The Michael Barry show. I'm a friend named Tim Belton. I haven't seen him in years, but he's still a dear friend.

And Tim is a true patriot. He is a conservative conservative.

He comes from a strain of conservatives. It's like a billbuckly conservative.

It's a opus day, very old line, very traditional conservative.

God and man at Yale kind of stuff.

And when I was just figuring out the tenets of conservatism, Tim's about my age, maybe a little bit older.

Tim had already read every book that needed to be read in order to get a basic grounding in conservative thought.

And was attending conferences and these sorts of things. But what made Tim interesting to me was that Tim was,

to my knowledge, I haven't seen him in years, a turnaround guy.

He would know not a hollow back. It's a whole different thing remote. It's not a hollow back. It's not the male version of a hollow back.

So Tim had gone to Harvard to get his MBA and he had been put by some private equity guys.

These private equity guys will go in and buy a company that maybe has a salvageable brand but is losing money where there's a discount.

And they'll put their guy in and they turn it around. It's basically a flip like you do a home.

Go in, slap some paint on the walls, put new doors, cut the grass and sell it. So that's what he did.

And so I, like with everybody else, I would ask him about it. And he would say, I'd say it did hard. You have to go in and fire everybody.

And he said, well, yes, it is.

We've all seen, you know, the greed is good movie, which was supposed to make you hate private equity and hate capitalism.

But it made a bunch of people, a bunch of young people want to be Gordon Gecko. The MBA programs across the country were overwhelmed with applications because people wanted to be deal guys now.

Well, what ends up happening sometimes is that the reason a company is failing is because the people at the company making the decisions are failures.

And we don't, we don't like that. Everybody gets a trophy.

People who are not particularly good at what they do typically don't agree with you when you explain that to them.

So if we're going to have a track meet and our company is going to compete against all the others and we're going to make our money based on whether we get the gold silver bronze or no money if you don't place.

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