read “The United States of America versus Molly Bloom”. I hadn’t run a poker game in two years. I was living like a Girl Scout. I just didn’t understand the legal system. I didn’t understand they were taking those two years to build this case. So I got put in jail, and I had a day and a half to get to New York City to find an attorney who would represent me in the fight of my life. The press release read I was looking at something like 30 years. I had eight meetings with attorneys. I didn’t have $1. My mom put up her house to bail me out of jail. And my dad, he was so mad at me for getting arrested by the feds. He said, “Get a public defender.” That was what he said to me.

Chris: What was his rationale?

Molly: He was mad. He felt like he had warned me all those years and he didn’t feel like he wanted to shell over hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance what he had told me was going to happen. Anyway, so I hung up on him. My mom and I went to New York City, and I had eight meetings that day. Seven out of eight of them said it’s going to be $250,000 just as a retainer just for the next week or so. Then my eighth meeting was with this guy Jim Walden. And Jim Walden is one of the really good ones. He had a great reputation with the government. He was a former federal prosecutor in the Eastern District. He would only bring forth these really serious indictments. He went after the five crime families, a very serious guy. This fluff girl running a poker game was not his style. He looked at the indictment and looked at my mom’s face and said, “I’m going to help you because you need help.” And my mom and I were just like, “Yes.”

And we had security the next day because most of the people in the indictment were people I’d never met before, but were very serious Russian criminals. I don’t know how they made the connection. I guess there were a couple of degrees of separation between sports betting and poker. Anyway, after the arraignment, I walked into Jim’s office and said, “ OK, what’s our strategy going to be and our angle? Because I don’t have any money.” And he said, “Our strategy is going to be integrity.”

And I just remember feeling like someone punched me in the gut. It was just like all right there. I wanted to be Jim Walden. I wanted to have an impact on this world. I wanted to be somebody who had moral courage and integrity. And here I was under federal public indictment, embarrassing my family and being dubbed like The Poker Princess and The Madam of Poker. I made a promise to myself that day that no matter what, no matter what was on the other side of the decision, I would never abandon myself again. I would never choose the shiny thing over my integrity or the wellbeing of others.

Living by her values and with integrity once again

Chris: That’s really living in your values.

Molly: Yeah. It’s alignment, right?

Chris: You’re not going to trade in your values for something else.

Molly: You either are or you aren’t who you say you are. And I had stopped being that. Anyway, the world has a funny sense of humor because literally a couple days later, the prosecutors wanted a meeting, and they were very excited to meet me, particularly this lead prosecutor. This is the Southern District. It’s a very flashy office, a very ambitious office. This is where Giuliani came out of. And the name of the game is to be the lead on a big flashy indictment.

He said, “Don’t worry, we’re not going to make you unsafe. We’re not worried about the Italians or Russians,” which is who they should have been worried about. But I think they had other agencies dealing with them. And he said, “I want to know about the hedge fund owners, and I want to know about the politicians, and I want to know about the checks you wrote and the checks they wrote to you and from which accounts. I want to know any inside information you have. And maybe we might ask you to wear a wire and ask them some questions.” And he said, “If you’re willing to do this, and it’s the right thing to do, then we’ll give you all your money back, and we’ll give you a deferred prosecution.”

Chris: Oh my goodness.

Molly: “Which will keep you out of jail.” I would have to say I have a record, but I could stay out of jail.

Chris: There’s a trade for money again.

Molly: Yeah, it’s the Earth School. I went home and I got to the same place I had gotten to two years ago. This was entirely my fault. I didn’t believe or have knowledge that anyone was doing anything in my games that was really harming society. Were they booking some bets? Maybe. Wasn’t that going to become legal in New York and New Jersey in the next year? Did they write $1 over their political contribution? I mean, let’s just say I didn’t have any Epsteins or Weinsteins in my game. I could also see the intentions of this lead prosecutor. I didn’t get for one second that he cared about justice. He cared about himself, and a New York Post flashy indictment. That’s what I thought. And that’s what Jim thought too.

So I went back to the office and said, “I appreciate the offer, but we’re going to turn it down.” Then I waited to get sentenced. And about two weeks before I was going to be sentenced, because we all thought I was going to prison, my dad called me and said, “You’re my firstborn and you’re my only girl, and you’re about to be sentenced in federal court, and we’re going to hash it out.” And it didn’t happen in Central Park. I wasn’t losing my mind and trading a Chanel glove for an ice skate, which was what was in the movie. But he did come. We spent two days talking, and I had always been afraid to ask him this question that I thought I knew the answer to, but hearing it from him would just destroy me.

And that question was, “Why do you love my brothers more than you love me? Is it because they’re boys? Is it because they’ve just made you look really good, made you really proud?” I finally just got up the guts to ask him, because F it, I thought I was going to prison. And he got really emotional. He said, “I don’t love them more than I love you at all. Sometimes I like them better.”

Chris: Sounds epic.

Molly: So I was grounded a lot. But he said, “I think I might’ve messed up or taken it too far, but I think the world’s a really hard place and I think it’s harder for girls. I just really wanted to make you tough.” And in that moment, all the missing information we fill in and live with these stories… and these stories can drive us and drive our decisions all the way to the end without actually ever knowing the truth fell away. It doesn’t mean I’d completely recused him from everything, but I saw him as this young man who is a psychologist and wanted me to be formidable. And from that moment, we were able to build this incredible relationship. I talk to him every day. I have the relationship with him now that I always wanted. And I think I might be the favorite kid now, because I got Costner to play him in a movie.

Chris: Yeah, there you go.

Molly: Legacy. I went to sentencing and got a judge who was pretty disappointed with my life choices. But he said, “I see a lot of people have shown up for you today. I have great respect for your attorney. You seem like in the last year you’ve worked on yourself, so I’m not going to put you in jail.” And you lose your legs a little bit with that. You can be tough, tough, tough. But I didn’t want to go to jail. I always say that in my speeches, “The good news is, I didn’t have to go to jail. The bad news is I had to go to dinner with my family.” And here is Jordan and Jeremy. Jeremy at 16 was number one in the world in mobile skiing, and he also played at University of Colorado. The first time he touched the ball as a true freshman, he ran it back 80 yards for a touchdown. Then he went to the Turin Olympics, decided he was done with mogul skiing, went to the NFL combine, got drafted in the fifth round of the Philadelphia Eagles. He was an Abercrombie model. Remember back in the day when they were all ripped? He started a charity in our hometown, granting wishes for senior citizens.

If you were wondering if he was a jerk, no. Then most recently, the kid we just thought was a really fast runner started and sold a software company. So here’s little Jeremy at the table. Jordan is a Harvard-educated cardiothoracic surgeon at Massachusetts General, who has literally dedicated his life to saving the lives of kids with congenital heart defects at Harvard’s teaching hospital. And here I am, the family felon. And I’m like, “This cannot be the way this story ends. I need a massive rebrand.”

Getting a movie deal with Aaron Sorkin

Chris: I know what I’ll do. I’ll write a book and get a movie made.

Molly: What else is there?

Chris: Freaking genius.

Molly: I was 34 years old, millions of dollars in debt.

Chris: Yeah.

Molly: A convicted felon, a social pariah. What do you do? What do you do when you don’t like the way the story’s been told? You figure out a way to tell it differently, right? From your words.

So I got all these awesome meetings with publishers. And they wanted big celebrity takedown pieces and they were willing to give me pretty big advances that would help a lot of my financial issues. I was living with my mom. But I said, “That’s not the story,” and I got rejected and rejected and rejected. Finally, I got a little book deal and I published that book, and I waited for my life to change. And 10 people bought it, I think eight of them had my last name. But this was my startup, right?

Chris: Yeah, yeah.

Molly: I still believed in it. I just needed to find a different way in. So I took a bunch of meetings in Hollywood because I wanted to learn the business. What I found out was that nothing happens unless you get one of these really prolific filmmakers, writers, or directors. Even if you attach great talent to it, it still doesn’t necessarily go anywhere. But if you have Sorkin, if you have Spielberg, if you have Shonda Rhimes, if you have Tyler Perry, it’s going to go somewhere. There were so many people in DC and LA and New York making calls to the studio saying, “Please don’t do the Molly Bloom story,” so it also had to be someone who was brave, and I’m a huge Sorkin fan, “The West Wing”, “A Few Good Men”, “Moneyball”. You can feel the integrity and the courage he writes with. I’m like, “He’s the one,” but Aaron Sorkin is the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood, and he doesn’t have any social media.

Chris: Cannot DM.

Molly: You cannot DM. So there are moats and moats and moats around him, but I just stayed relentless trying to go down the web of how to get to him. Finally, I found this great entertainment attorney who represents huge clients, but he and I became friends. And he said, “I can send this book to Sorkin.” Then a couple days later, I got a message forwarded from Ken to me from Aaron that read, “I’m looking forward to meeting Molly for lunch.” And I was like, “What?” And little did I know, he really wasn’t interested, but he was doing a favor for Ken.

So I flew to LA, and I had this moment before I walked in that door like, “ What am I doing? What am I thinking? His last movie was about Facebook.” Then I just said to myself, “You have to believe in yourself.” Just like when I was 12 years old, you have to believe that anything is possible, “why not you”, and it’s a good story and it’s a unique story, so just chin up, girl. I walked in and told him my story. And when I was done, I guess it worked, the little mind shift, because he said, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, kid. I have never met someone so down on their luck and so full of themselves.” I wasn’t full of myself, but I encourage people to believe in themselves even at rock bottom, even if you are 35 years old living with your mother, millions of dollars in debt and a convicted felon, to believe you are still worthy of incredible things. In fact, you’re more worthy because you have a story and you’ve been through hell.

So I said, “Well, are you in?” And it took him a couple weeks. He told me he knew he wanted to write the movie before he left the parking lot, but he played it a little slowly. He asked me questions, and he called me — I’ll never forget this, he called me and said, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is I’m going to write the movie. The bad news is you’re going to have zero creative control.” Now there are a couple times where I’m like, “Fine,” but….

Now I would’ve trusted him, just like I trusted Jim Walden. There have been a couple people in my life who I have been able to take a step back and say to them, “I totally trust you,” but then I had this great idea, this great thought. So I called him back and said, “But, Aaron, I’m your only source material,” because this had just happened. There was a Vanity Fair piece, there were some articles, but there wasn’t enough to do what his process generally entails.

Chris: There wasn’t the whole story.

Molly: Right? So for eight months, while doing community service for the government and working at a downtown clothing warehouse, another part of my day was going to Aaron’s office and constructing the story, which was the most incredible experience.

Chris: I’m sure. That’s amazing.

Molly: Just to see him and his process, and then to see how hard he fought for this movie. I mean, we went to studio heads and they’re like, “I can’t sell a movie about a girl unless she loves someone, has a broken heart.” And both Aaron and I said, “Women deserve to be able to have stories that don’t put them into this box.” I love love. I had some boyfriends. That was a different genre. We don’t need to go there in this movie.

Understanding the true value of effective presence and meditation

Chris: That’s amazing. It got done. It’s a rocking movie for sure. Your story has a lot of ups and a lot of downs. And I think the really remarkable lesson in my mind is really those two paths of the things that were happening and how full circle you came to kind of discover yourself, root for yourself, even at rock bottom. It’s a pretty powerful thing. But what’s maybe one piece of advice you would give to somebody facing a huge pivot in their life? Based on your journey, what would you say to them?

Molly: First of all, if there’s one thing I could tell anybody, it would be to start a meditation practice. Here’s why it’s not just me and other people being anecdotal. There’s real hard science behind it. If anyone’s curious to look into that, I think Sara Lazar does some of the most fascinating work. She’ll run brain scans on people who have never meditated. And then she’ll have them meditate I think for 20 minutes a day, for eight weeks. And when she re-runs the brain scans, she sees a decrease in the gray matter in the amygdala, which is the lizard brain, fear, survival, the tendency to be risk averse, etc. She sees an increase in the gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, which is the newer, smarter part of the brain that’s responsible for creative thinking.

I would not recommend starting at 20 minutes. I would recommend starting at 30 seconds because it is a very hard thing to do if you haven’t done it before to sit with your mind. And just to give you a real quick way to get started, I practice Vipassana because that’s the best way I’ve found to really be able to start to own your focus. So you sit down and you put your attention on the breath in the same way you’d put your attention on a book you’re trying to absorb. And you just follow the breath in and out. And inevitably, the mind will start, and you just label it thinking and come back to the breath. And you just do that over and over, and first thing in the morning if you can, and build up slowly so there’s not too much discomfort. And just if you want more guidance, Headspace is great.

For more advanced meditators, I think Sam Harris’ Waking Up app is fascinating. But what starts to happen is you start to really calm the noise. So many people don’t know there’s a separation between the thoughts and the emotions and reality. And so many times, there is.

Chris: Yeah. That’s why you’ve got to become the observer, because there is that separation.

Molly: Right. We’re just telling ourselves these stories. We’re just listening to this default mode network. I think about it as just the running scripts of a survival-based brain. Even people-pleasing has its value for survival because if you’re in the village and you’re a mom and you have a bunch of kids, you’ve got to make sure everyone in the village really, really likes you, so they’re going to bring you food. I mean, the brain is meant to keep you alive, not necessarily keep you happy, not make you a great entrepreneur, not make you a great partner. And that’s why I think doing something like meditation, in which you are starting to investigate the contents of your mind and learn how to manage them is absolutely the first place I would start.

Chris: I love it.

Molly: And then second, effective presence, learn about how people make decisions. It’s mostly based on emotions. So you may have a meeting with someone and have said something that they didn’t like. And the brain will store that as a memory in your subconscious, and so when you see them, you’re not really sure why, but you don’t want to go talk to them, or you don’t want to work with them, or you don’t want to do a deal with them. I kind of think when you meet someone, you have this shot because when you meet someone, you’re not just meeting them, right? You’re meeting their ex-wife, or their ex-husband, or their ex-boss, all these people, this cult of unworthiness, these people who have made them feel like they need to armor up. And when someone’s armored up, you’re not going to be able to establish a genuine connection with them.

Chris: Absolutely.

Molly: It’s your job in the first couple minutes, through eye contact, through warmth, through authenticity, through deep listening and several other factors, to show them that you’re with them. You don’t agree with that whole consortium behind their head. Because it’s only when both people can drop their ego and both people can drop their armor that you can start to have real impact and cultivate real relationships, and that’s the name of the game.

Rapid-fire questions

Chris: Well said. Well said. Well, we’re not done yet. We have some rapid-fire questions.

Molly: It’s your turn to talk.

Chris: No, no, no, no, no. Definitely not my turn. We just want to know more about you, so I want to ask you a few questions. This is one that I think is such a Chris Allen question, by the way. It puts a number on something that is not a number.

But the first one is: On a scale of one to 10, how accurate was the movie? 10 being perfectly accurate.

Molly: Eight and a half.

Chris: Eight and a half.

Molly: Yep.

Chris: I love it. If you could ski anywhere in the world today, where would you go?

Molly: I’d go heli-skiing.

Chris: OK. What’s the weirdest habit or quirk you’re most proud of?

Molly: God, there are so many. I don’t know because I feel like my whole life is weird and quirky. OK, here’s one. It’s not a habit or a quirk, it’s an aberrant way to do things that really works and I’m proud of how we’ve done it. So I met my ex, we got married, which is something I never thought I would do. Then I got pregnant. And two months into my pregnancy, I’m like, “This marriage, this isn’t going to work.” And I knew I wanted to have it figured out before Fiona came into the world. So Devin was finishing a PhD, I left him and our life, two months pregnant. Then we did what we needed to do. We grieved or whatever. And he was there for a year and a half, and now he lives with us and we’re best friends. And we love this little girl.

Chris: Wow.

Molly: And even the other night I’m like, “Mom and Dad are going out,” we have a relationship.

Chris: Yeah, yeah.

Molly: But it’s beautiful.

Chris: That’s amazing.

Molly: Yeah. So it’s a little quirky, but—

Chris: A little quirky, but.

Molly: Especially when I talk to other people I potentially might date, I’m like, “Well, my ex lives in my basement, so.”

Chris: It’s really an Airbnb, but that’s awesome. That was unexpected, by the way, that quirk, that was unexpected.

Molly: I like to surprise you guys.

Chris: Well, if you could instantly become an expert in anything, what would it be?

Molly: AI.

Chris: OK, I love that. Well, who’s the most generous tipper you can share that you’ve ever encountered in a poker game?

Molly: Celebrity or someone you don’t know?

Chris: You can say the name, yeah, whoever it is.

Molly: It was this guy, Larry.

Chris: Larry the tipper, I love it.

OK, so did you pick Jessica Chastain? And if you didn’t, who was your alternative you would’ve picked to play you in a movie?

Molly: It was mind-blowing because as soon as Aaron took on the project, a bevy of A-list actresses were writing to him, begging him for the part because he had never written a movie with a female lead. And when I saw Jessica’s name in contention, I was like... Because I fell in love with her in “Zero Dark Thirty”. She was so fierce, and that was the first movie I had seen that wasn’t a documentary where a woman was given the opportunity to just be on a hunt for terrorists and didn’t fall in love with her superior, or whatever. I just thought she was so versatile in “The Help” and “Interstellar”. I mean, I really was crossing my fingers that it would be her. And I definitely subtly let that be known.

Chris: You with your zero creative control?

Molly: Yeah. But I mean, I also knew Aaron was the expert here. When I find a true expert, I set my dilettante ass down. There are things I am for sure going to advocate for myself for, but he knows what he’s doing.

Chris: He’s the bee’s knees. Well, what’s the largest amount of money you saw someone lose in one night?

Molly: $100 million.

Chris: And what’s next for Molly Bloom?

Molly: I’m trying to understand and formulate a strategy around a two-year-old.

Chris: Been there.

Molly: OK. I’d love some advice. I’m writing a book on effective presence.

Chris: I mean, I haven’t actually heard anybody talk about that, but I’m like, “Makes total sense.” I think it’s a really great thing to kind of unpack for people because I don’t think there’s a lot of understanding about it.

Molly: No, there’s not. And the only other thing is EQ, and Dan Goleman, that’s prolific research. But a lot of it relies on reading people. And I’m really good at reading people, so were a lot of people at the table and their error variance is too high. To me, it makes so much more sense to know how the brain works, to know how people work, and then to figure out the things that increase the probability versus the things that decrease the probability. It’s really a learnable skill.

Chris: That’s really awesome. Well, I have to say it was truly an honor to sit down and have a conversation with you about your story and to unpack it in the level of detail we did, so thank you for coming to The Entrepreneur’s Studio.

Molly: Well, thank you for inviting me. And you’re an excellent journalist.

Chris: OK. Just a marketing guy trying to figure it all out. Thanks for coming, appreciate it.