Dank 4/2024 Unveiling the Veil: The Intricacies of Private Club Membership Vetting

0:00 exclusivity models to a lot of these clubs. Some are exclusive by virtue of being that top five percent of clubs in terms of price point. But you know, come on, I mean the best gms that I work with say that we help with their culture and oh damn okay so and oh damn okay so, I was gonna say because that leads right into predictive in information. But I want to talk about diddy uh no, I already hit recording. I was like, oh, it's gonna be a perfect segue, but no, we were chatting and I brought up diddy and just because it's like a relevant topic now, um, and and what?

0:46 Because you know you, you know I do magic and stuff. So what, what you're saying about predicting the future? It's not predicting the future. It was predictive information yeah, well, what we do is provide information, and there's two ways that we provide it reactively, when something bad has happened and somebody says can you help us get our arms around the extent of this and who's at fault and you know what led to it. Right, that's the reactive. In terms of the club's case, it's proactive and the whole thing is based on the same tenants that you have a college application for. The same tenants that you would have a. You know that you would have pre-employment screening for it's that past actions and facts are indicative of future behavior. You know that you would have pre-employment screening for it's that past actions and facts are indicative of future behavior.

1:29 You know, and I've said, I think, on your show, that I'm an optimist. I'm not really an optimist at all, but I say I'm an optimist and I believe that people can always turn a new leaf, except that they don't, you know, and so we do have those rare moments where somebody actually figures it out and changes Is that guessing when that's going to happen is probably not in anybody's best interest, whether it's membership in a club or for a job or any other reason that you would vet someone, and associations are really good at this. They've had standards for a reason. If somebody isn't meeting the standards, now's the time, don't let them in. When it comes to the club world, removing somebody is a nightmare.

2:10 There's usually a very detailed process you have to go through, which involves disciplining the person in second try and third try. Each club is different, but that process is a mess. And so when you have somebody who shouldn't have gotten in in the first place, wow, what a waste of energy and resources, what a hit to the reputation of the club. All unnecessary. If you actually looked at facts and said we can't just rely on others vouching for people. And there's a really good book out there that talks about prediction. And have you heard of the book by Nisam Taleb called Anti-Fragile, the?

2:54 name rings a bell. Okay. Taleb has written a number of books. He's incredibly well-read. The business community is all over him. I think anybody that's into behavioral analysis knows him and his work and whether you love him or hate him, anti-fragile really points out it's a very long book. It's a it's a little bit of a technical book. It takes some. You can't be reading this in bed before you fall asleep and soak it in, you need to be focused. But in the end, what it says is humans are really really bad at predicting things and there are a whole bunch of situations that we skew, whether or not they're fragile, right, meaning the odds of it failing and not working out the way I predict are very high versus things that are very low.

3:38 Sports betting is very, very fragile. I might think I know all about who's going to win the college football playoff next year, but I don't and I'm biased toward teams and people and I have a lack of information. But I tell myself no way my team's going to win. So that's a little bit of an example. But this is no different for wealthy people that are on a member committee, on a board at a club, deciding someone's tape, whether it's a membership director, whether it's a GM. We're really bad at predicting things and when we have less information meaning it's all information controlled by the applicant, maybe a little bit of contribution from other members in the club they don't have all the information.

4:24 And now we're doing this feel-good prediction that the person's going to work out and we just chose not to have facts. So it's kind of crazy, but the anti-fragile narrative plays out over and over again in this space. That's why, if you look at something and I go back to this because I think it works really well what it takes to get accepted into a public university, think about the process and all the documentation and all the review that they do and all the money they spend looking over those applications, because they actually know what's going to be successful at a university. They have really good predictive measures of whether you're going to make it or not. And, yeah, there's always going to be the person that flakes out and you wouldn't expect it to.

5:06 You know the kid who has really good grades and really good behavior and then gets to the open light and space of being in a public university right, and ends up drinking themselves out. In the first term it happens, but more than likely if you have someone that hasn't been a good student, that hasn't behaved a certain way, they're going to wash out in a much greater proportion than the good students. So universities really have this down. Clubs just haven't embraced the fact that they've said we're kind of void of information and that information goes a long way. So the predictive value is I want to believe that you're saying you're going to be an amazing member, but I'd also like to see some actual reasons that I should believe that you're a physician to do that and when there are things that we find in that background information and in the OSIP research that show us that they actually behave differently.

5:58 You know, that's the predicted value, right there, yeah and it's not. This isn't every like. How often do you find weird stuff I shouldn't say weird stuff like, how often is it? Like, how big of an issue is this? You know, like I'm just trying to, you know, put it into more like a layman's terms you know, like, out of 100 applicants, do you have like how many, like what percentage might be? You know, maybe we should watch out a little bit, because, because, because it's not every person I think you've told me that before most people are like, most things you find are, you know, it's, it's all.

6:41 Everything matches up, it's the few and far between. Yeah. So a little bit of a complicated question because we do different, varying degrees of vetting for clubs. So we have some clubs that are very, very stringent in how to go you know, soup to nuts, through everything we can. Others are much more restrictive on the data we look at. What I can tell you is that the majority of people that apply for membership clubs there is no derogatory information or contrary information. Then we get into varying shades, right. So you put something on your application. It looks to me like it was a misrepresentation. You tried to look like you were you know all that and a bag of chips, and you really weren't even a bag of chips.

7:25 So, but that's one or two data points. Then you get things like I see behaviors that you probably wouldn't engage in at the club, certainly when you're trying to get in. But if you feel free to do these things in other environments and you've done them in the recent past well gosh, that doesn't bode very well. Maybe I have someone here who's going to be violating the decorum policy before they've even set foot in the door. And then you get into finding the behaviors that are not necessarily criminal, but they're indicative of the fact that I don't follow the rules, I don't do what I'm supposed to do, so some of it, I guess you could frame it as criminal, but it's things like how I drive, it's things like citations, problems with insurance claims, right, and you get into aside from overt behaviors where someone is demonstrating and saying so got in big trouble because I jumped off the cruise ship.

8:30 This is, this is one that we had. I jumped off the cruise ship and everybody was super angry and they had the whatever Antiguan Coast Guard out there and they stopped the ship and I had, you know, ok, I mean, really, you're grown up, you're 30, and you jumped off because it was hilarious, you know, and this isn't somebody who's like Steve-O from the Jackass series, it's. This is somebody who's, you know, sells insurance for a living and wants to join a golf club. If you're going to jump off a cruise ship when you get tuned up, what are you going to do with the club when you get tuned up Again? Maybe your club is okay with that, maybe your club has different standards.

9:12 But you look for those behavioral things that say I'm not going to follow rules, I'm going to do what I want and it's not up to you. You have an opportunity to do that and it's not up to you. I haven't asked you to do that, and it's not up to you or Kenneth or anybody to decide who's good and who's bad. You're just presenting the information. It's ultimately the club can decide like oh, we don't care about that. So this is just the information that. I think sometimes clubs look at something like this as it's more in depth and it's like, well, no, they're not telling anybody what, what to do, it's just hey, we're just finding the juicy information that's just out there, um, and so so here here, here's a how um, you know, with something like that, how difficult is that to find?

9:56 And like so, like you know, I'm trying to think of, like someone applies for, for membership at my, how easy is it to find that, or how difficult, or you know. I guess that's another you know boiled question there, but I'll let you answer. Sure. So again, it sort of depends on what the club is engaging me, how deep they're engaging us to look. I've talked previously about the fact that the information is not linear, meaning if you want to find out information about you or me or anyone else, you're going to get some information directly from me, things like my LinkedIn I put that up, I control that information, my Facebook.

10:38 But really I'll give you the cruise ship jumper example. That was hosted by a friend who was on the cruise and it's not tagged as being the member. So if I were on that person's social media I would see the hilarious guy jumping off. It doesn't say who it is, so we can identify who he is. The club can identify who he is. It's him. So we can identify who he is. The club can identify who he is. It's him. So finding that involved us looking into that sphere, right. So we have to go into buckets where we don't necessarily know there's going to be information and the information is going to be unstructured. When we find it, then we can present it. Now that, you know, also feeds into the breadcrumbs idea, and that's that we find one and then we go to the next one and the next one and the next one.

11:26 So, opening that up, said, okay, this person has a group of people and, by the way, we've got coinciding dates. These are the people that were on the ship. These are the people that also are friends with that person. Let's start quickly looking in those buckets. That's when we find the story of dude. And it's by the first name, we'll call him steve Dude. And it's by the first name, we'll call him Steve. Steve actually had the Antiguan Coast Guard called out and they stopped the frigging ship and they kicked he and the wife off the ship and they're banned from the cruise line forever. And none of that was posted directly by him.

12:07 I'm pretty sure he doesn't want his employer to see that right Works for big companies, but it's there. And so where you let me look dictates how much I'm going to find. And then from there it's not easy. It's not as easy as getting the tech savvy kid that works in the office of the club to look on Facebook. Certainly do that, because sometimes that's a layup and you find the easy information, but that's what you're paying for a company like mine to do is to look for any and all facts that aren't easy to find and that takes the right training, the right equipment, access. And the craziest thing is how busy our R&D department is, because things are rolling out at a continuous basis, things like data breach data.

12:55 Once it becomes public and it's out there, it's full of intimate details about things. But even these breaches that happened four or five years ago. We find all kinds of information from the data breach data which doesn't live anywhere. But if you have it and you have it on a server and you download it every time data breach information is published, well then you've got a whole new repository of stuff that people tapping Google are never going to find, but it's public and it's laying around waiting to have. So, in terms of home gamers, thinking about doing what we do and being successful, limited opportunity. Can you briefly go into like so something like finding Mr Jumper here, what level package about is?

13:43 Is that information getting? Is that more of like? The? Is that like higher end? Is that more of like? Is that like higher end? Is that more of the middle? No, that was real close to the middle. Yeah, maybe a bit above the middle, I think. In total, you know, we offer nine packages really, with number nine being the nuclear variant and number one being a lot of public record data just done correctly. What I mean by that is if you think about pre-employment screening and the $29.95 super background search that you see advertised all over the web, you want to do a background check on your neighbor, so you go to whatever Zippy search and it's $19.95. Those are data.

14:25 Brokers sell information. What they also sell you is a disclaimer. So there's several asterisks that say based on where we looked, which was under my iPhone based on where we looked, these are the records that we found, and so they limit what they're looking at and they buy data that's already available. And so they limit what they're looking at and they buy data that's already available and it's always incomplete. It's grossly incomplete. They come up with things like a national background check. There is no national background check. Our records are firewalled off. They're very difficult to find If you're using someone with a common name. It's a nightmare. You have to have skills, processes, tools to do that stuff, and so when we offer a low-end package.

15:08 We do the public record thing correctly. We figure out all the places where records could exist and we search all of them. We don't use a data broker who says this is what I've got and no, it's not complete and it'll never be complete. They try and be a little more artful with their disclaimers than what I was saying, but that's the reality. There isn't a place to go. The CSI shows and the person with the cool haircut on the keyboard who finds everything in five seconds oh, look at this. That's a fantasy, and the record system in this country is becoming more wild than ever before. So you can get the records, but you have to pay to get them.

15:49 You have to search a certain way, you have to pay, whether or not you get a response or not. These municipalities have figured out this is a money-making adventure now, and so freedom has a price and you have to know who would have jurisdiction. We have issues all the time. We have a club that's in Memphis and it was a struggle with them to say well, you want us to pay a little bit more, and I said no, because you sit on the border of Mississippi, arkansas and Tennessee. So people have records and the Arkansas records are not available in Tennessee. No matter how hard I look, I can't find them. They're walled off and if you don't want me to look in those places, don't complain when somebody you talk about.

16:32 You know you and I have talked about how it, but within that package the jumper was probably very near the middle, maybe a little above the middle. We look at the sphere and we do that literally like an onion, one layer at a time. Do you want this additional layer of searching? The bad news with the additional layer is you're spending a little bit of money and a lot of what I'm finding when I go to that next level is stuff I've already found. That's OK, I'm going to find unique stuff. But each time we move a little bit further out, it's probably the law of diminishing returns, so pricing of our packages sort of also decreases, even though we've got a lot of information that we have to find a second time or a third time or a fourth time.

17:29 It's just the nature of the beast. I'm trying to figure out. Now I want to go back to the predictive information. How can like? What's the? What I'm looking for? And I'll let me make a note. Um, what are some like takeaways for? Like, so? So, when it comes to predictive information, is it? Is it you and your company?

18:11 Is it like? Are you the the predictive informator? Like, so like? Are you the one taking all the information and looking? Is it programs? Is it um? no, in terms of the information we presented. And then we presented an informant where things that we think are and the term is responsive things that we think would actually make someone pause or that they would want to evaluate we their court record history, for instance right, if they are posting things that are inflammatory directly, obviously those are going to go near the top and we keep going and presenting it in an order Because of the volume of what we found.

18:59 Most of our report is comprised of links, and those are links to data that we found. So it's definitely a data point about Denny Corby, but it really isn't going to make any difference. It's yet another address history in yet another database that's on the web, right. So it's something that we found. It's the fact that you had a MySpace and there's a directory that said that you had a MySpace years ago, and that kind of information usually isn't contributory toward making a decision. But again, we disclose everything that we find and we don't evaluate it, we just present it and you know there are things that you can say in Texas that you probably can't socially say in Northern California.

19:46 We're just a diverse country and the behaviors and norms in one place are insults in another, and so I have to leave it up to the clubs to sort of say you know what matters to us and remember, we're not just about yes or no, it's not just red or green. Sometimes there's a conversation to be had, so we'll provide data and someone will say well, this is an unfortunate thing, but it was five years ago. It's not the best, but I'm going to bring it up to the member and I'm going to remind them that at the club, something like that would really be frowned upon. And to make sure that you're clear that you're joining a club where the behaviors are different than those and you set the tone.

20:28 How about you have that conversation and then they defend themselves and say no, I'm going to act over and over. Oh cool, now I just need to get out your unfit for membership. You know, and it gives the clubs opportunities to work with that data in different ways to help them with the decision making process. It's not always a layoff, the guy that jumps off the ship. I'm betting there's some clubs that would say if he jumps off the cabana roof into the pool a couple times, you know, with the Jägermeister bottle it's okay, and other clubs it would be. This is not the right time. I think that that's a big part of it. What's going on in your life and is this the right time?

21:09 I had a club who came back and called me and said you found that the police were at their house four times in the last year. I did yes, that's correct, that's the data. Four times the police were called to the house. I don't have more than that. That department doesn't tell me the nature of the runs. But what's going on in the house? The police are coming four times. How often have the police been to your house, denny? Probably a lot in your case. Regular folk usually don't need the police a lot and doesn't four times stand out. So what's going on? So when you add four times to some other behaviors that say maybe I'm not a perfect fit, it makes it a lot easier.

21:52 But I think that's the whole point of being exclusive, right. That's the whole point of you have to exclude sometimes and you have to set a baseline, and I think there's probably even situations where now is not the right time for you to join our club and we're being a little bit choosy and you have more defects than most of our normal members. So why am I rolling the dice on you right now? You know, and maybe we'll see in a couple years if it changes, or you know, and that's a decision that they're going to have to make, but I think you have people think about it this way Would you invest money with someone that was showing signs that they don't follow rules?

22:34 And also you found out I told you from an investment due diligence standpoint they had the police at their house four times. No, they don't have a criminal record for the shooting. They wouldn't have taken away a handcuff. Would that make you feel super good about handing them $3 million to start a new venture? Probably not. At a minimum, there'd be a conversation, right, and you'd hope that there'd be a really quick answer. And you know what. You can always call me back and say this is the answer they gave me. Can you help me verify that? That's always a possibility. Clubs can always call and say here's the additional information we obtained about that. Can you provide the insight? Sometimes I can't, sometimes there isn't more to get, but a lot of times there is once I know something else.

23:18 The secret to the story is the police officer was really his fiance and he wanted to see her, so he would call the police. He would call 911 to say, hey, send over so-and-so, I need help. She shows up, it seems like a long way around there. But so I was saying this earlier I feel like now is the time for clubs to try so many new things and like push the barrier a little bit, or even like now is the time to, if they might want to do a little bit more of like investigative, backgroundy, fact checking on their members.

24:01 Like now is the time there's there's hasn't been a better. You know, demand is so much, uh, higher than supply for clubs and membership and the waitlist. Like now is the time more than ever to be pickier with your members, because you can, because if you don't like someone, it's not like you don't have a. Have a, have a waitlist Now. You have so many people waiting to come in, just wait, so why not? This is the time now to do it. Well, listen, I agree with you and the industry is doing great and it's fantastic. And the number of clubs we contact with waitlists is almost 100 percent. I'm sure the number of clubs that contact us, it's almost 100 percent. I have waitlists and some have waitlists in absolutely every category.

24:43 Some have maybe one or two categories that are open. But remember, despite it being a good time to be choosy, a big part of using Kennis is because you don't want to put yourself in a position where, as a club, you just decided not to look for the bad information and then the bad event happens and board members love to say well, we've never had a mass shooting at our club, so we're going to assume that that's just not the kind of thing that happens here. At whatever Hearst you know we don't do things. It would be in poor taste to have a mass shooting and none of our members would do that. Okay, well, it's not always just about a mass shooting. I can't tell you how many lawsuits are filed against clubs because of behavior of a member.

25:25 And look and look at anybody that you want to. Look at a celebrity that has broken, Look at a media, Look at somebody who's been involved in a mass shooting, what's the first thing the media does? They do exactly what we do. They do their version of it, but they dig into the past and they try and say look at all the predictive things that we're leading up to this. Every time our government, the people that are trying to protect us, have an incident and the incident goes through, somebody in the media will say look at all the predicted things. And the government failed to catch this person. They knew this person was a problem, right? This person was going to blow up a building or this person was going to shoot somebody and you could see that it was coming.

26:05 That's exactly what we're talking about. So, over and above refining and honing the culture of your club by letting in people that truly are going to fit in the club, forget about that. It's the reasonableness of saying we just choose not to look, we're just going to go with recommendations, because we always have. Clearly, the world has changed. If you look around, there's no organized, structured anything from employment to volunteering that doesn't have some level of fact-based vetting. Going on, Clubs are just fine and they're uniquely positioned for a fraction of the initiation fee to meet that and keep the wolves at bay.

26:51 A lot of the time you're going to find predictive stuff and those are the people that end up breaking. And I know you and I have talked about this. Your strata in society has nothing to do with your odds of having a mental health condition and in no way am I picking on people that have a mental health condition. But when people that have a mental health condition hurt somebody, somebody's still going to fail. If there were predictive values and the cause really doesn't matter, does it? If it was somewhat predictable to say this person really isn't suited for membership, so at a minimum you've got to do it in hopes of getting that. Let's say it's one in 10. Let's say it's one in 15. Members that are hard enough. We send something back and it's a hard enough not fit for membership.

27:34 That alone is the value. And if it's bad enough, if somebody actually gets hurt at the hands of a member, what is the price associated with that? That would be 50 years of tenancies, 100 years of tendencies, versus one situation where a staff member got hurt, a guest got hurt, another member got hurt. You know, come on, it's a no-brainer. But the rest of society has looked at this and said we're 100%, adapting it because it works. The predicted value holds true. And what I said about anti-fragile, it's true. We are terrible at predicting, we're just awful at it. And everybody likes to say they're a good judge of character.

28:14 There is no such thing. There is no such thing. That's just arrogance. And listen, I used to do it too, until I started seeing. You know, my judgment, combined with facts, was a lot better than my judgment, and I'm really smart. Just ask me the facts was a lot better than my judgment, and I'm really smart. Just ask me how smart are you, Paul? I'm uber smart. It's kind of scary. Plus, the coolest reason to work with Kainis is to tell people we have a guy in Detroit that takes care of these things. He doesn't want to say that we need to call the guy from Detroit. I wasn't wearing my Yankees are.

28:57 You just beat me to it. That's so funny. I'm probably going to end that one. I'll probably keep that as one episode and then I'll probably go that as one episode and then I'll probably go into this one, or it might be a part one and part two, I don't know, because now that starts leading into to me the legality of things in terms of I can only go so far down that road, meaning I'm not a lawyer. And if somebody listens to this and says that's how I can only go so far down that road, meaning I'm not a lawyer, and if somebody listens to this and says that's how it works, no, no, no, I meant so from a club's point of view.

29:40 You give the proper information. That wouldn't put a club at. I guess that would probably like. You just present the information and I'm assuming big, big, big assumption that there might be other companies who do similar things. That might not be, I don't want to say reputable, but can they? Can, can clubs be given the wrong information and can anything be done about that? Be done about that like, so like can somebody use like a less, less inferior, maybe someone who's not approved or I don't know? You know about investigative, uh, you know creds and stuff, but, like you know, if I'm xyz club, you know bogey springs and oh I have bob, he'll, he'll get me all all this info.

30:26 Can, can, as a club, can I get bad info and can that hurt me? Well, I don't know that I want to do an episode on this. Let me explain to you. So here's the answer. You can have whatever standard you want and so I'll give you. We'll go back to my college admissions, right? So let's say they say we want to do an in-person interview with you and you have a bad day where you don't like the interviewer or you're off your game or you took the wrong meds and you you pooch it. You don't get a redo. So if you come into the club and you're being interviewed and the membership member director says I didn't like how they acted, I don't like their behavior, so no, the clubs can pick what they want to use.

31:12 If somebody gave them data and said this applies to Denny and Denny's application process and it wasn't information about Denny I don't think they can ever be held to that. The only way that a private club can get into trouble actual legal trouble aside from I'm not saying a lawyer can't concoct a theory and file a lawsuit, but here's the way the courts work. They're used to things Divorces they understand a divorce. Drunk drivings they understand drunk drivings. Failure to fulfill a contract courts get that. When you come in with a new legal theory that something was done wrong, you're going to run into the fact that private clubs can set their own standards and the only way to really pierce that is to try and go with some attack on your civil liberties.

31:59 So if you're disabled, there's an act that covers that If you belong to a certain group a protected class, as they call it someone with a disability would fall into that, a person of color would fall into that then you can bring a suit if you are mistreated by virtue of your disability, your race, your gender, and then you can say my gender is why I didn't get in the club and that's what they did wrong. You can be in one of those groups and still not be fit for membership. So as long as the club doesn't mistreat you because of your protected class, the clubs can do whatever they want.

32:43 You know, I've talked to a couple of different lawyers who laugh and say you can do whatever you want to the white guys and really they can just set a standard. They can and the risk of being sued is incredibly small. So you know the answer is that you? get to set the standard and the data. Remember you. You know, when it comes to the data, what's the difference between that and a member coming down the hall and saying to the to the gm, you don't, you don't want that quality in here I think for me, I was just trying to think of a way to set you up for you know, in my head I was hoping there was going to be like a sort of like an easier yes to put you in like a better light of like you know.

33:26 Oh, they can get bad information or like just misinformation from Joe Schmo they're like local and you know or like something they just like find online. It's usually the quality of the information is probably going to be the same. It's the death. So if Joe does a DMV driving history and I do a DMV driving history, they're going to be the same. The problem is that they buy a little bit of data the criminal records, maybe the driving history, the sex offender registry. That's a no-brainer, anybody can search that. But but these companies have come up with that I compete with in the background check world. It's kind of like deluxe.

34:06 When you go to get lunch I'm going to get the deluxe. You know, fries, coleslaw. Is it really deluxe? I don't know. But they've come up with a national search and the national search is the disclaimer in. The national search is the disclaimer form, and so it says based on the bodies that report and the searches that we choose to conduct, which is I went to Zippy Search, which was cheap, because I want to make the full out of that $19.95, I want to make $17. So I bought the $3 data and within the $3 data I found three records. So that's what you're going to get. Now there are 19 records out there in existence. But the disclaimer is it's just based on where I look and what I do, and the real problem for clubs and everybody else HR people are usually a little sharper because they've been trained on some of this stuff.

34:57 You've got to know the difference in what you're buying. But why would you right? It's like asking me how does electricity work? I don't know. I use it all the time and I have no clue what that's about. I don't touch it physically because that's bad. I learned that. Other than that, I'm like whatever it does, it can do that in the background and people should feel the same way about background checks. I don't need to know what's in there. The problem is it's just become. I don't need to know what's in there, the problem is it's just become.

35:37 I brought this up in the show once before. It's like breakfast right. I mean, you already have breakfast and my granddaughter's pretty different. You know I have coffee, she has a Slurpee Mountain Dew Slurpee and you know you're an avocado toast guy. It's obvious. Oh my god, that's so funny. So I was at the grocery store once and this dude is standing there I'm not even kidding like, looking like, not frantic, but he's just like looking, and I was. I I end up being like next to him because I was looking at avocados and he's like hey man, you, you, you look like you know about avocados. Can you help me out? My, my, my, my, my wife or my, my stepdaughter's coming into town. She's in college, she's all about this stuff. I know nothing. And he was like what he was like what do you know about avocados?

36:19 Like it was, I haven't. It's so many bring that up in my. I have a, a notes of just like funny, it's just, you know, comedy and just things that happen, and that's that's in there and it makes me laugh whenever I scroll past it. He was frantic, so there's a phrase that I heard and then you have your way of saying it and it's actually come up more. It's more common than I thought would be and it's my members are better investigators yes, so we like to talk about books, you and I um Malcolm Goldwell.

37:01 Yep 10,000 hours, right. So there are people who will invest 10,000 hours in digging and snooping. It's a variant of what we do. You've got to put the time in. It's not the same because you're usually stuck with Google to do your digging, but you can do the same thing. Somebody can spend endless amounts of time saying who is Denny, who's Denny Spear? Now let me start looking into those people. Let me connect the dots manually on my own, and a lot of times they can find it to social media. But sometimes they'll get the public records and things like that. Your members also have the benefit of gossip. So in a lot of tight communities and this doesn't apply to all clubs, because you can't you can't say that you're in metropolitan um, los angeles or atlanta, and it's a.

37:55 You know, it's a tight-knit community. It's not a tight-knit community. There's people moving in and out all the time. There's's people from all over the place. The world is becoming much more transient. People move around for work opportunities, marriage, whatever. But when you do get a tight-knit community with a club in it, there's a lot of information and there is a lot of gossip. This is interesting to me because you will have clubs who will take action on someone's application based on gossip said by other members. In a way, it kind of works, but it's also kind of broken. It works because if the members that are telling you this stuff are concerned about it and there aren't any good members, well then that's a pretty good indicator.

38:37 The person's probably not going to work out right, not going to work out right, but you're willing to toss their application over those conversations which could be contrived and maybe aren't based on a lot of facts or valid information, but clubs will act on that. So the good news is it gives you an opportunity to keep people out that aren't going to be a good fit or have potentially exposure and liability. So you're doing the ultimate correct thing, you think, but you're doing it without fact. You're doing it based on somebody's subjective interpretation of things. So unless they can say this, you know I had a club who called me and said there's someone who said that this person's teen son was sexually aggressive with another community member's daughter and this is something that they're thinking about calling the police, and I said I don't know, I can't find a fact.

39:35 So that's, if that's true, that's terrible. And if it's true, it's not in a searchable fashion and it sounds like something that somebody said. So is it true? And this is all third party. This is a third party for somebody else who knows the mom of the girl. And I said, no, we'll look, but there's nothing floating around in public domain that points to that lone official that says it actually happened. And somebody was so long answer so no, no, no, because it's, it's. It was just fascinating that when you know, it just came up in conversation.

40:16 Um, because for me, you know, I, when chatting with people, things come up, and you know, so it was, it was, it was talking about the vetting Cause. I was asking uh, you know, they had a big wait list, all this, and multiple times, oh so do you guys have like a like, a like a vetting process or anything? And they'll, it's all our, our, our members are pretty good at that. All right, then I'll give you. I'll give you an interesting story. I actually told this a couple times before to prospective clubs the Detroit Lions, who are doing much, much better, who are doing much, much better. But in the past the Detroit Lions had a coach who came in and this is an employment situation, so it's governed by different rules than the private club standard.

41:00 But they had a coach well-known, kate. Matt Patricia came in referring the Patriots, took over as head coach. He was here, I think, for a year and a half, when a reporter from the Detroit Free Press called the GM of the Lions and just said did you know, matt Patricia was arrested for sexual assault down in Texas when he was in college and it was just stymied right and so, instead of saying what he should have, which is I'm aware of it number one, number two, he was not convicted. And number three, from an employment perspective, I can't even consider that. He was not convicted of anything, and it happened a long, long time ago, and I'm aware of it.

41:41 The problem was the Lions were not aware of it, so they brought him over. It sounds like they didn't vet him at all because he was already in the NFL. He was already known, right, everybody recognized the space, everybody knew who he was, so they brought him in without vetting him. And here's the difference. It's the same thing that you're talking about. You have these members that will invest all kinds of energy digging up dirt. Who's the last to know? In this case, the alliance management. But the club's management, hennis, affords clubs and companies like mine, afford a club an opportunity to avoid that from happening. Isn't it much better to say hey, a member approached me and I was able to tell them we're aware of that and that was not a factor that was critical in the decision making.

42:26 So, yes, we're aware of it and yes, they're a member, or better yet, you take care of it and you never have to be on the flip side of that coin, which is oh, we didn't know, and that's really bad because we never would have let them in, didn't know, and that's really bad because we never would have let them in it. Just, you know it doesn't make sense to go without saying we did the due diligence, because whatever my team is going to do, we're going to run laps around that number, no matter how much time they put into, if you're giving us a package that allows us to do the complete search. There's no. There's no, no way around it do you ever find things that are that make the person better? Like people who like underplay their?

43:08 stuff 100%, so it's like. people are like oh, this, this and this, but you find out it's like oh, they donated a billion dollars to this. Oh, they did that. Like oh, I didn't realize they're responsible for this. Do you ever get clubs that are surprised by how much better members are or people are that are applying? Absolutely so two things we usually don't get feedback on members, good or bad. Sometimes I'll ask a question if it's borderline bad. Or they might say, hey, is there anything else with this account? Or there was a person on Twitter who was attacking a prospective member a lot and they said can you give us any context on that person? We'll give you a couple bucks to figure out. Tell me that person.

43:48 And it turns out that's what that person does is just attacks people. And we did find a nexus in their backgrounds. I think they worked together at one point. So I don't know, I don't think it was very credible, not for me to decide, but the idea is, um, you know what? I'm sorry, danny, I'm losing the truth finding, finding good people, and then, oh, and then you don't really. And then it was one of those, as I was saying, the question I probably I figured no, but clubs aren't going to come back like yo, this person is so much better than when we thought, um, but yeah you're absolutely right. It does happen where it's the exact opposite and they say we really didn't realize. You know how good of a patron of the community this person is.

44:30 They're very humble and quiet and it turns out they do an awful lot and we've got a real, a real treasure. So yes, absolutely I don't, because we were talking about like bad stuff. I was like I wonder if clubs if you just find all this amazing information and club is like wow, he's too good for here our membership. I remember to eat him. Eat him alive sir, you don't want to be here. I think the focus is clearly on making sure that they're they're bad, bad things, as opposed to confirming all the good things or finding even more good things. But yeah, listen, listen, there's far more good people that are true, with their intention, who join clubs than there are people who don't.

45:11 What should clubs do? So, going back the membership is, the members are chatting in the hallway and it gets back to the people in charge of the membership committees. Know members, membership committees or whoever's you know the, the, the last, say what should? What happens when you hear a rumor? Well, you're asking the wrong guy. Here's what I know. Clubs have been dealing with this for the last 150 plus years. Clubs have been dealing with this for the last 150 plus years and I think, based on conversations with a number of people, that the informal, subjective decisions get made pretty easily.

45:54 When there's, you know, when there's a blackmail situation, whatever you want to call it, clubs are happy to say no. If they have some information and it's information that didn't come from a guy like me that's where we fit in is trying to fill that void of facts. And it's pretty rare that we get called to say can you confirm anything, like we did the situation with the two teenagers. It's pretty rare that we get that call, but we do get that call where they'll say this is something we were told and we'd like to look a little bit further. Other times they'll say, hey, without some proof of it, we don't have a choice but to agree. I think that just gets down to the culture of your club and how selective they are.

46:36 Gotcha. I think it happens all the time. The other thing that clubs seem to do is they will call a prior club that you are as an applicant or a member of, and they will have informal discussions and if that discussion is, hey, you don't want to call on your club, he's a problem, you will blackball that person based off of that conversation. And I would say that that's actually actionable when there's somebody I was a member of a club and someone was speaking about me, characterizing me directly, and they're speaking on my behalf about that relationship, and I'm getting blackballed and you're not telling me why. I think that there's a great deal of exposure.

47:17 There's a way for clubs to do that correctly. But having a, what can you tell me about that? Okay, good, yeah, I'm going to go with that. I don't think that's a very good idea. Now there are club members, gms, that know each other very well and I think that that has happened. But I think it's an area of risk and if people know that you made that phone call and things get hot enough, I could see that coming up. I could see people focusing on that. So I would say that that is definitely not a must practice. What about when members do it? What about when members see, oh, they're a member of that club.

47:58 Oh, Phyllis is a member of that club. Let me talk to Phyllis. What about when it's that chain of command? especially if it's negative. No, they'll come back and report oh, this person has, you know, the golfing privilege, has taken away on membership system multiple times and yeah, it's. It's no different than saying the person is bad in the community for the following reasons or you know they're up to shady things, or you know the members are going to report those things. And I think clubs, like I said, have been dealing with it for a very long time. So they already have a process to dealing with that. And again, some of the time we're asked hey, can you come in and find anything to substantiate this claim? Because it's not great.

48:38 But a lot of times yeah, I think they've already been dealing with that. That happens in a lot of different circles. I mean, look at Greek life on campus People will be pretty quick to say this person hangs out with uncool people or this person doesn't fit with us and here's why I don't like them. You know they're more of the wrong swatter. I don't like them and they're more the wrong swatter. And you know, I don't think professionally run private clubs are like that, but I do think that they act on information that comes subjective and indirect. So that's not going to change whether you're using chemistry.

49:20 I like it. Alright, I'm going to stop there if you don't mind, Alright.