And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. And, thanks again, and have a Nice Day. Hi, good morning. We're very appreciative of you having us here today. And, my name is Susan Marshall. I'm Senior Vice President and Director of Client Relations for Barings. I've been the Relationship Director on your portfolio since it started with us in April of 2007. I know that Matt talked a little bit about team change, but David did move up from the David Managed World Equity Portfolios prior to becoming Head of the IFA Department that includes the World Portfolios as well. So, he's got some tenure there with us, and he has been the Senior Portfolio Manager, Lead Portfolio Manager on your portfolio since the end of April of 2007 when Chris Lee's left. 2008. 2008, excuse me. And so, you know, we understand that there's been a hiccup in our performance lately. It's something that we went through about 14 years ago. We corrected it and moved on, and I have every bit of confidence that Barings will be able to do that again. And, if you want, I can just give a brief overview on the organization. From senior management perspective, there have been no changes to the team. On the investment team, the team that we have introduced you to over the last couple of years is the same team that's in place. The analyst structure and particularly the strategic policy group, which does the top-down portion of the scoring for the countries and sectors that's used by David's team in making the portfolio determinations. Assets under management are approximately $52 billion. When you hired us, they were $38. So we've grown our firm substantially, and we've had some turnover this year, excuse me, last year in this particular strategy. Interestingly, the bulk of that was some smaller corporate funds who did not have the staff on hand to manage in-house, and so they indexed their entire U.S. equity, entire international equity portfolios. Three of those were my clients. I was very sad to see them go, but understood that they just didn't have the manpower to do it in-house. So with that, if there are no further questions, any questions? Susan, any client turnover over a year to date as a result of performance or last year? Yes, last year there's been client turnover for performance. It's been primarily the smaller accounts. The larger accounts, most of our portfolios are large public funds, and they feel that the strategy fits very much into their asset allocation approach. They also find the strategy to be very interesting from the top-down, bottom-up combination. That's very unique to Bearings, and so what I hear from them when I go out and meet with them is that they really like it. I've had a couple of consultants besides Callan tell me that the strategy, again, is a very interesting strategy. And people feel very positive about what we do because we do have a very, very strong senior management team that does the strategic policy scoring of countries and sectors. They've got 30-plus years of experience, and so they've seen many different markets. The markets today, I was just talking to David this morning, are so difficult. One day you read one thing on one country, the next day it's completely flipped, and so there's just a lot going on there. Excuse me, Susan, I have a question. If David's going to address it, that's fine. But I'm just curious, if the top-down strategy hasn't changed and the personnel pushing that down haven't changed, then what has changed that would account for the underperformance? Well, David will talk about the blending of the top-down, bottom-up and address that question. Okay, definitely. Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for seeing us. It's good to be here again. Susan's been quite kind, and I guess we can be standing next to her. I'll start with a statement of the obvious, which is we've not performed well over roughly the last year and a half. We've struggled. But what I want to do today is really threefold. First is to give you a bit of background about what it is we do. You don't see us on a regular basis. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on it, but I want to give you just a brief overview of what it is we do, how we do things, and why we think we ought to do things that way. The second thing I want to do is talk about exactly your question. I wrote it down here as what happened, what happened. So I want to talk about what happened. We've done a lot of soul-searching, a lot of looking at what we do and why did it work in the past and what's not working now. And then the third thing is really what are we doing about it. What are we doing about it? So those are the three things I want to cover. And, you know, if you've got questions, fire away. I'm here to answer any of the questions you might have. So I'd like to start maybe just with an overview. If you go to the second tab, actually, yeah, the second tab is to do with process. To the point that Susan made, the team for the last four or five years has been quite stable. I joined Bearings in 2000. I started life as an analyst working on the European team and gradually moved to take on the global equity portfolios, and I've been running these portfolios since April of 2008. There's a team of four of us. The most recent joiner is Tom Mann, who I think you've met before as well. Tom joined us three years ago. So I guess my point is just in terms of the team, it's been fairly stable. And despite the difficult performance, you know, we remain quite motivated and keen to turn things around. Turning to page 8, and these are just some of the things to give you a flavor for what it is we do. The key in terms of what we do, our philosophy is called growth at a reasonable price, and it means that the portfolios we're building do tend to have a growth bias. So across the cycle, I'm not saying every stock in the portfolio is going to be a growth stock. Where we're looking at earnings growth, you'll find some ideas that maybe are to do with valuation, but in aggregate at the portfolio level, we're building growth portfolios. What we're asking our analysts to do is to look for unrecognized growth, either growth in earnings that the market is missing, so we're finding companies that are able to grow their earnings better than what the consensus of the market thinks, or in other cases where the market recognizes the earnings growth, but it's putting the wrong value on it, and we're going, that's a good growth stock, but that valuation is too cheap. That's a stock we want to keep in the portfolio. I want to come back to that because there's, you know, we'll talk a little bit about the kind of environment we've been in, and I think I'll show you a few things that might point to not the entire reason, but one of the reasons why growth has struggled a little bit. The final thing I'd say to our philosophy is that our approach is to take a broad approach, both in terms of cap spectrum, so we go down the cap spectrum. If we can find some good smaller ideas, we'll look at them. And in terms of sectors, there aren't, you'll find some growth managers that are every year overweight the same sectors. It might be tech, you know, they're always overweight tech, but because we're looking for unrecognized growth, we feel we can find that in just about any sector. Where a sector was maybe value-destroying, there's a lot of competition, there wasn't a lot of profitability, if something changes, and that goes from, you know, value-destroying to value-creating where the companies become profitable, that could be a good source of growth, is what might traditionally be a more value-like sector. Page 9, and I'll come on to this in a bit more detail, but the point I want to make is just to the bubbles on the left. We, this is where we try and distinguish ourselves from our peers, our competitors. We have analysts that look at bottom-up stock ideas, and that's that fundamental stock research bubble. But we also have a group called the strategic policy group that looks at sectors and countries and tries to give us an idea of where in the world, where in the world, what sectors in the world, what countries in the world are we more likely to find some good ideas. And what we're doing as the portfolio managers is trying to pull those three strands together. Things work best for us when we find good bottom-up ideas that also are in those parts of the world that our top-down team think look quite interesting. So very much what we've been trying to do at the portfolio level is pull those together. If we, like Japan and our Japanese team, have got some really good bottom-up ideas, those are the kinds of ideas we want to make sure get into the portfolio. I don't want to talk too much about the bottom-up, but I think page 10 is one thing I want to just leave you with. You might look at the portfolio and you see that in many quarters stock selection hasn't been great. And yet when we look in aggregate at our analysts' performance, and that chart on the left is showing how our analysts are performing, and we score stocks from one to five. One means our analyst thinks it's going to outperform and they have high conviction it's going to do it. And if it's scored a five, they think it's going to underperform with high conviction. And by and large, our analysts' stock scores have been working. So it's wrong to just blanket say our analysts are getting it wrong. And so when I come into what happened, I'll show you a little bit about what I think is going on and why some of our top-down views have not really meshed with this market. But just to be clear, our analysts continue to do a good job of identifying stocks that are outperforming their markets. We maybe haven't done as good a job of getting the stocks that are outperforming the overall market into the portfolio. And there's a little bit of a country allocation thing that we've not been getting right at the top-down level in terms of building the portfolios. But I just want to point out that, you know, a team of 40-plus analysts continue to do a pretty good job of identifying the stocks that are working. Yeah. Just a quick question. Susan made a comment earlier where you went through a similar performance period 14 years ago. What you're showing us here is just 10 years of performance. Correct. My understanding of the history of the product is that there were some pretty major changes that were made to the product. Yes. Roughly 12 to 10 years ago. Well, in fact, it really starts here. I don't want to make it too long a story, but we used to do global and international portfolios slightly. The approach, I think, in the industry was called the Lego approach. We used to have small regional portfolios that were bolted together. And at the time, in May of 2004, was when we made the change to actually building holistic. I guess my point is that for this particular approach that you're using to build a portfolio, this period of underperformance that we're going through, somewhat unprecedented. Correct. Yeah. So that's the bottom-up. And, you know, the way these bottom-up ideas come to us is really channeled through page 12, which is our best ideas list. So we have individual analysts, but we also have sector heads, senior analysts who are in charge of maybe the tech sector, the telecom sector, the energy sector. And what they're doing is putting forward to us what they think are their best ideas in those global sectors. And for us and building our portfolios, we describe the core of our portfolio as being built from this list. So, you know, the first thing that happens when a stock leaves our portfolio, you know, because it's hit a sell price target or it's been downgraded, is we go looking to this list. Is there a stock on this list we don't own that we want to get into the portfolio? So that's very much how those bottom-up ideas come through. But you were comparing us to our peers. At this point, that's normally where our peers, their process would stop it. They talk about bottom-up and best ideas and building portfolios. One of the things that's philosophically different about us is we think the top-down. We think the top-down matters. And page 13 is, I guess, the philosophical starting point of the top-down for us. And that philosophical starting point is that we think the top-down matters to different degrees in different parts of the world. And what you're looking at here, what these charts are showing, and this is some work that Morgan Stanley did for us, is showing to what extent sectors drive a share price performance and to what extent a country drives share price performance. So, for instance, let's say you've got a Japanese telecom stock, telecommunications company in Japan. What we look at is what's more important. Is it the fact that this is a Japanese stock or that it's a telecommunications stock? And what Morgan Stanley had done for us is show how this varies in different parts of the world. So, in emerging markets, you find that the country really dominates. So, just by way of example, if you have an Indonesian bank, the fact that it's a bank and global banks might be going up doesn't really drive an Indonesian bank. What matters for an Indonesian bank is what's Indonesia doing. That's intuitive. The reason it's intuitive is because that Indonesian bank probably only operates in its home market, whereas a company like a Citigroup or a Morgan Stanley operates globally. So, you can see why emerging market companies tend to be more regional. But by contrast, take a look at Europe, and you see that Europe back in 1998 was very much driven by countries, but the adoption of a common currency and more integration in Europe has meant that today what really drives share prices in Europe is almost as much country as it is sector. Japan is the one thing on this chart that to us looks a little bit of an anomaly. And we say that because Japanese companies are very globally integrated. Toyota, Honda, Sony, these are global companies. And yet when you look at how their shares behave, they tend to behave very much almost like an emerging market. They tend to go with how Japan is going rather than with how the world is going. So, it's a philosophical starting point, but we just recognize that, yes, we think top-down is important, but it's important to different degrees in different parts of the world. Now, that team of ours, that strategic policy group meets once a month, and that meeting actually is happening later today. And that meeting is to review the current scores, the current top-down scores of how we see countries and sectors around the world. And on page 15, you'll see where we currently stand on these scores. So, if we start on the right-hand table looking at sectors, again, we use that one-to-five scoring system. And the key here is that if it's a one or a two, then we've got some high conviction that that should outperform. If it's a four or five, we've got some high conviction it should underperform. And you can see that what we're favoring currently from the top-down are things like industrials, technology, the materials sector, and financials. And what we don't like are things like utilities and consumer staples, and energy to a certain extent. So, that's very much driving how we build our portfolios. If you look at it by region, what you see here is that currently, if we ignore the U.S. as a portfolio that can't hold the U.S., if we look at the international regions, you'll see that there's only one region currently that we really like, and that's Japan. And just keep that in mind because when I talk about what's happened, what's working, what's not working, keep that in mind because there's some strong reasons why we like Japan, but Japan's been a little bit of a struggle for us. The key about our strategic policy group is, as Susan mentioned, it's quite a senior team. Sorry to cause you to flip around here, but if you went to page six in the pack, it's between tab one and two. You can see the team there, and I've been heading this team since April of 2008, so that feels like a long time, but it's nowhere near as long as our top-down strategic policy group has been together. Hayes Miller has been with Baring since the early 80s, Susan, mid-80s? Yeah, late 70s. Late 70s. So, Hayes Miller's been with us for a long time. Percival Stanion has chaired this team for over 10 years. The numbers that you see there are the years of experience. So, it's a very senior team that's looking at what our views are on the top-down. And what's more important is that it's not an academic exercise where we're making these calls that we think Japan is likely to outperform. The strategic policy group also runs our top-down multi-asset money, and so they're backing those calls with real and substantial money from their portfolios. So, it gives us confidence that these are not just, you know, it's not an academic exercise, and I think this is going to outperform, and let's see what happens. It's actually backing it with real money, so there's some real conviction behind these ideas. So, we have to take it seriously when, you know, if they're saying they think Japan's going to outperform, that's a serious call for us because it's being backed with serious money. So, we'll look at that in just a moment. Okay, so that's how we build these portfolios, top-down and bottom-up. So, I think the good stuff is what happened, what happened and what are we doing about it. So, if I look at the last six quarters, the last five quarters in this quarter to date, without a doubt, we have a growth bias. It hasn't been a particularly strong market for growth. And if I get you to turn, just as a starting point, page 28, this is a key chart in our outlook. We talked about this in our quarterly report to you. Last year was unusual for development. What you're looking at here is international markets. It's basically the developed world excluding the United States. So, this would be, you know, Canada, Europe, UK, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia. And what you're looking at here, the green line is how that market performed last year. And the red line is what happened with earnings expectations for that market. What did analysts do with their earnings last year? And the key here is that developed markets did extremely well last year. They rose 22%. And it wasn't on the back of companies delivering strong earnings. In aggregate, company earnings last year were marked up about 3.5%. And so, you know, we've had a strong rally, but we haven't had the data to back it up. And if I think about what we've been saying at the strategic policy group level and from the top down, is we felt since 2009 that it would be a challenging growth environment. Countries are highly indebted. It means economic growth is likely to be weak. And weak economic growth is likely to translate into weak earnings growth. And that's largely been right. The key last year is investors were not interested in whether companies were able to grow their earnings or not. There was an expectation that things were going to get better, and these stocks got re-rated. And when I think about what we're asking our analysts to do, we said that we ask our analysts to look for unrecognized growth. And even from a top down point, if you were trying to find those parts of the world where earnings growth is likely to be strong, the one market that bucked this trend last year was Japan. Japan had very strong earnings growth, partly on the back of a weak yen, but Japan was a very strong market. And Japan was actually, since I guess it's going on almost nine months now, Japan has been a laggard. So our most favored region of the world where we are seeing earnings growth is an area that we're not seeing the company share prices perform. And in areas where we've struggled to see earnings growth, like Europe, for instance, company share prices have actually performed. So part of it is there's a little bit right now of this value growth thing. But the thing I would stress, and what we believe, is that in the long term, company share prices do follow earnings growth. They might not have in 2013, but in our view for 2014, the key is that companies, the onus is on them this year to show that earnings growth. So I feel confident that what we've asked our analysts to do, which is to find those companies that can grow their earnings growth, it wasn't rewarded as much in 2013 as we've seen in the past. But I think the chances in 2014 are that much higher, given what we saw in the market last year. So that's one aspect of it. There's a second aspect where – Real quick, David. So you're actually – your analysts are finding growth, top-line growth in companies today where they weren't 12 months ago, or growth to a greater extent? No, not to a greater extent. What I'm saying is the companies that we held in the portfolio last year, I'm not saying all of them, but a lot of them continue to grow their earnings and grow their earnings quite well. But they weren't rewarded nearly as much as some companies, for instance, that actually didn't have earnings. There was an expectation that – so, for instance, take peripheral European banks. Did not grow earnings last year. Actually, earnings went down, and yet they recovered quite strongly. There was a strong value case for last year. So a lot of the things we're asking our analysts to find in 2013 weren't rewarded to the same degree that I think they've historically been rewarded. Will 2014 be that year? I don't know. 2014, it could be another year like 2013, but the odds are less because the valuation of the market is that much higher. So that's one aspect of it, which I would call style. If I could interrupt. To me, and I guess this is just some confusion on my part with my concept of value versus growth, particularly in portfolios. And I think one of the things that's confusing me is I'm kind of hearing you use them interchangeably. And you say that you all have a bias towards growth. But with the approach that you explained, it sounded more value oriented. So I guess I'm a little bit confused, and if you could clarify that for me. Yeah. So we describe it as growth at a reasonable price. It's not growth at all costs. But the key is we're asking our analysts to find unrecognized earnings growth. We're asking them to find stocks where earnings are likely to grow in excess of what the market's expecting. And what I'm saying happened to a large extent in 2013 was the market was less interested about companies with what looked like pretty reasonable earnings growth. It was a case of there were some companies that did very well, even though they don't have earnings growth, because there was an expectation. Take Portuguese banks, for instance, had a good year last year. Portuguese banks 12 months ago were looking like they might go bankrupt. Their earnings did not go up last year, but the risk of them going bankrupt diminished, and so the stocks performed quite well. So they didn't show that earnings growth, but the stocks performed well. It's not something we would anticipate happening year after year after year. But in terms of 2013, to my mind, it was a bit of a headwind that we faced. Look, it happens periodically. Styles go against you. We've generally been able to deal with that. If you look back at years where we've done well, we've had periods when styles have gone against us, and we've generally been able to overcome it. So there were other factors. So I don't want to put the whole thing on style. I'm just saying we did face some style headwinds. I doubt we'll face them. It's not a permanent thing. So I'm hopeful we'll get a turn there. I'd like to talk maybe about some of the other things that happened, because some of them were not about style. Some of them were about our own calls, our own views on the world. One of the things that hurt performance in 2013 was, and we've talked to you about it before, we had a precious metal. We continue to hold precious metals mining companies in the portfolio, gold and silver miners. And that's very much a top-down view. Our multi-asset funds have held actual gold and silver. It's a nice diversifier. Our view here has been that in a world where interest rates are being driven to near zero throughout the developed world is the kind of environment where precious metals have done well. And by and large, over the last five years, it has been a good place to be. In 2013, we continue to see central banks loosening monetary policy and printing money, basically. That should be a good environment for gold, which is a hard commodity currency. It wasn't in 2013. And the tail end of 2012. And the reason we think that was the case is largely to do with Europe, that the threat of increasing the amount of money being put to the banking system was going to help avoid these banks defaulting and the euro breaking up. And as good as that money printing environment might be for gold, it was even better for the de-risking of these banks. So, you know, I mentioned some of these banks that did extremely well. The counterpoint to that was that the hedge against those banks was owning these gold stocks. Now, what we've done is we've reduced that position in the gold mining stocks. We're not banking that gold prices go up a lot from here. What we do have in the portfolio are stocks that we think can grow their production and hence their earnings. They've been a very good performer in the year to date. So something that's been a headwind to us in 2013 is so far proving to be a good tailwind for us in 2014 to date. David, we'll give you a couple minutes to summarize and then we'll have questions if there are any. Okay. So just the last thing I want to talk about is what we're doing about it. So we face some top down headwinds. We've been more cautious on Europe and the market's been keen to embrace a European recovery where we haven't seen that. We've preferred to focus in Japan. What we're doing is three things. The first is that at the portfolio management level, we're trying to be a lot more proactive. This is an environment where a lot of – look, when things go well for us, bottom up ideas fit with top down ideas and it's fairly easy to build portfolios. When we're in this environment where bottom up ideas are not meshing with our top down thinking, what we're saying we have to do at the portfolio level is get more engaged with companies. We've always been engaged, but what we're trying to do now is raise the degree of challenge. Challenge to analysts. In cases where you've got a stock that isn't growing earnings, it's saying can you look beyond just next year? What does it look like three years from now? So there's a lot more engagement from us in challenging analysts and the strategic policy group. The second area is – I mentioned challenge, but the second one is to do with what I would call secular versus cyclical thinking. I just want to make one analogy. John Greenhill on our team covered the Japanese market for 15 years. Japan was terrible from about 1990 on, and you could have taken a 20-year view that you don't want to be in Japan, and you would have been right, but along the way you would have had periods that lasted 12 months, 18 months, where actually Japan recovered quite strongly. Our strategic policy group are saying that Europe looks structurally challenged. We think Europe is going to take – I don't know how long, but 5, 10, 15 years to work itself out of its problems. So if we took – the structural view is Europe is going to be a difficult place for quite a long time, but last year it did extremely well. And so what we're doing at the portfolio level is being more sensitive to periodic cyclical upturns, where things have changed just on the margin. And Europe, yes, might potentially resume its downtrend at some point, but for the time being there's some good cyclical points that we should look at. And what we're doing very much at the company level is saying, look, I don't want to bet on a European recovery, but I'm very happy to find more European stocks that have self-help opportunities, a chance to cut costs that maybe aren't selling into Europe, that are selling globally, European companies that sell into the U.S. where the economy happens to be better than what's happening in Europe. That's where our focus is. So, yes, we recognize Europe is a challenged area. What we're doing in the portfolio is working extra hard on European ideas to find self-help opportunities. So my message to you is just in terms of what my team is doing is they remain motivated and working very hard to overcome what for us feels like an environment that's going against some of our top-down views. And the key thing for us is challenging what we're saying internally to find some of those ideas that are going to work in this environment. Thank you. Are there any questions? I've got a few. So, you know, if you look at 2013 performance and you talk about the headwinds that you faced, you know, you underperformed, give or take, by 7%. You know, from an attribution perspective, how much of that was style headwinds? How much of that was miners? How much was that the Europe versus the Japan bet that you have? So it all depends on how you cut it. In the period that we had last year, miners probably cost us 3%, 3% of that 7%. I don't know exactly the Europe versus Japan. And the reason I say that is we actually had good stock selection in Japan. So Japan was a bit of a headwind in that it wasn't the best-performing market over, say, the last nine months. But our team actually did a pretty good job of finding Japan ideas. One of the things we've done as well is to look even within Europe. And one of the things that we noted was that if we look at Europe in aggregate, it looks more like a stock selection issue. If we break Europe down into countries, what we find is that a lot of the ideas that we've been liking have been German companies and French companies. And in 2013, they didn't do nearly as well as Spanish or Italian companies. If we break the analysis down into actual countries, what we find is it was about half country selection and about half stock selection. So it's alerted us to that. And what we're doing is looking for self-help opportunities. Look, Italy, Spain might be troubled markets. We don't want to make a bet and go against our long-term views on Italy and Spain. But what we can do is double down our efforts to find stocks that have self-help opportunities, find that Italian stock that really isn't driven by Italy factors. It's an exporter or there's some self-help opportunities, something that they're able to do internally to improve their performance. Okay. I think I understand your explanation on the one-year. And I don't mean to speak for everybody, but individually I can accept a one-year problem because sometimes humans get it wrong. I guess where my real concern is, is inclusive of fees, the one-year rate's like 775 points off the benchmark. The three-year rate, excuse me, the three-year rate's like 340 points off. And then the five-year rate's 125 points off. So my concern is that this wasn't just a hiccup in 2013. It was a hiccup in 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008. I haven't heard you talk about that intermediate or longer-term part of it. So you have to look at it by calendar year. And what you find is that 2012 and 2013 have dragged down what were not that bad 2011 and 2010 numbers. In fact, I think 2011's number in particular was strong. So it's a case of what you're looking, when you say five years, it's not five individual years. It's the five years strung together. And the most recent data weighs on that. But even within that, just to address your issue about the timeframe, in 2012, at the end of the third quarter, we were broadly flat with markets for the year to date. The 2012 performance was all about Q4. We wrote about it. It was a quarter where European banks did particularly well and our mining companies did particularly badly. So it was a difficult quarter. But when I look at 2012, it was really the very end of 2012. So when we look at it on a quarter-by-quarter basis, the difficult performance environment for us started in Q4 of 2012. It's just that it's been quite troubled. And so the last year and quarter or so has been the performance headwinds that have made the three-year and the five-year number not look so good. So what I'm saying is if you look by calendar year, you'll see that it's really about 2012-2013. Any other questions? I would just like to add one comment to that. Throughout 2012, it happened all in December of 2012. If you look at the calendar year performance up through October, it was very, very positive. And in 2012, in December, when Tom and I were here, performance was still, at that point in time, very good. It took it all in the last two weeks of the mining stocks. What do you mean by very good? I thought what David said was we were flat with the market, which I interpret in 2012. I thought he said we were flat with the market through the first three quarters. That's right. Which I interpreted to mean, and if I'm wrong, please correct me, which I interpreted to mean that you were essentially in line with the benchmark. Yeah, broadly in line with the benchmark at the end of the third quarter. I'm doing that off of my memory, but I'm pretty sure that was the case. I know you have the numbers in front of you, but I just, whereas if someone tells me we did very, very well, I think of that as exceeding the benchmark. You should use the word very. We did well up through the third quarter and through October through November, and then December is where the number went south. But you guys trailed the benchmark by 8% in 2012. That didn't happen in a month. No. Q4 was, I'm going from memory, but I'm pretty sure we were flat with the market at the end of the third quarter, and I would agree Q4 was quite bad. You're correct. You were close to flat through the third quarter, give or take. I have a comment. Something that concerns me is that here you hit up this fund, and you tell me that you're looking for value and growth in these companies, and you said that you're just now asking your analysts to project out three years or better. What's the typical amount of time that you hold a stock in this portfolio? So if I look last year, our turnover was around 60%. So if you invert that, it means our holding period is just under two years, just under two years. The thing about the holding period is if our views were to change dramatically, so I've said we'd like Japan. If that changed dramatically, we would want to change the portfolio. So the turnover can change from year to year. We ask our analysts to look forward 12 to 18 months. That's if you look past times that we've come to speak to you. We ask them to look 12 to 18 months forward in terms of their horizon, in terms of catalysts, what might drive things. The challenge for us is we're looking at some companies in Europe that 12 months ago, if you look 12 to 18 months forward, they were loss-making. And what we're asking analysts to do is to, in those cases, look further, look further ahead. 12 to 18 months, yes, we're going to see losses, but what happens if things don't get worse in Europe? Does this thing maybe become break-even and maybe potentially earning in two years, in three years' time? And where are the valuations today? I will admit that's looking at a company on a more value-type basis. And we've said we're growth-type investors, but our portfolios in aggregate are growth portfolios. It means, though, that if we can find some potential for unrecognized earnings growth that maybe looks a little bit more like a value case, we could have a few of those in the portfolio, as we've done historically. So there's no change there. But the point being is that if we take this hard-line approach in Europe, for instance, about only finding the stocks that have the earnings growth, well, that's part of what's been a headwind for us, is that a lot of companies with no earnings are doing extremely well in the market because people are looking quite a bit into the future and expecting that there's going to be a turn. You had mentioned that in your analysis of this, if I heard you correctly, that your bottom-up philosophies or efforts were not really meshing with the top-down. And I've heard you talk about what's happening on the bottom, what's changed on the top, or are we just assuming that the top-down strategies are correct and we have to make everything work into that? So the answer is on the top-down. I made the point about a secular versus a cyclical view, and what I mean by that is that secular is long-term. Our long-term view in Europe, I believe our top-down team, everybody's getting excited about a European recovery, and yet what we've been expecting and what looks like, if I look at what the European Commission has said, we're expecting about 1% GDP growth in Europe this year. That's terrible. So our strategic policy group is right. That's going to be one of the weakest-performing developed markets in the world is Europe. 1% GDP growth is terrible. What we're doing is saying, though, that, okay, if you went from minus 1% to plus 1%, you might still have this view that Europe is challenged. And from an economic point of view, you're not going to want to make a huge allocation there, but what we can do from the bottom up is in that transition from minus 1% to plus 1%, there's the potential that companies go from seriously loss-making to marginally profitable, and some of those stocks potentially offer some good return potential, and in particular, as is relevant to our style, some high degree of possibility of delivering some unrecognized earnings growth. So, no, it's not like we're saying, yep, our top-down team says this. We've got to go against it because it's not working. What it is is actually looking very hard at the bottom-up ideas, finding some of the ones that are less driven by top-down factors, less driven by long-term Europe, and more driven by internal factors, self-help opportunities, very company-specific things. So we're not making that bet against the top-down team, who I have to say, quite frankly, have a very good long-term track record. I was going to say, based upon what you were just telling me, again, you seem to find a bit more fault with your top-down approach a little bit, because you've said your analysts in the bottom-up approach have done quite well, but with what you just explained to me is that your top-down team is kind of looking long-term at things, and if you're looking at a 12- to 18-month period, that to me, just from what you're standing here telling me, doesn't really jive with what you're trying to do here. Does that make any sense? I hear what you're saying, but I would start by stressing I find no fault with our top-down team. The work we do in the process by which they go through looking at economies, monetary policy, GDP growth, valuations, has not changed, and it's a strong aspect of what we do. What I'm saying is that that same approach, if we applied that same approach to Japan in 1990, Japan has been in a decline since basically 1990. It's 24 years of decline with only a few little blips along the way. That approach is a very, very good long-term approach. What we're finding with individual bottom-up ideas is that even in what is a 20-year decline, you can find periods of 12 to 18 months where a market can recover 50%, 60%, 80%. It doesn't change your top-down view. And the thing about top-down views is you don't change them month to month. You don't say, I think Japan's going to be up this month. That's my top-down view. What you necessarily have to do with top-down views is look into the future. Given all the information, where is the position? And I believe what our top-down team are doing, and I believe the calls they're making. What I'm saying, who I'm challenging, who I'm challenging is us ourselves, the portfolio managers. I think that signal from the top-down, I have to be clear, when we say Europe is likely to be in structural decline for the next 20 years, okay, I'll put that to mind. It means, though, that the focus in Europe has to be is in companies that can buck that trend because they've got some self-help potential. We threw a few examples in here, but, for instance, Philips is a Dutch company. They make medical equipment. They have a lighting business, and they have a consumer business. They make electric razors. That's a European company. Europe might be in decline, and that's a fairly big market for them. But the key for them is they've got a really good cost-reduction story going on. Philips used to be a diversified conglomerate. They're focused down to three core businesses, and they're taking a lot of costs out of their business, which can drive, we think, unrecognized earnings growth. And, you know, it's a stock we added mid-year of last year. It's been a very good performer for us. We just need more of those. Matt, how much money do we have in this fund, and how much have we lost during the downturn, including fees? Just give me one moment. You have $55 million with them at the end of December. And we had a with-fee $7.75 reduction. So what's that going to be? How much have we lost? Well, you haven't lost anything because the markets have been rising so that the account has continued to grow. Relative to the index, you know, 7% of underperformance. Very rough mental math, about $3 million. Okay. Are there any further questions? Yes, sir. Earlier you all stated you had a 14 years ago, you had a HITCUP system, and you changed or did a few things. Is that what you're similarly doing now, or did you change personnel, or did other things go on that 14 years ago that's a little bit different than now, per se, short answer? Yeah, so 14 years ago we did things quite differently, and the difficulties back then led to what we think is the process that we have today. Okay. We were very happy with the process up until, you know, the last year and a half. So the answer is in terms of our process, no, we're not changing anything. There's too much of a long-term track record from the analysts in the bottom up and our top down to say, hey, we need to throw the whole thing out. What it's really come down to is me and my team and how to make the process that we've got work better. How long did that HITCUP last 14 years ago? Well, I joined Bearings just a little over 13, so I can't really comment. I think it was related to the TMT, you know, the whole dot-com bubble at the time. I think there was too much of an emphasis on growth, and then when that growth market ended, I think we had a lot of portfolios that were really exposed to growth. One of the things that was brought in at the time was a lot more risk tools, actually some of the same risk tools that you see us using today. We monitor style to a much greater degree, making sure that even though there's a growth bias, that we don't exceed some of the limits on that. And I've mentioned that in looking for unrecognized growth, we might look for value opportunities, but we've got tools to help make sure that the portfolio doesn't drift into a value type portfolio, that we maintain that style characteristic. Did I hear you earlier say that some of your small funds have left and some of your larger funds have stayed because they like your style and stuff? Did you all state that in the beginning? Yeah. What are we considering? How do we fit in that? Is it a large fund or a small fund? You would be a medium-sized fund. Some of the small funds that we're talking about are $2, $3, $4, $5 million. So about how much money or clientele per se could you say that would be that may have shifted out? Are you at liberty to say? In terms of how many is a number of our funds? Yeah, I mean, in the last years? I don't. Five, ten? Yeah. But we're considered a medium fund. Yeah, I mean, if you include all those small clients, I'm sure we have hundreds. Thank you. Any further questions? I just have one more. Yes. Susan and I had traded notes before. As we evaluate you and potentially other candidates, you're at the higher end of the fee schedule. I know you can't answer this today, but we would just ask that you revisit that fee to aid us in our decision. Okay. I hear you. Thank you. I hear your question. Okay. Thank you. Great. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. Okay. The next item on the agenda is the Treasurer's Report, and I think Chad's going to do that for us today. Okay. Good morning. You should have in your packet the financials for the month of December and January, as well as the transfer letter. As of this morning, the portfolio value was $614,565,677.89, which compared to last month's meeting, the value was $608,383,880. So we had a little dip in January, and we're starting to see it return back to where it was. Any questions? Move to approve the authorization letter. I have a motion on the floor with Tommy Puckett to approve the transfer authorization letter. Do we have a second? Second. We have a second by Jonathan Bastian. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. The motion passes. The next item is minutes for the February meeting. Do we have any additions or corrections to the minutes? Okay. The chair would entertain a motion to approve. So moved. I have a motion by Jonathan Bastian, seconded by Clay Mason. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. The motion passes. We have ghost time purchases for Brad Alt, Raleigh Brown, Marcus Martin, Michael Moffitt, Cecil Tatum, and Jonathan Wise. I have a motion on the floor by Drew Short, second by Chris Sweat. Do we have any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. The motion passes. The next item is a military time purchase for Raleigh Brown. Do we need a motion on that? I have a motion by Drew Short, seconded by John Maxwell. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. The motion passes. Disbursements for March. We have those in front of us. We need a motion to approve. Moved to approve. I have a motion by Tommy Puckett to approve. Do we have a second? Seconded by Jonathan Bastian. Is there any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. The motion passes. The next item is retirement disabilities and resignations. Service retirements. These do require action. The first is Officer James Root with a retirement date of 2-24-14. And then we have Detective Michael Sweeney with a retirement date 2-28-2014. And I assume we can do both of those with one motion. Is that correct? Yes. Okay, I have a motion on the floor by Larry Kennard to approve both applicants. Second. Second by Jonathan Bastian. Is there any discussion on the motion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. The motion passes. The next item is disability that requires action with the first case. And maybe we can discuss both of these in one motion. Phillip Turner, Division of Fire, application for total and permanent disability. And Keith Spears, Division of Police, for the same. We need a motion on the floor. Move to send them to the appropriate doctors. I have a motion by Tommy Puckett to ascend to appropriate doctors. Do we have a second? Second by Larry Kennard. Is there any discussion on the motion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. The motion passes. The next item is tributes. And Henry Griffith, Division of Fire, passed away February 14th. And Joseph Brown, Division of Police, passed away February 23rd. Would any member like to make a comment? Joe Brown. I worked with Joe when I first came on, and I'm trying to be he was an original, no doubt about it. A lot of fun. I enjoyed him immensely. He was quite active in the FOP and also the retiree organization. He will be missed, no doubt. Great guy. Okay. Mr. Vance. I did not work with Henry Griffith. However, we do appreciate his service to the community, and on behalf of the board, our sympathies to the family. Okay. The next is informational matters. Do we have any informational matters to be brought before the board? I've got a question, if I may. I didn't know with Matt being here if there's anything we needed to move forward with looking or doing anything for next month or the following month. If there was something we needed to do today. I don't want to speak for the board, but I think the consensus is we should interview some other firms. We could do that at whichever meeting is appropriate, April or May. We can coordinate the agendas. But we do need to decide which firms to interview. That's the other question. I think we had some conversations. Didn't we narrow it down to two last time? I think three, wasn't it? Yeah, we had three that we were discussing. We had MFS, we had Bailey Gifford, and we had American Century. I'm perfectly happy to have all three in if you want to interview three. If you prefer to interview two, then I think we'd have to determine if we wanted to interview Bailey Gifford or American Century. MFS, in my mind, is the best structural fit for what we're looking to add into the portfolio. But I'll leave that decision to you. Okay. Do we need a motion to do that, or is that something you can schedule? Yes, we need a motion, please. Okay. I move to invite all three. Is a month going to be a long enough time, or do we need to go out maybe two months, Matt? I think we could do it in a month. Plus, it's April, so April is a good month to be in Lexington. I totally understand. Let's try for April. I move that we try to get them for April. Okay. We have a motion on the floor to invite in the three fund managers. American Century, Bailey Gifford, and MFS. We have a motion on the floor to invite in the three listed fund managers for presentations. Second by Drew Short. Is there any discussion on the motion? Chief, I seem to recall from our last discussion, we pretty much, I thought the way we talked was MFS, Bailey Gifford, and having Barings come back in to present to us. I was going to say, if we don't really need American Century necessarily to come in. I thought we had narrowed it down to two plus Barings. Maybe my recollection is wrong. The big issue with American Century is the emerging market allocation in the portfolio. It's a very good firm. It's a very good long-term track record. That emerging market allocation can creep up to 25, potentially 30%, which is going to have some structural impacts on the portfolio. And what's difficult from a day-to-day management and cash flow perspective is that we don't have control over the rise and the fall of the emerging market allocation. That was really, that's one of the reasons we eliminated Artisan. That's one of the reasons we eliminated Wellington. My recollection was, you know, we kind of left American Century open a little bit because we didn't know we wanted to hear from them and decide whether we wanted to continue our relationship or not. And I didn't see anything. I didn't feel like I heard a lot that would excite me to keep them. That was the reason I think that I would like to see the three. The normal process is usually three. I think we tend to follow Matt's recommendations pretty heavily, so I think it's kind of a waste of time to bring American Century in here. Ultimately, because of that emerging market allocation being somewhat problematic, I'm not sure that we'd pick them. Any further discussion? Now that he mentions it, I remember it. We have a motion on the floor to have three. Did we have a second on it yet? Yes. We did? Yes. If they would withdraw the second, I will withdraw my motion. Okay. Okay, and I will. And now I will make a motion to have the two. Okay, we have a motion on the floor by Tommy Puckett to invite Bailey Gifford and MFS. Seconded by Drew Short. Is there any discussion on the motion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. Motion passes. Are there any additional informational items? Anything else that we need to be looking at or doing for the future? I mean, do we have due diligence or anything? You know, Chad and Susan and I have been talking a little bit. I think the next project is to start to think about a review of the custody relationship. That's the last of the relationships with service providers that you haven't reviewed. I don't think we have a firm date on when the last time that was evaluated, but probably eight or nine years ago. Over ten. Over ten. Excuse me. So my expectation is we will provide a little bit of basic education on the role of a custodian and the functions that they perform on your behalf. And then we can start a dialogue from there about the appropriate timing and the appropriate structure of any sort of custodial review. Okay. All right. Any further items? I'd just like to thank Jim Root and Mike Sweeney both for all their years of service to the Division of Police. I'd also like to thank Mike Sweeney for all his years of service to the Fraternal Order of Police. He spent the past eight years as the president, and I'd like to thank him for that. Don't hate him for it, but he was actually one of the ones that convinced me to apply for the Division of Police here. So I thank him for that as well, because I'm happy. I rode with Mike one day, I think, when I came on the police department. He was an FCO. I've known him a long time, and I would echo your thoughts there. They both have contributed a lot. We will miss them. Any further action or items? Okay. We have a motion on the floor by Drew Short to adjourn. Do we have a second? Second. Seconded by Larry Kennard. Any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please indicate by saying aye. Aye. Opposed, same sign. Motion passes. Meeting is adjourned. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Summer time in Georgia, I'm dreaming of you, and that makes me Atlanta blue, blue, blue. Don't wipe away my memories, by making all my dreams come true, the way it was always seems better, so let me keep on missing you. I'm Atlanta blue, wishing I could be with you, summer time in Georgia, I'm dreaming of you, and that makes me Atlanta blue, blue, blue. And that makes me Atlanta blue, blue, blue. Back through the years I go wondering once again, back to the seasons of my youth, I recall a box of rags that someone gave us, and how my mama put the rags to use, there were rags of many colors, but every piece was small, and I didn't have a coat, and it was way down in the fall, mama sewed the rags together, so in every piece with love, she made my coat of many colors, that I was so proud of, as she sewed she told a story, from the bible she had read, about a coat of many colors, Joseph wore and then she said, perhaps this coat will bring you good luck and happiness, and I just couldn't wait to wear it, and mama blessed it with a kiss, my coat of many colors that my mama made for me, made only from rags, but I wore it so proudly, although we had no money, I was rich as I could be, in my coat of many colors, my mama made for me, so with patches on my breeches, and holes in both my shoes, in my coat of many colors, I hurried off to school, just to find the others laughing, and making fun of me, in my coat of many colors, my mama made for me, and oh I couldn't understand it, for I felt I was rich, and I told them all the love my mama sewed, in every stitch, and I told them all the stories, mama told me while she sewed, and how my coat of many colors, was worth more than all their clothes, but they didn't understand it, and I tried to make them see, that one is only poor, only if they choose to be, now I know we had no money, but I was rich as I could be, in my coat of many colors, my mama made for me, made just for me Copyright © 2020 Mooji Media Ltd. All Rights Reserved. No part of this recording may be reproduced without Mooji Media Ltd.'s express consent. I could stay awake, just to hear you breathing. Watch you smile while you are sleeping, while you're far away and dreaming. I could spend my life in this sweet surrender. I could stay lost in this moment forever. Every moment spent with you is a moment I treasure. I don't want to close my eyes. I don't want to fall asleep. Because I miss you, baby, and I don't want to miss a thing. Because even when I dream of you, the sweetest dream will never do. I still miss you, baby, and I don't want to miss a thing. I'm close to you, feeling your heart beating, and I'm wondering what's your dream. Wondering if it's me you're seeing. Then I kiss your eyes and thank God we're together. And I just want to stay with you in this moment forever, forever and ever. I don't want to close my eyes. I don't want to fall asleep. Because I miss you, baby, and I don't want to miss a thing. Because even when I dream of you, the sweetest dream will never do. I still miss you, baby, and I don't want to miss a thing. I don't want to miss one smile. I don't want to miss one kiss. But I just want to be with you, right here with you, just like this. And I just want to hold you close. I feel your heart so close to mine. And just stay here in this moment for all the rest of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't want to close my eyes. Don't want to fall asleep. Because I miss you, baby, and I don't want to miss a thing. Because even when I dream of you, the sweetest dream will never do. I still miss you, baby, and I don't want to miss a thing. I don't want to close my eyes. I don't want to fall asleep. Because I miss you, baby, and I don't want to miss a thing. Because even when I dream of you, the sweetest dream will never do. I still miss you, baby, and I don't want to miss a thing. I don't want to close my eyes. I don't want to fall asleep. And I don't want to miss a thing. I don't want to close my eyes. I don't want to fall asleep. Because I miss you, baby, and I don't want to miss a thing. Because even when I dream of you, the sweetest dream will never do. I still miss you, baby, and I don't want to miss a thing. I still miss you, baby, and I don't want to miss a thing. An active, animated, vigorous urban core. Downtown and a city are so important to economic vitality and energy. Downtown is everyone's neighborhood. It's not just a separate little island. The Downtown Lexington Corporation is the centerpiece, is the foundation block. And that's what it's been for 25 years. And that responsibility is growing today. The expectations are even greater today for the influence, for the effectiveness, for the imagination of the Downtown Lexington Corporation and all it represents in our city. Music As a newly elected Urban County Council member, I represented this downtown area. And I really wanted to see what I could do to help what appeared to be some problems. Across the country, downtowns were suffering. And we were no different. We really had infrastructure issues. We had vacant buildings. We had all the things that ultimately I discovered were everywhere. The interesting thing is that Don Webb contacts me and says, Take a walk with me downtown. Let's take a look and see where there are some opportunities to make some improvements. Maybe this city can do their share. To have an organization such as the Downtown Lexington Corporation that could bring to the table the private and the public sector and have the conversations that need to happen in order to do the events, the business transactions, the kinds of things that make a downtown successful. We kind of charted our course as to what else could be done to kind of orchestrate, you know, improvements for this area relative to landscaping and parking and development and people feeling like that their tax dollars were really doing good work. The mayor called and asked me if I would be interested. And I think Deborah Hisley had talked with him about that. And I said, yeah, sure, let's give it a try. And 15 years later, I left the D.L.C., but it was his return from 1989 to 1990 that I took over. All these people would come together over the lunch hour once a month in separate committees and have a discussion. And there was this open communication between property owners, residents, government. And it worked very, very well. And I think all of that is what today's D.L.C. has been able to build on and take and expand so much better. If you look at the vitality of a city, it really starts with the inner city, with the urban fabric. And I think the D.L.C. has helped promote that both for people that live in town, in the region, in the outskirts of the city. We look just at downtown and what is going to bring people downtown, what's going to keep people downtown, what's going to make people want to come back to downtown. We're a member-driven organization. We have approximately 400 members, the largest of which is the city. We organize a number of events throughout the city. 65, actually, were done in 2013. And we advocate on issues to support downtown. Over the last 25 years, you can see the number of people that now live down here. Businesses continue to relocate down here, and we've certainly played a role in that. One thing that's neat about downtown within the last five or six years is you have a lot of people that have grown up here that have decided to stay and then invest in downtown, open new restaurants, open new bars, open new businesses, and just kind of make the city a lot more vibrant. I think in the next 25 years, you'll see a very thriving urban core here. You'll see more retail. You'll see a lot more residential at every level. I'm very encouraged with the way downtown is headed right now, where it will be in 25 years, as well as the DLC. When a business is thinking of relocating here, we try to work with the other partners that are trying to make those deals happen. The DLC enhances the vitality of downtown by promoting it in different ways, whether it's parades, the Thursday Night Live events, fireworks, Fourth of July. The best thing about the events the DLC puts on are you have lawyers, you have CPAs, you have bankers, you have people in the nonprofit world that are there, so you kind of mix all sorts of different industries and organizations come together. I think that what they're doing with downtown is absolutely amazing. We come down here every chance we get, pretty much every Thursday night. We come for the atmosphere, the camaraderie, for a little piece of downtown Lexington. I can remember coming here when they started in 96, and it was like 30 people in a beer truck. It's a lot better than it used to be. We come here just about every week and bring the dogs and get a couple drinks and enjoy Lexington. We walk around, we have a little dinner. Am I allowed to say that on tape? Absolutely. We agree. It's near the office, and it's fun, and it's after work. You'll run into people you know downtown. It's just a good place to gather. I think downtown Lexington Corporation has done a fantastic job bringing people together. I think downtown Lexington Corporation has done a fantastic job. Look at Thursday Night Live. Look at all the people that come down here. Look at all of the events from Mayfest and on. They've done a great job. The communications have been wonderful. There's still room to grow. I learned from Toyota the word Kaizen, continuous improvement. And that means that every institution, especially one like the downtown Lexington Corporation, has the opportunity to grow and improve. So really, the sky's the limit. It's an old aphorism, an old song, an old saying, but it really applies. And it really applies to our urban core, our center of our city, our central business district, whatever you want to call it, our downtown. So as the agent of leadership, as the agent of change, as the agent of imagination, as the agent of change, as the agent of imagination and invention, the downtown Lexington Corporation is at the center of gravity. Well, if I look 25 years down the road, let me pull out my crystal ball. That would be easy to answer a question about where are we going to be in 25 years. I have no idea. But I do know that this community has to have an advocate. We have to have these voices that say things are changing. Are we flexible? Are we nimble? Can we go to that next stage? How do we bring on these young, new entrepreneurs? Their needs and their desires are a whole lot different than what we originally envisioned. So to me, flexibility is going to be the key for the future success of downtown Lexington Corporation. How do we be flexible to serve all of these groups and also to make our downtown one of the neatest in the country? ♪♪ Hi. My name is Scott Sherman. I'm originally from London, Kentucky. I came to Lexington to go to Transylvania University. After Transylvania, I started working with the Actors Guild of Lexington and the Downtown Arts Center, which had just opened when I was in high school. And I've been working there ever since. And I've been working there ever since. And I've been working there ever since. I started working with the Actors Guild of Lexington and the Downtown Arts Center, which had just opened when I left Trancy. ♪♪ I was one of the original members of the technical staff here. When the building opened, I started less than a year after it opened. I was one of the technical coordinators for the technical director at the time, Thomas Taylor. Worked here for several years as an assistant to him. And then when he left, I took the technical director position a couple of years later. And I've been here full-time working there since then. This past summer, I was offered the general manager position here, and I took it gladly. And we've been implementing some changes here since then that I think are going to be great for everyone, the community, the city, LexArts. ♪♪ A black box theater is an enclosed room as opposed to a separation between the stage and the audience. Everyone in this room is basically part of the actions, very intimate. All of the seating and all of the playing takes place on the same floor. And we have the opportunity to adjust that. We have modular risers so that we can put them in different configurations to suit different needs. And sometimes, as we can see today, we don't have any risers whatsoever, and we just put seats on the floor. So the opportunities in the black box theater here are immense. You can do whatever your brain can think of to make it happen. I would say that over the years, we have had dozens and dozens of different iterations of how the room can be set up, how the audience can be arranged with the action. Sometimes the audience is on the outside. Sometimes the audience is more toward the middle. ♪♪ We were happy to host the Trio Brasileiro this past fall, and we're happy to be hosting them again this spring, the Friday after Cinco de Mayo. So we're very excited about that. And hopefully we're going to start turning that into a world music festival that next season and the following years should be much more robust, should have a lot more diversity in it. ♪♪ LexArts manages the City Gallery, which is on the second floor here at the Downtown Arts Center. And from time to time, we will program that in different ways and have different types of exhibits in there. There's also Ann Tower, who has her gallery right here on Main Street in the front of the building, and she has constantly got a turnover of very exquisite art. We will rent it to you for just about any reason. But we have a lot of different types of events. Some of them are very artistic, plays, dance, music, and some of them are wedding receptions, business conventions, different types of things, gatherings, weddings, birthday parties, all that. So we will rent out the space for just about any need, and we are very excited to hopefully be offering this space next year for more wedding receptions and conventions and things like that as well. We have a grid, a wire rope grid, that is suspended about 17 feet above our heads right now, and we can walk around that. It's very similar to a trampoline or a gigantic tennis racket, maybe. And from there, we can stand and focus all of the lights and rearrange our speakers and different things like that for the sound and lighting needs that we have. So it really makes the room exceptionally functional, along with the modular seating and all the different opportunities that it offers. We are downtown, 141 East Main. We're located—we typically tell people we are located between Alfalfa's and the Fayette Cigar Store, and right across from the Public Library on Main. We do have a Facebook page, but you can start at www.lexarts.org, which is LexArts, our parent organization. That is the website there, and from there, you can click on the venues. One of them is the Downtown Arts Center, and of course, one of them is Arts Place. ♪♪♪ My name is Rashida El-Amin, and I'm the Interim Director here at the Lyric Theater. We are located downtown Lexington on the corner of 3rd and Elm Tree Lane, East 3rd. ♪♪♪ We originally opened in 1948 as the main venue for many African-American acts, and this was during segregation. So this was the main venue for African-American acts to not only come and see movies, but also to see many mainstream acts. We were a part of the Chitlin Circuit, so we had artists such as Ray Charles, Count Basie, Duke Ellington's son all come through here, and people in the neighborhood could come to this facility to see the entertainment. ♪♪♪ We've grown bigger. So we went from a 13,000-square-foot facility to a 29,000-square-foot facility. So not only do we have the theater, we have a multipurpose room, which we have community events and private events like weddings and balls and banquets happening in there, and we also have a museum and gallery, so we can actually offer more. So this will be the second year that Woodsong's Old Time Radio Hour is here, and that's nearly every Monday, and it brings in a different music act nearly every Monday, ranging from a variety of types of music. We have the Troubadour Concert Series, Robert Earl King. Tickets are going fast for that, so if you're interested, please book now. And we also have the Lyric's Motown Magic Review. That includes the Four Tops, the Temptations Review, which we had early in the year, and the Marvelettes, so it should be a great show. They can either go to our website, lexingtonlyric.com, or they can call the Lyric Theater at 859-280-2201. Well, to start off with, Woodsong's moved in January 2013. We had our social service project, Lyric's Little Dresses for Lexington, the second year of that. We had the Temptations Review, which I just mentioned. That was really big for the Lyric. The Community Action Council's Poverty Forum, which brought in Melissa Harris Perry. The Troubadour Concert Series brought in the Wailers. It was the second year for our summer movie film series, which was an intergenerational experience, which was really nice. We had an exhibit of African art, which is possibly the largest collection of African art in North America, on display here at the Lyric. It was also up during the Roots & Heritage Festival, so we had several events that complemented the Roots & Heritage Festival, which basically happens at the footsteps of the Lyric. Of course, we have our youth classes during spring break and the summer break. We brought in Les McCann. That was pretty big for the Lyric, because Les McCann is an artist who actually came from Lexington, Kentucky, and is internationally noted for his jazz contributions. We have rotating exhibits in both the gallery and the museum. In the museum, we have an exhibit by a Latino artist called View. It is organized by an organization called Blend. It's a variety of Latino artists in the area, and it just showcases their different techniques to the art. ♪♪♪ In the gallery, we have the Kentucky Arts Council's Uncommon Wealth exhibit, and that is a celebration of their Al Smith Fellowship Award. They've awarded over 100 artists in a 30-year time period, and we have 62 visual artists on display here at the Lyric. This will probably be the only time that this full exhibit is on display at one time. They do plan on breaking it up into minor exhibits and traveling it all over the state. In mid-February, we're going to have the Lyric's second annual Black History Convocation. The target audience technically is the youth, but it's open to the public, and we're going to have a variety of presenters talking along with entertainment. It's going to be a good time. So for rental information, you can either go to our website, lexingtonlyric.com, or just call into the Lyric, and we can help you. And we basically rent out all of the rooms, so you can rent out our 530-seated theater or a multipurpose room, which banquet-style, including tables and chairs, can fit up to 250 people. We've had fashion shows and weddings and banquets and just about everything in that room, so it's appropriate for all types of events. ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ When selecting a financial institution to serve you, bigger is not always better. Metro Employees Credit Union is owned by our members. Your interests are our interests. We've served Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government employees, partner agencies, and their families since 1940. MECU offers a full variety of products and services, including first and second mortgages, car loans, as well as other free or low-cost benefits. Discover the MECU difference. Visit us online at metroemployeescu.org to see if you are eligible to join our growing family. ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ I get a little bit closer to feeling fine He's got a daughter he calls Easter She was born on a Tuesday night I'm just wondering why I feel so all alone Why I'm a stranger in my own life Jump in and let's go Lay back, enjoy the show Everybody gets high, everybody gets low These are the days when anything goes Every day is a once in a while I get a little bit closer Every day is a faded sign I get a little bit closer Every day is a once in a while I get a little bit closer Every day is a faded sign I get a little bit closer to feeling fine I've been swimming in a sea of anarchy I've been living on coffee and new jeans I've been wondering if all the things I've seen were ever real Were ever really happening Every day is a once in a while I get a little bit closer Every day is a faded sign I get a little bit closer Every day is a winding road I get a little bit closer Every day is a faded sign I get a little bit closer to feeling fine Every day is a winding road I get a little bit closer Every day is a winding road Every day is a winding road Every day is a winding road If there's anything that you want If there's anything I can do Just call on me and I'll send it along With love from me to you I got everything that you want Like a heart that's oh so true Just call on me and I'll send it along With love from me to you I got arms that long to hold you And keep you by my side I got lips that long to kiss you And keep you satisfied If there's anything that you want If there's anything I can do Just call on me and I'll send it along With love from me to you Call on me So you just call on me And I'll send it along With love from me to you I got arms that long to hold you And keep you by my side I got lips that long to kiss you And keep you satisfied If there's anything that you want If there's anything I can do Just call on me and I'll send it along With love from me to you To you To you To you applause Ah, yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah Hey, little darlin' Oh, little darlin' Oh, oh, where are you? My lover I was wrong To try To love you But no, well That my lover Was just For you For you My darlin', I need you To call my own And never do wrong To hold in mind Your little hand I'll know too soon That all is so rare Please hold my hand My lover I was wrong To try To love you But no, well That my lover Was just For you For you piano plays piano plays There you are Lookin' just the same as you did Last time I touched you And here I am Close to gettin' tangled up Inside the thought of you Do you love him As much as I love her? Will that love be strong When old feelings start to stir? Looks like we made it Left each other on the way To another love Looks like we made it What happened from until today Until you were there Everywhere And all I could taste Was love the way we made it Love's so strange Love's so strange Playin' hide-and-seek with hearts And always hurtin' We're the fools Standin' close enough to touch Those burnin' memories And if I hold you For the sake of all those times Love made us lose our minds Could I ever let you go? Oh no, we made it Left each other on the way To another love Looks like we made it What happened from until today Until you were there Everywhere And all I could taste Was love the way we made it We made it Looks like we made it Left each other on the way To another love Looks like we made it What happened from until today Until you were there Everywhere And all I could taste Was love the way we made it Looks like we made it Oh babe, we made it Ooh, ooh, ooh Ooh, ooh, ooh Ooh, ooh, ooh Ooh, ooh, ooh Ooh, ooh, ooh Ooh, ooh, ooh Each day through my window I watch her as she paces by I say to myself You're such a lucky guy To have a girl like her Is truly a dream come true Out of all the fellas in the world She belongs to me But it was just my imagination Running away with me It was just my imagination Running away with me Ooh, ooh, ooh Soon, soon we'll be married And raise a family A cozy little home Out on the country For two children, maybe three I tell you I Can't visualize it all This couldn't be a dream Or two weird, it all seems But it was just my imagination Once again Running away with me Tell you it was just my imagination Running away with me Every night on my knees I pray Dear Lord, hear my plea Don't ever let another take her love from me Or I will surely die Her love is heavenly When her arms enfold me I hear her tender laughs so deep But in reality She doesn't even notice Just my imagination Once again Running away with me Tell you it was just my imagination Running away with me I'll never know that I can't forget her Just my imagination Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Running away with me Just my imagination Running away with me You've been told So maybe it's time to learn You've been sold Maybe it's time to learn I can't stand it You moving around I can't stand it Running around You moving around I can't stand it Moving around with my heart How strange I feel like I'm being used Making plans So you can get confused I can't stand it You moving around I can't stand it Running around I can't stand it Moving around with my heart I can't stand it You running around I can't stand it You moving around I can't stand it Moving around with my heart I can't stand it Running around I can't stand it Moving around Moving around with my heart It's time Time for me to let you know Ain't no crime No crime to let you be sure I can't stand it You moving around I can't stand it Running around I can't stand it Moving around I can't stand it You running around I can't stand it You playing around I can't stand it Moving around I can't stand it Running around I can't stand it Moving around I can't stand it Moving around I can't stand it Running around I can't stand it Moving around I can't stand it Running around I can't stand it Running around I can't stand it Moving around I can't stand it Running around Is not my heart Not my heart Running around Fooling around with my heart Fooling around I can't stand it Running around I can't stand it Fooling around I can't stand it Fooling around I can't stand it Fooling around I can't stand it Fooling around I can't stand it Fooling around I can't stand it Fooling around Fooling around Fooling around Fooling around Fooling around It's my alarm clock ringing Woke up the telephone screaming Boss man singing his same old song Well it's been late about an hour No cup of coffee, no shower Walked the shame with two different shoes on Now poor me, why me, oh me Born in the same old war Now fly fly story There's no good explanation for it at all Ain't no rhyme or reason No complicated meaning Ain't no need to overthink it Let go laughing Life don't go quite like it's planned If we try so hard to understand it Here's a funeral and a funeral Bad days, shh, it happens My thristy rusty hat flat I barred my neighbor's Cadillac I'll be right back Going down to Wally World That yellow light turned red too quickly Knew that truck the moment it hit me Out slept my ex and his new girl Sorry about your neck baby But it's poor me, why me, oh me Born in the same old war Now fly fly story There's no good explanation for it at all Ain't no rhyme or reason No complicated meaning Ain't no need to overthink it Let go laughing Life don't go quite like it's planned If we try so hard to understand it Here's a funeral and a funeral Bad days, shh, it happens Ain't no rhyme or reason No complicated meaning Ain't no need to overthink it Let go laughing Life don't go quite like it's planned If we try so hard to understand it Here's a funeral and a funeral Bad days, shh, it happens When I'm feeling blue All I have to do Is take a look at you Then I'm not so blue When I'm feeling blue All I have to do Is take a look at you When you're close to me I can feel your heart beat I can hear you breathing in my ear Wouldn't you agree Baby you and me Got a really kind of love Anytime you want to You can turn me on to Anything you want to Anytime at all When I kiss your lips Ooh I start to shiver Can't control the quivering Inside Wouldn't you Welcome to the Myers Report. Today we're out at Big Ass Fans and we're here with owner and founder Kerry Smith and one of the Big Ass Scholars Dylan Sarkeesian. Thank you for coming. Thank you. So I saw Kerry Smith on TV a few weeks ago with Bill Bryant and you were talking about the scholarship program that you have. I believe it's called the Big Ass Scholars. Yes. And I was very intrigued by that program. It's something that I've been trying to get going in our community for the last five or six years and to see you on TV talking about and articulate exactly what I'd envision companies like you doing was just phenomenal to me. And so I immediately reached out to you to see if we could have a conversation about what you're doing and what motivated you to do that and that's led to our conversation here today. I had worked prior to starting school, college and I had to work to make money and during college I worked to pay the tuition and the room and board. When you do that sort of thing I think that it becomes obvious to you that it's a very difficult thing to do. I mean I pull together various grants and awards and scholarships and that sort of thing but it's a constant struggle and it's constantly on your mind. And so it seemed to me that it was only right or it only made sense looking from an individual's perspective that we should try to make it easier for people in the same situation. But here at Big Ass Fans we have the opportunity there's more that we do. We do an awful lot and people think about manufacturing they think about fans they don't understand precisely the way we do business. We spend an awful lot of time and effort on R&D, on research and some of it we even split the R&D in two pieces and there's the R&D which is an awful lot of testing testing of products testing of ideas that we have but there's prior to that there is the work that goes into just coming up with ideas for products. And I think that's very interesting and that's where we typically put our where we're planning to put our scholars. Currently we put a lot of our interns in these programs because it's just a very interesting place to be and I think it shows kids that there's a lot more to manufacturing there's a lot more to what we do that makes it very interesting. Life is not as simple and as well defined as it is in school and there's an awful lot of opportunities and that's what we're trying to make available to people like Dylan. So you put together you kind of married an internship and a scholarship together so can you talk a little bit about the dollar amount for the scholarship and then what the relationship between just the scholarship dollars are and the opportunity that the scholar receives inside of Big Ass Hands. It's a $5,000 a year scholarship that goes towards tuition and room and board and that sort of thing and then there's $5,000 a year at minimum actually that is paid as an internship. It's a different approach it's not academia and I think that a lot of times that people like Dylan look at the future and think academia and there's nothing wrong with academia but that's a very, very narrow profession in a lot of respects. So we think it's very interesting what we're doing. So it sounds like if I'm a scholar recipient and I'm at Big Ass Hands in this program that I can look forward to you know we talk all the time about hands-on experience and those kinds of things but really because you guys go that step further and treat your scholars as peers they're actually it's almost as if they've been hired by the company and they're expected to do some of the very same things that your employees do. Oh for sure. I mean we when we interview people for example I mean we're looking at SAT scores to a certain degree we're looking at ACT scores we're looking at letters of recommendation we look at them but then I throw them away. No, I don't throw them away not every time but what we're interested in with our scholars is the same thing that I'm interested in when I talk to somebody that's going to be a co-worker here. And so what we're really interested in is people that can take the initiative people that are bright people that have a sense of humor people that are curious and I think curiosity is is incredibly important and underrated in this type of situation so it's a little bit more than your standard scholarship sort of interview they have to at some point they have to interface with me and that can be a trying experience but not with Dylan it wasn't I mean we were fine we got along great. That's awesome. So Dylan talk a little bit about yourself and what led you to Big Ass Fans and to get involved in this scholarship opportunity. I was lucky enough to be born and raised in Lexington and I stayed in Lexington for 18 years went through the public school system and then I graduated from Henry Clay High School recently I was in the magnet program the liberal arts academy and senior year I was looking for something to do ideally not bagging groceries I think I remember telling Carrie Yes that's the first thing you told me. And that really is the prospect mostly for people graduating high school you can't really do a lot of anything mentally stimulating when you don't have a college degree so I was looking around and I had heard from a few people who go to college in town that Big Ass Fans is a really interesting place to work for I didn't know much about Big Ass Fans but I did know that they had this cool mural on a wall downtown with a big donkey looking backwards at me and I thought that was pretty interesting and my juvenile need for cuss words and business names was really attracting me so I decided to come to an open house and it was definitely a little bit intimidating at first because I was surrounded by college students and a bunch of people representing every different department and I didn't really know what to do except just start talking to people so I started talking and one of the people I started talking to was Carrie it turns out and from then on I went to a couple of interviews and I started working here over the summer and thanks to the scholarship I'll be coming back and working next summer Okay So Dylan can you talk a little bit about what you do here in the internship part of the program I work in a department that researches and develops new technologies and I think at one point it was referred to as Badonkadonk Team Badonkadonk What's so difficult about remembering that? I mean you remember your name but you don't remember Team Badonkadonk I don't understand It's illogical I don't know Regardless of what you call it though it's dependably not dependable what I can guess I'm going to do at work the next day it's very different and always something interesting and new over the course of the summer I did everything from research to product development and then I participated in experiments and helped operate those and then I even went on business travel as Kerry mentioned so it was definitely it's hard to even summarize it but I guess the best way to say it is that I get paid to learn and use that knowledge to help the company You know what I think one of the things that you did that was very interesting was involve the fans in Rwanda That was very interesting to me So you might talk a little bit about that because I thought that was fascinating I did too When I came in one of the first things I was introduced to was the fact that Big Ass Fans had donated several ISIS fans to Rwanda a Butaro hospital in Rwanda that was created by a non-profit in order to help tuberculosis patients there So something about tuberculosis is that it's transmitted through the air So Big Ass Fans got involved in making a system to ventilate the air and purify it using ultraviolet light and so we gave the fans in order to circulate the air and keep it well purified throughout the day So what I did was I helped design a system to operate the fans autonomously so that people who were going through the building didn't have the opportunity to change the speed or anything because it needs to be in a specific setting in order to work So that definitely shocked me to learn that Big Ass Fans was operating in something so completely exotic Sure It was very interesting That was very interesting for me to hear as well because one of the things that most intrigued me about that is that the fan has to work at a certain speed to circulate the air to make sure it's purified but it can't circulate too fast that would cause a breeze and make the patient want to turn the fan off So I just thought about the technology and the ingenuity that has to go behind making all that work It's just fascinating to me That's where Dylan came in That's what I like about this program This isn't your typical internship where you're filing papers and you're doing that kind of stuff You're out there doing real world work that you're standing along colleagues and co-workers that are actually on staff and doing this work If you were back at school and you're at Stanford and you're talking to a group of your peers and you're saying What did you do last summer? and everybody's talking about I did an internship here and I did one there and I'm in D.C. and I'm doing different things and you say I did an internship at Big Ass Fans and somebody says to you What? An internship at a fan company? What's that about? What would your response be? I tell them I got paid to learn and I enjoyed what I did and I was part of a team that did important research so it definitely is different than what people imagine as a manufacturer of fans because they don't know that that goes on but it has to go on especially if you want to be cutting edge Sure So when you look at your personality and we talk about entrepreneur and entrepreneurship and how so often they say It's just the way I'm wired There's just something about me that entrepreneurialism works for me What about the way you're wired works with Big Ass Fans and this opportunity you had before you? I think as Kerry said the most important part of this is curiosity or a very valuable part that you don't immediately think that is important but that's definitely the most important part for me I think I just like to learn things and so it's pretty fun Sometimes it's things that I didn't think I would be learning but that doesn't mean that it's not interesting to learn them Sure And so every day it's a new and interesting thing to pick up on and I don't know sometimes every once in a while you even pull it out in conversation Like oh yeah the Potaro Hospital in Rwanda Absolutely I worked with that too or something along those lines So that's definitely what was driving me and what still drives me here is just passion for learning new things and making them useful to someone So you'll have the opportunity when you graduate from Stanford probably to go anywhere in the country in the world to get a job Having this opportunity though back here in Lexington Do you think that will impact at all your decision when you start to look at where you want to locate and maybe start a family and either start your own business or help grow someone else's business Do you think that this opportunity will have an impact on that? Well I definitely think it's changed my opinion of what manufacturing is and what business is in general I think that I completely didn't know what business was before I came here and now I have such a much better perspective on what that is And growing up in Lexington it's like you never like your house Everybody else's house is always more cool But then when you get to a certain point you start to realize that hey your house isn't all that bad and Lexington definitely is a place that I see as I can walk anywhere with my friends I can be part of a community and I feel safe all the time and I feel like raising kids here or living a life here would be easily a happy experience So Dylan one of the other questions I wanted to ask you What has your other summer job experiences been like? I did two internships over one summer and both of them were honestly what I expected an internship to be I was doing pretty basic repetitive work that someone asked me to do it and I did it and I knew someone else could just as easily do it but I was doing it because they didn't no one else who worked there had time to do it so I mean I didn't exactly I wasn't insulted because that's what I think that internships are which is definitely why this internship surprised me so much because immediately I was it was intimidating almost to be asked to contribute work that was valuable and no one else was like spell checking me or you know reading through my work and saying okay well alright this is good but this is how I would do it like they would value what I did and once I embraced that freedom and that responsibility it was definitely fulfilling and that again is a part of the vision that you have for this that really attracted me is that it's real world work real world experience where you're expecting someone to step in and fill the shoes of an employee and work alongside their co-workers and really contribute and conversely you're contributing by allowing them like you said earlier to get paid to learn but then also you're adding value to what the company already does and so my challenge for other companies out there in Washington and in Kentucky is to rethink the way you do internships and the way that you do scholarships and look at what they're doing here at Big Ass Fans and the Big Ass Fans or the Big Ass Scholars Program and emulate that because you're getting some of the best of the best you're bringing them into an environment you're expanding their knowledge and their ability to grow and think but that's adding real value to your bottom line and I think that's one of the things that's most appreciative about this program so again I thank you guys for coming and allowing me to be a part of this and learn more about what you're doing and then help get the word out if you're out there and you're looking for an internship and possibly a scholarship I encourage you to go to Big Ass Fans BigAssFans.com and you'll see it on the homepage it will direct you to the scholarship application the other thing you can do of course is give us a call the number the general number is 877-BIG-FANS and you'll be directed we'd love to have you and I think the deadline is March the 10th so let's get with it well again I appreciate you inviting us out to talk about not only your operation your success in Lexington your impact on our economy here but also what you're doing in the lives of young people and the vision that you have and so thank you for viewing the Meyers Report we'll see you next time bye we will continue these conversations in the future thank you for watching Hi, I'm Siobhan Akers council member for the 2nd district so we're here today to talk with Barrett Shack from the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department about the effects of radon Barrett, can you tell us a little bit about radon? Well, radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas that comes from the ground it's uranium in the ground that breaks up and then can seep up into your home through cracks in your foundation or just come up into your home through your basement so how prevalent is it in Kentucky or here in Fayette County or... Kentucky, for the most part is considered a zone 1 they go county by county Fayette County is a zone 1 county and basically what that means is that we have higher levels than a lot of other places that's mainly due to a lot of the cave system in Kentucky I'm sure everyone heard about the Corvette Museum yes yesterday they had the same level of radiation that we have in Kentucky so we have a lot of radiation in Kentucky and we have a lot of radiation in Fayette County because we had the sinkhole so just all those pockets of air in the ground can hold that radon gas and so are there certain sections of Fayette County that are more at risk than others that have more sinkholes or... it's really it just depends if you're in a neighborhood you could have high levels of radon gas in your home and your neighbor could have low levels they might have a better sealed foundation than you it's just a lot of different factors so it could be in the ground and not necessarily in your house correct correct there's always a level of radon gas that you're breathing outside it becomes a problem when the levels become elevated in your home and trapped inside the house correct correct and so how can people find out whether or not they have radon in their house well there's only one way to know radon gas is odorless it's invisible of course so you have to test and in order to do that luckily we have free test kits at the health department you just have to come pick it up at our environmental office 804 Newtown Circle ok and any time between 8 a.m. 4 30 p.m. Monday through Friday and you get one for free that's great and how does the test work and what is the process for administering the test it's pretty simple I actually brought one with me today oh good and they come in these little packages you want to make sure you keep them sealed until you use them ok and all the directions are on the website and all the directions are on the package that's what makes it so simple you do just want to be careful that when you fill this out you mark all the information correctly I've had them come back where people don't put the correct times the correct dates down and then they can't get results ok but basically let me show you how it works yeah yeah tell us how it works yeah yeah it comes like this it looks like a postcard and you've got this little charcoal filter and basically you put the charcoal filter in the bottom of the kit and then you hang it up and we always recommend you hang it wherever you spend the majority of your time in your home ok for me when I'm at home I guess I'm sleeping if I'm not watching TV I'm sleeping so I probably spend eight hours a day in my bedroom so I would hang it breathing level in my bedroom so normally like a nightstand off of a lamp ok so in the living room where would you hang it if you were in the living room near a couch right yeah near a couch or a table ok normally we say breathing level about four feet off the ground is a good spot ok and how long should it stay there this is a short term test kit now there are long term that go to a year but we just offer the short term and I believe these are 72 hours is what they recommend so you could say do it on a Friday set it up take it on a Monday and mail in and so they mail it does it come back here to the health department we do get a copy of results but we don't keep track of your address there's a test kit number on each test kit so we just we keep a list of test kits so if you were to call in and you lost your results we would have a copy of them ok but you all don't actually run the tests no these get mailed to North Carolina North Carolina and they get results back fairly quickly if you provide your email address they'll get them back even quicker oh great great and so I mean out of the number do you know the number of people that can pick up the test how many come back positive I'd say probably 75% come back positive and then what do people do if you find out that you do have radon in your house what can you do about it we have a list of I guess certified contractors we call them mitigators that can come out take a look depending on how high your levels are and they can give you an estimate on installing a mitigation system and what what do you do what do you do what do you do what do you do what do you do what do you do what do you do what do you do and what would that involve um well a lot of first are the contractors are those provided by the health department or are they we have a list that would be a cost for them to come a lot of them will do free estimates ok I always recommend contacting two or three and comparing what they offer for the price we only recommend the contractors that are NEHA certified the National Environmental Health Association ok and if they have that certification then they go on a list and then they send it to us and we recommend them ok um but most mitigation systems um it's just PVC pipes a lot of it that sort of sucks air from underneath your foundation and pipes it out up above your roof line and so are they installed in basements or I guess ground level uh could it be in your garage or would it have to be in the indoor part of the house it really depends um on the type of home you have ok levels  so it's a pretty good chance of getting lung cancer yes and so do you think because Kentucky has one of the highest rates of lung cancer and that we're also the zone one for radon that those there's a correlation between those that's very possible um you know and then of course if you're a smoker and you smoke inside your home and you have high levels of radon sort of compounds the effect um certainly elevates your risk ok so you can estimate how what your levels are and how difficult it would be to capture the gas and then correct um different estimates some old documentation said eight hundred to twenty five hundred um newer estimates are more about a thousand to three thousand dollars and is this something that could be um installed while you're building a home in the building process it's cheaper to install it as you're building a home and then it's going to be there even if the system is not hooked up um it's more cost effective in the future if you do discover you have high radon levels to go ahead and hook up that system it's already there right so you can install it and not even know whether it's going to work or not you can go to um www. Lexington health department dot org and you can call there's a link there you can look up the radon should have some information if not you can call our number our environmental office eight five nine two three one nine seven nine one and you can get it by email they'll put it up on the screen my email address is barrett c dot check at k y dot go I'm sorry I'm going to confuse you well thanks a lot I think it's really been educational and I hope that everyone out there will visit the health department at eight oh four eight oh four new town circle suite a it does it it it it it it it it it it it it eight seven eight nine Continental health department dot org that that dot go dot go dot org dot org dot org dot org dot  dot org dot org dot  dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot org dot organization org . Right now there are a number of organizations that are committed to doing the best they can to do the best they can to do the best they can to do the best they can to do the best they can to do the best they can to do the best they can to do the components they can to do the best they can do the best they can they can do the best they can to do the best they can to do the best they can do the best they can do the best they can do the best they can do the best they can do the best they can do the best they can do the best the best they can do the best they can do the best Gru can do the best they can do the best they can do the best standards they know they can do the best they can do the best standards they can do the best standards they can do the best standards they can do the best standards they can do the best standards they can do the best for the best for the people in this country. It is important that we do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. We do well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you. And I have to tell you, we love our jobs. It's 24-7, 365, and I can't think of a better thing to do. But we really enjoy working with LFUCG, great partner, and we enjoy working with you as well. There's a great passion. Thank you, Bob.  Thank you, Bob. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, I'm Council Member Jennifer Misati, Council Member of the District 9. I'm here today at Fire Station Number 1 with firefighters who happen to be female. With me this morning is Assistant Chief Kristen Chilton and Captain Maria Roberts. Good morning. Good morning. Assistant Chief Chilton, tell me about your history with the Lexington Fire Department. I was hired at Lexington Fire Department in 1993, so this next January I'll be here 21 years. 21 years. 21 years ago, what most women, I didn't think, would be interested in being a firefighter. What made you decide to be a firefighter? I happened to be attending Transylvania University down the street, and I was a senior, and I had a basic first aid class. And we decided to do a little field trip, and we walked down here to Station Number 1. And the fire department personnel at the time was on the EC unit that's stationed here, gave us a tour. And there was one of the females, one of our first females that was hired, which was Lisa Daly, was assigned to EC1. And she just, at that point, they were like, if you ever want to come ride with us, come ride with us, and we'll show you what it's like. And I did a couple of ride times with EC1 that was stationed here, and I just decided to go ahead and try out and see if I could possibly be a firefighter. So you got the bug. Mm-hmm. You did. And Captain Roberts, what about you? What made you decide to be a firefighter? Well, that would be my entire upbringing. I grew up, my father was a volunteer firefighter. Both my older brothers were volunteer firefighters with that same department. So I grew up responding to the station with my dad and with my brothers and sitting around. So when I turned 16, I joined that department, came down here to Eastern Kentucky University and got my degree in fire science and got my paramedic and tested here and got to live out my dream. Tell me, how many firefighters are there in total on our Lexington department? Currently, we have 543. How many females of that 543? We have currently on the line today, we have 13 on the line and we have our 14th is right now in the recruit academy. And I see both of you ladies have rank. How many do we have in rank? We currently have one assistant chief, which is myself. We have three captains and two lieutenants. Okay. Let me ask you, how do we compare with other cities our size or nationally as far as the number of female firefighters? Currently, we're about 1% behind the national average. We're about 2.9% female population here and across the nation, it's about 3.9%. Have you encouraged any type of, let's say, discrimination, especially since the two of you have been on for such a long time, maybe when you go to respond to an event or from colleagues in the department? A lot of times, the public's perception of you is a lot different. They don't expect you to be the one that, especially when we're in a leadership role and you're responding as the leader of the group that you're responding to, especially in a district major's position, which Maria has found out. Oftentimes, the public will automatically go to one of the male members of the company and when they direct them to the female, they're all kind of astonished sometimes. So it takes a little while for even the public to get used to. I would understand that. Has there been any specific incidences in your career that stand out to you that you have either been involved with or can give some information on that would be unique? I had an elderly woman one time. We went to her house for her smoke detector going off and we checked it out and I talked to her about it and she said, do you think you could send one of the boys in and just make sure? And I think a lot of that is more age than anything. Our elderly generation, women weren't doing this when they were our age. A lot of it's generational. Since I've been on the job, as far as the other firefighters go, I've had great, great welcome from the people I've worked with. There was an incident where a female firefighter was killed. Has that been the only, I know it's not been the only tragedy, but has that been the only tragedy involving a female? I think she was a paramedic. In 04, Brenda Cowan was killed. She was an EMT and she had just made lieutenant that January. But that's the only line of duty injury or line of duty death that's involved a female firefighter. It's a difficult job. Any type of job involving public safety and contact with the public is extremely difficult. What do you find is your most difficult task being on the fire department? I don't really know that one thing. If you take this job and look at it and just look at it as coming in and doing your best every day, gender isn't as big of an issue as we would think. As I said, you're firefighters who happen to be female. Absolutely. And that's, I think your counterparts suggested that to me when I came in, that there's no question that they feel comfortable working with you, that they feel that you know the job and that you can handle a job. And I certainly do appreciate your hard work. I know how difficult it is to deal with public safety issues and to deal with something that's not a normal job. Every day there's something different, I believe, you face. As assistant chief, how do you feel in your position? It's been an honor that Chief Jackson has trusted me to put me in the position that I am, which is assistant chief of administration. So I'm over hiring and discipline and a lot of the budget stuff. So it's been quite a challenge. A lot of adjustment. Budget is always a challenge. Yeah, budget is always a challenge. I get to attend lots of council meetings, as you know. Yes. But the career in general has been a great career. It's always exciting. I really miss the fire line. I miss coming to work and going out and feeling like you make more of a difference. I know that takes a lot to keep the fire department running behind the scenes. But you do miss being on a truck and you feel like you're not part of the division like you used to be when you actually got to ride a truck. So I do miss it. Another question would be longevity. What is the typical longevity of a firefighter or as a female firefighter? I know a male firefighter probably does not have to be the primary caregiver when it comes to children and family. Does that enter into the picture at all? I think you'd be surprised how many of them are. Is that right? How many of them on their two days off or home with their kids? How many moms do we have on the fire department? One, two, three, four. I'd say at least half of us are. More than half. By three quarters. So you do a lot of juggling because your schedule is not a normal schedule, is it? No. Tell me about your schedule. It's the ideal schedule. You have one day on and then you're home for two days. So I get to have a career and I get to be a stay-at-home mom. I've got an incredible group of stay-at-home mom friends that we do play dates and we go to the library and we do all those things because I'm home two out of every three days. I get to spend that time with my child, but at the same time I have a career. And to have that kind of balance is really a blessing. To have a job that you love and be able to do another job that you love is truly, as you say, a blessing. Absolutely. And, again, I can't thank you enough for your service, and I appreciate you coming down here this morning, and thank you. Welcome back. I'm here with three firefighters, again, who happen to be female, who were the first female group that responded to an event here in Lexington. And Captain Maria Roberts, a firefighter, Amanda Arbogast, and Firefighter Sarah McGill are here with us to talk about that incident that happened approximately about two weeks ago? About two months ago. I'm sorry, two months ago. Can you tell us a little bit about the event? It was close to shift change. We get off at about 7 o'clock in the morning. My normal driver needed to be out the door at 7, so he asked if Amanda would take the run for him. So she drove us, and we went about a block down Martin Luther King to a very serious mulch fire. It was smoldering, just a little bit of smoke, so we grabbed a water can and put it out. So, Firefighter Arbogast, you drove the truck. Yes, ma'am. Which side? I'm talking about this big truck here? Yes, ma'am. Tell me about driving this truck. What does that feel like? It's a little bigger than my personal vehicle, but it takes a little bit of training, but you get used to it. Tell me, you're a firefighter. You've been on for how long? I came out of the academy on March 1st. So from March 1st, you've been here approximately seven months, and you've been driving the truck ever since? After about two months after you take your first red book is when we are allowed to officially drive the truck. So, have you always wanted to be a firefighter? I always wanted to do something in the medical field, and I started EMT class and loved that, and then got affiliated with a fire department back home in northern Kentucky and loved the fire service. So at this particular incident, you were driving the truck. Yes, ma'am. And Firefighter Miguel, what were you doing? I was in the back, and I went with Captain Roberts and helped put it out. Now, when you say helped put it out, did you drag a hose? How did you help? No. Did you use a fire extinguisher? What did you do? We used a water can, a fire extinguisher, and that was it. And how long have you been on the force?