Bonjour maman! J'ai survécu à un bombardement, Hello World! How can I help you? From Paris to Bankong from Thailand to New York ...

[Zuhal Danyildiz]

I am in a cab and making my way to a fundraising event for an organization called, "Post Conflict Development in New York City," on the Hudson River and West Highway. As I watch the gorgeous view with an incredible sunset, I am also planning my trip to China. Where am I going to visit in China, what budget should I estimate and whom am I going to interview ..?


photographed
by zuhal danyildiz, The Champagne Bar at the Plaza

There is a note on the door that says, "use the next door." My friend Johanna, from Sweden, and I step into the apartment, and start a conversation that gives me the chance to have an amazing interview.

Mr. Leong was introduced to me as the host of the fundraising event and most importantly he turned out to be the one who has got all the answers to my China questions. My life is always full of intersting coincedences!

Our next meeting is now at the Champaign Bar at the Plaze on 5th Ave. Here our long Friday talk goes ...

photographed by
zuhal danyildiz

Terence F. Leong
President and CEO of the
Walker Street Associates

Mr. Leong is the principal of Walker Street Associates which he co-founded in 1996. He has acted as a consultant on numerous projects in the U.S. and internationally. He has acted as an interim executive officer of numerous ventures and is a member of the board of directors of two publicly traded companies.

Leong is the founder of 3 operating companies and has advised dozens of business in a broad array of industries. He has helped all start up operations at their inception.

Family & Education background
Both sides of my family are Chinese but immigrated to the U.S My mother's side is actually Chinese but from the Island of Jamaica. My father side is from south of Hong Kong, and I was born here in Upstate New York. All education in upstate was in public schools. My family wanted to send me to the Christian All Boys Academy. I only made it to the second level of testing because I didn’t’ want to go to the Christian Boys Academy. So I made sure that I didn’t do too well on the second level.

Is there any particular reason for that?

I like girls … I wanted to go to school with girls … I started at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, PA, where I studied design and transferred to Parsons School of Design. It was an architecture program.

Design was a conscious choice?

Absolutely, I thought I was going to be a designer, however, I didn’t know what kind. Whether it was going to be industrial, ad, or architecture … What I was taught in high school was so visual. So I transferred from Carnegie to Parsons, and it has a program in Paris, which was very informative. Just traveling to Europe, Paris as a base …

How old were you at that time?

18-19 years old, and it was one full year.

So how was Paris?

It was incredible, it was great. My parents were saying “go out and see the world.” The school curriculum was extremely easy; it wasn’t hard to maintain it.

In terms of what?

It was a joke! I mean for me anyways … Carnegie Mellon was extremely intense. There were times in Carnegie that I felt like I discovered my limits, what I could achieve, what my boundaries were. I was up to three days straight to get the work done. And the Paris program was lighter. I think you’re there for the cultural experience and travel. The school is made to facilitate your life style, which is basically ‘traveling!’

When I was working for International Program in graduate school as a President of Internaional Student Association in Texas, I always encouraged (I still do) my friends here and everyhwere to get out of their safe world and experice something different that they wouldn't have a chance to do otherwise. The more you observe outside, the more you know about the world inside yourself, so more Paris …

What was the most stunning experience in Paris?

I’ll tell you what happened … It was the first month when I was there … At that time Paris was going through terrorist bombings. Some of the students were considering going back to the states because they were afraid of these bombings occuring. One of my friends she actually went back home because of her parents. We were laughing at her the next morning, how she was overreacting, and that afternoon, I actually survived a bombing! I was in the store and had just left there. No cell phones, no Internet … nothing. I called my mom on the pay phone in the U.S., and the news was already on T.V. So my mom was telling me what was going on.

I’ll give you some advice, if you survive a terrorist bombing, don’t call your mom first thing.

photographed by
zuhal danyildiz san francisco, CA








And then how did it effect you? Had you ever considered going back to the state?
No, not at all. Not even once. It just shocked me. I saw some people seriously injured; 56 injured and 5-6 died if I remember correctly. You know, these people have nothing to do with these terrorists who bombed the store. They were just human beings shopping. And I was just looking at all these bodies. These people had nothing to do with whatever it was. I can’t believe someone is actually that cruel. It made me extremely sad.

*****
Well, French people were never acknowledged but some of the backroom deals said that the brother of this terrorist was being imprisoned in France. They were doing bombing after bombing in order to win his release. That was the last bombing. I have to check it out but I think he was released after that.

As a designer Paris must be a great please to be inspired …

In order to go to school everyday, if the weather is nice, I’d walk from my apartment to the school every morning. I lived on the Right Bank and the school was on the Left Bank. I’d walk underneath the Eiffel Tower every morning… You approach it, it’s underneath, and behind you, and I’d walk up to Champ De Mars. What a stunning and setting trip to school everyday. It was just inspiring to be there.

After Paris, what happened?

Before I graduated, my brother and I started a trading company. A kind of “branded merchandise,” – I think that its called, “trading company.” He was in Thailand at that time and he still is. He and I had always this idea when we were kids that at some point we would grow up and we would start a business together. We started exploring what to bring over from Thailand into the U.S. markets. So before I graduated from college we identified some, “table top accessories," like small furniture items, that we were manufacturing in Thailand. So we lined up some customers in New York City.

So can we say designing and manufacturing were your passion at that time?

You know what, business has always been my passion. Even though I thought I’d be a designer. I never looked at design as a profession other than business. When I was little, I don’t know what other people played, but I used to do two things … One, I had this town and I was like an “urban planner” in the basement of our house. I used to build up everything, traffic and houses. Number two, we played what would the word be, “corporate mogul!” Me and my friends… I made up a miniature city in the entire basement. So we were trying to go out and hire our friends to grow our empires. We cut payroll every week, we even had employee identification cards. I used to draw this amazing campus of my corporate empire, different divisions, all the operating entities and the department. And it was not even on a PC, it was on a typewriter. I was 12 and typing these paychecks every week … It was such an administrating burden. And then I felt such a strain…” Typing out these checks everyday, I'd be like, “I need help” ;-)

*****
What resulted from the trading company was that we were growing nicely as a result of having started at a high level. The very first customers were Kate’s Paperie, GoodMan, Barney’s New York, MoMa, Pottery Barn, Pier 1 Imports, and Saks etc. We started designing online. We had four thousand customers and were doing very well. I was designing the goods, and my brother was manufacturing. So we started to get our products into these types of stores, and then we got/had some trade shows. The company was growing. It wasn’t a huge company – it was about less than a million in revenue - but as we got bigger, we started to sell bigger and bigger stores. We kind of route the whole houseware break outs in the U.S. because at that point Crate & Barrel had numerous outlets and catalogues, but they had a few locations, so the whole houseware just started to boost up.
You’ve mentioned that you kind of, “route the houseware in the U.S.” What was different at that time in terms of the market from today?

The U.S. hadn’t really developed a houewares market the way it is today. Now you can see them in every block. If you walk down the streets they are in every corner. Each department store has started to expand their houseware departments at the same time. So the factory had to scale in order to meet the much bigger orders. We used to call them up on Wednesday and we could get a meeting on Thursday. It was that easy. Today, forget it! For example, Barney’s called “Chelsea Passage,” and it was just one woman running the whole thing, Lisa Pressman, she was the president of Barney’s.

******

The other dynamic was that, as we got bigger, the customers got bigger too. Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel were a pretty big jump. For us to meet that jump was refreshing for the company. By the time I got out of there, we started to sell Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club – which is a division of Wal-Mart and Office Depot.

In the mean time you were still dealing with the small accessories?

Yeah, that’s the thing … Even though we were still dealing with these accessories, the larger the customers we had, the less they needed our designs. They don’t necessarily want to see what the Leong design had produced for the season. They have their designers who basically say what it is that they want exactly, but don't design. As for me, even though we were growing and getting bigger as a designer, with the guy who ran the U.S. operations, my role actually was being reduced. We didn’t need a warehouse, we didn’t need a distribution center … We didn’t have as much incoming goods to process anymore. The emphasis started to go overseas, everyone started to treat company outside of Bankong.

So you have mentioned that your part was being reduced, what was the next step?

I didn’t design anymore. We needed to inventory products and had our own warehouse pick up and pack ... These operations have stuff flown back and forth between the U.S. and Asia or you have agents who live in a region near East Asia or Bankong. They got in touch with my brother directly. So our U.S. operations were becoming wastage, it was really unnecessary. So we were growing but I was actually having less and less to do on a daily basis. And I didn’t really want to go and live Bangkok; however, for me it would have been logical to keep the business going in Bangkok and relocate there. But it wasn’t my thing. So what happened was, my cousin who was running the Hedge Funds at that time, was running private management. He said, “Hey, why don’t you come up here and check out what I do, and see if you want to do this?” It was a completely different industry. You have some wealthy individuals who give you their money to manage. It was a totally different industry.

Bankong, Thialand
And how did you feel about it?
Well, I was interested in it because I wanted to get out off this business anyway. I thought that what we had been doing was kind of old fashioned, in essence we were taking these goods that were made in Asia and bringing them into America. It sounds like 70’s mercantilism, and it didn’t really interest me. I was interested in getting to something else. In addition to that, dollars make a lot of sense. You had to pomp up the volume on the sales in order to get additional meaningful dollars, and it didn’t really appeal to me!
One Thing Led to Another!

Ideally and technically, it is always good to be organized and have certain plans in life. That doesn't prevent you from going into totally different directions though. There is no doubt everyone more less experience that once. The point is, if it is at least predictable for you, and because dollars make sense, let's give it a shot, like Mr. Leong!
I didn’t have anything planned but my cousin was doing that job, he was asking for help and he offered me. It was convenient and easy for me. I said, "Why not!" So we ended up managing the money for wealthy individuals … They gave us hundreds of thousands of dollars to put into their account, and we were making recommendations. We’d buy and sell on their behalf. So we were kind of investment advisors.
And how did it go?

That’s a good question! I couldn’t stand it actually, because you are dealing with very sophisticated investors. We basically focus on very small public companies and managing their money on behalf of that asset class. I was 24-25, a Parsons Design School graduate, I didn’t have any background in finance, and they looked at you over their shoulders and asked, “What’s this kid doing?” The answer is, sometimes you can win sometimes you can lose. If they give us a quarter million dollars, they usually go by their sense and they didn’t necessarily follow the outline I had for them. If you make $10K on Monday and lose $30K on Tuesday, guess what? You’re going to hear from them next three months, "How did you lose that money?” And I was just sick of it. You know these guys barely acknowledge when trade makes money. One dollar goes out of the window in the wrong way and we’d never hear the end of it.

You were happy to leave the designing job behind, and money management didn’t work for you, what’s next on your plate?

I enjoy running consulting, and troubleshooting in existing businesses. So as a consulter, which is really where I ended up, I analyze the pitfalls and capitalize their strengths. I analyze situations and figure out what’s good and bad, what do you need, what does it mean take up and drop, and who needs to stay and go, etc. Those are the skills that I have developed.

If you can't beat them, join them because you can't win them all, right!
When exactly did you discover that you have these sort of skills?
That’s an interesting question … There is a time frame when I was doing private wealth management, I couldn’t stand it, and I tried to figure out what was the value that I brought into acquisition. So instead of managing the money and buying and selling these equations, what happened was that we worked with these small companies very closely and were trying to get some information about them just to see whether we should invest in them. I have met a tremendous number of executives of small, tiny, public New York companies. They made 10-30 million in revenues but their market capital was significantly smaller than that. As I started to speak to those executives and talk shop with them, my comfort level was in dealing with them on their operational issues and the challenges that they face as they grow their companies because I’ve done that with our design company -- Well, I didn’t have a business degree, I went to Parsons design school, I didn’t know how to finance, I didn’t know what financial statements were, etc. I learned all that on my own because I had to raise the money for our company to grow. We did it with our private sources or others just like everyone does.

It was pretty quick and within a year or two I became defacto consultant to these types of executives and then it grew from there.

All's well that ends well ;)

By considering this financial recession or any other difficulties, how do you master tough times? Personally and professionally.

Definitely, there is no doubt about it! It’s a very cynical business. When you’re consulting in business, if the market is up there are clients, as many as you want. When the market is down you can go play tennis every single day because there is no client at all. So this is an extremely cynical business. I’ll be quite honest with you. In the past, I was caught by the cycles. During the “dot.com bubble era,” 2000-01, a lot of us downsized and cut expenses.

We invested in those companies. I was a co-founder of at least, I think, four tele-com startups from 1999 until 2001. For each of them, I actually put my own cash to invest in them. So when the market died, those companies became fresh and worth, and originally they had appreciated to all our liquidity and networks to get the huge dive. We had friends, well actually almost everyone, they went back to their home office from working places on Madison Ave. I had friends that sold their house in Manhattan and had to move to Florida; because if you go bankrupt in Florida, you don’t lose your house.
It was a lean period back then. It was a rough, rough period for us. You just have to react and respond. So it wasn’t the online companies effecting my business per say; it was that we had all been deeply immersed in these telecom start-ups either on an investment base or our portfolio was comprised with a lot of them. Or we were executives ourselves, a lot of my friends were. Obviously you learn your lesson. Up until 2001, this person would never have thought that he would go down. I’d go, “What! My income will go down, you’re crazy …” We went down 80% ! (laughing). So you have to back up to those levels. It took us a while to go back to those levels.

At that time 9/11 also broke out, too …
Ugh, 9/11 was another kick in the head! Horrible time, horrible …

Mr. Leong, like any other businessman would experience in such a situation, lived hard and fast. He started to realize that there would be times when his income would go up again, and he should have some assets put away that can be liquidated when you don’t have a stable income. (priceless adivice, priceless) Yes, that sounds pretty simple but watch out! As he said, laughing, "they didn’t teach me this at Parsons. I didn’t have any assets to put away!"

So that's how you might lose your money easily, too!

What were the lessons you learned?

“This financial crisis, I am not suffering. I am having a great time. On a personal basis I was prepared for this one. Economic downturn … My expenses today are still only 32% of my monthly income. In terms of severity, I mean, I am having a good time.”

I'm sure many is wondering at the moment why and how?

Because I was prepared for that. I have some cash put away and assets like liquidity. After the dot.com bubble era, you make sure that it doesn’t happen again. So yeah, this recession for me is no problem. But if you ask me how it is in terms of the market in general, this is the severist of our lifetime, for sure! My friends in the financing and investing community, I think it is close to 75- 80%, are out of work! I say about 20% are hanging on by their fingers. You have taken some significant income reductions or there are positions that are tenacious right now. And the other maybe 5% are probably fine. But a lot of people are having a rough time.

Why do you think of the reasons of why we experience this financial crisis from your perspective?

I think it is pretty easily identified. I agree with the common consensus. It’s been analyzed over and over. You had a lot of people who shouldn’t be homeowners encouraged to be homeowners and put into these mortgages and loans which are probably not the highest credit rating but we gave them the highest credit rating and these people had escalated just more rate mortgages that went up significantly in the period of 2-3 years. It was bound and trickled down and wiped out the liquidity of the debt that had been passed out to these institutions.

The mortgage crisis started this and everything that has leveraged on those evaluations, all these assets.

A lot of people say, “We didn’t know this was coming …” What would you say about it?
John Paulson, president of Paulson & Co., Inc., a New York-based hedge fun, saw this is coming, a lot of people did see this was coming. I remember I was buying a house in 2004 and there were all from these crazy rates in my favor as a buyer and I remember looking at them thinking, "this is nuts!” Who would have ever signed an interest only mortgage for two years, then, have to start paying principal … It didn’t make any sense at all. And it was the same mind that said, your income would never go down, but the matter of fact is that it does go down. After having been in the dot.com bubble era watching my income go down 80% in one year, I knew that your income can go down. When you plan your future, you can’t just plan for everything that is surprising. These people may have been thinking that, “Oh! Okay, it is two years from now, I’d be able to afford it by then,” but it didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen for a lot of people. And the rates were significant, 1 or 2 points. These are huge jumps. Even though some people were marginally making the payments from the beginning anyways … So mortgage crisis started this and it is triggered in many other areas because it’s all interrelated… The thing is that it was not originally a U.S. thing because of the way these mortgages are securitized, but then it became endemic globally.

When do you think that it is going to recover?

You can measure recovery in a lot of ways. Debt is going to take a while. I think unemployment is not going to get worse, I hope! I’d look at “unemployment” as the indicator. – Maybe housing values, the stock markets—but unemployment is important because when people have income and if they pay their bills, that’s what starts to push the rest of the economy. So I think, hopefully, it will take another two to four quarters before we get it to zero. (The debt.)

Since I was trying to undestand the relationship between the debt and the crisis, Mr. Leong probably felt like he needed to put in more effort to explain it to me. Money is not easy to understand, at least for me. It is actually half and half, because if you go through some articles and Op-eds, you will eventually find out the fact that some experts or economists have different perspectives on this issue. So debt is the cause or effect, or it's been there forever? Here is the answer.

There is no correlation between recession and debt. Dept is used as a stimulus to save us from going any further. We can get out of a recession but debt is going to take quite a while. Everyone is concerned about the debt at the moment because the stimulus which was put on the plate in September, was about a year ago from now. But the debt didn’t cause the recession and the majority of the debt has occurred in order to stay it off a deeper recession or depression whatever you want to call it. I would not use debt as the indicator of whether we will go out of recession or not!

CHINA

Boosting economy

China has a very large cash surplus at the moment. All other nations don’t. The U.S. is obviously the World’s largest deter ration at the moment and it has been for quite sometime. Every country has money!

I think the U.S. and China are inexorably tied together. The man on the street in China understands more than the man on the street in the U.S. does. The economy between China and the U.S. are inevitably linked. All factories that are popping out with the low-cost goods, they’re doing this for the industrialized world; Europe, the U.S., Japan, and the rest of the Asia. But obviously the U.S. is the biggest consumer in the World and a big driver in all of that. When the U.S. is in a recession, China is not going to humming alone. There are some thoughts that China would be able to draw a middle class, and be able to maintain its GDP growth while the rest of the world goes down into a recession, but that obviously will not happen. Because all these factories are making goods not for the Chinese middle class but for Europe, the U.S., Japan and Australia, for all the industrialized world.


photographed by
zuhal danyildiz, chinatown, san francsicon, CA

China has a communist regime but not a communist market
In this part, I have to confess that I learned more than I would have learned in a class. We have been discussing over and over about the fact that if there is really a middle class happening in China and what this has to do with us as the people living in the U.S.
Open your eyes and ears...
How has China become part of the Global World?
I think the middle class in China is evolving and developing. Other economies in the world are talking about the popping up middle class in China because the American middle class is on the rail as a result of the recession. China’s middle class is nowhere near the size of the industrialized world. Its size doesn’t even approach the other middle classes in the U.S, Europe, Australia or any other industrialized countries in terms of pro-capital buying power. China as a whole culturally – as a nation-- is a saver. Even if they make an extra $100, they are not going to buy Nike’s, it’s going to go somewhere else like their daughter’s education. The idea of China’s middle class, yes it exists, yes they are consuming more than it happened to do in the past but I don’t think it is going to be an economic powerhouse for sometime. I think that it will be … But it is not like China is going to save the world from going into a deeper depression than it already has.
Would you consider that as positive or negative?

I think it is positive. Every time, if you take people out of poverty and sustenance to having income, I think it is always positive. Like India, Africa, Asia, or Russia.

What strategies do you think China has followed and succeeded in?

They have a lot of factors that came together and not only economically. It is entrepreneurial and cultural. China is very proactive and seeking out for business opportunities. They’re all over Africa. I consider them as “tradable or charitable missions.” For example; human rights, environmental or something else. Chinese are only driven by dollars. So there are tons of factors that came together to make China to be what it is today. Its natural resources … It is inherently, culturally entrepreneurial society, which is Chinese diaspora around the world basically where they have Chinese people in business. The other factor is the mass population of China. 1.4 billion people which is five times bigger than the U.S population, and they are eager to go out to make a living. Then you’ve got some development since the “economic reform (1995).” They have probably taken the root and been able to get some critical mass behind them. So you see all these factors are coming together and there is nothing stopping them! And I think it is going to get to a more critical mass.

I can tell you one thing about these factories that I go to in China, I don’t see any of them drumming up to the stage for any reasons. The cost of labor and energy are too low over there.


*********
Yeah, China is going to be ascending for quite some time because of the sheer size of the market, its capital resources now, and the dynamics. The West and the industrialized nations are going to continue to feed China’s cash and trade surpluses, and it will be quite some time. I don’t see a bunch of cheap clothing being made in Manhattan anymore. Trying to make clothing made in Italy versus trying to make it in China, I mean I don’t know!

What is your political view?
I’ve been very supportive of some Tibet Sport Groups since 1999. Obviously that has a very anti-government stance in terms of just its perspective. Where I stand? Since I’ve been to China and because I’ve lived there for roughly two years going back and forth for that period, I’d say that I’ve gained a tremendous amount of insight into the government and how it controls the country and what it has done to its people. So that has given me a more well rounded view of China’s government. Having been able to live in different villages, cities, and provinces, people seem to do greater things as others seem to have their own private agenda, which is not unusual in a regime like that. However, I think that a lot of people misunderstand China. They’re stuck with their political spectrum. Some of them are too friendly, and some of them are too antagonistic and unforgiving for the Chinese Government. Neither or is healthy for either China or the U.S. I tend to have an argumentative tone whenever I discuss China. If I am with my NGO activist friends (left-wing center) that are too naïve, I would stand on the PRS side. stand towards the PRS Government, in spite of the Tibet situation. My really right wing, conservative friends seem to think that we are going to be inevitably at war with China. I think this is ludicrous, why would you hold that mind set?
*******
I think that Americans need to analyze it more objectively; I don’t think many of them have a healthy view of what the U.S. and China relationship is, what it should be and can be as well. (Chinese) people in America don’t understand China. I think that it is an absolute system, and a lot of people in China think that at some point they are going to be a-two-party system, more central, and have democratic reforms but right now this is what we have, “the communist party.”

The new generation is happy with that, do you think?

People I met that are significantly younger than me don’t seem to be fulfilled with a change and they don’t seem to protest. There is a lot of mumbling under their breath but they’re not happy with the system.

What do you think of President Obama?


As for Obama overall I am relieved the US finally has a President who exhibits genuine leadership qualities: cohesive articulation of a vision for various initiatives, at least genuine attempts at bipartisanship, and ability to interface with the world on a rationale basis looking at the world from US interests but how those dovetail with countries around the world. Think he’s a little aggressive w the healthcare overhaul but he’s prob trying to push it through before midterm elections next year and Democrats lose some seats. Overall I look at government as like the weather. No matter what the weather is doing, you note the conditions, dress accordingly and just go to work each day. That’s it in a nutshell, but obv I could amplify and expound.
How about New York?

One great thing about New York is the opportunities. There are just so many chances to do things, I mean business wise, full of potential. There are a lot ways to develop yourself in this town. I came from a very humble family and from a small town in upstate New York. I don’t have an ideal degree or strong networks to the White House; however, I’ve been able to do quite a bit for my self and become fulfilled and a happy person within so many different levels; spiritually, entrepreneurly, and physically. So I think that New York has so many resources to realize your potential and that’s what I like about New York.

Overcoming difficulties

You have to have an unshakable self-confidence in yourself that you’re going to be able to raise to the challenges and


overcome obstacles as they present themselves. That’s it! And you develop this in a lot of ways. You have to have 100% confidence in yourself … Regardless of the setbacks, down days and also on good days too. If I have children I would advise them this first. Self-confidence allows you to move forward through anything and temp anything. It means no fear of failure and no fear of making mistakes but it doesn’t mean that you don’t make them; you analyze and learn from them. How do you call, “headstrong!” means without wondering if you’re going to make mistakes. Obviously you’ve got to be strategic and have some assets. When I’m trading, for example, if I lose money that I didn’t’ expect … You just have to look at yourself and say, "Well this is where I made the mistake and guess what I’m going to do … Wake up tomorrow and not do it again!"

When we were talking about life, I asked Mr. Leong what or who touched his life and change him. And he mentioned the book, "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. As I was reviewing the book in order to purchase, thanks to Google, I figured that it is also in Google books list. So that night, I ended up reading a few chapters already. I am happy to introduce this book to you, and yes there are many of them outside, but what happens to me all the time is that , no matter what, I touch a book when I am ready to be touched. Not any other time. And finalize the interview with these very last valuable words;

Self-confidence allows you to fulfill your dreams and to be a compassionate and humble person who treats people with kindness. If you treat people rudely or with anger, there is an insecurity there. You have to cultivate, establish and maintain it. There are plenty of tools, methods and possessions that you turn to, however, that’s what you need to do in order to have that necessary foundation. Persistence is a key and positive attribution.


As I was leaving the Plaza (although I didn't want to) , there was this word turning around in my mind over and over:

Unshakable self-confidence, un shakable ... self-confidence, ... unshak ......

New York, you make me think more!
Special Thanks to:

Eloisa Mata, University of Texas

Taylor Erickson

Sofia Karlsson

and of course Mr. Leong for this delightful and warm talk.