SMU Cox's Strategy for the Next Decade: Talent, AI, and the Business of Higher Ed | Todd Milbourn

Where do you see SMU Cox the next 3 to 5 years?

World domination.

Todd Milbourne is the 10th Dean of the SMU Cox School of Business, where he also holds the Tolleson Chair in Business Leadership and the Andrew H. Chen Endowed Chair in Financial Investments. An experienced academic leader, Todd brings a long-term vision focused on advancing teaching, research, and real-world engagement to prepare the next generation of business leaders. His work sits at the intersection of rigorous scholarship, leadership development, and and the evolving needs of the business community.

What do you think the biggest risk is to university, or is it one of those institutions where it's too big to fail?

Definitely not too big to fail. Higher education has never been under more pressure than I think it's been over the last few years.

It seems to me there's going to be some displacement associated with AI.

AI is going to disrupt many, many jobs across many, many industries. Where is our advantage then going to come in? Is, can we identify new problems? It can do a lot of stuff, but it's still going to do what you've specifically told. And I think that's a big part of what we can train at an academic institution.

There's a spirit at SMU Cox, a drive that pushes professors to go further, that sparks ambition in our students and inspires alumni to open doors for the next generation because they know Mustangs will rise to meet any challenge. It's an energy that fuels bold thinking and real-world learning, that drives us to create cutting-edge programs for the industries shaping tomorrow. It's why we invest in innovative spaces where students connect, grow, and lead. This spirit has lifted our rankings, delivered breakthrough outcomes, and attracted a new era of leadership committed to going even further, faster. It's built SMU Cox into an engine for economic growth a pipeline for skilled talent, and a partner in innovation to fuel Dallas and beyond. It's this Mustang spirit that brings us together and sets us apart. Join us. So, you know, we were just talking about the Miami game. You're saying that was like one of the most exciting events you've ever been to.

Oh dear Lord, I've never, I've never been at a live sporting event with that much sort of drama, passion, and excitement. I was blown away.

Yeah.

And it was one of the first games that I actually saw, I think, 11 plays from scrimmage, which was 3x on the number of plays I'd seen in the previous 4 games, because you're just busy shaking hands and kissing babies and trying to meet people.

Yeah, because you're still like 6 months to a year in a new job where you're still politicking and, like you said, shaking hands, kissing babies.

Yeah, there's a lot of that. You know, I'm literally just crossed the, the half-year mark, so I think I'm 6 and 3rd, approximately. You know, you start keeping these things pretty precise in the beginning.

I think, I think I've heard you say, I think you said last night about being the away games your favorite because then you can actually watch the game.

It is nice to sit back on your couch. And we did go to one away game. We actually went out en masse as the whole leadership team to Boston College, which was really cool. So it's kind of playing, leaning heavily into the ACC, which is phenomenal for sports. And maybe we'll chat about this more, but to me it's a much bigger academic accelerant of just putting you, hey, we're now in BC, we're going to beat the pants off Stanford. Stanford in a football game, but what happens is you're in a box score with Stanford as opposed to some no-name school. That's pretty spectacular.

Yeah, it's fascinating how the dynamics between academia and athletics and how sometimes there's tension, but it's like if you have a winning team, your university is lifted.

Everything is lifted. I mean, there's something— even if you're not winning, and this was a big appeal to me, in looking at, you know, potential deanships, you know, once you've been around for a while, you get some gray hair. I had been in the dean's office for a decade at my previous institution. And so you're going to show up on the search firm's list. One of the checkmarks for me was they had to have Division I sports. Now, part of that is I'm a huge sports fan. I actually naively thought I would get to watch those in real time, you know, at home games, etc. But there is just something about that passion and purpose that everybody just has for the whole institution that I think the overwhelming root cause for that is the athletics. I mean, I was at a Division III place for 25 years. I was a DIII guy way back in the day, maybe 55 pounds and 1 and a quarter fake knees ago. But to be a D1, nobody wore the t-shirt on Friday. You know, here you can have your faculty and staff, everybody's talking about it. That just— it just generates a kind of a shared purpose and ownership that you can't— I think it's really hard to replicate with anything else outside of sports.

So, so being the dean of the Cox School, which is the business school at SMU, like, and now how SMU is, is R1, R2, what is the R1 research?

Number one, baby.

I just don't know. I don't know the, the, the, the, the how they spell it out. But, and I've heard you say before how research is just, you're going to go full throttle on that. Is there any research aimed towards NIL, the effects of NIL, athletics, college, university? Is that something that's being looked at from an academia standpoint, or is it more just business?

You know, from a— we'll look at it with a research lens, but it's really in the business of running a university and where that can play a huge role. I mean, the more prominent you are, the more prominent your bowl game. You know, I felt terrible for the young man when you lose to Cal, but then you step back from a business perspective, you're like, oh man, the financial implications of not being in the ACC game. And to be honest, everybody was looking past Cal. I think we were already looking past Virginia in that game. And you start looking at the financial implications that are direct for being in the CFPB, that the equivalent paid media spend that also comes from that is just dramatic. So there's no way not to look at it with a business lens from there. From the standpoint of kind of research, looking at NIL, I think would be an interesting paper or two that, you know, some of myself or some other minority faculty where we do the scholarly side of the research I think it's a nice platform as you're putting in essentially a pseudo salary cap. It's not strictly enforced because obviously they can get endorsement deals outside. I think there will be a paper or two that will emerge over the next couple of years. I don't know if my faculty will necessarily look at it, but certainly as an institution, I know President Artsol, the Provost, Damon Evans over as the AD, they are clearly thinking about the business of doing it. Because if you're going to do something, you've heard our president say it's all about winning. Clearly, an AD is going to say the same thing. To win, you do need the financial resources to do it. There's no way to separate the two.

Then one last question, I promise I'll.

Get Lane in here.

Is Lane here too? Yeah, he's right there. Thanks for having me on your joint show.

He's very engaged. He's an executive MBA student.

Literally, SMU gets a shout out every single interview. But the business of running a university, the business of running a business school, the business of running the athletic program, Being that the Cox School is so prominent in the business community and in that world, how many resources in the Cox School is actually going to assist in those other departments to help them with their actual business?

I was going to step back. When you think about a university, and SMU and Cox School is not unique, the professional schools at any university by definition and sort of by construction need to be a net contributor to the greater whole. If you think it's important to have a performing arts side, it's unlikely the performing arts are going to generate the same resources that will be able to deliver that in an exceptional way. And so what do you do is you put, you know, you can think of a university as we're very much like a holding company. And so there's going to be divisions of the holding company that are more economically viable, and they can help to support what you deem to be an important or key strategic investment, which could be the performing arts, it could be arts history. It could be some of the other humanities that are going to be harder economically to be able to pay for that party as a standalone division. And I think athletics fits in that as well.

I'll take a step back. Dean Todd Milburn, welcome to The Deal Table. Welcome to Dallas.

Thank you.

Delighted to have you here. You spent 25 years at a great university, Wash University in St. Louis. And you said that when you've been in the dean's seat there for a period of time, you start getting you start getting recruited. Why Dallas? Why SMU?

The list was very long. The list was very long. So I always start with, I'm originally a Chicago boy. So where I spent 25 years at WashU in St. Louis, I'm not a St. Louis Cardinals fan. So please ask me about the Cubs, the Bears, the Bulls. I'm not a White Sox hater, but they're second to my, to Cubs from there. While I was at WashU, so I spent a decade as either the vice or deputy dean. I supported across that 10 years, 2 full-time deans and 2 interim deans. I think it's the longest stretch that any vice or deputy dean had served in that role at the Olin Business School, probably maybe in it since its existence, but certainly in the 30-plus years that I was familiar with it. As you were, you know, I had kind of done my dean's deal. I'd finished up in 2023, went back to faculty. Even while I was in the dean's office, I continued to do research. I was still teaching, in fact teaching a little bit more than my required load because I really enjoyed it. I spent the next year when a new dean had come in from the outside. I said, all right, 4 deans is enough. I don't need to support 5th. And Dean Mazzio, he's doing great. He came in and took the seat and brought in some of his own team. Took a year just to kind of get my feet under me. I did kick the tires on a couple positions going through, like, well, maybe we should— we'll throw the hat in the ring. And it's good to do that because it's a different kind of interview game in doing it. So I was glad I had some practice before I really threw my hat in the ring for the one that I wanted. Now, to your question, Lane, of why SMU Cox, Over time, because you'll get— search firms will send any and all, from the worst possible school to something like an LBS was one that approached me about a year and a half ago. London Business School, sorry, LBS. I can't— you come up with a checklist of sort of how politely you're going to say no. And so for me, it had to be first a very good school, at least a good or a very good school with aspirations to be great. And SMU Cox absolutely had that. I was— I asked a second question. Everybody aspires to be better than they are. So I'd ask the question, is that really feasible? I used to make a joke athletically. I wish I was 6'5" with 4.4 speed, but that never happened no matter how much I would have wished for it. So wishing to elevate your game, is it real? And here I felt like it was real in spades, in particular because of the economic environment that surrounds the SMU campus. There is no more exciting place to be a business school dean than the city of Dallas that is just growing at an astronomical rate. So that was a big piece. Third checklist for me is I had to have an undergraduate program. There's a lot of exceptional business schools that have only graduate business education. University of Chicago, Northwestern Kellogg, they don't have an undergraduate business. Harvard, Stanford, neither one. And so for me, there's just something— I love our graduate programs, I love our Executive MBA students, Ryan's Fantastic member of our class there. It's an incredibly important and value-add thing that we do. But there's just something to me kind of drives the needle a little bit more for what you can do for an 18 to 22-year-old's life trajectory is you just get a much longer window over which you can affect not just their life, but everybody they're going to touch. And then I'll get to the sports, which we've alluded to. I wanted there to be D1 sports. The fifth and kind of final piece is that you had to believe in the leadership of where the university was going. And we were coming— this was now where we knew President Turner, right? You know, a giant for sure, brought SMU through the death penalty, really put SMU as an academic institution on the map. But I knew he was turning over. And coming in, if you don't know who the CEO of the holding company, which is the president, if you don't know who the leader is, sort of what their values are and where they're going to want to take the university, this could be the best job in the world, that could be the worst time of your life. And so when Jay Hartzell was announced in early January, that became the key piece.

So I don't know the mechanics of being a dean in the sense that you use a holding term analogy, which I think is great. And I sort of think of it like a private equity firm with portfolio companies, you know, to extend that analogy. And so How do you function as a dean? Do you have a budget? What levers can you pull as a dean to impact the day-to-day operations of the school?

Yeah, no, I think the sort of set of, you know, the portfolio of operating companies or just a general holding company is the right analogy. Is obviously I have responsibility for my own budget, but there is, because there's a university or, you know, the PE fund itself or the university, there is going to be some give and take between those. I was kind of, I joke that I call it, you know, these are the taxes that we pay to center that help support the activities that are there. So you do have, you know, you do have pretty reasonable control over your budget. And we're making some moves to try to make that even more transparent and incentive compatible to grow and to collaborate, which is something I'm really excited about that's happening. One big thing that I think is really different about being a dean of a business school that makes it, on one hand, you're like a CEO, and on the other hand, you are the CEO of a partnership. So with respect to sort of staff, they view you as truly truly the boss. You are the CEO of that organization, and so you're going to be managing resources that staff get, helping on promotion, guiding the strategic— the strategy for the school. For faculty, it's a little bit different. In particular, tenured faculty is— if you think of it as managing a partnership, these are the senior partners, and you might become in and become the president of the partnership or the CEO of the partnership, but you're only going to be there for a period of time, and it's going to be finite. And if the senior partners are not a big fan, they realize they're going to be senior partners long after you're going to be partners. Tenured faculty realize they're still going to be here, whether it's 10, 15 years from now, on to the next dean. And so it's a very empowered workforce, which I think changes a bit of just how you're going to work with people. You got to make sure that they get buy-in in what you're doing. I think that's a subtlety on the faculty side. Probably many people don't appreciate— you can't just say jump and they're going to say how high. Not that that's my style anyway. You really have to make sure you've got them engaged. But I think that's also just good management.

So real quick on that subject, like, because your role is a CEO of the business school, but you're part show pony, you know, part decision maker, part—.

You'Ve been called a show pony before.

Capital raiser. It's the first time I've had that one. I've had some other colorful terms of what I am in the new environment, which I'm not going to share.

But of all the hats you have, because again, you do have to be the guy that's cheering on your students, you're cheering on your faculty, but you're also the guy that has to lay down the law. So it's like you have all these— I mean, you always hear the expression of somebody wearing a ton of hats, but your hats are so different where, again, show pony, where you're cheering people on. But then also you're trying to engage in businesses to see the value of SMU. And then you have your bosses and your strategic partners you have to— I don't want to say suck up to, but you know, you got to pay your dues.

You got to build relationships. Right. And there's important stakeholders that— Stakeholders is.

The word I was looking for.

There we go.

But like, so how are you— how do you— in terms of time as the dean, is it all equal or is it always a moving target, or where do you see your time most valuable?

It's everywhere. So there's something a lot of times when you're especially of a professional school, when you're a dean, you'll often get the question, are you going to be mainly an externally facing dean or are you going to be the internally facing dean focused on the operations, the programs, etc.? And my running joke has been when someone asks, are you internal, external? I just say yes. To do it right, you have to be— you've got to do both. I think the proportions of time will vary over the next 5 years. You get a 5-year term to begin. I'm loving this. Hopefully we're going to be doing great. I hope to be renewed for a second, even a third term going forward. In the early days, I can sort of just characterize in this first half year, it's been roughly two-thirds internally facing and about a third externally facing. And internally facing, this goes back a little bit to your question, Leah, that I kind of just touched on with some structure but didn't give you much sort of meat to the answer. You are basically working with everyone to set the strategic course for the school. And so we are about 85-90% of the way through our strategic planning process, trying to run the business school like a proper business that's going to dictate these are our 4 big priorities over the next 5 years. These are the things we're going to need as enablers. Here's our shining vision on the hill, our aspiration of why we're doing these things because we're trying to get to here. And so there you're truly kind of running the business.. And I would say that's been about two-thirds of my time. The other third is that externally facing, which is meeting with trustees, with my own board members, meeting in addition just the Cox— I'm sorry, the business community of Dallas that maybe don't already have an affinity for SMU or Cox, but trying to build those relationships because we are a net talent importer to the region, whether it's for new hires or whether it's continuing education through Exec Ed. Or whether it's through thought leadership, or our research can match to a real business problem that's there. It's really trying to build those relationships. I think if you think of that sort of two-thirds, one-third, two years from now, if the strategic plan is starting to come to pass and we're executing it, and I'm a pretty impatient guy, so we will be doing that. As we're doing those things, it could get to a point where maybe it's half-half.

I mentioned to you that I'm from Memphis, and I served on the board of the Fogelman College of Business at the University of Memphis years ago, and, and there was a new dean installed while I in that role, Dean Rajiv Grover, and he sat down with the board and he said, are we talking to our customers? And I thought that was kind of interesting because I don't really think of academia as being sort of customer-facing. And he said, who are our customers? And I thought that was an interesting question as well. And he said, we really have two customers. We have our students, but we have the employers in the city of Memphis that hire those students. And if either side of that equation is unhappy, we've got a problem. Have we gone out and— asking the board, have we gone out in the community and asked them how we're doing? And we hadn't. And we went out and we talked. FedEx was the largest employer in the city of Memphis, actually in the state of Tennessee. And we went to FedEx. That's broader than just Memphis.

Yeah.

And we said, how are we doing? And they went, not so great. And we said, how can we improve that? And ultimately that led to a FedEx curriculum where they sponsored scholarships The point of that, though, is that you're in Dallas, Texas. It's growing rapidly. You have this wonderful business community, and you're trying to attract students, and you're competing against all the other schools in Texas and outside Texas. I had a, someone call me the other day that said, should my child go to SMU Business Graduate School or Michigan? I have no idea. Of course, I said SMU, right? I have no criteria in which to make that recommendation. But I guess the question is, how do you think about that of, are you pleasing students? Are you pleasing the employers of those students? How do you think through that?

Yeah, I mean, I love that sort of bifurcation is you definitely, those are both of our customers. I think it's less about, you have to keep the students happy, but I don't think of it as pleasing the students. Either they or their families are making a huge financial investment to be there, whether it's undergraduate or graduate. They're making a huge investment in their time, so the opportunity cost what they gave up to be there. And so for me, I always think of it as, are we truly adding value to that individual student in a way that they can find themselves a purposeful career that can extend for their entire life?

Right.

But to be able to do that, you've got to make sure you are delivering. To have a purposeful career, those need to be skills and objectives and sort of, you know, tool accessibility, if you will, or familiarity that they're going to want to employ those. And so you are out working with both of those. I mentioned the strategic plan before we even put any pen to paper. Clearly you have some ideas of things you're going to go, and there was some low-hanging fruit. Yeah, we're going to go invest in faculty for research. Those were just obvious things. But a big part of that strategic plan was the information gathering. So we did a massive survey university-wide. Obviously I'm focusing on the data for all of our internal faculty and staff. We had at the Cox School of Business north of 90% participation in that survey from our faculty and staff. And people that have run surveys, if you get high single digits, usually you're happy. 90%. We then had an additional survey to current students, to alums, and then we had 60,000 contacts that are from the business community, not just in Dallas, but— and not just nationally, but globally, to rephrase that. Now, we didn't get 90% in these next buckets, but meaningful numbers that collected what are we getting right, where are our gaps right now in a world that's changing faster than any of us I think have seen in our lifetimes, where do we think it's going? And that's literally been the raw data with which we've been working with that's designing the plan.

Talking about the customer and the business of college, it feels like the business of college in the last 10 years has gotten a lot of heat, especially with the creator economy and all these influencers like, oh, entrepreneurism, you don't need college. Drop out now, just get a phone and start making video or whatever. That coupled with now you have all these AI things, and then also you have economic factors. What do you think is the biggest risk to the university system as a whole? And, and just, just to preface, we have had people like Jim Keys on Education is Freedom where he's a huge proponent of education, and, and I'm a, I'm a huge I'm obviously a huge promoter of education, but I see it.

More for— Because you haven't graduated yet, so keep that safe for a while.

Yeah, right.

I had a final this morning. But it's just the element of the relationships, the human intelligence, all those factors that come in. And if you look at, in my opinion, if I'm looking at college as a math class, yeah, that's probably not going to be relevant to a career down the line. But if you look at it the whole, It's just obvious to me. But when you have so many people online just dunking on it or AI or this or that, or I'm making millions as a 17-year-old dropshipper or whatever, all that to be said, what do you think the biggest risk is to university, or is it one of those institutions where it's too big to fail?

Yeah, it's definitely not too big to fail. I mean, separate— you hit on a bunch of really almost all— a bunch of big third rail potential. Topics that I think university leaders are thinking about. Higher education has never been under more pressure than I think it's been over the last few years. And I made this, but I did an interview with the 1911 Group or sort of a fireside chat just a couple of days ago, and I made the same statement. Arguably, there was a bit of probably overcapacity. And if you look through, this happens for any kind of industry, just happens to be in the higher education space is, You get growth and growth and growth. And at some point, maybe you've got more manufacturers than you need. Maybe you have more colleges and educational systems than you need. And you've seen over the last few years, there's been some rightsizing. A lot of smaller schools have had to basically fold tent. It was a little college right next to my former institution at WashU. Really just, I looked out, we can't keep the lights on, just turned it off, closed up shop. And I think WashU came in and bought up all the real estate and got some dorm space out of it. But I think there's going to be a bit of continued sort of compression in the number of universities that are there. I don't think it goes away. I still think education is your— whether it's access to freedom, but it just puts you into a different conversation and just opens up so many more potential doors. Now, clearly, that sounds self-serving for what we're doing. It's been interesting to watch over the last few years is we are right in the early days what was referred to as the undergraduate academic cliff. And it was simply from the fact that during, during and around the global financial crisis, when businesses were shutting down and we were in a pretty deep— we were in the Great Recession, people decided this may not be the best time to crank out a little baby. And so there were simply less children born across that 2, 3-year period, which means there are fewer bodies available in that 17, 18-year-old group nationally that are looking to go to school. That was the undergraduate cliff that was there. The way that has manifested itself is some of these smaller, maybe more boutique colleges or liberal arts schools, or maybe ones that just potentially weren't doing a good job, those have started to go away as the demand from students kind of fell. But applications at the very top, so it's been really the tale of two cities in a sense, applications for the very top schools, SMU included, were continuing to rise while this cliff came in. And so I think it was more of a reshuffling of we're going to get more folks into perhaps the better institutions as some of these go away.

So you had that— it seems like there are two issues there. One is this smaller population of potential students. So, you know, there's excess capacity, as you said, and that's going to hurt the weaker players. The other seems to be the advent of Online education combined with— you talked about people that are challenging the historical construct, like an Elon Musk who says, I don't care if you have a college degree or not. So you have some people that have loud voices that are saying it doesn't matter to me. And then you've got the alternative, which is I can go to the University of Phoenix or whatever it is where I can, you know, have a Zoom call with a professor and they can leverage their And so SMU to me seems to be taking the position, we're going to invest in buildings, we're going to have a beautiful campus, we're going to have a football stadium on campus, we're going to deliver this larger experience versus this stripped-down version of education. But that wasn't the case 20 years ago. So you have a smaller population of college-bound students combined with maybe alternatives that didn't exist when— certainly when I was going to college.

For sure. So I think there's a number of things that are happening. I am for those that want to get a 4-year degree. And now we've seen the data because we all kind of shut down our campuses and pivoted to Zoom during the global pandemic. Right. You know, different states and different colleges did it for longer durations in time, but that sort of changed. And it really caused us to sort of up our game. But we got to see the data. If you are really trying to get the most out of a program, You could see it from exam performance. You could see it in the writing performance. You could see it in assignment performance. Those that were sitting physically in person always did better on the same set of tests than those that were doing it from Zoom. And we kind of know when you're on a Zoom meeting, yeah, you're going to be more likely to— you keep looking up, but we're all pretty good at kind of clearing an email or a text while we're in Zoom, especially if you've got 40, 50 people sitting on it. What is a huge benefit that came out of it, so I think that's why we're still committed that when available and for the right student and for the right program, in-person is still the best way to do it. But what we also is we learned some really good tricks out of Zoom that I actually brought back in when I moved back into the classroom full-time is that I would still create a Zoom link with my 50 undergraduate students in the room. I would still use my own iPad as the whiteboard rather than going up and writing it across here and still just put it on. And I just projected that. We were still in real time. It was still Q&A. It was synchronous like we had done on Zoom, but we were in person and people paid more attention. You could kind of tease somebody if they're looking at their phone too much, like, hey, tell mom I said hi. You get your jokes. You try not to embarrass someone, but you keep a little bit of the nudge that's there. And so it causes us to up our game from a technological standpoint that we actually teach better. With that, it's a couple of things, whether you need to go to school or not. Elon's obviously a pretty loud and powerful voice, and it's like, if you want to come work for me, that's not what I'm going to look for. And that's— if you can get him, if he would double down and say, hey, for others you do need to go through it, but for those that are going to be the Jimmy or Janie Neutron that can come in and work with my mania, yeah, you probably didn't need to go to college, and probably sitting in a classroom isn't going to work for that kind of kid anyway. But I think as someone who is say, I don't necessarily need the 4-year degree, but I just need some technical training in something, then an online program, University of Phoenix, a YouTube video can augment some of the skill sets that they need. And I think you have to deliver education for whatever that purpose would be. I think we have to be open to those. That's not our lane that we're going to play in for an undergrad, but it is a lane we play in for our graduate programs where, hey, you're working full-time, Hey, this semester, really, I'm traveling for work a lot. It's going to be really hard for me to get in in person to be in a class. But if I could jump on the online or a live remote version of it for that semester, it doesn't slow down my educational path towards an MBA, but I can still keep the lights on with my jobby job on this side. And I think we've got to be more flexible in that.

Yeah, I think on that note about like the, the people that would be capable of working with Elon Musk, those people will most likely not go in school anyway. I think you've always had those guys and those gals, but I think the problem nowadays is everybody thinks they're a superstar. Everybody thinks they're super special. Everybody thinks they're the smartest in the world. It's like, I think the risk there is like, hey, bro, you're not that smart. Maybe you should go to school and maybe learn something.

It's the American Idol effect. You're really not a good singer.

Yeah, because like— If you could screen those a little earlier so that someone doesn't get too far off the track for 5 years, that would be more efficient.

Right, but I'm just saying, and there's just a comment, there's really no value add other than like, hey, you're probably not that smart.

Stay in school. These are not words— for the record, these are not words I've said out loud.

Looking right there. There you go.

There you go. No, but I think there's also one thing is there is never— I mean, I believe this. I'm a free market. I'm a finance guy. There's no one size fits all. That's why regulation one size fits all doesn't work. This is why one size fits all policies for at a university for what humanities or an education school is not necessarily going to fit for what you're trying to do in a business school. Same thing for education. If you're along the way and all of a sudden you do come up with— you have a skill or an idea that is economically viable, well, hit pause. That university most likely, unless you're a fringe player that maybe needed to get squeezed out, isn't going anywhere. I had a kid— it was— this has now been, gosh, 8, 9, 10 years ago. This was at WashU, prestigious undergraduate institution, Washington University in St. Louis. I think it was his junior year in the business school, which was the hardest school at WashU to get into as an undergrad. He came in and he was doing DJing on the side, and he was starting to pick up more and more gigs. He was picking up $100,000 to go to Vegas on a weekend. He's like, man, I feel terrible if I I step away from this? Like, dude, we'll still be here. Like, we're going to be here if this works out. You're going to go make $11 billion, and Godspeed to you. Finish your education if you even need it at that point. But this seems like this is kind of a one-moment-in-time chance to go. And so even though I was the finance faculty, I think I was even in the dean's office at that time, I said, absolutely, you should go pursue this. I think if you've got that, take the stab at it. We'll still be here.

There was a guy in, in my cohort. Yeah, I finished the first semester and then I think halfway through the second semester, he was a Google— he was a Google exec and he got tapped by, you know, some financier to start to launch an AI company. When there's that many commas.

Yeah.

Yeah. You take the opportunity.

Come back and say yes. And that AI is an existential risk we haven't addressed. As I mentioned to you, I'm an instructor in the Business Leadership Center, which is how Ryan and I met and ultimately how this podcast was born. And the last few times— Thank you for your service.

It's good to have you on my payroll, my friend.

It's a great pleasure and I enjoy it and I meet a lot of really interesting people and a lot of great opportunities.

Come.

And so this last semester I lecture on alternative investments and mergers and acquisitions.. And after each of those sessions, there was a line of students and invariably the question was, is there going to be a job for me or is AI going to take that job? And I have talked to some people in financial services here who have said, we're not hiring that entry-level position right now because we can get what we need through artificial intelligence. So it, it seems to me there's going to be some displacement associated with AI, but I don't think it's going to be this catastrophic event. Others are forecasting that though. Do you have an opinion on that?

I do. I tend to be an optimist, and this also would sound self-serving, right? But there's a lot of forecasts out. I am a firm believer— there's no question AI is going to disrupt many, many jobs across many, many industries. I'm a firm believer that AI, as it continues to grow, and as now we get into even more powerful generative AI, there are going to be more jobs created than destroyed. But they're not going to be the same jobs. They are going to unequivocally be different. And I think as a, you know, I view my role in that and leading the charge of all of our faculty and staff and helping to guide our students through that is to make sure they're in ability to pivot as the world changes. And so one, and I'm going to call it or refer to it often as a risk management strategy for it, and it's like we're not shying away from it, is preparing our students to get there is one way to do that is can we infuse the entrepreneurial mindset or infuse entrepreneurial thinking into all of our students? Now, we're going to have a host of students that do create a business idea and go out and start that. And we're doing a whole host of things to try to foster and encourage that where we can. But 90-95% of our students are going to go work for an established company, whether it's small, medium, or big. But if you can think and get some of the traits that an entrepreneur has, in particular the grit, the resilience, the ability to frame your mind of, I need to take some risk-adjusted bets. Like an entrepreneur has to do. The resiliency for me is the most important, is every entrepreneur gets knocked on their backside multiple times, and everyone that we know that comes through on the other side that's successful finds a way to stand up, knock the dust and dirt off their jeans, pivot, be nimble, and move into that next thing. And I think if we can get sort of that resiliency and a broad set— I'll come back to a set of other characteristics statistics that are there, that if one particular path all of a sudden starts to close, that they're going to be a broader student, that they're going to say, you know what, I can take the skill sets that I have, I'm going to be very familiar with all the tools of how to augment my own expertise with AI, and I'm going to be able to pivot in whatever that new job may be.

Real quick though, also I think there's an element of the echo chamber as well, because when you have students that are at school and they're talking about AI there's so many people that have zero AI usage, right? Paul and I were talking about a mutual friend that's working on his house, and he was showing him how to use ChatGPT. Here you have a master electrician who's one of the smartest persons I know dealing with, with, you know, voltage and all this other thing, never touched ChatGPT. I have a nephew who does instrument repair at A&M, zero usage whatsoever with AI. So my point to say the echo chamber is the students, you know, we're forward-thinking, we're looking at it, and we're using AI all the time for different aspects. I do think there is a bit of echo chamber in that world because I try to use AI for things and I still fail at it, and.

I'm like, well, crap, I'll just do.

It the real way, you know, for business-wise. So I like the real way. Well, that real way is changing. Actually, I have to do work I can't just push a button. But I do think there's the— I forgot what it's called, but the hype curve. And I think there is a hype curve aspect. But there's definitely— there's obviously AI usage. But I agree with you in terms of job creation versus doomsday.

We saw this with the Industrial Revolution. All of a sudden, there was a lot fewer farmers. And yes, there were farmers that were displaced. But those that wanted to survive and still wanted to feed their family, retooled and then moved into a manufacturing facility. And we've seen the data and how that ran. That led to even greater growth, which was more productivity and more jobs. I see AI as that tool and technological advance— advancement that's doing exactly the same thing. Where we step back is we are infusing it into everything we do. Any student leaving the Cox School of Business needs to be adept in a multitude of different AI tools. And it's really how to augment your expertise. But it's expertise plus AI. It's not AI and maybe I know something else. You've got to be expert in understanding. And I think that's where the critical thinking, maybe taking a class on logic, making sure they're good problem solvers. And importantly, the value of humanity, I think, is going to start to go up dramatically as AI can do more things. I mean, I was a math major in undergrad. President Herzl and I were kind of joking about this. We were both math majors undergrad. You do a PhD in financial economics, there's a ton of math involved. You know, we had to actually learn how to grind through all these equations. I joked, used to have this huge book that had 14,000 integrals that were solved and you'd see one and you'd kind of flip through of what would be the method to get there. Now it's going to be one click and that thing does it. But where is our advantage then going to come in? Can we identify new problems or a new way to think about what the solution may be? We're just going to be able to get to an answer more quickly with this one. And I think right when, when ChatGPT first came out, every university— and my past one was the same, and I'm sure they did the same thing at SMU Cox— who immediately said, oh, we need a tool that will tell us if they used AI to write this answer. And so you'd plug it in as, does this seem to be AI-generated? And so it was all about trying to stop it. And I, you know, and I think that was a natural reaction, just like you don't want somebody copying from a fraternity file. Or something. You want people to have to do independent work. And now we're leaning in saying, okay, we just need to lean in. They need to know how to use it. Let's make sure they understand the limitations. So one of my colleagues, he teaches a class. I don't know if you've had Venky on our— from our marketing faculty for a class yet, but he did it for our full-time MBA. So I think it was a full-time MBA class, came in as maybe 30 students in the room. He just verbally said, here's what I want all of you to log in. I don't know if he used Claude or Gamma or ChatGPT, picked one in the class and said, hey, here's what I want you to use your AI to do. And he just said it verbally. And so everybody had to come up with their own prompt of what they were supposed to get. He then posted all 30 of them up on the screen and every single answer was different because people had used different ways of framing what the problem that he had said. Now, obviously, if he had pasted it up there, everybody would have typed that in. But it was to say, these are the limitations. Yeah, it can do a lot of stuff, but it's still going to do what you've specifically told. And I think that's a big part of what we can train at an academic institution.

And I think, you know, just something to showcase SMU a little bit is, you know, if most— if you would think about universities, you think of the bureaucraticness, you think about how slow they are to turn on anything. And last semester I had a class that— that AI strategy, actually, it might have been— no, it wasn't even— it was Mod A of this semester. There was like one class on AI strategy, and then it was Helmut Ludwig. And then all of a sudden there's like two other classes that now— so what I'm getting at is the speed and pace that SMU is seemingly adapting in actually integrating these core beliefs and these core learning curves into the program, where normally it would have been, we'll get to that in 3 to 5 years.

Yeah. Now, universities tend to move in glacial speed. So my running line since I got here and got dropped out of the plane at a dead sprint since June 1st was we're trying to melt that glacier as quickly as humanly possible. And I think we've been great at jumping in to do it. And it's symbiotic. We learn from the students because you're going to have a handful of kids in the classroom that are clearly more adept at the technology than we are. I'm getting pretty old and I still hand my phone to my grandson or my youngest son to say, hey, I can't get this thing to work. This new software update is weird, they can solve it quickly. And so it is, it's a two-way street on these, which is pretty fun.

I want to talk about your, you talked about coming in and tenured faculty, but beyond the tenured faculty, you have a team of people around you at the business school. And I guess like a head football coach coming in, you've got to evaluate that talent. You got to think about, you know, to have the right people in the right seats doing the right things. I do want to acknowledge you really have some exceptional and outstanding people over there. Gotta give a shout out to John Terry, who is a shareholder in my firm and a good friend and has been on our— one of the first guests on our podcast. But I also want to talk about Shane Goodwin. Shane leads the SMU Corporate Governance Initiative, and you have a background in incentives and executive compensation. And I know you know this, but Shane advised Tesla's special committee on the compensation package for Elon Musk. It must, must make you proud to have a team of people around you at SMU that are playing at that level.

Yeah, no, I have an absolutely exceptional team. I had great people at WashU. There's not a single person I would trade out that's on my team here at Cox from either the faculty or the staff. Yeah, we'll keep augmenting and adding. On the corporate governance one, it's great. It's putting the right person on the right initiative. And I've known Shane for quite some time. Just academics at the end of the day kind of a small world. You know who's doing research or who's working on different things. It's clearly always been his passion. You go back to his banking days at Goldman. I mean, that is just where he lives and breathes. Under Dean Myers, you know, he had taken on and oversaw the graduate programs for a really long time in addition to that exec ed. We came in, he and I chatted this summer, and I'm like, what do you really want to do? And clearly I have a huge— with the All Street coming, the rise of the Texas business courts, my own research and focus is been really on corporate governance. And we started talking about this idea. So we have a joint initiative, it's with the Devon Law School. And so it was one of my onboarding trips between signing the contract in March to actually get being officially in the seat June 1st. I want to say it was probably mid-April, but it was Dean Myers, myself, Shane Goodwin, Dean Jason Nance came over and said, hey, we want to maybe think about this. Once I got here, you can have a great idea, but unless somebody's going to run point and go make things things happen. And so near the end of August, I'm like, Shane, would you be willing to be redeployed over to this? I think he jumped out of his seat. He might have given me a hug, he was so excited to do it. But he's just the right person to be doing it. And he's been out obviously getting the practical side of advising, you know, trillion-dollar pay package. You get some mixed messaging that comes back. But the fact that he is out there, and I'm exceptionally excited about where.

We'Re going to go with that. The Quadrangle, the investment that SMU's made in the business the school's physical structure. Obviously, it was under construction for a period of time, and so I was getting bounced around campus for— Oh yeah.

All over the place. Yeah, it was about 2 years, I think, it took them to get that done.

Right, and then I showed up one day when it was finished, and it's remarkable. Can you speak to what the investment was and what the result of that is?

Yeah, no, it's an interesting— and I had actually had come to Cox twice in my life to present just research papers. I was here right around 2005, came in and gave a finance— one of the research papers I had to their finance group. It's kind of a way to get your research out. So I'd been out here sort of mid-2000s, came back again and gave a different paper seminar, maybe around 2013, and there had been a little bit of construction there. What they had decided to do is they had sort of 3 buildings, all unattached, that were there. And I think it was a choice. Do we literally just raise everything, start from the ground and just build up, or do we try to preserve the history and the legacy of what we had before, but create the most modern business school. And right now it's the best business school that's out there. There's always one upmanship. So within a couple of years, somebody is going to build something that might be close. I still want to think of us as winning, but it was a massive project. It took everybody leaving the building. I think they were out of the building for over 2 years. And so it's a bit of the culture that we're trying to recreate. As you had COVID where everybody had to disperse and go home, they barely came back and then they started construction.. And so you have almost a 4-year period where faculty and staff, everybody was kind of disparate, as you saw from going to teach classes. That structure is absolutely phenomenal. And the thing I remember reading the description of it as I was interviewing for it, and it's like, oh, you know, we have this new building and I hadn't seen it yet other than just a quick walkthrough. And it was the first week they were opening. So students weren't quite there yet to get a feel. Said we want a building where students are comfortable 9 to 9. And I'm like, that's really cute tagline. I'm sure that helped to raise some money, etc. It is unequivocally true. The students are simply in every single space of that building from early in the morning until late at night. The energy that creates, and I think scope for collaboration is phenomenal. So I've got a parking spot that's, you know, it's because the dean spot occasionally people go in there and I kind of smirk. I go make sure to mark down their grade. I said, hey, you're great, your grade just got changed. And usually, usually it moves.

I will say that there is a Dean visitor spot, and I have yet to text. I'm like, hey, you've been tempted.

I have.

You've been tempted. But I'm like, I don't want to push— I don't want to push that relationship because like a parking spot, that.

That'S a— but every morning I come in and I park in that spot, and I could go right up to the first level of the floor, but I always go downstairs. Now partly I'm going down to the little convenience mart, my breakfast of champions, and just go grab a protein shake so at least have some calories in me to survive the 10-hour day that's in, in front of me. Uh, you walk down there and you just— the students are there. It's just fun. You just— it gives me a bit of energy just to say they're like, hey, what's up, Dean?

All right, we made it. What's the celebrity status like? Because when you walk around in, in Show Pony, celebrity, celebrity status, guys, he's.

Working for— he's working that grade.

That's funny. What I'm saying is, like, because in that building you are the guy, you know, so there is an element of people, like, they may be surprised to see you walking around. I mean, what's the funniest reaction you've had from, like, a freshman student?

Oh, I've had quite a few, and it's actually from some of the staff, some of the SMU, like, SMU catering staff. I'm a pretty extroverted guy, so I'll just— I'll talk to anybody, say hello. Not as much as Ryan.

That's like— there's, there's— you don't have.

To initiate a conversation with Ryan. Incredibly extroverted. Then there was Ryan, and I'm like, I still have work to do. So I'm, you know, young grasshopper to the master over here, for kung fu reference. But I've had several, like, after a month and a half. Funniest reaction has been— I was actually— I think he was from the, uh, like, maintenance and landscaping crew, was driving around. Also, he stops me just about 2 months ago walking by, he's like, Todd, I didn't know you were the damn dean. Sorry, I just thought you always said you're always nice to me. And I'm like, what's the difference? Does that— right. So I think for a while the students thought maybe I was just another faculty member, probably because I am just walking around, give somebody a fist bump, like, how's it going? I think now they're starting, you know, obviously our face gets put up quite a bit. I don't know that I'm famous, but I'm no longer anonymous. You're the show mustache. Um, and so I think they seem— I mean, I love because for me, just that's why we're there. Yeah, it's fun to see. But I did make that line. I said, you know, I'm definitely not famous, but I'm no longer anonymous. And so, you know, walk into restaurants, doesn't matter where you are, it's a little bit of, okay, let's make sure you're kind of always buttoned up. And even at the airport, when you think you're off the clock, you're not.

Really off the clock. So I want to pivot a little bit to, you know, you talk about Y'all Street, Texas Stock Exchange, and the impact not only on, on Texas and Dallas, but the potential for the Cox School of Business itself. Where do you see the partnership? Where do you see the opportunities? Where do you see it on, on, on the SMU Cox role? Where do you see your role, the students' role? And is it a partnership? Is it a feeder? Like, what are the opportunities? I just want you to just pontificate on SMU Cox, Texas Stock Exchange partnership.

I mean, the whole thing is a feeder and a partnership. For sure. And that was a— when I went back and landed, asked me, you know, what drew you here? The thriving economic environment around the school. Like, if you really want to level up a school, you need an economy around where you can engage, you can get students in front of companies, many consulting projects, leads to better internship, leads to better full-time employment. Bring, you know, bringing the business folks to campus for thought leadership. We just had a full 1-day Economics of Healthcare conference 275, 300 people just packed into Crum Auditorium. I've seen Nicole speak now a couple of times. She came in as part of a TexCap, ran their event at ours, and there we had somebody from NASDAQ as well as Nicole came up on Texas Stock Exchange. We had legislators. That's where that symbiotic relationship goes. The All Street is going to be more than the Texas Stock Exchange, right? You've got NYSE is going to be here. In fact, I think they're housed here in Old Parkland. I'm getting to meet their president next week with President Jay, so my boss's boss and the boss of NYSE. Obviously, NASDAQ is coming as well. The exchange, you have really a duopoly whenever you have two firms that are competing. I mean, it's been NASDAQ and NYSE have been the only games in town for US capital markets on equities forever. And now, all of a sudden, you're now bringing in a new player. So there's going to be some naysayers of what's this young upstart, why does how does Texas think they can do this? The fact that NYSE and NASDAQ are like, we need to be on this party. I think they would have come anyway, but I believe they're coming more quickly because you get a new young upstart comes in, you're like, well, wait a minute, we're not going to give up turf in that space. But having those exchanges here, it's going to be less about the amount of trade that's actually happening. Most 90-plus percent of the trades, and it might even be 95% by now, our trades are all done electronically through the BAT system. It's not like you don't have people on the floor like you used to see in Wall Street and all these movies, which looked pretty cool. Now, you want to go do a tour of the New York Stock Exchange floor, they're like, oh, yeah, come on in. They used to have to be, hey, we do this from 4:00 to 4:30, you've got to stay over here. It's like crickets when you walk in, because everything is done outside. But the presence of that, they're coming because of the full force of the financial industry, along with a lot of other industries, but the financial industry coming here. Goldman is going to have more people in Dallas than they are in New York very soon. I am certain Morgan Stanley is only a year or two away before they're bringing another 3,000, 5,000 people in. JP Morgan up north of Dallas, I think they're in— is it Frisco or Plano? I always mix up where JPM is. I want to see Plano, I believe. I think they're in Plano. I think 12,000 or 13,000 people. Schwab just put their HQ here. Everybody and their brother, sister, crazy Uncle Larry in finance are all coming here. That is a huge opportunity. Y'all Street is just going to be, I think, a piece of it. I think having Y'all Street and the Texas business courts is a huge complement to this because you need— if you're going to come and you're going to leave Delaware and do this Dexit to come here, you've got to have the set of corporate sort of contracts in place, the legacy effect that's there so that companies feel comfortable. Yeah, this is a free market environment and we're going to be able to do business more cheaply. That's just bringing all the industries in. And for us as a business school, that is greater opportunities for our students. If I think specifically, and it's coming out very clearly in our strategic plan, you know, you take, you take stock of what are your strengths. Where we are absolutely strongest from a programmatic standpoint is in finance, real estate, and energy. Those are our three biggest. We have great marketing department. We've been making headway into management consulting. Entrepreneurship has been picking up steam, but we are great in finance, real estate finance, and really energy finance have been where we place a ton of students. All of these industries coming in, we're just going to lean even more heavily into that. And I think it's us feeding talent to the region, but it's also the thought leadership of what we can do back and forth.

That ecosystem is pretty powerful.

One thing I just heard there is we need to invest in— I don't know if you can long vest vests, because the amount of vests that people are going to start buying in Dallas. The Finance Bro vest? The Finance Bro vest. The Finance Bro vest.

Stupid joke. My bad. The British will call them the Gillies. We just call them the Finance Bro vest. I actually wore one out in New York for the first time. And I made that joke to a few people like, yeah, I guess— they had no self-awareness. Of the Finance Bro. I guess we all do wear that. I'm like, you haven't noticed this? I mean, it's like a uniform. No, it'd be good to get some of those.

I was at an event last night and Nicole was there and I had my little vest on. We have an inside joke about the vest because she hates them. Don't tell anybody I said that. But speaking of the finance role, the real estate role, the energy role, do you see the Cox School of Business leaning in on that chair, that tripod? Or do you see you going, hey, obviously we're in old Parkland with Trammell Crow and the likes legacy of— hell, one of the buildings is the Trammell Crow building, but one of the buildings is the McGuire building, which is energy. And like, where do you— do you ever see it ever kind of like going more this direction because of, of y'all street? Hey, we need to lean more finance, or is it all supporting the same.

Kind of a mission? I think they're all heading in the same direction. You definitely don't have to pick an alley among those three. And I think as you, as you see other industries that are coming in, you're starting to see aerospace and defense tech starting to move in. I've taken quite a few meetings just over the last couple weeks as firms that have been headquartered in California are like, hey, defense tech, we're moving to Texas. As the industries change, and I think one thing that we're likely to see over the next 5 years is you're going to see even greater and greater inroads on the tech side side of things. They might come in initially as sort of support to these other industries, but I think you're going to see more and more tech happening over time. It's going to be a necessary ingredient if Dallas wants to be truly a sort of entrepreneurial ecosystem into new industries. You're going to need that to come in, and it's a bit of chicken and egg. But there's— you know, if you fast forward and look at this 3, 4, or 5 years from now, I think you're going to see the tech talent being deeper that then feeds back in that it's a lot easier to move a company in because they realize they have enough talent around that they can tap. And I think that's the directions that we're going. But for us, you know, you pick your thing. What are you really good at? Are they areas that are still in huge demand? Well, yes, finance, real estate, and energy. And that demand's only growing. So you keep leaning in there. Where else can we go? I think the entrepreneurship side is massive. I think we have the ability to be a great focal point as a business school where anywhere where business is at the intersection with tech, data science, and AI. And that's not just the Cox School of Business. That means I'm in partnership with Dean Janan, who runs the Dedman Humanities and Sciences, Dean Jalili, who runs the Lyle School of Engineering. In fact, we actually already have a couple of programs up and running that are going to help to feed these kind of industries that I see us going in.

Talk to me about your student population. I'm kind of curious about the, you know, that U.S. News and World Report fact sheet, right? How many students are there in the Cox School of Business? Where do they come from? I have a daughter who graduated from SMU, but liberal arts, and all of the girls around her in her dorm were from California. So I know California is a big market, but can you sort of help us understand How, how, how big is the school in terms of its population? Where do your students come from? And do you think in terms of what's an ideal student, uh, look like?

Not Ryan. Not Ryan. Ryan's the ideal, right? You get a military vet into my program, I will do that all day long. All day long. All right, back to the undergrad. I'll take those three parts there. Size of the program, we have 500 seniors, 500 juniors, so take 1,000 there, roughly 700 freshmen and sophomores. So that puts us at about, what is that, 2,400 undergrads? Did I get my math right? It'd be pretty embarrassing for a finance guy. Our undergraduate program is growing. We are likely to be closer to 800 freshmen come next year. So our undergraduate population is growing. Part of that's what the strategic plan is looking at is half of our Cox students want to do finance. Do we have some other opportunities where we can grow? And one of those is wealth and asset management. And help putting talent into family offices. Many like— you got a great community here. It's a great community here. That's going to be a piece where that's a great career where they're really smart. They may not want to go out to the iBanking. They may not do our premier ALTS program, but they're smart as a whip. But they also have really good social and emotional intelligence. They can go out the value of the human in that spot. People, when it comes to their money, yeah, you can automate it. Please be really efficient. You still want a person there. And I think that's a spot we can go. Where do our students come from? I kind of change up these, you know, never let the data get in the way, you know, the facts get in the way of a good story. But this is directionally accurate. More than two-thirds of our students at SMU and closer to three-quarters at Cox come from outside of Texas. Really? 75% of Cox students take a job in Dallas. Wow. We are a net importer of IQ points. So they are coming. Now, where are they coming from? We have a lot from California. We have a lot from the Northeast. We have a lot from Chicago. I actually personally recruited a kid out of Miami Beach. So we've got them coming from all over the country. This year, applications were up again. They were up 10% for the undergraduate class. That is on the heels of last year being up 64%. Oh my goodness. Now last year, there were kind of 3 things that changed that everybody says, well, it's hard to disentangle what these are. They went to, they went to the Common App, which makes it easier to say, yeah, also send it here. So that does— you're going to pick up a little bit there. We remain test optional. So if you got a really good test score, you put it in. It's a game I wish we would get away from, but it is that game that's there, right? And, and I think we had zero application fee or a really modest one. The third one, which I think is overwhelmingly the driver, is over a year and a half ago we joined the ACC. I, I truly believe if we were able to do a principal components analysis, that would be the lead one. So they were up 64% last year. We're trending 10% more than that this year. So we're getting students, and it's still that same ratio coming from outside. An ideal student, anybody who has the grit and passion to come in and study business as well as get a liberal arts education, which you do as a business school student, I want that student to be able to come here whether they're financially able or not. But we want the best students that are choosing to be here that want to really embed themselves into the community and into the curriculum and leave it a better place than when they go.

So what does that mean from like, you know, if I'm a student, if I'm an alumni, if I'm the business community at large, the community in general, the staff, what does it mean to be involved?

At SMU? So many ways you can do it. We are actually— what's one thing that's coming out of our strategic plan, like I said, I'm trying to run this like a proper business. What's in the strat plan is what we're going to actually do, is for us at the Cox School to have a better coordinating mechanism for people that want to help. And so we're going to find a way that says, oh, I want to be a guest speaker in a class, I want to mentor a student, I want to have a team of students for maybe 10, 12, 13 weeks work on a mini consulting project for me. Those would be examples of things you could do. We have to do a better job of coordinating. Okay, I need to slot you into this person. I need to slot you in over here. I need to go into that side. And we will have that by this spring. Ways you can help is as you are looking for talent, give us a look. All right. Make sure to reach out to not only the Career Center at the SMU But if it's a broader job, send it over to the Hagee Career Center, which handles the whole SMU community. Give our students a shot to come in and just open the door, take a look. If they're not what you want, no harm, no foul. But I think people would be delightfully surprised what we see. As you are counseling somebody who's thinking about school, make sure you come in and take a peek. Whatever, you know, prejudices you might have or biases you have coming in, positive or negative, Come in and take a look. Come do a tour. Come do one of our, you know, admitted or preview weekends and see what happens there. It's pretty freaking powerful. So come in and give a shot from that standpoint. Engage with our students as you're looking to hire. Please come out and grab our students as you have ideas and thought leadership. Just come hang out on campus. I mean, we put on so many events. I mean, I still feel like I'm in a bit of Candyland. You know, we had St. Louis was a great little business community. My kids grew up there. It was a great spot to be, but it's a small economic microcosm. Once every couple months, maybe once every 3, we would put on a pretty good panel session on a topic and it'd be well attended. That's a random Tuesday here, and I probably could only go to that because I turned down the other great event that was also happening on a Tuesday. There are so many things happening on campus that people can come in and engage in. And I think that's a way to just start meeting people, just start networking a little bit.

One of my favorite things on planet Earth is to be proven right within.

A few minutes of making a statement. It's also one of his favorite things to say. I think I just heard that in the last 24 hours.

Hey, I didn't call you out on the stuff that you repeat. I literally— yeah, I just said the story last night, but I, I met a woman on Wednesday who's coming. She's I think she's starting in the summer. And one of my favorite— this is one of my favorite things about SMU is because it's such a small school, you see, you have the opportunity to meet the Dean Milbourne, the David Millers, the Tucker Bridwells, the whomevers, and they're just there on campus. And it's up to you just to go say hi. And literally 5 minutes after telling her that, we're, we're out in front of one of the parking garages and I see Jim Landon, Security National Bank, who won the Outstanding Alumni Award last year. And that was an opportunity to meet. Hey, Annette, this is Jim. Jim, Annette. And just casual conversation. And I was like, yeah, he's a big deal here. And there he was. So that's one of my favorite things about SMU. But to your point, it's up to you to actually go say hi.

Yeah. Yeah. But we're good at rallying people.

I I try to, yeah. So we're getting close to the end.

Any final thoughts from you, sir? I'm just so happy to be part of— a very small part of the SMU community. It's been a great experience for me and my family when we moved here in 2019 and didn't know many people. The city of Dallas is so excited and enthusiastic and welcoming and supportive of your community. And this podcast and the relationship Ryan and I have came out of, came out of that. So we— and it seems like every other podcast guest we have, including our.

Next guest, is an SMU alum.

And the next two guests. The next two guests are SMU alums.

So I did bring in the last guest of the day is, you know, just came back from Nepal.

So that's different. Right. That's cool. I'd like to come back for that one. Give it my aspirations of a wannabe mountain climber. There you go. I'll watch that one for sure. I watch all of of course, but.

I will watch that one closely. This gentleman, he did something like 59 peaks in, in 7 weeks, something just extraordinary. So, but yeah, the influence of SMU in the community is profound and I'm just really pleased and proud to just.

Have a small role in it. Yeah. And there's, there's so many topics that we haven't covered. I know one of your passion points is, and I'd like to give you like a minute or two to get into it, is like the spirit. Because I know you did— we did cover entrepreneurship a little bit, but I know that is one of your— your not passion projects. It's all— it's all passion for you. Yeah. But I'd like to give you an opportunity to kind of expound on that real quick just before we— yeah, cut out, you know.

Then I'll tee that up and I'll keep it even broader. I'll finish up with the Spear side. And I kind of mentioned it part of in a response to the AI question. I was infusing entrepreneurial thinking into every student. The set of toys in the sandbox that we have available at Cox School of Business in the space of entrepreneurship There's no other business school or university that has what we have here. We have 3 separate institutes in the space of entrepreneurship. We have the Kruth Institute that is the longest standing, most, you know, the first endowed entrepreneurship institute at any business school in the country. And the Kruth really handles kind of our curriculum, the coursework that comes through. We have one called HITEI, which is the acronym, all capital letters, that was graciously endowed by Mitch and Linda Hart. That is a joint research institute across the Cox School of Business and Lyle Engineering. And so where Karuth has been on the curriculum side, HITI is really my tech development side. Is, you know, if you're going to get an invention or a new app, it's more likely to come out of Lyle or Dedmon than it is out of a business school student. But the business school student can add huge value of, hey, let's get to MVP. I can do the business plan, I can push this, here's the marketing, etc. The third piece in this sort of trifecta of awesomeness is the Spears Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership. It's the newest of the three institutes. It has great resources. It is an amazing facilitator, connector, and coordinating mechanism for everything entrepreneurship in that ecosystem, from the angel networks to running its own accelerator this summer. To the business community. Of all of my institutes in— it's run by a gentleman by the name of Josh Taylor. He gets out and he is walking the halls of Weill Engineering and Dedman and the Simmons School of Education and Guildhall on the gaming side and Dedman Law. It is just an amazing opportunity where students have opportunities to get coached, to do business pitches. And this last summer, we had our very first launch of the accelerator program, like running a full incubator from here. We had proper talent from the outside come in and manage all 11 businesses with the 18 students that were there, putting out content, coaching, getting their pitches together, and really more importantly, helping to— with true mentorship in real time— to develop their businesses before they were able to pitch them in the Bush Theater. We had 275 people in there. These 11 kids got up, up, the kids, some of them were a little bit— I think the oldest kid might have been 38, still a kid to me. I'm old enough. They got up, pitched their business. Out of those 11, 3 have already found some funding outside, one to the tune of $2 million, 2 other in the low 6-figure range, but real. We're going to do this again. It was Accelerator 1, and that's going to happen. That's an amazing opportunity for our students who are getting their degree but have come up with that business venture. Well, we're going to continue to see increase new student ventures coming out of the SMU and the Cox community.

Where do you see SMU Cox the.

Next 3 to 5 years? World domination. World domination.