. . . . a weekly interview prom with relevant guest hosts interviewing top nonfiction

authors about their latest work. all "after words" programs are also available as podcasts. >> host: show, thank you for being with us here today. it is a heck of a book. really enjoyed it. it is a gripping story and well told. i guess my first question is why did you decide to write this now, is it restless joe ricketts syndrome or was there something thathat you moore wanted to sayt this point, what motivated you to want to do this now? >> guest: i tell you now it was written to appeal to entrepreneurs to let them know how hard it can be and how rewarding it can be so that it offers an encouragement to people to think if i want to

start my own business, i should do it. the other thing i wanted to do before i got too old and don't remember everything is because looking at this chain should from when the fcc dictated the new york stock exchange to get rid of the fixed commissions. it was a reflection point in the financial service industry and i wanted to tell the story from the inside so people would see the human aspect of it. >> so the title, the harder you work the luckier you get, is that tongue-in-cheek or do you believe that? >> guest: it happened to me so many times i think sam is the first one that kind of put that phrase together, but as i was talking to the people at simon &

schuster i would've told them here is a problem and of course it isn't about time and time again the harder you work the luckier you get. it came out and sounded like it should be a good title. >> host: there was an amazing amount of artwork that you went through. in the financial industry that worked for close to 20 years, myself the story you tell about building ameritrade and how hard it was is truly gripping. and i've written books about the history of bear stearns and goldman sachs and i never got the impression that in writing those histories of course i didn't live through it that it was tough as you experienced involving ameritrade, how did

you do that? >> guest: one of the things that made it tough is lack of capital. back in the 70s we had to set up a financial statement every six months to the customers and one of our customers called me and said i thought i had to tell you you left three zeros off of your net worth and i said no, those are the figures that are seeing their. so, we could only grow by the capital that we left in the business from our profit. we also have to be careful about running a business so that in the regulations of tracking the net capital and to stay within those regulations, so it was a constant struggle of balancing

and then how much can i put in advertising and how much do i need to make sure the increase in the business is not going to exceed our net capital and how much can i put into hiring new employees and buy a new record for them to use. that was a difficult balance for many, many years. that is what really allow allows to grow as well as we did, but even after being in business almost 20 years when i saw the opportunity i simply don't have enough cash or money and we are not going to make it. we are going to have to go public so that was at the time that i said if we are going to stay in this industry and be one of the winners we are going to have to have more capital and that prompted us to go public.

>> host: that is the decision from any company's lifespan. you spoke about the momentous big bang and commissions went okay and what that meant for your business. in my own writing and research and experience on wall street, one of the most important moments in history of wall street is when firms started going public and they went from being public private partnerships to the company is an obviously need access to capital a lot easier. it sounds like you had regrets going public that you have to do it for the capital access some of the same thing can be said about goldman sachs. was something lost and you went public in your mind and how important do you think this idea is for the way to change the culture and wall street?

>> guest: for me it was a difficult position because i always wanted to leave a business for my family to update after i could retire and i knew that it would be difficult to maintain the atmosphere of the family business. but the same time i also knew that we needed access to that of capital in order to take advantage of opportunities ahead of us and that turned out to be right. i kind of figured we need 100 million for technology and 100 million for advertising. both of them turned out to be low so we went public at the right time to get the right amount of capital for the lack of a better term for the upper echelon of the people that were going to be able to stay in time. at the time we had over 400

competitors but most of the people were out before the late 1990s. a very similar story to the automobile industry or any other kind of industry and i was aware of that. i knew that if we wanted to stay small, we were not going to be able to survive and i wouldn't have anything to leave to my children. at the time we went public in the cu gut that blessings to compete i knew he wouldn't havee the same intimate atmosphere about looking at ameritrade it was kind of a very fun environment even though it was very stressful and people had to work hard. everybody seemed to enjoy it. when you go public, you really kind of become a different company. you become for the lack of a better term or professional and

that's touched that you feel when you are in a private company. i have a different attitude towards the investment bankers. they had better management of what they were doing as investment so i thought dealing with the public in the retail buying and selling and being an investment banker is two different businesses that need to be kind of thought of separately. on the public side it was when you are dealing with customers that was okay. we really did well by going public. public. it was us personally as a family that lost. >> i certainly agree with you on

balance into the idea that the investment bankers in the state privates, however of course you know they were getting to so many other businesses, so obviously morgan stanley had a big brokerage surveyor were so many different businesses maybe it was inevitable and the capital requirements were not that much different than the retail brokerage. did you feel that the underwriterunderwriters that tau public did a good job with that and was a process for you or did that leave something to be desired? >> it left something to be desired. i was amazed we have been in this for 20 years. we were going to have a small offering until he got to boston and then they didn't understand the business and they were not enthusiastic about us taking it public. they did it because it made us

money. it's what kind of growth we could have and they said why don't you tell us. you wouldn't listen, you wouldn't buy into it. we had been growing at a phenomenal rate and nobody in the securities industry thought we were going to be anything other than a startup business. that was all a surprise and a shock to me. if it is quite all right. a lot of people were close neighbors. if we were located in one of the

money centers, i think that we probably would have been looked at the same way because the securities industry didn't want to think that we were competitors and didn't want to think that we were doing as well as we were so they subconsciously ignored us. that is true but what warren buffet does is so much different than what we do. i don't know that phenomena would wear off on us. i had a couple business meetings with him over the period of about 30 years and maybe i will see him once a year or so at a fundraiser or something of that

sort but he is in a completely different world than i am. that is certainly correct. >> host: your childhood is so interesting and growing up it is interesting and you had a very different outlook rather than your family and parents. the typical things kids growing up were interested in. >> guest: it was not hard.

being in nebraska city in the 40s and 50s and 60s were some absolutely wonderful place for people to grow up and we still look back at that and say in the most wonderful way w we didn't realize it, we didn't know it. with respect to my father, he was in business with his father and when my grandfather died a. he encouraged me to get into engineering school that i had no intention of going into that business. i've tried as a young person but you have to have some talent with your hands and i don't have that talent with my hands. i couldn't conceive of the mechanics. you have to understand how you

should. the second part is i couldn't wait to get out of nebraska city even though it is a wonderful place to grow up. although my father would have enjoyed becoming antibusiness. and he fired me he said you are just not going to make it as a good carpenter. so, even though you would normally think that that would be a stressful time am if he was comfortable asking me to leave the company and i was comfortable saying i'm happy you're asking me to leave. i don't want to disappoint you and i'm pleased that you are not so disappointed. some of the other aspects that playing sports, i never had a shortcoming in myself when i played sports. i tried to play sports, but i

was old phones. it didn't work. i would take my few dollars and go to the bank and go to a teller a that really made me feel grown up and that was a feeling that i got this nothing else would replace. so, working to make a few dollars if is probably the most important thing in my life as a young man. my parents always an urged me to work and saved. they never encouraged me to play sports. so, i always had -- of course my parents were raised during the depression. the amount of times that you have a different attitude.

you talked about how growing up in that freedom and responsibility. that feels like such an american concept to me and an admirer of all american concept i didn't want to disappoint her and do things she would consider to be something that would make her feel embarrassed. we always did understand we had a certain place in the community and we needed to work to maintain that place. even though i had no idea what was happening to me at the time as i look back now, i can see that i always knew i should be responsible, but i also knew i had the freedom to go anywhere and do anything.

can you tell the story of the family -- it seems to be a seminal moment. >> guest: it was a great lesson for me to learn when i was a young man or boy. my grandfather was a successful farmer in mandalay nebraska. it's a small farming town. being a successful person in that community meant that the rules that you -- the roads you plow horse trader, things of that sort and the other thing of course is the catholic church in that small town offered the first few to the family that gave the most part the second fugitive family that did the second-most in things of that sort and my grandfather always had a different view.

you lend your money and take your risk and put an interest rate that you thought it would be something that would give you the adequate reward relative to the rescue were taking. it took a dip after good supply on the market. during the 1920s, times were

good. as soon as they had some equity they borrowed against that. so they had some equity again and they built the inverse pyramid and if everything would have continued the same it would have been just wonderful but of course it didn't. we went into the depression. one of the things my grandfather did is feed cattle. his dream was to have on the side but before they got very old, he thought baseball and it had a disease. i get fro can prevent it, tubers or hoof and mouth disease. it was a very prized bull and

when he brought it home he had a party. it was like a tear in his barnyard and invite him in and there was a number of tables taken from the house to put in the yard and everybody got some food so the tables were full of food and people would play games that they could make up. one of the games my aunt told me was the then what that on how many eggs they could lay on the back before they start to fall off. my grandfather was in his heyday. this was the peak of his career because he was able to show off the ball and think about the benefits that he could have two maktweaked the herd gets biggerd better as far as the type of meat they would produce. when he got the decision from

the state that his animal had this disease, he lost all control than the state took control and it was before current science knew how to handle it so the whole herd had to be destroyed and of course he didn't have the money they make the money to make a payment on the loan and was like pulling the fulcrum of the universe. and everybody lost their farm. this was also before the days of any kind of social welfare. when he lost the farm, he moved to nebraska city to go to work in the packing house but he had a nervous breakdowns we never did work after he lost the farm and my memories of him are sitting in a rocking chair just looking out the window. his sons were old enough to work in the packing houses and his daughters went to work so the whole family went to work to support the family but here is this man that had a very strong

social position while he was a good farmer and had to move into a house in nebraska city. they rented at the least expensive thing they could find, didn't even have any floors, it had floors like a log cabin so very much of a come down in hard times for the family. like i said, he never did recover. it had a big influence on my mother and she told me that story many times. times. >> host: did you take a lesson from that story? >> i did. i always had to say to myself be ready to fail. be ready to lose all of your dreams and start over. and in fact, i've got a website and one of the entrepreneurs on

the website that i interview says entrepreneurs are different. the fail and when we do, we get back on the horse. as an entrepreneur you've got to understand out of the ten businesses that fail your risk is quite high but if that happens and you are really an entrepreneur you get back and try again. >> host: another important moment if i get this right your father's business and what that told you about the importance of innovation and technology. >> host: it is an important part of the story, an and i reay started out there and pointed out how important it was because after we were so successful with technology around the turn of the century and we were big and successful, everybody thought i

understood technology and that understanding is allowe waswasa. the reality is i didn't understand, i just understood what it could do and that image is where my mind went after i got the idea. these people don't know i don't know about technology and my mind went right back to that afternoon in the yard when my dad first used a bus -- buzz saw and he was impressed by how much more they could do. >> host: is this the idea you don't have to know how a car engine works you just have to know what a car can do for you? >> guest: that's correct. same thing. >> host: it seemed again from reading the book technology was always a hurdle you were trying

to get over and it would be obsolete by the time you implemented it and a lot of money was spent and a lot of people cycle through trying to figure out the technology and it is as simple as the innovation of having people be able to dial a phone number to make their trade to do that sort of automatically. it seemed like every time you thought you had the edge on the technology is let you down and you were behind the ball all over again. >> guest: it is amazing to me to think where we started with a touch tone telephone and a pencil and a piece of paper for an order sheet. when we had a trade may be

recorded in the book and then we put it on a ledger sheet that went into an alphabetic system so as i said in the bucket is just right out of charles dickens days everything was done by hand and it didn't take long to learn we couldn't continue to do everything by hand and expect business to grow and of course we all wanted to grow and saul that opportunity so we had to have some sort of automation come in to help us out and as i describe in the first company that we used was accompanied by the name of computer research and they gave us a machine that was like a big typewriter where the clerk would type in the activity for today, the trades, the money received, the checks going out, that sort of thing. and then prepared a tape and he

would then send our telephone into a holder and the tape was hooked up and it would give the beeps and information to the computer and philadelphia. so we are in omaha and all of this goes to philadelphia. if you have some static on the line, the information was incorrect. so the company in philadelphia would receive the information that we send, process it and print it out in chicago so all of the ledger sheets and confirmations, all of the statements would be printed in chicago. in chicago the person that ran the machines that put them in a box and send them to us in omaha so all of that was to happen overnight. very seldom did it happen seldon overnight something always happened. there was a snowstorm or somethinsomething preventativess usually a day after we were supposed to get it than we had

to go through and pick up all the mistakes. it was a much more efficient way to operate but it was never solved service opportunity pharmacy and in some ways it was very inefficient because we were ready to do the business of the day which is answer the telephone and write the ticket and not spend time going through the business we did two days ago and immigrant fears. so it wasn't too long after we had that business and i've got to tell you i'm very happy we added. it was a good stepping stone that we realized we needed to have our own system. but i had never heard the word software so when people said you've got to have a computer and software the first question was what is software. back in 1975 it is hard for people to realize it wasn't all that long ago that these things really came being and the world was completely different at that

time than it is today. i'm sorry, go ahead. in the book i talk about dave kellogg who was the genius that all of the software together, but if anybody thought that you are going to build a brokering system from scratch, they would have said you are crazy and basically if i had known dave kellogg co. the fact you could even get it done was amazing so when i started writing this book and realize all the things we did i was amazed. but dave kellogg was instrumental. without him we wouldn't have been able to do it. and he did it out of a challenge to himself. he wanted to do the impossible

in a way that demonstrated he could do things other people couldn't. you are going to ask a question. >> host: could you ever have imagined we would be with the technology we are now where essentially it is all done through the internet, through a website interface you can do your own trading right there online and it works and people feel good about it and there's confidence in the system, could you ever have imagined that when you start about? >> guest: when we started in 1975, to have that as an objective was beyond our imagination. nobody even had the concept you could do that. we took them by telephone and then gave them to a clerk to call in and get a callback. years later when we can report that execution back to the customer within six seconds it was truly remarkable almost like america truly remarkable

interview. everybody had to build the systems so that it would flow through the customers to the exchange and back and make us all the information. they looked dashing and impressive and prosperous. i wasn't happy with my job. i wasn't excited about my care career. i knew that i wanted my own is nice but i didn't have any capital or any way to get the capital.

by the time i went through the story of seeing the cover of the magazine it was a full market and the brokermarketingof the bt of money. thinking i could have the opportunity to put in my pocket of my own compensation relative to a commission job and do it in a way that is related to the securities investment market was the most attractive i could get. so, when i understood what happened, i had to go there. so i went to omaha and all the managers had we don't even look at somebody without a bachelors degree.

a. the idea that i would be one of these people for this florist bt by making a lot of money as a stockbroker. it just so happened i got registered at the top of the market. how do you go from being a broker to thinking you could start your own discount. my partner, my mentor is the one that they would try to offer prizes and a loweprices ended le he has experienced with the

grocery business in competition. as the brokeragso the brokeragey doesn't want to change. they didn't think it would change, so they thought even though the government had instructed negotiating commissions people wouldn't reduce their prices. they said somebody well and that will start a trend. i don't understand it, so why don't we if we think we have to compete for our business now on the commission of the charge. that's how it all got started. we had no idea how to do it. we just have a lot of hope and thought that really sounds gre

great. we were not stupid enough to follow our dream we just kept flowing along and tried not to be that when you think there's a market for somebody to just wants to make the trade, they just want to let you know here is what i want to buy, here's what i want to sell and i don't need any research a lot of people came back from the conflict of the war to go to college on the g.i. bill to become engineers, architects, accountants, doctors.

going on at the same time is really made the market to deeper and broader than we ever thought it would be. so, another one of those things the harder you work the luckier you get. we didn't know it was there until it started. if i'm going to leave this, what do i do. several times my back was against the wall and i thought i might lose it all here but i can go get a job. am i going to be happy, no. i took the risk an and fielding tough to recover from it in some way. so having your back against the wall really does help. there's also a certain bittersweet quality to make it a

family business at times and at times to have hopefully your brother working there and you hope to have your children working there but it sounded like. what was that like for you and how did you feel about that? >> guest: it's terriblethat?gue, but it's one of the things you have to go through sometimes. i would like to talk about tim mcreynolds who is right out of

law school when we had our first difficulties with the securities and exchange commissions. because he had a lot of confidence in himself and because he had a unique way of trying to solve the problem, he saved us from going out of business. now this is an attorney. only in business as attorney for a couple of months and who had the ability to save our business and keep us running. a few years later, he changed the industry by thinking differently and irreverently about all the rules and regulations. they gave us a no action letter and if you did exactly this way we will take no action.

that changed the whole industry. he'd only been in business for a couple of years and he changed the whole securities industry. a little bit later, he saved me. we had a fight with my partners in the brokerage firm i helped start because i was doing obnoxious things related to the thoughts and judgments and so tim was very important and was very near and dear to my soul about as close as a friend you can possibly have. we had a go for $75,000 that was a huge amount of money. what i would like to do is give half of it in stock.

something to grab his attention and needed cash so he called me and wanted to sell his stock. to me it was like cutting a hole in your heart and letting the blood flow out. after he did that a couple of times, i said i can't do this anymore. i'm going to. we parted ways. we were not really mad at each other but we lost touch.

when i have t had to see my men, that was hard. don't let their emotions get in the way of good judgment. try to think clearly and logically follow these ideas that come out at the type of effort and don't let your emotions become involved.

if you sharfuture with entrepreh resolve david had similar experiences. most of the time i read stories of successful people, they generally have associations that was difficult for them to keep as the business grew. it may be normal for the new business getting started with more than one person, but it's something you have to handle successfully or you won't survive. so you are clearly driven to succeed. i assume you have succeeded beyond your wildest dream that

changed your life could you have imagined this happening this way, eventually if it did happen and i know you wanted to leave the business for your children and grandchildren, but that didn't happen. shiva published many of your goals but not all and you are a very wealthy man. this was the story of america in the 20th and early 21st century. how are you feeling about your experience backs >> guest: i'd accumulated more money than i ever dreamed of i thought that i would have. but at the same time, i was old enough when that really happened that i am not going to change. so, my wife and i still have the

same values that we had when we didn't have any money. it allows us to do things that we wouldn't have been able to do, for example, my children wanted to buy their baseball team the chicago cubs. we wouldn't have been able to do that if it wasn't for that kind of success. it's been a wonderful business for my children. >> host: obviously that is quite a momentous thing. >> guest: my kids did it. they pushe.they pushed the idea. i said why would i want to buy the team? i have no interest. basically they said well, we don't want you to have interest, we want it for ourselves. my wife taugh talk to kids about baseball and we got the

television station carrying the chicago cubs into the omaha area so my kids up from an afternoon with watching i did not know that. my kids went up to chicago, loving the chicago cubs but i have no knowledghad no knowledg. so, if this one of those things that was serendipitous where you can see the harder i work the luckier i get. i had no interest in it with my kids did and they went after it in a very earnest way and they did win the world championship as i think you know. first time for the cubs in 100 years so they've been very successful with the baseball team and the remodeling of the ballpark and neighborhood and businesses around it so it's been a very wonderful thing for us. we wouldn't have been able to do that if we hadn't had the fortune that came with being successful as a brokerage business. >> is the family in chicago

because -- taking to get yourself a championship like you got one or two or three or four for a? >> guest: first of all, my wife and i have four children. they were the ones. it was suggested, but my son, tom, has the most interest and he has an entrepreneurial mind, so the kids among themselves put him in charge, so really he was the one that is to make all of the important decisions. so, in chicago when we won the world series, i think my son could have been elected to anything. i think anybody would say he should be president of the united states or mayor, everybody has respect for what has happened and my family, my three kids but still live in

chicago are well regarded. >> host: i want to touch on something a little more personal, and that is that you have a brother who was gay and died of aids and a daughter that is gay, you come from a catholic background, grew up in the midwest. has this been -- you are very forthright about it in the book and it's very honorable about the way that you discuss and handle it. becausbecause the experience bee for you and your children and growing up the way you did? >> guest: well, obviously i think you can imagine growing up in a town of about 6,000 in the agricultural community, you don't have much exposure to this broader idea or the reality of a homosexual. it just doesn't come into your well-being.

i never had an idea that my brother was until he called me and told me that he had aids as i describe in the book. so, but he was only a year younger than i was and so i left him. it didn't make any difference to me whether he had aids or whether he had been a homosexual. so, we took care of him until he passed away. my daughter was in her early 20s and was a young woman when she came to my wife and i to tell us that she was gay. she said i didn't choose this. nobody would wish upon themselves that they would be ricketts. i was born -- that i would be gay. we told her never take second place, hold your head high and be whatever you want to be. both of those things, with my brother and my daughter come out of love.

the love is probably the strongest emotion in a persons life and certainly the strongest connector to other people's families afamilies as the basicf society and if the society is going to work, family has to work. my wife and i both came from very strong families, different types of families with very strong. so, the family came first. some of those decisions were really automatic on a part. i know that a lot of other families they are not considered that way and i think that is a shame and part of why i talked about it in this book. i could let both of thos with be things out and about would still have been good but i think what's important to let people know that, you know, there's a good percentage of the population that are gay and the fact that they are shouldn't have any influence on any other aspect of their business.

so, i really kind of wanted to tell those stories in the book. >> host: thank you for discussing that. i wanted to ask about advertising because it is such a big part of your business and you put a lot of money into it. you clearly to provide into benefits of driving customer volume through your advertising. what do you think about the advertising of the ameritrade today? >> guest: i'm still a large shareholder and i really enjoy the fact that i think they still have good management and i would like to tell this to the manager today i think that the ad you have running has been on too long. it's old, it's blurring that they must have a reason for continuing it. do i like it, no.

i would have liked to tw it twos ago that i don't like it now. >> host: it seems a little long in the tooth, doesn't it. [laughter] but it is ubiquitous and memorable although i don't know quite why i remember i it for wt it gets me to do. and you have a view of schwab, the market cap about 70 billion you are 22 billion e*trade dogma but is still around about seven or 8 billion. what is the dynamic in the industry now, why is it such a higher valuation than ameritrade although it's clearly well beyond anything that you've ever could have imagined i assume. >> guest: chuck schwab, who was a friend, but at the time we were competing all through 75 through the turn-of-the-century commission as a competitor that i just had to worry about and i mention him by mention of the company several times in my

book, but he was fortunate enough to have started in california. california i think at a time havthe timehad the ninth largesn the world if it had been its own country. now in nebraska we had 1.5 million people. most of them didn't buy stocks and bonds, said he had so he ht that was right out of his front door and i had to have a market where we had to search through the haystack to find people that would want to be interested in buying and selling stocks from us. so, although i think that he started at about 1975, i had never really heard of the discount workers in san francisco until about 1977. and he also wrote a book i think they were published within the same month if you read this book you see that although he had the opportunity of being closer to the market, that was larger than

the market that i was in that he wanted to grow as fast as he could with branches and those branches are expensive. so i think that he's done a wonderful job all through the years of managing his business and it allowed him to get to a larger market cap than ameritrade just because of where we started and what we had to deal with when we were a new company and getting to grow he had a bigger base to grow from just because of the population and the kind of speculation that he had. >> host: and he also bought a bank, right, a wealth management business? >> guest: somewherbusiness?guese along the line, yes. i've got to tell you every entrepreneur is going to have to make mistakes, because you are doing things that have never been done before so anybody can look at chuck schwab and on any

particular interest they can say that was a bad thing and they are probably right. so, you have to take your hat off and give him a lot of credit for doing some of the things that don't work but by the same token i have to say to myself i deserve credit for being brave even though i failed and that's noble when you have a growing distance. you have a view on the market that is at an all-time high for month after month for people that would like to know your views of what you think the market is going to. i'm still working 40 to 60 hours a week. i did retire from the ameritrade as the ceo about 20 years ago. and i figured i deserved to take use of the money that i had accumulated to do the things i wanted and that kept me happy for about six months.

after six months i was no longer happy. i have to be in business. i have to be part of the creative process that makes the economy's work so i went back to work and now i'm very happy and i've got to tell you i have never worked a been such a strong economy as it exists today. i think it is really quite wonderful for the country. it's a little bit awkward for me because i'm not in the brokerage business. i'm off in other businesses and as i try to buy other businesses there is a lot of money going around and a lot of competition which kind of makes the prices ridiculous sometimes, so you kind of have to pass. but the government is really giving the country the attitude of times are good, the president led the charge on reducing taxes and reducing regulations and i think those are two important things. and if i could, i would like to get off my soapbox and say again there are still too many government regulations on the

part of the federal, state and local level that stop people from starting their own businesses and that is what makes our economy grow and what makes our wealth so good. >> host: on the other hand you say you support regulations or at least in this industry it's the same is like having a seat belt and a car maybe. >> guest: deceitful to the car would be going too far for regulations. i don't think that -- i feel like i shouldn't have to be told what to do but found the other argument is if i get in a car wreck without a seatbelt, and i end up on the charity list for helping me get well, i was negligent in not wearing a wearg deceitful, so i can see both sides of my feelings or leave me

alone. i will make my own mistakes and go my own way and do my own thing. that is my emotions. realistically though, you know there has to be some regulation. i'd like the word free enterprise more than i like the word capitalism. capitalism is a great thing, but it really kind of gives the image that is unbounded and that it's really all that it's dog eat dog in the capital which it is and which it should be. but, the enterprise may get the same image but it brings in what comes with regulation. so, we do need regulation. we do need an overseer of the securities industry, probably every industry to make sure that the balance between the consumer and the people that are offering the products and services are offering them in an honest and in a good way. so, we do need some regulations but the question is always how far do you go. my personal feeling is both on

the part of the municipalities in the states and so we've gone too far. we tried to protect the public too much to the point where we are stopping people from starting their own businesses. and when people start their own businesses, that is where we create the new jobs that are necessary to make the economy get along well. so, i think that we are going a little too far. >> host: on that very optimistic note, i want to thank you for being part of the program today and to tell everybody that this is an amazing story of entrepreneurship, persistence, the american dream within a very readable way. congratulations to you and your co- writer. we give kudos it is a great read and i recommend it. i appreciate that. thanks very kindly. >> this program is available as a podcast. all "after words" programs can be viewed on the website at

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