Interview: Stephen Schwarzman
Chairman and CEO, The Blackstone Group

The decisive moment in your career was probably when you left Lehman Brothers to found the Blackstone Group. Was that a difficult decision to make? There was a lot at stake.

Stephen Schwarzman: Yes and no. I didn't view it as particularly bold. One has to understand context, I think, on this.

In 1984, Lehman Brothers, where I had worked for my career, had been sold to American Express. I actually was the person handling that transaction. I was 36 years old, or 35, I forget which. I had a non-competition agreement, and as part of my wanting to do that deal, I wanted to leave for a variety of reasons. I didn't like what ethically had happened with the firm. I didn't want to be with the people -- not all the people but the leadership people -- so I worked out a situation where I joined the former chairman of the firm at Lehman, who had been pushed out, which necessitated the need for the sale. He and I had always worked very closely together. So all we were trying to do by forming Blackstone was sort of re-forming our own working relationship. We didn't view it -- and on this, I'm sure I was sort of colossally naive -- as that big a step. I knew we had always been successful doing almost everything together, commercially, and I didn't understand why we wouldn't be. The fact that we had no phone, no office, no company, that small little companies like this were not successful in investment banking, in fact they didn't exist at all -- there was only one of them that existed, which was a small firm founded by a fellow named Jim Wolfenson. Jim's currently the head of the World Bank, but even Jim had never done any larger mergers until that time. We just assumed that we would be accepted as the sort of equivalent of a Salomon Brothers or a Lehman Brothers or a Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, and I guess that's the height of ridiculous hubris. Because we were too silly to understand that people might be worried about that, we went ahead, and it worked out.

It sure did! It worked out pretty well.

Stephen Schwarzman: Pretty well. I must say, for those who haven't the experience of doing start-up businesses, at least in the mid-'80s, it wasn't quite as amusing as apparently it is in 1998 or '97 in the Internet, where there's tons of money available now. That was not the case then.

In New York, which may be atypical in the United States, people are only happy if someone they know well is failing. Particularly when you're more vulnerable in a smaller setting, like we were at Blackstone, I know there were many former colleagues who were staying at big firms, who were looking at what we were doing, and some were hoping that we'd make it. But you know, we were somewhat of a threat if we could make it just in a small organization and end up making a good deal more financially than the people who stayed at the large one. That was, in effect, a threat to a system. We were not aware of this, of course. All we were trying to do was pay the rent. We had more modest expectations at the beginning. But we took a number of large leaps at the firm, and part of that is -- you asked a question earlier, "What makes someone successful?" and I think that another answer is sort of feeling what's going on around you, seeing what's going on around you, and taking a big step to take advantage of that. One of those steps, for us, is the second year we were formed, we decided to go forward with a plan we had when we started, to go into the leveraged buy-out business, and neither my partner or I had ever done a leveraged buy-out, which one might think would be a liability when raising money.

There's a certain pattern of this in your life.

Stephen Schwarzman: My partner is a very experienced, capable fellow, previously Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of Lehman Brothers. He wanted us to raise $50 million to do our fund and start doing smaller deals, learn, and then raise something larger. I had been over visiting one of the large firms, and I looked at their balance sheet -- it actually was a company called First Boston -- and at that point in history, they had a billion dollars of equity. I said, "You know what? I think it would be fun to have a billion dollars of equity without all the people," and I said, "I think we could do that. "

I went back and met with my partner, and I said, "We're going to raise a billion dollars," and at that time, there were only two other organizations on the planet that had a billion dollars, and he said, "How can we do that? We don't have any experience." And I said, "I know we can." I said, "The time is right." We're in the '80s -- it's sort of 1986. There's enormous momentum. Leveraged buy-outs are becoming very popular. They're going on the covers of magazines, on the front pages of newspapers. There aren't enough vehicles to take advantage of this. We're well-known people. And he said, quite intelligently, "That's a long way from a billion dollars," and I said, "I just know we can do this, and in fact, if we tell people that we want a billion dollars, then if they were going to just give us $10 million for a small thing, they'll give us 50 million, okay, because we'll have scaled up expectations." And he said, "You know, I'm going to be a good partner, but I think we're biting off more than we can chew," and he was probably right. We ended up raising $850 million, going through enormous amounts of difficulty. We subsequently raised another 100 million from one of those investors. So we got to 960 actually, at the end, and it launched the firm in a scale where we always did very big things, because that's what I wanted to do. It's also what my partner wanted to do. He just didn't know that that was achievable. And you know, none of us knew, but he was a good enough partner and a smart enough man to also back my vision of what I thought was achievable.

Now that's just an instinct, and one has those types of instincts in my type of business. I don't know how one describes how you would know that that could happen, but it's from reading the newspaper, seeing what's going on, feeling what people are talking about, and just knowing that ought to be possible.

Can you recognize that in a young person's who's interested in becoming part of this world?

Stephen Schwarzman: Oh sure. Sure. There are certain ways that people think, patterns of thought. In our firm, we've gone into a lot of new businesses, and we're subsequently quite big. We're one of the biggest investors in what are now called alternative assets -- which is leveraged buy-outs, real estate, hedge funds, mezzanine debt -- in the world, and every time we have one of these new perceptions that there's a really interesting thing to be done, you just do it. It's sort of like a basketball player who only shoots when they get a real good sense that they're in the zone, okay? It's not like a player who keeps forcing because they're throwing them the ball, that they've got to put it up, they have a cold hand, and they're throwing up bricks and they have to keep doing it. This is a game that you play only when you have a really strong feeling. It's like fishing in a pond that's been deeply stocked with giant trout. Now, you know that that pond is stocked, but other people don't necessarily agree with you, and there is a certainty that comes when you just know that things are lining up. You don't have to be very smart about this either. We went into the real estate business in 1991. I never bought any real estate. I didn't even understand it. I always felt uncomfortable with real estate, because buildings don't move and neighborhoods change. So can't you make a bad decision? Companies can at least change their products. Buildings don't move. There they are.

We were in the recession and real estate was collapsing. Everybody wanted to sell real estate, and somebody brought us a deal which had a 15-percent yield on it, a bunch of apartment buildings. An -- ironically -- Little Rock, Arkansas, bankruptcy of a savings and loan. I don't know if it was the same one that was involved with, you know, the more popular things of the time, and we could borrow money off of that 15-percent yield and earn about 23, 24 percent at the bottom of a recession with apartments that were close to new. And I said, "Well, what can go wrong here? The economy can't go any worse than it is now. If the economy gets stronger, then rents will go up. It's hard to borrow money now..." (at that time). And even with the difficulty of borrowing money, we were earning 24 percent on our equity. So I figured when times got better, money would be more available, interest rates would be down further, you could borrow more on the property, and so there was no downside, there was only upside. The present moment we were doing it was really already excellent. So why not just buy as much real estate as you could possibly find? And there was a whole country of real estate to be found at that time. Now to me, this doesn't go into the blinding insight mode. Anybody, when told those same facts, I would assume, would act rationally and would be buying real estate. In point of fact, the problem was everybody who would normally be buying real estate had already lost a fortune and was in no position, because most of them were either bankrupt or undergoing enormous difficulties with their existing properties. They couldn't go ahead, and if they went to a bank to borrow money, they were creating bankruptcies for the same banks, so the banks didn't want to talk to them, and we were sort of there alone with two or three other groups of people who had never been in real estate and saw the same things.

Very few kids set their sights on being investment bankers when they grow up. So when you were about 10 or 12, what kind of kid were you, and what did you want to do?

Stephen Schwarzman: Wow. That's a great question. At 10 or 12, all I wanted to do was basically win any sport I played in, and that's what I liked to do then. Clearly, I evolved somewhat. I didn't even know what investment banking was, at that age, let alone even in college.

As a 10 or 12-year-old, did you think you might have a shot at a sports career? Were you good?

Stephen Schwarzman: I was pretty good for a kid. You're never sure how big you're going to grow and how strong you're going to be, but at that age I was big and strong and pretty well-coordinated, so that was what I enjoyed.

What about your family? Big expectations in any particular direction?

Stephen Schwarzman: I was the oldest child, and the expectation was to get everything right, and it was an interesting expectation, because it wasn't drummed into you. It was simply assumed. There wasn't much reinforcement for doing things in a 100-percent manner, but you were just assumed to do it. That was the standard. No one discussed it, nobody bought into it, it was just part of what was expected.

Were both of your parents part of this climate of expectation?

Stephen Schwarzman: I think my mother was more the pusher, I guess. There's a classic Jewish mother syndrome, and I certainly had, at a minimum, an acceptable level of pushing, which was, I think, culturally normal, at least where I came from. I think my dad wasn't so much that way, but he's a very, very smart fellow, smarter than I am, still. With that as a role model, it was somewhat hard to sort of out-think him, because he'd usually have the right answer, and still does catch little imperfections in logic. So that was what the family scenario was. It was very much from a place where -- major metropolitan city, this happened to be Philadelphia, where it was, in the city -- a place where people, typically, in the late '50s, early '60s, would move out and go to the suburbs. It was, could you blast your way out of the city and get to the suburbs. It has nothing to do with the child. That's what the parents do, and my parents made that transition, which was a lucky thing for me.

Did your father's work have anything to do with the financial world at all? Was there anything around that was going to provide a model of that for you?

Stephen Schwarzman: Yes, it provided a unique model of something I did not want to do. He worked with his father in a retail business that sold curtains, linens, draperies, handkerchiefs. I started working there, in effect, at the age of five, which he did with his father, and I found it an absolutely horrible way to spend time. I didn't like waiting on customers, I didn't like folding merchandise. I didn't like dusty basements where you had to mark merchandise, and I decided that whatever I did in life, that would not be part of it.

Did you ever tell him that?

Stephen Schwarzman: Of course.

Did he take it in good stride?

Stephen Schwarzman: He's got a very amiable, wonderful disposition, and he heard that, and then I would end up back at the store the next year. So I think, during the time when I was a child, you more or less do what you're told, subject to one or two years of revolution where I decided I had had it. But I don't think that not going into that environment was heartbreaking for my dad. It was what he did.

Sometimes fathers want you to do anything but what they did, but it seems that he just had a sort of comfortable relationship with the issue.

Stephen Schwarzman: Yeah, absolutely. He worked with his dad, who was a very dominant personality, and my dad is not a dominant personality, so it would be out of character for him to be that way with me.

If you were interested in sports, you probably had coaches. Were they an influence on you growing up?

Stephen Schwarzman: I had some amazing teachers and coaches. I had a history teacher in the 11th grade in American history named Norman Schmitt who was wonderful. He just made American history burst forth, and I was entranced by it. I always liked to study and get good grades, but there were always kids smarter. I might be in the top -- oh, I don't know -- six percent of my class, but that meant there were five percent that were smarter, and indeed they were.

I also had an amazing track coach, ironically named Jack Armstrong, very much like an all-American boy, and indeed, he was. When we ran competitively, we were second in the country in the AAU junior championships. His teams -- as a testament to him, rather than any of the individuals like myself -- when I graduated from high school, until that time, he had been 107 and 2 as a record in dual meets, which meant that he went through many different generations of kids, and the kids always mysteriously ended up being enormously capable, which was a testament to him. He would have all kinds of wonderful ways of motivating people. We used to train in the winter as well as the summer. We trained outdoors in the freezing cold, ran sprints and middle distances on frozen parking lots, which is a real challenge as the wind's whipping and you're wondering if your legs are going to go out from under you. No matter how miserable you felt, he would be there smiling, and as you rounded the location where he was, he'd say, "You've got to make some deposits on training day to make some withdrawals on meet day," and he was very cheerful, because after a while, you were wondering why were you going through this level of agony. But the camaraderie on the team was fantastic. I was the only Caucasian in most of the races that I was ever in, because I ran sprints, so that made it sort of a whole cultural experience for me, which I really enjoyed.

I was also one of the student leader people. I was usually the president of my school, junior high school president, president of my high school. I was one of those -- what do you call them? -- student leader-type people.

Let's talk a little about your experience at Yale University. How did you pick Yale?

Stephen Schwarzman: I went to Yale because when I was interviewing at schools, I saw a kid walking down a street -- I can still see him right now -- wearing sort of tan chinos, Bass weejuns, which are a kind of shoe for us mid-lifesters when we were young, and a blue long-sleeved shirt with a button-down collar and a corduroy sport coat, and I looked at that kid and I said, "I want to be that kid."

This role model is walking around the world somewhere and doesn't know that he changed your life.

Stephen Schwarzman: Right. Who knows? So I went to Yale, and I had a real good experience there.

What did you study at Yale? What was your major?

Stephen Schwarzman: Remember, this was the 1960s, when everything was touchy-feeling. I was in an interdisciplinary major -- which was a new thing then -- which was psychology, sociology, anthropology and biology, which is really sort of the study of the human being. Why do they think what they think? Why do they act the way they act? You studied from all four of those disciplines.

So at some point did your father start whispering in your ear, "What are you going to do with your life?"

Stephen Schwarzman: When all fathers do. That's a normal thing. I'm now a father, and I have a child that's a junior in college, and I know better than to whisper, because when you're whispering, they're truly not listening. You have to let them do their own thing. But I think, as we got closer to the end...

I remember interviewing with a company. It's fun for me to remember some of these things. It was a company called Pan American Airlines, which at that point was the dominant international carrier, subsequently bankrupt, and it was started by Yale graduate Juan Tripp. So they interviewed at school, and I went to interview with them, and I sat down, and there was a very establishment-looking fellow, and he said, "Well, why do you want to work at Pan American?" And I said, "Well, I've sort of got an idea." I said, "The Vietnam War looks like it's coming to a close, and there's probably a lot of surplus airplanes around, and why don't you just buy up a lot of those airplanes and go into the cargo business?" and the guy looked at me like I was completely deranged, which may have been true, and he said, "It's not your job to think about things like that."

What a response.

I listened to that, and I said, I don't know anything about business, but I think this company is going to do very badly if that's the response of their representative to what I thought was a pretty clever idea. There were companies started around that time, apparently, to do that, like Flying Tiger and other types of things.

It's not a ridiculous suggestion.

Stephen Schwarzman: Given the Pan Am name, which was the best branded name in the airline business. I was 21. What did I know? I thought that was a good thing, but it didn't sell, and I didn't go to Pan Am. I had no job when I graduated, and it's a wonderful story of how I ended up where I went to.

I was working at a reunion, because I didn't have much money and I also had no plans, and I was a senior. I don't know why I did this, but there was a family at these reunions. This was the 15th reunion, so that meant that the people were 37 years old. There was a family having a picnic in the quadrangle, and I thought they looked really romantic and like a nice family. And I went out, and for no reason, because I didn't even have any money, really, I bought a Babar the Elephant book, which is a book that my parents used to read to me. I just went over and I gave the book to this kid. The father looked up and said, "What are you doing?" I said, "I don't know what I'm doing, but I used to read this as a kid. You look like you have two wonderful children." And the fellow was a gentleman named Bill Donaldson, and Bill started a firm that was very small then, called Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.

I didn't do anything directly with him at that point, but...

He had a friend that was sitting with him named Larry Noble, and Larry worked at the admissions office, and Larry sort of befriended me. And you know, as I was looking for a job, he would introduce me to people in New York. At that point, this was a very formal world of finance, and I had had no economics courses. In fact, I didn't even own a suit. So I bought my first suit, and Larry would send me on interviews. I met the number two person at one of the New York banks. I had only been in a bank to make a deposit in a passbook, and here I was meeting the number two person at some giant money center bank. I could remember being almost completely overwhelmed that I went to this man's office and he offered me lunch and it was right in the next room. The idea that, one, you could sort of offer somebody lunch in an office building, and second, that he would do that with me was pretty overwhelming. The offices were so big I thought I was on one of those walking belts at an airport going the wrong way. I could never get to his office, it was so far. But he offered me a job. He's a very nice man, and he offered me a job and recommended I not take it, and I said, "Why is that?" He said, "I think that you're too smart and too quick for my type of organization. What you should do is go to an organization that's very small, comprised of very bright people doing anything." He said it doesn't matter what they do. It just matters that it's small and the people are very smart. He said, "Otherwise, you're going to be unhappy."

Wonderful advice.

Stephen Schwarzman: I went back to this fellow, Larry Noble, and said that was the advice. He said, "Oh, you should go see Bill Donaldson. He has a small investment banking firm." I went down to see him, and the appointment -- he was late, he was doing something else -- and I was sitting in the lobby, and at that point, they had nothing but young guys working there and beautiful girls, and I was watching all this, taking it in, and looking at this skyline out of a new building, 140 Broadway, in 1969. Then I went to see Bill for my interview, and he said, "Why do you want to work here?" And I said, "Frankly, I don't even know what you do here, but I know that everybody I've seen is very excited about it, and with all these bright guys and pretty women, whatever they're doing, I want to do it." And he gave me a big smile.

The right answer.

Stephen Schwarzman: He said, "That's a good reason, and offered me a job. I was there for six months, and then I went into the Army Reserves and then back to Harvard Business School.

By this point, it sounds like you were set on a career. Was the decision to go to Harvard Business School a decision for banking, particularly?

Stephen Schwarzman: Well, I learned an interesting thing.

People have observed that you only learn truly by failing, and I was, I thought, a complete failure at this job. I had no economics. I had no ability to read a financial statement. I had never had accounting. They gave me an office and a secretary and some annual reports and assignments. I didn't even know how to approach it. I'm pretty good on my feet, I'm pretty decent at bobbing and weaving, but there's only so long you can bob and weave when you don't have a good base. So it became clear to me, without anybody advising me, that leaving myself in an environment where I was intellectually unprepared was a danger not only to me but to everybody that I had anything to do with. So I went to business school, really, just to deal with this complete lack of preparation that I had. I really didn't like the kind of research-oriented business that DLJ was doing. I found I wasn't particularly good at that either, instinctively, so I interviewed at a variety of businesses out of business school, investment banks and advertising businesses and I think a consulting business.

I'm almost reluctant to tell you some of these stories on tape.

I remember going to an advertising firm. They offered me a job, and the compensation was $10,000. So I looked at the fellow who offered me the job, who thought it was a wonderful thing, and I started laughing, and he looked at me and he said, "Too high or too low?" And I said, "The fact that you wouldn't know is the problem. The starting salaries at that point in the investment banking business were 17,000; he was at ten. Now you know, when you're off by that percentage, that's pretty bad, and the fact that he was so unaware of what sort of was being paid competitively, I said, "Well, this is an industry where you can't make a lot of money if they don't really know even where they are." I interviewed at the different investment banking firms and in the corporate finance business, which I sort of thought felt like the right thing. It felt like the right thing because you were helping people. In other words, executives would tell you their problems and you would come up with a solution. You were both on the same team, and they were helping, you were helping. That seemed like something that wasn't too complex. You didn't have to be over-burdened with intellect. We're not talking about brain surgery here. This is finance -- add, subtract, multiply, and divide. It wasn't until decades later that calculus really came into finance on the trading side. So it seemed a comfortable fit.

Was it the relationships part of the business that attracted you?

Stephen Schwarzman: When I was at Yale, I figured out what I wanted to do, but I didn't know it existed. I figured that I wanted to be a telephone switchboard -- and we don't have telephone switchboards, just about, anymore -- but I wanted to have coming in enormous amounts of data, I wanted it to go into a central processor, and I wanted some kind of output. But I really wanted the volumes of input, and I didn't know where in the world I could find a job like that. I didn't know it was investment banking. I didn't have any real understanding of investment banking, so I just started looking around, and I guessed Pan Am wasn't it, and advertising wasn't it. Consulting was okay, but nobody really listened to you. I mean they do, but usually you're hired for political purposes as often as real purposes. You know, have one executive's view be the controlling one, or to convince a board to do something that maybe they don't want to do. But I was very lucky. As soon as I sort of found this corporate finance field, I said, "That's it."

You recognized it?

Stephen Schwarzman: I recognized that that was the model that I already had in my head. That was a fun model, because you keep getting all this stimuli, and always changing, and then you need to do something with it, and then you actually make something happen, not just talk about it.

You become Managing Director of Lehman Brothers at age 31. You must have been pretty good at it. What do you think was propelling you forward?

Stephen Schwarzman: I think investment banking is pretty easy. The reason why I was probably pretty good at it is that it's very easy to get the sort of fundamental base for it. After that, it's anticipating what's going to happen, figuring out new things, new relationships, solving problems that people haven't focused on in the right way. I don't know if that describes it. Here's just one thing I can remember, just sort of at random, which I was proud of at the time. It seemed pretty simple to me.

There was one of these development institutions, like the World Bank -- it had a different name -- and they had a variety of bonds outstanding, and each of those bonds had what's called covenants, which are really restrictions in them. The bank wanted to do something, but wasn't able to because some of these issues forbid them, and they still wanted to do something, but they couldn't get those bonds in. They couldn't call them. They were stuck with it. It was an important initiative, and everybody was real concerned. They didn't know what to do. So nobody could solve the problem, and I was one of the people working on this, and I remember going home at night and I often think of things when I'm sleeping. I don't sleep real deep REM stuff, and I woke up, and I said, "You know what? What's the problem here? The problem is that these bond-holders want to be protected for something, and what's the worst that can happen to them? The worst that can happen is, if you did the bad thing and it didn't work out, they'd lose their money, right?" So, I said, "Why don't we just take a bunch of money" -- because banks always have money -- "and just dedicate that money behind those bonds and go ahead and do whatever we want to do. Because the worst that can happen is that they lose their money, and if we assure them that they could never lose their money, then they don't have to worry. And if they don't have to worry, they have no cause for damages against the institution for going ahead and doing something. So I came in with some elaborate sort of proposal to do that for large amounts of money -- at that point, large amounts were hundreds of millions, now it would be tens of billions -- and everybody just sort of sat there and went, "Geez, no one's ever done this," and I said, "Well, so what? Aren't we addressing the problem?"

They all said, "Yeah, but it's not legal." I said, "Forget the legal part for the moment. It's not technically legal, but if we went to all the bond-holders and asked them for a vote and said there's no conceivable way you can lose money, because the money to pay off the bonds and their interest is already dedicated, and we got a pretty high percentage of the vote," I said, "That seems to me like a risk you can take, because you're doing nothing unethical. You're protecting the bond-holders better than they are today, okay? Today, they just have to rely on the general credit of the institution, and we're making it even better. We're putting a few hundred million dollars worth of cash behind to guarantee the payment. I said, "Who could be unhappy?" So they did that.

You didn't get the Pan Am response. At the end, they bought in.

Stephen Schwarzman: Right. They bought in because they had a problem, and they wanted that problem solved.

I've always found, in investment banking, that there's real logic to everything, and I don't understand why somebody else didn't come up with that. They probably would have, at some point, but you know, I've always found -- and I really didn't specialize in doing financings like that. I really did merger things with most of my career, and that's just another derivation of solving problems. In the merger business, there's also the ability to sort of go out on a limb and sort of invent things, sort of creatively imagine "What would this company buy?" before they might even think about it. And then sort of go to them and convince them, and then convince the other side to do something, or negotiation, which is -- you know, a lot of people don't like really being in zero sum games, and you try and make a zero sum game not a zero sum game. But you know, that's your first level of solving of problems. But at the end of the day, if money's being paid, usually it's out of somebody's pocket into somebody else's pocket. So that is a zero sum game at the end of the day, and usually that generates huge amounts of conflict and tension. A lot of people don't like being in situations like that, and for whatever the series of reasons, that didn't bother me. I don't always enjoy it, but it didn't bother me.

It would be normal for the other person to get angry if you were demanding a lot of money or something. That would be a normal response. If I were on the other side, it would just be the opposite. I found that I was pretty well adapted for this stuff, in large part because finance has much to do with understanding what's on the other person's mind, and if you can understand what's on their mind, in effect, that's the problem to solve. There's a zone of fairness where you can solve that for that person, and at the same time not disadvantage the other person you're representing. So that was probably what made me pretty good. You don't even have to meet with the other people to know what's on their mind, because you say, "Well, if I were them, what would I want?"

It's a kind of empathy.

Stephen Schwarzman: Whatever.

It sounds like the factor of common sense, which is not so common, is a fundamental factor, at whatever level of the economic process you're in. Do you find you have to make a gut-trusting decision at a certain point?

Stephen Schwarzman: Yes, I think that's right. You don't even have to have a remarkable gut as far as I'm concerned. Once you see things line up that way then the issue is just, you know, crushing execution, okay? You go into an execution mode. The important thing, ironically, isn't the execution. If you have the right vision and the right perception, the rising tide will, indeed, lift all boats. If you happen to have a super-buoyant boat, you'll do better. If you have a super-fast boat, you'll go faster, but the tide is going to bring up all the boats. The thing that's most important is figuring out where those special, special things are going to be happening, and that's really pretty easy.

Mr. Schwarzman, that's the last word. That was great. Thank you very much.

Stephen Schwarzman: A pleasure.