Serving The Public Sector With Brian Miller, CFO Of Tyler Technologies

Brian Miller, CFO of Tyler Technologies, discusses the importance of maintaining a strong workplace culture, upgrading talent and forming intra-organizational connections.

Tyler Technologies is a company you may have never heard of, but is at the heart of systems used by millions. Providing a wide range of software applications that power all the backend functions of government at all levels, Tyler Technologies and its CFO, Brian Miller keep the public sector running—from tax systems to 911 systems to land records.

Miller joins Jack McCullough to discuss the company’s growth, its focus on providing innovative software solutions for the public sector and the importance of cultivating a strong workplace culture. Brian also shares valuable insights about the evolution of the CFO role, the future of technology in government and the market and how to champion inclusivity and diversity in the corporate world.

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We have a great guest. He’s one of the few CFOs that I have ever met who has been in his role for about a quarter of a century. Brian Miller is the CFO of Tyler Technologies. Tyler Technologies is a provider of software and technology services to the public sector. Brian, welcome to the show.

Thank you. It’s great to be here. I have been looking forward to this.

Company Overview

You and I both. Tyler Tech public company, a good size but I suspect it may not be a household name to my audience. Could you share the 10,000-foot view of Tyler?

We are a little bit under the radar partly because of the market we serve, but we are bigger than most people realize. Tyler provides software and services exclusively for the public sector. High level we are a little over $2 billion in revenues. Our market cap is around $24 billion. We provide a very wide range of mission-critical software applications that power all the backend functions of government at all levels. Mostly local government but we also serve the state government and the federal government. We provide tax systems, property tax systems, financial systems, 911 systems, court systems, jail systems, land records and anything that runs the back office of government.

We are by far the largest provider in what is a very fragmented market. We have the biggest customer base and the broadest set of products in this very focused set of solutions for the government. Everything we do is about the public sector. We have been doing it for a very long time, and we are pretty good at it.

Brian’s Early Career and Education

When you think of how many towns and municipalities there are in the United States, it’s a huge market. We’ll get back to Tyler in a little bit, but before we get into it, I’d love for the audience to learn a little about you. Where did you grow up, Brian?

I grew up in San Antonio, Texas. I was born in Ohio, but as we like to say here, I got to Texas as fast as I could. I grew up in San Antonio and went to college at Texas A&M.

When did you move to San Antonio?

Middle school.

Is Texas like Massachusetts, where if you weren’t born there, you’re considered an outsider? In Massachusetts, people who move there at age two are still treated like outsiders, which is crazy.

Not so much. Texas is pretty welcoming. Now, we have a lot of people moving here, and Texas is a pretty welcoming place. I will claim myself as a Texan even though I wasn’t quite born here.

Did you grow up with a lot of brothers and sisters?

I grew up with one brother, who is younger than me, and two half-sisters who are older than me. There was a pretty wide age gap between the two older sisters and my brother and me.

I noticed you studied business at Texas A&M, perhaps accounting. That turned out to be a pretty good choice for you when I look at your career path. What was it about the 17-year-old Brian Miller who found business an interesting career option?

I was good with numbers, and I liked the idea of business and maybe organization. I thought I was going to be a lawyer. When I started out, I thought business and accounting in particular would be a good foundation or a good base for pre-law. That was my intention as I went to college and went through college. I intended to pursue corporate law which was my focus. I was president of the pre-law society at A&M.

As I went through, I grew to like accounting a lot. I also thought that maybe it’d be a good time to take a little break and work for a while before I went to law school. I was accepted to law school but decided to defer my admission and work for a couple of years in public accounting. I never went back. I’m happy with the choice I made. Our CEO describes himself as a reformed lawyer, so he is a lawyer, and we’ve taken interesting paths to get to the same place but that was what I thought I was going to do, and I changed my mind while I was in school.

It appears like it was a series of good decisions. Out of college, your first job was at EY although it was Ernst & Whinney when you joined.

I was on the Arthur Young side. I left a year or two before they merged. There were still eight firms back then.

When I talk to young people, they’re not always sure they completely believe me when I say there was once a Big Eight, and they were dynastic for decades. I was with, at the time, Peat Marwick Mitchell, which is now KPMG but what was that experience like? You had a good run; you put in six years there. What were some of the important things that you learned along the way that set you up to be a future CFO?

Public accounting was a great start. You learn an awful lot. You get a lot of responsibility early. After your first year, you’re supervising other first-year people, and in your second year, you’re supervising even more. You learn management and how to interact with a lot of people. You’re dealing with clients and talking to CFOs and managers in your client companies. You learn a lot.

It was interesting. I went to work in the Dallas office, which was one of the bigger offices we had. There were probably 40 or so in my starting class. All of us were starting in the same place and generally moved there from somewhere else, so we had a ready-made group of friends or peers. I’m still very good friends with most of the people I started with, and we keep up with each other even decades later.

It’s just a great learning ground. From our interaction with our auditors, I can tell that the industry has changed an awful lot. I’m not sure it’s as much fun as it might have been back then but it was a great learning experience, especially because of the amount of responsibility they gave you early. We didn’t have all the technology auditors use now. Back then, it was a lot of 14-column paper and red pencils but it’s a great base to start from. After six years there, I was in audit. After being a manager for a year, I realized that wasn’t where I wanted to spend the rest of my career. That’s when I started thinking about moving into the industry.

I was going to make a joke about starting in Peat Marwick Mitchell. We used stone tablets and quill pens, which were considered cutting-edge technological innovation but the audit profession is almost unrecognizable to me in terms of how technologically advanced it’s become.

It’s changed so much, and then with all the pressures from the PCAOB and regulators. It’s a very different industry.

It sure is. You left after about six years, and then you went to work for an airline. I’m curious what that was like.

That was fascinating. I had spent a little bit of time on the American Airlines audit when I was at EY and found it to be an interesting industry. Then an opportunity arose to go work for a regional airline, Metro Airlines, which was a public company at the time. They had moved their headquarters from Houston to Dallas and were looking for a controller. I knew somebody who knew somebody there, so I interviewed for it and decided to make the jump into the airline business. It’s a fascinating industry, a tough industry, but another great learning experience. I enjoyed my time there. I progressed from controller to eventually becoming CFO and spent a little over 10 years there.

You mentioned it being a tough industry. I remember the first big airline bankruptcy within my conscious memory. It might have been TWA I’m not sure but they hadn’t turned a profit in something like 26 years. It was remarkable, and it wasn’t uncommon for airlines to lose money year after year. Southwest might have been the first one that was consistently profitable.

There are a lot of characteristics that make it tough. It’s capital-intensive because of the equipment of the aircraft themselves. It’s dependent on commodities, with fuel costs being one of your biggest expenses, and you don’t control that. There’s often irrational pricing, where your most desperate competitor sets the pricing for the industry, and everyone matches. You also have unions, and the industry is highly cyclical, affected by geopolitical events.

I was there during the Gulf War, which threw the whole industry into a tailspin. All those characteristics make it tough, and none of them apply to the software business. When I made the change, it was the complete opposite. It was a great learning experience. I learned to deal with all those kinds of problems. If you’ve worked in the airline industry for any period, you’ve probably been through bankruptcy. After the Gulf War, Metro was a regional airline, and at the time, most regional airlines operated under franchise arrangements with major carriers. We were the American Eagle carrier in Dallas-Fort Worth. We partnered with Eastern Airlines in Atlanta and the Caribbean, and TWA in the Northeast, covering New York and Boston.

Two of those relationships were very problematic because both Eastern and TWA had major issues, and those carried over to us. After Eastern went bankrupt, we also had to file for bankruptcy to restructure aircraft leases, union agreements and other things that needed to change. That was another good learning experience, but you only want to go through that once. It was an interesting experience.

It sounds like that was a fascinating eight-year run. Then you decided to leave the airline industry and move to technology. I’m curious how that is positioned and how that became available.

Tyler was also undergoing a change. It was moving away from its prior life as an industrial conglomerate and into the software business. Tyler had a big change in focus and leadership. The founder had retired, and a new CEO, longtime board member C.A. Rundell had stepped in.

He had been an independent director on our board at Metro. They were looking for a finance leader, and that opportunity sounded interesting to me. C.A. knew me, thought my background was a good fit and shared the vision for Tyler. It sounded like something I’d like to be a part of, so I made the shift from the airline business to the software business.

Company Culture and Diversity

I’m guessing culturally, the two companies were about as different as they could be but what is the culture like at Tyler Technologies?

Tyler has an interesting culture that’s a core part of everything we do whether it’s acquisitions, internal growth or maintaining our culture. That’s important to us, as we are the product of many acquisitions—about 60 during my time at Tyler. That sounds like a lot, but it averages two or three a year. We originally built the company through a set of core acquisitions, supplementing our organic growth with additional acquisitions along the way.

It’s a collection of businesses that were typically very entrepreneurial. Even though we’re now a $2 billion-plus company, we still try to maintain that entrepreneurial culture. We’re very customer-focused, which is typical of the kinds of businesses that became part of Tyler. We often talk about the three legs of the stool, our customers, our employees and our shareholders. We have equal respect and devotion to all three constituencies. It’s a very inclusive culture, and we’ve worked hard to maintain that as we’ve grown over the years.

On the subject of being inclusive, I want to give you a little shout-out because you made the Forbes list of the best places to work for female employees. If I have my facts straight, that’s not the first time, is it? I’d love to learn more about how you make inclusion a core value at your company.

That’s important to us, and it is one of our core values. Especially in the tech business, which has historically been male-dominated particularly on the development and technical sides, we go out of our way to be inclusive including the female employee group. We have several programs, including a very active women’s leadership network. Several members of our C-Suite, our chief marketing officer, chief HR officer, and chief legal officer are women. They are very active in mentoring and providing opportunities. Inclusion is something we put a lot of emphasis on.

Relationship with CEO

Kudos for doing that. I also want to explore your relationship with CEO Lynn Moore. For the readers, what’s interesting is that you’ve worked together for more than a quarter of a century, if I recall correctly. Can you tell us more about your relationship with Lynn?

Lynn and I started a year apart at Tyler. I started in late 1997, and he started in 1998, not in our roles. I was the chief accounting officer at the time, and he was the chief legal officer. We were both one-person teams in our respective parts of the company. At the time, our revenues were probably less than $50 million. There was even a point where our market cap was about the same around $50 million. We’ve been here together through all the growth of Tyler and have evolved into different roles over time.

Lynn worked very actively in our M&A processes. He’s a very operationally focused lawyer more of a business-focused lawyer and became a close advisor to John Marr, who is now our executive chair but was a long-time CEO of Tyler. Lynn learned a lot about the software business, as did I, along the way. He eventually moved into the CEO role, while I became CFO and then CEO after John stepped back to the executive chair role.

We’ve evolved in our roles and have had a very close working relationship the whole time, dating back to when Tyler was a much smaller company. We complement each other well and share the company’s values and vision. Our whole team is made up of senior management members who have been with us for 10, 15 or even 20 years. We all like and respect each other a lot. We’ve enjoyed the success of the company along the way, and we’re all having a lot of fun. We expect to keep doing this for a while.

You probably know Lynn as well as anybody else in your life.

Yes, we’ve watched our families grow up and been through all the changes in our personal lives. It’s been a great relationship along the way.

I wanted to touch upon something else. You’re a long-term guy. I want to understand your approach to building the finance and accounting team. How do you recruit, retain, motivate and upskill your team?

Our team has certainly grown. When I started, there were about three of us on the finance team. Now, there’s probably close to 150 or so. My philosophy has always been to hire the very best people you can find. Every time you backfill a role or fill a new one, you should be upgrading the talent. You should always try to hire people who are smarter than you.

Occasionally, I’ve seen people who are afraid to hire someone smarter or better than they are because they feel insecure. I encourage my team members not to think that way. I’d much rather have a team full of people who are smarter than me. I also think about their career paths and ensuring we have succession plans in place. It’s about strengthening the team as we go. I like to hire smart people, give them the tools they need, provide them with responsibility and authority, offer the right level of oversight and mentoring, and then let them run with it.

In my case, it would be difficult for me not to hire people who are smarter than me.

I don’t think it’s too tough for me either but I try to.

It’s interesting what you said because somebody once taught me that A players hire A plus players, while B players hire C players. It’s for the reason you mentioned they’re insecure and don’t want to hire a smart person who might be capable of replacing them someday and everybody suffers. You have to focus on the greater good and hire the best talent you can find. It’s not always the smartest person who leads the organization, and it shouldn’t be.

I like to hire people who could replace me. That’s always my goal.

Future Vision and Growth

Let’s chat a little about your future thoughts on Tyler Technologies. You’ve had impressive growth. What’s your strategic vision for maintaining the momentum that you’ve got right now?

We were fortunate that the market we play in the industry we work in, the public sector provides a lot of stability. The public sector has many needs, particularly around software. There are a lot of challenges facing the public sector as they try to do more with less, provide essential services to the public and deliver a better experience for citizens. We are here to help them do that but there are a lot of needs there and the public sector faces a lot of challenges.

With our laser focus on the public sector, we’ve been able to develop a broad set of strengths that we bring to them. We continue to build on that and maintain a strong leadership position in this space. Our goal is to continue doing so. Our tagline is “Empowering the people who serve the public,” and that’s what everything we do is focused on.

As we make acquisitions, we broaden our product line, add new capabilities, expand our TAM and provide more services and solutions to the public sector. Our vision and strategy remain very similar to what they were several years ago when we embarked on the space. It’s a continuation of that vision. We’ve been fortunate to experience very steady growth over multiple decades, and we aim to continue that trajectory. To achieve this, we maintain an active M&A program, invest heavily in R&D and focus on internal growth as well. This combination is what we want to continue to do for decades to come.

Technology Adoption and Innovation

Technology changes business models and has since early in our careers, but even more so now than ever. How does Tyler stay ahead of the latest technologies, not just in terms of what you deliver to clients but also internally, to make for the most efficient and productive workforce?

We’ve evolved. In the early days, Tyler looked more like a holding company that acquired a lot of businesses. Over time, we’ve focused on what we refer to as One Tyler, integrating our operations. From a customer perspective, this means integrating our products so they work closely together and provide more value to customers who might have multiple products from Tyler.

Those products, like a court system and a public safety system, work seamlessly together in that they should share data and workflows, creating more value for the customer by having multiple products from Tyler and being able to build on those relationships. We have almost 40,000 installations of our products across more than 13,000 cities, counties, schools and government agencies. Building on those relationships is important to us. We invest heavily in R&D, and with strong free cash flow we’re able to put a lot of that back to work in the business.

We’re also fortunate in our space. Generally, governments aren’t on the leading edge of adopting new technologies. They are looking to us to show them the way and to show them how to use new technologies rather than demanding the latest and greatest leading edge from us. We have the benefit of time to thoughtfully integrate new technologies into our products and how to bring that to our customers at a rate they can absorb the change and them down the path of technology. AI is a good example of what we’re seeing now as we look at how we integrate AI into our internal operations to become more efficient in how we integrate it into our products.

I’m glad you brought up AI because I told your marketing folks that I’m legally required to ask a question about AI to keep my show licensed. It does seem that way but honestly, I’ve always thought the internet would be the biggest game changer of my career. It was probably the biggest innovation since TV or the car or something. AI seems right in that category, just in terms of how it’s changing the way we do business.

Non-GAAP Metrics and Performance

There’s an awful lot of attention on it these days and conversation around it. You mentioned free cashflow and you and I share the fact that we are CPAs, or at least we were at one point. I’m not sure if you kept it up, but that’s always an interesting thing. CPAs like the conventional GAAP metrics, but you want free cashflow. What are some of the other non-GAAP ways you measure your company’s performance?

Free cash flow is the biggest one. We had an investor day about a few years ago and reset or established our mid-range and long-range targets for the company. We have been going through a cloud transition, talking about technology and changes there. We migrated or evolved from being an on-premise license-based software model to being a cloud-based subscription model for delivery of our software, and that’s going to be a multi-year evolution.

Like with a lot of things, the government has been a little slower to embrace the cloud than the private sector. It’s had a pretty significant shift in the last several years, and we have gone from having less than 50 percent of our business in the cloud to close to 90 percent of our new business in the cloud and migrating our on-premise customers to the cloud.

Free cashflow and recurring revenues are the biggest metrics that we have focused on as the best measures of our growth and the things that we are focused on driving. Recurring revenues are now close to 85 percent of our revenue, which gives us, again, that nice stability and driving good free cashflow that we can then invest back into our business. We can make more acquisitions and continue to improve the things that we provide to our customers.

Role in Company Culture

As I was prepping for this conversation, I did a lot of research, not only on you but of course on Tyler, and one thing that comes up over and over again is the strength of the culture and how it’s essentially almost a competitive advantage for the company, much more so than other companies I have researched. Your role as CFO, historically, CFOs weren’t necessarily thought of as the custodians of the culture. That’s different, and I’m guessing in your case, because of your longevity with the company, much more so. What is your role as the financial leader in maintaining such a robust culture?

It’s evolved over the years from several years ago being the numbers guy and being strictly focused on numbers, but not as much on the operation. To me, it’s always been important to build relationships and to know people throughout the company, whether they are in an operating unit of the company or a different corporate unit.

Building those long-term relationships and all of us as a management team, having a lot of alignment on the vision, the mission, the values of the company and all of us driving that not through our organizations but across the company. We all try to have a lot of visibility with the broader employee group, to spend time with employees outside of the finance organization, and get to know those people. To get out of the corporate headquarters and spend time at our business units, and to be a good example of the culture that we try to foster and be very visible with that.

It’s so critical because historically, there has always been tension between finance and accounting and marketing. The first job I [had], I shouldn’t laugh because it’s not funny, but it is funny the marketing people called us bean counters, but my boss, and this was the ’80s, and he was even old school for the 1980s, he used to call marketing arts and crafts. I thought that was so hysterical. The point is, that neither group valued what the other group was bringing to the table. It’s like, I wouldn’t want to work in a company that didn’t have world-class finance, nor would I want to work in a company where the marketing team wasn’t a strategic asset. It seems like you folks are very cognizant of this.

There’s a point in a prior place in my career where the marketing people were viewed as the free spenders of the organization and not to be trusted with the checkbook but at Tyler, it’s very different. They are seen as an important, strategic asset, and we have a great marketing team. We work very closely with them, and we all do that in a very cost-effective manner.

Whether it’s finance or IT, same thing with IT guys. There’s a lot of stereotypes about that. We’ve got a world-class team and have made a lot of progress in improving our internal systems. It’s interesting we provide world-class systems to our customers, but we’ve had a lot of work to do to build our internal systems to support the business. We’ve made a lot of progress in years, went through the implementation of a new ERP system, and have done a lot of work there to provide us with the tools we need to do our jobs as well.

IT is the one group I would never anger. They can screw up your life worse than anyone else in the company can, I would think. I want to get your take now. You and I both started in public accounting, a great foundation, but the role of the CFO has changed. The tagline for this show is “CFOs no longer record history. They make history.” How do you see the role of financial leadership changing in the years ahead?

It has evolved and will continue to evolve from being about the numbers and about the accounting and the bean counting to being much more operationally focused on how you can help drive the business to achieve its goals. It’s much more of a partnership with both the CEO and the other C-Suites, but also with the people who are operationally running the business. That’s how I’ve tried to build my role as a CFO at Tyler, and it continues to evolve that way.

You see a lot more non-traditional CFOs that came up, not through the finance and accounting organization, but through operations or engineering and have that organizational or operational focus. If you came up through finance, you need to build that operational focus to be effective in that role and to be an effective advisor to and partner with the CEO.

Work-Life Balance

At one point in my day job, I ran an association for CFOs the CFO Leadership Council, and at one point in our early years, I’m going to say that 90 percent of the CFOs were CPAs. While there’s still a good number of them, I believe Spencer Stuart issued a report a few years ago showing, for the first time, there were more CFOs with MBAs than CPAs. That reflects how the job is becoming more strategic. When young people ask me which they should get, I tell them to get the one that they like the most. They’re all going to give you rewarding career paths in this space. I want to ask a little about yourself. I know something about you you have a second home in Sun Valley, and you’re an avid skier. Is that correct?

I’m not as avid as I was several years ago but still enjoy skiing. Yes, so we can’t do that in Dallas. It’s a little flat where we live most of the time. We’ve had a place in the mountains for several years and enjoy spending time there both in the summer and in the winter. One of the happy byproducts of COVID was that we learned we could work effectively in other locations, at least part of the time. We have had a big focus on how we build out our hybrid work environment at Tyler and adapt to flexibility. I am fortunate to have the flexibility to work part of the time from a different location and enjoy being in the mountains and going down the hills in the winter.

It did occur to me. That was my follow-up question. How did a Texan become a snow skier?

You’ve got to go somewhere, but the contrast and the variety is great. We don’t get the cold winters, so it’s fun to be somewhere different, with different scenery and different sports. I have been skiing since college and have enjoyed it. I’ve slowed down over the years and, fortunately, no major injuries or anything. My wife and I have also come to enjoy snowshoeing, which is a little bit more stable. We have a lot of opportunities here to do that as well and see more of the backwoods on it.

This leads me to a question because, to me, it’s critical and some do it well and some don’t do it well but you’re a busy fella. You’re the CFO of a public company, which is a lot. You are also on the board of trustees for the 12th Man Foundation. How do you try your best to have all the family stuff, exercise, all those things? What advice do you have on the whole work-life balance thing?

It’s something you have to feel your way through over time, and hopefully, I have done a good job of it. I believe very strongly in giving back and doing things outside of just the business world and giving back to causes that are important. Both my wife and I are involved in schools we attended and in various charities that are important to us.

For me, Texas A&M is one of those things that’s very important. I have been fortunate to serve in the middle of a term on the board of trustees for the 12th Man Foundation, which is the athletic fundraising arm of the university. It’s also a good learning experience. I have gotten to meet a lot of great people that I wouldn’t have otherwise met. Hopefully, I bring a little bit of my expertise to help the organization deal with some of the issues present in college athletics, like NIL and the need to raise capital. Those are things I have experience with from the work side, and I can hopefully benefit the university through that experience. I enjoy that, and it’s important to make time to do these kinds of things.

I understand in Texas you love your high school and college pro football too.

We do.

It’s like a state religion up here. In Boston, we follow professional sports, but we only follow our teams, pretty much. If the Patriots-Red Sox and Celtics-Hawks are in the finals for their sport, the TV rating is great in Boston but not very good. We had a nice little rivalry between Boston and Dallas in the NBA Finals. You’ve got a great team. You’re going to be formidable for a few years to come. Maybe we’ll see you back soon.

It’s the Cowboys that we need to get back on track after a few decades.

There are rumors that if this isn’t the year, that Belichick fellow, had some pretty good success up here. He might be available. He and Jerry Jones are very friendly. They may have difficult personalities to work together with but you’d be getting the best football coach if not ever of this era.

That would be an interesting combination to watch. It would probably be a show.

Advice for Future CFOs

It would be worth it to see those two clash, for sure. Brian, I always like to conclude this with any advice you might have for the next generation of CFOs. Areas they should focus on, skills they should adopt or whatever it might be that helps the first-time CFO or even those people who are six months to two years out from being a CFO.

The biggest thing that you need to work on is building relationships. It’s so important to build those relationships. We talked about it a little bit earlier throughout the organization, not just with your team and your boss, but across the company. That’s been valuable to me in my career and something that I encourage the people who work for me to do to get to know the leaders and the workers in the business units, the operational side, software developers and professional services leaders.

Throughout the whole organization, you need to understand and get that operational focus because you have to go beyond the numbers and understand what drives the business what the challenges are that they are seeing, and ultimately how you can perhaps help them address those challenges. Without the relationships, you can’t do that, and so you have to get out of the silo. That also means physically getting out there.

That’s one of the things that concerns me there are a lot of things about hybrid work or remote work that are attractive and that people like but especially as we’ve hired a lot of people in the last few years who were fully remote and have spent very little time in an office it concerns me, both from our company’s standpoint and from a cultural standpoint, that they are not absorbing the culture and getting the feel for it. They don’t have the proverbial water cooler conversations, leaning over the cubicle and asking a question.

You’ve got to go out of your way to make sure that you are building those relationships and that you are physically getting out. Tyler is a very geographically dispersed company. We have offices all over the country, partially because we were the product of a lot of acquisitions. You have to make an effort to get out and not just be on a Teams meeting with someone, but sit down with people, get to know them, get to know what they are about, what their challenges are. Those relationships are the most important things as you try to advance through your career and have that deep understanding of your company the challenges and opportunities, and how you can help address all those.

That’s fantastic advice for young people. Even in the world of technology and its ubiquity, it comes down to people and relationships. Brian, thanks. I know you are busy, so I appreciate your time, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to get to know you a little bit as well. I’d love to leave you with the final word.

It’s been a pleasure being here, and I hope your readers find a little nugget of something that they find valuable and entertaining. I appreciate you having me.


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