In Conversation: Rabbi Shalom Axelrod and Tobias Levkovich

titan wins i'm leaving the country this is not a political statement i just want to travel again um and i i've spent nine months plus now that i've not been on an airplane that that has not occurred since i began 36 years ago so the content you know getting a path back to normal an important one in a critical one so we're starting to see this if you want to call it the light at the end of the tunnel um and i think that's important in the interim we're still going to have some time here that we're going to have to be very careful and you know they have a lovely term now for people who aren't careful it's not new it started back in april of last year when young college kids were going on spring break um and and they called it covidience and i firmly believe that that people who don't take care are indeed that um we can prevent so much just by our own behavior and i think society is struggling with that because we're not used to being closed down encased in and there was a study done by the american psychological association came out about three weeks ago of generation z um and for my friends in canada generation zed but um kids between ages like 18 and 24 and 50 of them are suffering from some symptom of depression so the societal aspects of this are incredibly hard you know heartfelt and um and it is very difficult economically we've done fairly okay despite the initial shock if you want to call it back in march april time frames um and the reason i said it because we have the technology that allows us to do things so people are ordering more stuff online they're working out at home with you know equipment as opposed to going to the gym um there's a lot of take out food uh the three biggest areas for example in the second quarter of this year for consumer spending and it all makes sense when you think about it was one do it yourself at home so people said i can't go out on the weekend to do things i can't take my children to soccer practice to dance to whatever to this to the zoo so they went out they bought paint and they bought shelving and they did the things they wanted to do for a long time but finally got the opportunity to do it the second area was food away from home people got tired of spaghetti and meatballs and they said you know let's order out thai food or let's order it you know let's put in the in the jewish community like uh izzy's smokehouse was doing deliveries for the five towns really exciting moment to get some smoked brisket right and it kind of made your meal a little bit more fun than just being stuck at home and the third area was um in electronics some of that was required work from home your computer wasn't really the one yet at home wasn't really ready for this it was five years old um you needed tablets for your laptops for your kids for you know remote learning or zoom school all that was changing so these are people by big screen tvs because their entertainment now was netflix not going to the movie theater they bought xboxes switches all these kind of gaming devices to again entertain themselves so the economy was actually doing far better than i think a lot of people anticipated because of technology imagine if this happened 30 years ago and we didn't have all these devices and we didn't have all these ways to communicate so it's been far better than i think most of us even perceived it would look like in march or april okay now turning to it a little bit of a different topic i know that you have a broad view of economies and industries so what is your view with regards in terms of israel economies the israeli economy in terms of its position for the future especially with regards to these more recent peace deals which open up tremendous vistas for their economy so it's interesting i i'm very fortunate the city has a joint venture with a company in israel one of the large investment houses and we i get to go to israel every year to go visit our institution with our institutional clients there and again most of the not most all of the work i really do is for our institutional client base so for the people who might want to get a sense of what that is we're talking to portfolio managers to fidelity we're talking portfolio managers and a bunch of major hedge funds at t row price and capital all the places that you might have money um with those funds and we don't do a lot of stuff with in fact currently we do nothing with traditionally what's called high net worth individuals who have brokerage accounts that morgan stanley at you know merrill lynch and things like that um we used to own smith barney we sold that um but we do a lot of stuff with our private bank customers and these are ultra ultra high net worth people so you know i do have conversations with um some of the these 70 millionaire billionaire type people who get special access through the city private bank but um when we talk to the institutions and they go to israel and get this opportunity but they always ask me kind of the same question and you know what do you what do you think about the israeli companies and it's not my area of expertise but if you think about where israel tends to be very strong in terms of the their business areas they tend to be really strong in areas like technology biotechnology um that are actually really important and it is why israel has been you know startup nation but also incredibly successful in their export markets um then we saw that with companies like intel blind mobile live for example uh to enter the sensors business um somebody put up a question about the auto industry and asked me a question why are auto prices higher today and you know obviously it's not because of these cool electronics that you're getting that are telling you don't drift out of your lane and sends a you know a beeping sound or if you're too close to a car it's it's already telling you to break or indeed it's breaking for you because this is what some of this technology can do and israel's been a huge leader in that in that area not not specifically autos but in general software you know anybody who sits there and says they want to do bts and boycott israel well they better have to get they better give up their text messaging services because israel was the first ones to come up with that and develop that and it's it's happening in variety areas so in that sense israel is really well positioned in terms of um its marketplace is it you know does israel have other challenges absolutely um with respect to the auto price question that was asked i will answer it uh use prices have gone up dramatically as people have gotten very fearful of going on public transportation so they bought up used cars to to travel as opposed to getting on train subways etc or buses and that's pushing up the new car market as well because once you take the used cars off the marketplace be able to buy something and they will then see some higher demand and supply prices go up it's not that complicated okay so we're gonna put up a picture now and when you did the interviews live in the studio but with kovid um you're no longer doing the live interviews or probably not as much and i think those interviews some of them are being held out of your home so for by pardo and we have a picture i want to do a share screen for everyone to see as i ask this question they'll appreciate it so this was i don't know this was on cnbc um probably recently i don't know when it was taken uh but it's it's tuvya being interviewed as tobias uh in front of his uh swarm shank and so we can see a whole selection of uh his farm his pictures um and a sh actually two i think it looks like two chauffeurs i'm just wondering if you got any comments you know first of all a is that your central location when you get interviewed and if it is you know for all these people who might have been listening to you all these years being interviewed in the studio not knowing your deep connection certainly to swarm with hebrew letters on them um so have you gotten any response to that yes it's a simple answer but um so that's not really my sperm trunk to be to be fair it's an area in my in my downstairs den whereas a computer a different in a different direction i purposely set it up that way not because of this farm but because during the interview i don't want to be distracted by what's going on on my screens so i purposely turned a totally different direction away from the screens and i don't get you know the the market or an email or something that would be very very problematic in the middle of the interview and just kind of cut out for a second while i'm focusing uh i think i told you rabbi that for a producer on on tv a minute is an eternity so they're always worried about how long everything takes and you get distracted it really messes you up um so i have that in a lot of responses um i would say the funniest one i got and it was through linkedin was somebody tagging that picture a picture of that um there's three guys in the insurance business in either brooklyn somewhere in brooklyn near borough park or williamsburg and one guy who said wow rambam and and graham dodd and ben graham was the father of value investing and another guy kind of responding you know kind of uh you know amazing and the third guy kiddish hashem but you know and that was kind of fun for me because it was you know seniors you guys would pay us down it was really funny um i've gotten emails um from people in silicon valley saying love the judaica behind you and my probably one of my favorites there's one of the cnbc anchors a woman named sarah eisen who's a lovely person a lovely jewish girl from a woman i should say from from cincinnati she actually knew my one of my second cousins there who was no longer living but the conservative rabbi named ceon vockholder and her family knew him so it's kind of funny and she sent me a text just saying wait a minute is that a chauffeur in the background um because she thought it was really funny um so it's it's been it's been you know kind of a cute little aspect to it i figure if i do one as we're getting closer to key slave and hanukkah i might put a menard behind me just for fun very cute that might work um you know i guess in transitioning from your life um you know from the walls of these meadows of natural through their years in wall street any wisdom we're teaching from khazal that you can think help in putting together an investment strategy so i think you and i talked about this i'm going to tell a slightly different story than i did before because it was really really to me it was really funny i didn't remember when i told you but um when i got hired at smith barney and then became solomon smith barney eventually became citigroup and when i got hired the guy who hired me was a guy named d larry smith larry smith was married to a jewish woman could not understand that i'd never had a cheeseburger in my life and you know asked me can't i have a cheeseburger and then ask for forgiveness later um now with the impossible burger we can kind of play around with that but um but but the notion of um you know being no knowing i come from mary stroller my resume said near israel you know rabbinical college um and he said i just want you to know when he gave me the offer he said i just want you to know that we're not here to sell absolute truth we're here to sell stock this isn't you know rabbinical school and years later i ran into him he's no longer my boss i ran into once in san francisco in office uh he was leaving i was coming in to see a different client and and he said hi and everything i said you know larry you're not going to remember this you know conversation but it had a lot of impact on me and you know here i am five six years later you were wrong and he said what do you mean he said that we're not here to sell absolute truth we're here to sell stock and actually absolute truth is what makes stocks go up we always tell investors that the way to make money in markets is exploiting the gap between perception and reality reality always wins you just have to figure out the timing for when that reality will come out so people have great misperceptions about stocks and about investing in general and it's usually because of our experiences but there's no kind of real objectivity to it there tend to be very great subjective views for example saying a stock is cheap or a stock is expensive is a subjective view i can go back and test which valuation metrics have been the most predictive of stock price performance not is it cheap or expensive so i have to be able to park that partiality or that bias that is inherent and again when your name is tobias it's kind of a verb um so you got to be able to remove that and kind of look at data and be very very non-emotional about it that's what we create i mentioned in those videos our panic euphoria model which is our primary sentiment metric it measures not how how i feel not how you feel but how actually investors position themselves and then we can back test and say what are the probabilities of of making money look like versus kind of a random outcome so i'm not a quantitative analyst but i understand the value of that kind of mathematical study um so you know if we think about what's so core is ms right is truth and trying to find that is is pretty is pretty important in life not just in you know sitting through a black gemara and you know stewie's on i was just on with your brother earlier and doing a vodazara and you know trying to figure out what the absolute truth on what is a voters are how are you voters are things like that but okay that's that that's a torah truth but there are life life truths from that that we learn and it to me it's it's i mean i've had a lot of fun doing my job for the most part there are certain days that i don't but um most of it's just a lot of fun because you're constantly trying to pick your work against really really smart people all over wall street okay thank you um in terms of mitzvos and observance any interesting anecdotes from your global travels and interactions so i'll i'll say this most people are very respectful there are a few that aren't um and when you get to places like asia they have literally no idea what kosher says or judaism is for that perspective so there it's kind of funny and what i would say is the the you know i get around it it's not easy you have to be thoughtful and prepare things in advance and if they're going to go to a trey restaurant you got to call them up and find out what you can get at that restaurant so you don't look like a total weirdo um and it it's complicated but doable you just have to be you just have to prepare so i would say one thing that i've always loved is is when you're traveling um and you get to and usually if i'm in europe or in asia i'm there for shabbos right because i have i'll see i'll go to eight countries in 10 days so for those of you things travel is fun it isn't um but when you get to when you get to shabbos and you're sitting in in hong kong or in singapore and you go into the jewish center or the chabad or whatever and you get to meet people and it's just you reconnect you kind of feel like by the way you get excited believe it or not when you get on an airplane to get a kosher meal okay most of us who've had experience with kosher meals and airplanes probably don't think it's the greatest thing on earth um but when you're not eating it's like i don't care this is a piece of chicken it's rubber i don't care it's kosher i can eat it i'm excited but when you're away for shabbos and you reconnect with like your yiddish guy in a certain respect yes you're putting on fill-in in the morning and thousand dominating but it's very different when you're with the community and you feel like your life is re you know recharged in a certain respect because they're i define my life as sometimes you know divided being there's tobias and there's trivia they're you know they're different time slots for for both of those lives and it's weird in that respect for most people to hear that but that's how you have to operate um i'll tell you my favorite one of my favorite stories okay and then and and that was sitting at a when i before i did the strategy work um they spent 15 years covering industrial companies and this was really interesting for me a nice jewish boy from montreal went this year's whole life and all of a sudden you're going to farm country to look at farm equipment you're going to mining areas i went to one crazy mining area off off literally off the coast of england where you went down an elevator two miles and went out three miles underwater to where they're doing underground mining talk about claustrophobia but um you're seeing all this stuff that you've never seen before in your life hanging out with i mean really interesting people salt of the earth but totally unconnected to anything you've ever experienced so i'm at a caterpillar meeting at their peruvian ground in peoria illinois and they're showing us all their new equipment all their new construction equipment mining equipment um it's pretty fascinating you get to drive some of those things by the way if you've ever really wanted road rage a 60 ton mining machine where you have to climb up um like 12 feet to get into the cab to drive it um it is like the most amazing experience around but um the we're in the proving ground they have and they break for lunch and they have all these fire pits going with steaks and burgers and hot dogs and you know and pork ribs and whatever going on and they're very nice the investor relations people got me a sandwich from like delta airlines it's kind of you know little teeny thing in a cellophane you know uh bag that you rip open and you're thrilled that you have your three slices of baloney and you spread on the mustard and you're you're like excited that you can eat something right and all of a sudden glenn barton who's the ceo of caterpillar at the time walks by and he says looks at me he goes he's tobias what are you eating i said that's a little sandwich he says why don't you go get yourself some steak or some ribs or something like good like that looks kind of really crummy i said well glenn i kosher and you guys are you know you're you're you're you're people really nice and got me the sandwich and he says wait a minute you eat kosher you're jewish like for i think most people here left sounds like a jewish name but if you're not in that world left sounds like a ukrainian slavic name they have really no connection to the way we would think about it and he says you're jewish and he looks over at the other guy sitting next to me we're on these picnic tables he says chuck move over one of my competitors then in charles harrison chuck harris says what he says he talked to tobias about judaism and i go like and he looks at me he says but glenn i'm jewish he says yeah but you're not eating kosher move over and and chuck moves over a little insulted and um and glenn sits down he's just that's amazing he says you know i grew up in peoria and i lived in a two-story home we were upstairs and downstairs were the owners of the home and it was mr katz and mr katz was a pharmacist in peoria and they were kosher so i would like i every friday night i come to their home and i make the turn on the legs and then come down later and turn the lights off he i was their shabbos toy he knew the term and everything was just really funny story and he said to me he says like i still remember the chicken soup i still remember the chillent i still remember the cobalt and i said glenn in sabbath you want you're welcome to come to my house and have that as well he never took me up on the offer but he was so excited about it so that was probably one of my most positive experiences again i've had some bad ones but um i don't i don't want to necessarily share those um well i'm going to just show a very brief clip i'm going to take all of us back some of us don't want to remember this but in order to appreciate the question we're going to go back to september of 08. uh rabbi pardo is going to show a clip here just a minute or so of it just to get into the moment apple's up more than six percent right now google about three percent but dell intel research motion and microsoft are all to the upside look how strong did not disappoint 400 points higher yes indeed the markets wore higher last 30 minutes of trading as volatility once again rules today most of the techs this morning if not all of them have just exploded down 1.7 percent here loss of 37 points or so apple shares are just getting hammered this morning we're down by between three and four and a half percent generally across these markets let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate we read everywhere essentially down by four or five percent we're down over 16 percent dow at the same time has fallen about 18 the stock market is now down 21 because we're now down 43 what in the world is happening on wall street two year no yields went from 190 to 166 in the blink of an eye the nasdaq everything and more has been completely wiped out it was the worst day on wall street since the crash of 1987. from the financial capital of the world nobody bell is going to ring in five seconds and to be honest with you we wish it wouldn't traders here working the phones say a lot of their customers are freaked out waiting to see how low the dow will go they're focused on the dow not so focused on opaque yes okay did cut production by 1.5 million barrels per day really you're seeing just broad-based declines across all of the major technology sectors apple's under pressure uh yahoo down eight and a half percent cisco six and a half percent research so i know for many of us that's a time period that we uh certainly don't remember and some of us are still climbing out um but i wanna a reason i play that is because the next question is tuvya you're in the middle of that you're driving home from work it's heir of rosh hashanah you know you're heading into two days what's in your mind and and what's in your mind over the two days of rosh hashanah so i i i i'm going to put it in in the context of i left early it was because it was i knew i had to write something up for our investor base as i'm driving home i'm talking to our traders or sales people bunch of clients some of my my colleagues in in the strategy area i'm talking people in europe as well at that time and it was a very challenging drive home in terms of trying to think of how to compartmentalize this and how to explain it and i got home and i spent the next three hours on my laptop you know working like crazy um got my note of my thoughts and what we thought the next few days might bring as well because i knew i was going to be out of pocket and i got that information to my team and they took care of it you know thereafter in literally 15 minutes before when i finally finished and got it done and i jumped in the shower because of sort of something i've got two days um i think everybody in chile was happy that i took a shower first and um you know and then you sat there saying you know going into um davening and and kind of thinking about my my sealants were maybe a little bit different than many others um in the sense that i was yes doing all the stuff that we normally do but i was also sitting there saying you know ramon shalom you know please no depression we can't handle that americans are for lack of better than we're just too soft we don't know what hard times are and in the sense that there are people who suffer terribly in this country as a nation we don't really know how bad things could be and this market collapse is it you know something foreboding about the future and that that was going through my mind most of the most of the dominions please please no depression okay now so there is a question that actually segues into the next area that i wanted to focus on there was a question how has your father a survivor in his unique story influence your life and success so we actually have a clip that we're going to play of a trailer because your father's story was so compelling that they recently had a documentary put together that he you know was in maybe you could just give a little intro then we'll answer that question after you know to set up uh you know this documentary that your father was featured in and i might add your father your father it would have been beautiful to have the two of you on at the same time but he lives in arizona and we would not want to do that to uh someone in the middle of nowhere look he's night and can i know he's 94 years old he might be up at four in the morning because older people do get up early in the morning but he's actually a pretty good sleeper thank god um with respect to so my father obviously no i should say obviously a lot of people know um survived the holocaust he was in many work camps in a weird way fortunately in slave labor camps as opposed to extermination camps his family was unfortunately not so lucky as most of his family was murdered in belzeck very very quickly after they were rounded up um but he survived came out of it did some really fast you know incredible stories of survival um uh was was from from a little town near krakow but was in krakow when the war started and um new let's say the the plasho uh work camp that a lot of people are familiar with from schindler's list um and after the war did some really phenomenal things in terms of trying to hunt down nazis and also try to save jewish children who have been put into um you know non-jewish families to try to certainly to help them survive through and then after the war try to reconnect them if there was any family or at the very least get them back to to yiddish um into jewish environments um so in many respects he's he's a great hero um and obviously has a lot of influence in my life in a variety of ways not just being my father but in terms of some of the stories that occurred and we can save those for after um i would say that in general somebody said um you know hey you know how has he contributed to my success i mean i'm gonna say two things one people are successful in a variety of ways um and how you determine success is is yes for some people can be financial for some people it's how good a parent you were um how did you influence other people around you what kind of goal you are so i i you know and that's one of the things my father taught us a lot as children about being being we can talk about some of the stories after the clip if you like but um he's uh for a five foot two little guy he's he's really a giant okay so maybe we'll just show the clip and then we'll get your answer on how he has influenced your life oscar schindler said we need your help because he knew that i was looking for nazis i was a witness of the most notarious murderers on earth that destroyed my whole life eliminated my whole family more than 150 members killed for nothing totally erased i was left the only one in the world to bring them to justice the nazis which i was in their camps pleasure to auschwitz mauthausen a camp called milk maybency my life was hanging on a thread working day and night to catch nazis and i could do those things it's unbelievable that was my destiny [Music] we have to do something for your people [Music] so i i guess in it you know in a very powerful question first of all if you could just fill in you know in terms of you know he mentions schindler and helping and assisting schindler in terms of hunting down nazis maybe if you could just elaborate on that part of his life and uh and as we and then as to answer the question in terms of you know that that influence that he has had on your life so let me let me put one context on this is i i've been pushing my father for many years to write a book about his experiences saying that you know he lived 120 but he's not a young man and that you know the survivors are we're losing them year after year after year and we won't have the eyewitnesses per se so put your puts it down more so after lots of pressure he's only got a ghostwriter to help him do that um and after a few revisions that book finally came out called from uh uh from you know uh so from the actual student to lachaim um and and you know to have that positive attitude on life is pretty impressive for people who went through that so i would say that that was probably one that led to the movie j roots which has a relationship with the young israel as well um found out about the story investigated it um and then decided to create this documentary it was released in late last year in a premiere in london my brother my sister um and i and my you know my son joined me um and we were able to be there with my father for that premiere we were going to do that in the states as well unfortunately covet hit um and over tisha but i think the number of people were able to to see it live streaming um right now i'm not sure if you can see in fact you can't i do have a copy but i can't legally let anybody see that copy i don't own the rights to it um with regards to his influence so again this kind of positive attitude towards life in other words you have to live life you can't you can't live in a world that's that's full of misery um and to have that positive attitude is something that makes us all you know able to overcome whatever hurdles we face number two i would say um i mentioned before being gone so let me let me give you an example so my father at one point um became kind of a helper for one of the commandants in the camp and he he weird story where he like he was called forward and he like gave a fake salute clicked his wooden boot and shoes together and basically said you know whatever in my phosphates are about nine languages and um he spoke german to me he raised his rank let's say it was a major he called him general um and he said you know here we'll burst your whatever it was you know um you know i could i could shine your boots till till you know that you'll see the you know the sun shining off of the moon shining off something like that and he the guy laughed a little bit at this little you know at that point teenager jew you know initiated saying this and he said you know what tells the adjective tax them have them come and shine my boots and so every day he would go up this hill to where the kumandan's house was and go and shine his boots and then they said also you know what feed the the the rabbits so he had a little like collection of animals and he would go in there and he said he my father would say he fed the first rabbit himself so he took potatoes or carrots whatever it was there and he was able to eat something which he wasn't getting obviously um enough of in terms of what they were feeding their prisoners um so what he would do is he would smuggle food back with him to share with his um barracks mates and you know the other his the other jews who were you know in in being tormented by the nazis and and he would do this every every day basically at the risk of his own life but was kind of helping others so it was you know something he taught his children that that you have that a crisis you have that responsibility um and again for us we're not risking our lives necessarily to do that so um pretty kind of powerful um mets and oscar schindler so um he knew because he was from krakow everybody who oscar schindler was and what he was doing to help jews and um at one point my father was beaten by ammangeth he come undone for those who saw the movie the crazy guy shooting people from the balcony um and he was beaten almost to the you know to the to death and he's again he doesn't remember this he was unconscious um and apparently the capo said the swindler pulled i've not sure uh gath pulled out his gun to shoot him they're lying there and and the couple said don't worry he's dead anyway don't waste the bullet and then he was saying the hospital he came to a couple weeks later and and he was told the story by the kappa when he showed up you know out of the whatever hospital they had he came back to the barracks the guy was oh you're still alive wow you know he explained and he told him what happened um and amanda was definitely a target for my father to go after the war and you know to bring justice not revenge justice revenge for him was more about raising a family that kept her amidst us that was much important than that to him that's the ultimate revenge on his life is he tried to wipe us out we're not wiped out we're here and my parent my father led south america after the war met my mother there um and she she got out well before the war thankfully um and um the my brother and my sister were both born in bogota colombia and when my brother got to five or six years old they said like there's no jewish schools here and this was a very important commitment to him in terms of again raising a family torah mitzvos and uh decided to leave um and they came to america but that america was canada and they still i remember during when we were sitting shiva for my mother my father was telling the story to somebody and i asked my father when you did that pilot trip to new york because that was the first place he thought of he was in the diamond business it made sense and um he looked around said this is too busy crazy for my mother she's used to more you know relaxed lifestyle in south america um and somebody said you should go check out montreal and he went to montreal he's very impressed with the community and with the uh it's not too far from new york because you have to go in for business and i asked my father after they said we're going to montreal i said when did you do with like when did you make this visit like what what what date and he said i made you and i said yeah i don't think you would have made the same decision in december they were coming from a very tropical place to go to what was probably a very fierce first winter um and for my mother she left her entire family in south america so i i said this when i'm sitting shiva for i'll say again it was like for her she she gave up everything um for kids to have jewish educations and uh so i would just say obviously it's such a compelling story in terms of the life that he that he lived and uh as you mentioned and still know and lives lives and still lives um and we didn't even get to talking about him finding you know maybe another time in terms of finding the uh the jewish children who were hidden um i was just wondering you know in what way do you see um let's say either your role well the role in general of people who um you know interacting with individuals who are the best and brightest in today's investment world and the jewish philanthropic and educational you know how how how should they see their role in doing good in this world look i i think there again the different ways of doing it i can only impact what i can impact i deal with a lot of um these really incredible powerfully healthy hedge fund managers who are incredibly philanthropic um i think wall street gets a really bum rap a lot of the time um it's it's every industry has their bad their bad apples um and the amount of generosity and and spirit of that uh is remarkable amongst these people i i i have rarely asked anybody i did once this was during um uh what was it called i forget the operation now um something edge when when when the israeli troops were going into effective edge sorry protective edge protective edge so when the troops are going in my nephew noah went in as as a soldier into when he made all the uh as if it was a khayal and he went into uh into gaza in some of the really horrible battles and um you know and i got an email saying we don't have the right kind of protective vests so i sent that an email they need it for their battalion these protected vests these early armies protect them with certain things but they're older vintage they're lighter better vests they could buy but the army doesn't provide it it's the only time i've ever asked people on wall street to to for some money for this purpose um i sent an email to about 25 people mostly not from and um i raised in 15 minutes the money to um not outfit his battalion but five battalions so and that was the one time but i also know so many of these guys who set up educational uh funds um you know scholarships everywhere it's it's really remarkable i don't think people really appreciate how some of these people have have given like crazy um and and they do it nationally as well as internationally but i mean they do it for the nation as well as for the jewish people um so i'll give you one example because of public information david rubenstein who runs uh carlisle um gave a hundred million dollars to the smithsonian institute and re-did he put up all the money to rebuild after the uh washington monument was cracked he put up all the money to fix the washington monument so that it's there for the for americans so it's not just what they do for the jewish community they do a lot for the general community and they get trashed regularly in the media and it's really upsetting to me um i i think the only thing we can do is is really making kids don't be the feel hashem when i see the scandals that encompass members of the jewish community i i will tell you that i'm personally disgusted there are about 25 30 people that i'm regularly in contact with a little of guys on wall street um we all know who the bad guys are and when we find out that they get caught it's like well big surprise um it isn't a surprise we're very aware of it um so it's sad that it occurs but that's the only thing you can do is just make sure that you're not the one and the problem is when those scandals occur you're the rabbi not i don't know smith but i'm saying you're the rabbi for your colleague how could that happen how could it do that and you get to some interesting theological discussion there's one portfolio manager whenever we have a meeting we set it up for two hours because he's a devout christian and the first hour is just not discussing theology he said i was reading genesis last week and you know i was i had like where i was reading the exodus like how could the jewish people the children of israel have the golden calf like he doesn't get it like after all the miracles and we obviously have the same and i have to explain to him the some of you know some of them a fortune talking about is an intermediary it wasn't really they believe this half was what saved them um but they still need that connection between themselves and god not the intermediary but it's a it's a weird kind of conversation to have especially when you're dealing with somebody who isn't jewish and doesn't have the same background but but it's kind but it's fun i actually enjoy this we're really good friends um you know and and we're you know we have a great relationship and you get to talk about things that are not typical with some people most of it most of its very business life once in a while it gets a little fun and uh particularly if you're on a bar without having a few drinks then it really gets interesting do you have uh as we as we wind down do you have a final message uh for everyone listening so somebody asked me and show this question last night after chai's um shear um you know what do i think about the markets where it's gonna say look i'm not gonna answer that question in javascript um but it it's more around what's your risk tolerance we actually put out something over the weekend talking about our outlook for 2021 we do think the market can go higher not dramatically but can um the thing that that um that i would say is you have to figure out your own risk tolerance when it comes to investing what allows you to sleep at night and what doesn't um and some people are more risk averse and some people are more risk tolerant and that's a very personal issue that's not something i can advise anybody to do um i would say that you probably should have some of your portfolio in stocks because over time that's rewarded investors um i think people tend to be so concerned about ever losing money that they hurt themselves that they're too risk-averse now again this is a very personal thing so i'm not encouraging anybody to do something that doesn't let them sleep at night um but i think some people are so concerned and they really hurt their long-term um you know goals by doing so but it's very personal the other thing i would say is be really careful when people tell you about you know here's a great investment you're going to double your money triple your money this is great like you know um i i've heard those pitches and i leave them on the sidelines do i do stupid investments yeah i do but i also know how much i can risk on those investments before i make them and you know a few of them work out and some of them really don't work out and this only told me a long time ago that there are certain investments you may kiss over and there's certain investments you may kind of show um and you have to actually have that mindset of it's not always going to work out because and realize you only risk what you can afford to really risk you don't risk things that you can't afford to risk and again people get trapped in the idea of i'm gonna make so much money i'm gonna make so much money and and that's unfortunately how they get suckered in to less than scrupulous investments or investors who are putting on money i invested in something that literally went to zero because of covet um something happened the markets blew up and this had to do with trading carbon credits in california and it literally went to nothing in three days now i knew that there was always that risk so i'm not really angry at the person who presented the id to me it was something i was putting in my portfolio as a diversification idea it wasn't a ton of money um i still don't like losing money i don't think anybody does um but it's i'm not going to lose sleep and i'm not going to lose my my you know my health over that because i was aware there was risk um and i think that's the best advice i gave anybody for young people who want to go into finance is not as much fun as it used to be it's a much more challenging industry than it was 30 years ago when i went into it um it doesn't mean that people can't do well uh but recognize when you hear about these this guy who made 100 million or a billion dollars as a hedge fund they're probably thirty thousand forty thousand other people who failed so there's you know this you get to see that winning it's you know think about how many pitchers make it to the major leagues and don't even succeed there and think about how many people don't there was a great commercial um for autism um a number you know for not for it but for raising money to fight autism and it taught and it showed on it you know what the probabilities were to be a baseball player a ballerina you know one out of ten thousand one of the fifteenth all these kind of things and then it talked about what what's the number to for autism was like one out of four so people have a higher probability of of getting unfortunately that kind of outcome than being that really successful hedge fund manager so i think people have to set their sights appropriately and not just you know jump too far and and it doesn't mean you shouldn't follow your passions and i that that's probably the most important thing i would tell you follow things you really love i saw one of the questions how do i get into investments pure luck um and the there's another lovely story like telling i i worked for a guy um leonard wilson who i have a lot of cars at the top to he's now is his 80s um just a really phenomenal teacher mentor and flynn lynn was a conservative jew um and trust me if you ever met len he had a really jewish nose um i don't think he's on so i'm not gonna get in trouble for saying that but um and the first business trip i ever took was to des moines iowa okay and i went to no sorry cedar rapids iowa even worse than des moines and i'm walking to the cedar rapids country club with the chief executive officer of the company my boss glenn is walking with the chief financial officer about 30 40 feet ahead of us and he said how long have you worked for lynn i said six months and he said how are you finding it and i said i'm loving it and he goes with me and i can't believe they pay me to do this this is so much fun and and i said but i don't want to say that too loud because i really do want a bonus and i don't want lent to hear that um so i again i've been fortunate i found something i got really passionate about but i kind of looked into it it wasn't the original plan if you want to think about that um i was i was thinking um lawyer initially but then i realized law school was three years business school was two years and i really don't want to spend an extra year in school i wasn't one of those most studious types let's put it that way i think a lot of people in mary's role probably back me up on that um there was one other question i saw popped up which i'm going to answer um brian the canadians will win the stanley cup um they're they're a much better team after the off-season trades so um we're we're very encouraged uh but we can talk offline on that that's another passion i got growing up in canada was hockey i really don't get baseball sorry uh game of strategy but yeah whatever uh message time we could do a lot better with uh our understanding and appreciation of hockey and uh and uh international relations god willing uh this time of year in the meantime though i wanted to thank you two of you uh tobias to the rest of the world but silvia to us um uh taught a lot a lot about risk but and risk assessment but also about uh kirish hashem being kiddish hashem and living a life that we can all hope to emulate that uh i'm i'm sure is uh that's right you want him late not proud of me i didn't tell you anything the bad stories the the bad story as well well we'll we'll focus on the good ones aspire to those um and uh i also want to thank rabbi axelrod who uh really led us uh through this journey this really was a a conversation in the fullest sense um all over the place a lot to unpack that as this hashem want to thank uh rav shai shakhtar and rabbi arizats for organizing mr henry orlinski as the chair of torah initiatives for uh spearheading the concept in the first place please join us uh next mostly shabbos we're going to be with rabbi hane and ben brothman uh the this recording is going to be up on ou torah you'll be able to find the archived version here and anyone who wants to sign on next week the exact same time if you found the zoom link a little uh difficult uh it's made it ou.org conversations uh is the easiest way to pop into this so uh tell your friends tell your frenemies and mats hashem have a have an incredible week full of opportunities for kiddush hashem and we'll see you here next week all right good night everybody good thank you again tokyo what's up