John Zito

Get out of fixed income, get out of credit, and get into equity products.

Finance at the cheapest level possible, term finance.

So what do you do?

Go into infrastructure, go into real estate, finance.

finance it very aggressively, build other alternative products, but don't build a credit business.

Why are you gonna build a credit business?

You're making no money.

And I joke because I feel like it's not a great analogy, but rates went up 500 basis points and I felt like Lieutenant Dan on the ship, you know, like on the ship, let's go.

It was all in all of a sudden because we were now over-indexed to origination.

We never had really built out third-party institutional business on that side.

We had done it all for our own balance sheet.

And we crossed the Rubicon where all of a sudden we're actually originating more than can actually service our own balance sheet.

And that's been the last three years.

So now all of a sudden we can build fixed income products that are innovative, that actually invest side by side with our own retirement business.

And now you see everybody trying to get in the business.

It's very hard to emanate your way into the business because there's a...

origination culture that's been built here for 15, 20 years, just in credit, and to align yourself in a principle way and to actually... Origination isn't just having a bunch of sourcers finding risk.

Origination is also the understanding what fits our balance sheet and how we think about risk and reward.

Very hard to scale if you haven't worked

with those people and really have a clear understanding and clear narrative about what works and what doesn't work a lot of people can originate lots of bad risk if you wanted to go buy a bunch of stuff you theoretically could probably not a good long-term strategy we've really built it organically with very little m a in the last several years so i don't know now we have tons of our own origination market leader and overall spread origination market leader and liability writing and that we feel like that business is going to do well for a really long period of time