Andrew Milgram

So we actually stood up

a servicer to service the space, which today has almost 30 people in it, a collection of lawyers, paralegals, phone bankers, people sort of calling borrowers.

Anyway, as we thought about taking down the government's paper, they wanted to understand how we were doing that servicing and how we were enforcing, if that was necessary, and what our thoughts were about ultimate resolution.

So when we got deeper in, so we ultimately became by far the largest lender in the space, by far the largest participant.

So it was over $600 million deployed into the space.

Wow.

We had over 4,000 individual assets on the balance sheet.

Out of 13,000 medallions.

13,587.

Now you're the taxi king of New York.

Yeah.

But I think one of the good pieces of advice that we got actually from Risa Heller, who runs a firm called Heller Communications, who has advised us throughout this.

And Risa had come out of Chuck Schumer's office and has a great connectivity into the New York political scene generally.

She said to me very early, you need to go explain everything you're doing and plan to do to every regulator and politician that touches this or is interested in this.

And so we spent a lot of time going and seeing individual council members, individual regulators, went to the mayor's office, sort of laid out for them, look, these are the problems we see.

This is what we think the solution set looks like.

We think it's going to be difficult, but we think the outcome looks like the following.

And by being transparent about what our plans were, even though we weren't advertising ourselves or what we were doing broadly, we were making sure that the people who would be most interested and the people who were going to have the most political sensitivities to this were informed and well-informed.

So by going out and getting in front of that, as we became large, we, I would say, had a very constructive dialogue with everybody in the system.

I think the other thing that we did, again, I think that has worked to our benefit over time.