Scott Shay

Ryan Serhant:		Welcome back to another episode of Big Money Energy, where we talk to super successful and self-made people to find out exactly how they did it, how they went from nothing to something. I’m Ryan Serhant and today I’m joined by chairman and co-founder of Signature Bank, Scott Shay. We talk about what it takes to start a bank from the ground up, how religion could possibly tie into banking, and what influenced his decision to write a book about faith. Let’s get into it. Welcome to another episode.
Ryan Serhant:		Today is a very, very special day because I’m not sitting down with just the insanely successful and intelligent Scott Shay, I’m sitting down with somebody who started a bank. I want to pick his brain a lot on that. But if you don’t know Scott, you should. He is a leading businessman, author, a speaker, a co-founder and chairman of Signature Bank, which is one of the best and most notable banks in New York for private business owners. And not to mention, he’s also an author, which we’re going to get to.
Ryan Serhant:		You are easily one of the most knowledgeable people in your field, and I’m honored to have you here. And for those of you who are also watching the podcast, this is the first time we’ve done this in our first floor office. This is our conference room. We are all kind of back from COVID. Scott’s here without a tie. We are living it up. So Scott, thank you so much for joining us.
Scott Shay:		It’s a pleasure to be here. And by the way, flattery will get you everywhere, so thanks for that wonderful introduction.
Ryan Serhant:		I’m a salesman. Listen, you look great, you’re in great shape. You’re killing. It’s awesome. It’s great.
Ryan Serhant:		We negotiate deals. We do something called the positive sandwich. So the only way you can ever give anybody… Not that there’s negative information here, but the only way you ever give anybody tough information is you got to have those positive pieces of bread there. And it works.
Ryan Serhant:		The first question I have for you, which I think will really, really kick us off, is how do you start a bank?
Scott Shay:		I had this crazy idea in the nineties that New York was over branched but under banked. There were plenty of big banks. There was JP Morgan. There was Chase. There was Manny Hanny. There was Chemical. There was Long Island Trust. There was Westchester Trust. By the way, those 19 other banks merged to create JP Morgan Chase.
Ryan Serhant:		Yeah, yeah, I remember.
Scott Shay:		So all these banks merging. And these big banks, these mega banks, they were good at servicing AT&T, PepsiCo, IBM. I thought that was really a niche to focus on middle market, small and medium-sized business. So we started a bank, not doing retail, not focusing on the big business; and people thought I was crazy. I mean, literally, I had two co-founders and they just thought I was crazy at first. But I’m a persistent sort of guy.
Ryan Serhant:		Did you work with these guys altogether?
Scott Shay:		I knew them from Republic Bank. And when HSBC decided they were going to buy Republic Bank, the first thing I thought is this is an opportunity. I’m going to find these two guys, considered the best two guys at HSBC, and we’re going to start a bank. Unfortunately, they didn’t know that. That’s what I thought. We had breakfast and they thought I was inviting them to breakfast over something else. And I said, “Let’s start a bank.” You can ask, they’ll cheerfully admit they thought I was crazy. But I worked-
Ryan Serhant:		It’s not something that most people… I mean, you don’t see new banks every day. You see new companies, apps. Everyone’s an entrepreneur right now, everybody. But you do not see people get together over breakfast and say, “You know what we should do? We should start a bank.”
Scott Shay:		Yep, very few.
Ryan Serhant:		So what did you guys… Because that was what? That was 2001 though.
Scott Shay:		When we had the breakfast, it was 1999. They thought, “Let’s try to buy a bank. Let’s try to get some money together. We’ll buy a small bank. We’ll build it.”
Scott Shay:		And I said to them, Joe Depaolo and John Tamberlane, who are my two partners and dear friends, at this point they’re dear friends. That was our first real getting to know each other. I said, “We got to start it from scratch because we’ve got to make our own culture. The big bank culture, it’s just not going to get us where we need to go.”
Scott Shay:		We had applied to 19 different institutions. We started with a whiteboard. We’re here in your conference room. The office that we started in was no more than a third of this size and it had five people in it, no more. And there was a white board and we listed everything we needed to do. And we did it from the number of adding machines to what we needed in terms of-
Ryan Serhant:		People, personnel.
Scott Shay:		… people, positions. We opened with five offices,
Ryan Serhant:		You opened… wait. You opened with five offices?
Scott Shay:		Five offices, which is-
Ryan Serhant:		Where did you… I’m sorry to cut you off. This is really interesting to me because we just started a brokerage. I’ve been with the same company for 12 years and throughout COVID and this year, we did the same thing. We had a big whiteboard. We had this little office with sheets of paper everywhere, with all the things we needed to do and all that. But starting a brokerage is very, very different.
Scott Shay:		Yep.
Ryan Serhant:		Where did you get the money together? Was a personal money? Did you go and raise money to be able to start a bank and to start lending?
Scott Shay:		That’s a great question. We thought about, should we raise personal money or do we need a big backer? Because if you start a bank, people are a little bit afraid to put money in your bank. At the time, the insured limit was $100,000. We wanted businesses to bank with us who generally have much more than $100,000 in the bank.
Scott Shay:		We got a big bank backer. At the time I was on the board of Bank Hapoalim, which is the largest bank in Israel. And we convinced them to invest $42.5 million in our new bank. We started out, in the first month, we lost $2.5 million. And 21 months later, we broke even. We cut our loss every month. The first month we made like $2,000 and we were so happy. We were making this little bit of money, but we were just deliriously thrilled. By month 34, we went public.
Ryan Serhant:		So fast.
Scott Shay:		We’ve never done an acquisition in the history of the bank. As we sit here today, as of last June, as of this past June 30th, we were a $61 billion bank.
Scott Shay:		And every single person who has come in the door has opened an account with us because they want to open an account with us. We’ve done no acquisitions. It’s not like Chemical Bank got the clients from Manny Hanny or Manufacturers Hanover. You have to want to join us. So at this point, I think the hypothesis that I thought, which is there was a need for a smaller and medium-sized business bank in New York, I think the tentative conclusion is it was correct.
Ryan Serhant:		Yeah. But you’re not a retail bank.
Scott Shay:		No, that’s why most people haven’t heard of us, even though we’re the 40th largest bank [crosstalk 00:06:47].
Ryan Serhant:		Right, because you’re not going to your ATM’s.
Scott Shay:		We have them, but they’re on the 12th floor, the eighteenth floor. We have an office on Union Square. You won’t even know it’s there because you have to take an elevator up. And if you’re a private business you’re up here doing it. We have an office south of you.
Scott Shay:		Again, you’ve probably walked by it a thousand times on Broadway, but you’re not going to get an elevator, go up to the 20th floor and find our office. We’re not retail. Most of our clients who are retail clients are owners of private businesses that they’re already banked with us.
Ryan Serhant:		And so they are small businesses. What’s the biggest type of client you have and what’s the smallest type?
Scott Shay:		Well, are sweet spot is 25 to 500 employee firms. That’s our sweet spot. If you look, that’s probably 85% of our clients, we have bigger, we have smaller. We’d be happy to bank you. We’re happy to bank anybody, but that’s our sweet spot. That’s where we’re best.
Ryan Serhant:		How has COVID been on the co-founder of a bank?
Scott Shay:		It was very strange that before Governor Cuomo wrote the order closing, essentially shutting New York, I got a call from the deputy-
Ryan Serhant:		Yeah, we remember that day.
Scott Shay:		… I remember the day a little bit before because I got a call from the deputy superintendent of banking in New York who said, “This is going to come down, but don’t forget you’re an essential service.”
Ryan Serhant:		Sure.
Scott Shay:		And it was very strange getting that call. Because I knew we were an essential service, money’s important and the transfer money is important, but we’re not a hospital, we’re not doctors. I didn’t conceptualize us in that way. But then when the shutdown happened, I realized how essential we were and that we were getting calls immediately. We bank some hospitals in New York who immediately needed money. The people were coming in, who were, I mean, serious issues, and they needed to immediately have their lines expanded.
Scott Shay:		I mean, ultimately, the federal government gave the money and it all worked out fine, but not day one. We had all sorts of clients who had their supply chains from China disrupted. So in a day, they had paid for materials or final product in most places from China and that was gone. It was shut off. Those products weren’t getting in, so immediately they had to go and try to get alternative products. Buy it in the United States, buy it somewhere where they could get at it, where they could supply. All of those things, it erupted.
Scott Shay:		I mean, literally, I was working 24 by 6. We had calls. We had a daily call at nine, at three, and then a 9:00 PM at night among senior management. It was incoming from all directions. And then PPP happened.
Ryan Serhant:		Well, at the time in between people, non-essential workers don’t get to go to work, essential workers have to stay. And then the city gets shut down, the country gets shut down, and then PPP was kind of a month-ish, give or take. Were you ever nervous about a run on the bank? Where you nervous that everyone with a credit line was going to come and just call for cash because they were going to freak out? What do you do in that scenario?
Scott Shay:		When COVID was just starting to be an emerging issue, before the shutdown, before-
Ryan Serhant:		Yeah, so like January, February. Yeah.
Scott Shay:		… February, early February. We decided we just wanted to have a ton of cash.
Ryan Serhant:		Same. Always.
Scott Shay:		We just kept it in the Federal Reserve, essentially, which sounds like a lot of money, $3 billion of cash at all times, something like that, two, three. Kept our lines clean because we know it’s possible that people are going to want to draw on cash, so we just wanted to be out there so there was no issues. And we have stayed so liquid, which is earning us nothing. I mean, literally cash at the Fed is earning us nothing.
Ryan Serhant:		It’s just sitting there.
Scott Shay:		We just felt we needed to be there. Thank heavens, thank God we never needed it. PPP was a totally different story. There’s going to be a movie made about it at some point I think.
Ryan Serhant:		How was Signature involved in PPP? People came to you for it and you are handling those PPP loans?
Scott Shay:		As you learned, just about the majority of our clients are small and medium-sized businesses who all qualify. Essentially, every single client of the bank applied for PPP, what happens was is we said… It was overwhelming. I mean, it was truly overwhelming. It was discussed, I think, on like March 26. And by April 3rd, again, it was like a mushroom cloud.
Scott Shay:		What we did is we decided to redeploy about 20% of all the employees of my colleagues, all of our colleagues, into working PPP. You might’ve been UN working on wire transfers or client services or cash management, we said, “We’re moving you to PPP.” And we had people working literally all night creating systems, taking the applications, so that we could get… And I’m really, I’m so proud to say this. We got every every compliant application through. That was our motto is that we want to get everyone through. And we did. And that’s the way you actually build client loyalty is because people realized, I mean, people were filling out applications and talking to senior vice presidents of the bank at 3:00 AM. I mean, I was up-
Ryan Serhant:		People were scared. People were nervous. They [crosstalk 00:12:24].
Scott Shay:		They were freaked out.
Ryan Serhant:		How do you… and this ties into your book which I have right here, which is a lot to it. First of all, it is 500 pages.
Scott Shay:		Easy reading though.
Ryan Serhant:		Yeah, no, it looks good. I mean this is a good amount of book and it seems like you touch on a lot of different things. What pushed you to write… You run a bank. You run a big bank. You have a couple of billion dollars at the Fed so you can have good liquidity.
Scott Shay:		That’s 61 billion in assets.
Ryan Serhant:		But then you sat around and you wrote a 500-page book for the betterment of mankind. Why’d you do that?
Scott Shay:		I think for most people, there’s two important days. One when they’re born because then they have shot, and the second is when they figure out why they’re supposed to be here. For some of us there’s multiple reasons why we’re supposed to be here, what we’re supposed to do. And this book was actually in me and I needed to get it out of me, because people would come to me.
Scott Shay:		I’ll freely admit in New York, I’m a believer, I believe in God. And people know that in the bank, and know that among clients, and know that among my friends, and they would ask me things, questions like, “Well, you seem like a reasonable sort of guy. You actually built this bank, and isn’t God just like sort of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny?” So I started reading the new atheist books that all these folks had read, Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion; Christopher Hitchens, Why God isn’t Great; Daniel Dennett, Letter to a Christian Nation, et cetera. And I looked for a book that would respond to them and I didn’t really find a good answer.
Scott Shay:		So when nobody is doing something, that’s the time when I try to act, and I started writing this book. And I’m so glad nobody told me it would take five years for me to write this-
Ryan Serhant:		Yeah, because you never would have done it.
Scott Shay:		… I would never have done it. But I started and I’m a persistent sort of dog and fellow. So once I started and I had the bone, I wasn’t going to let go. And so it took five years.
Ryan Serhant:		When did you… And we’re getting a little off topic, but it’s curious to me, when did you know that you believed in God?
Scott Shay:		I got to give you a little bit of backstory. My father is a Holocaust survivor, was a Holocaust survivor. He passed away. My father was 13 years old in Švėkšna, Lithuania when the Nazis marched in and they murdered his father, his brothers, his aunts, his uncles, his cousins. His mother had already died in childbirth giving birth to his brother. And he was taken for slave labor, and he was liberated from Dachau. He was less than 70 pounds. He was probably days, weeks, certainly not months away from death; and he made it to Chicago. So long story, he made it to Chicago. He got married and had a son.
Scott Shay:		And my father had this very interesting belief, that in a way that’s the backstory to this book, is that he knew that there was God because had this cup with an S been not here but six inches over there, my father would have been dead. Had my father been standing one position forward, one position behind, one position back, or one position forward, he would have been murdered. There were so many little things that were so amazing, that they were so different, he’d be dead. That he knew in his heart of hearts that there was a God who got him to Chicago.
Scott Shay:		On the other hand, he was angry at God because he survived but what about his father who was murdered a few feet away from him, and again, all of his family. So he had this relationship with God that clearly I inherited some of the… I don’t want to call it trauma, but some of this questioning, is how can we believe in a God when things like the Holocaust happened? Would a good God allowed that, but on the other hand, that’s evil from people?
Scott Shay:		So I’ve been struggling with this all my life and that’s why it spilled out into this book, trying to understand that problem. Because to my mind, to be a non-believer, there’s a lot of questions to be answered. But to be a believer, the hardest question is, how can a good God let things like the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide… I mean, I can go on and on, happen? And that’s a hard question.
Ryan Serhant:		It is. I think freewill exists. Were you religious when you were growing up or is this something you came in later?
Scott Shay:		My father had this belief of God. We went to synagogue, but during services, and I noticed this among other Holocaust survivors, during services they would chat. When the rabbi gave his sermon, they would doze off. Afterward they would go and have a l’chaim, have a little schnapps afterward. But they all made sure their sons and daughters are bar and bat mitzvah’d. So he felt it was important to have a connection, but he was so angry at God. He couldn’t actually pray so easily because he was giving God the silent treatment. And I think God got it. I think God gets that, yeah, my father had some things to be angry about.
Scott Shay:		But I will say this, the one thing I’ve also learned, and one thing I tried to do in particularly section five of my book, is explain how to read the Bible because just being given the King James version is really tough. But if you read stories where Judah is willing to become a slave so that his brother can be freed, where Esther has to convince the King to save the Jews and takes on basically the risk of her life to do so, all sorts of stories of heroism, of what is really going on in the Bible, what is really being tried to convey, it’s such an ancient book that we need a little bit of background to really engage with it.
Scott Shay:		So I find sort of the less people know about the Bible, the less they like it. And when you give them some introduction to it, they really recognize what a rich book, no wonder this has been around for 3000 years. Because before the Bible things were pretty bad. There’s the god-king Pharaoh who could chop off anybody’s head and he was the decider of whether you were good, you were bad, and he was the conduit for the real God, Ra or whoever it was at the time.
Scott Shay:		And the thing people have forgotten, and this is one of the things I try to explain, is that the whole 20th century was a catalog of god-king Pharaohs: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the Assad family, the Kim family, Hitler. They used the same tropes as Pharaoh.
Ryan Serhant:		Yeah, it doesn’t change.
Scott Shay:		Parades, myths, theater, all of course backed up by secret informers and powerful armies because they established themselves as god-king. That’s why Stalin had his image put by the Soviet Space Agency into space.
Scott Shay:		And it’s not just at a macro level, it’s at the level of our intimate encounters. So how did Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, and unfortunately there’s a very long list, how did they get away with what they got away with? Well, they set themselves up in their industries as idols, unquestioned and unquestionable. Just like Pharaoh, what Charlie Rose said was the truth that CBS, what Harvey Weinstein said was the truth. And in the same way that the god-king Pharaoh could decide if you live or die-
Ryan Serhant:		You wouldn’t question it.
Scott Shay:		Harvey Weinstein, based on his whim, could decide if your career was going to work and if it wasn’t going to work. And it’s hard to stand up to idolatry, but thankfully people did. Thankfully they have in the past. And that’s what the Bible tries to explain. And that’s why in the middle of banking, I thought I got to try to take my shot to explain this.
Ryan Serhant:		How does religion then play back into the bank? You’ve just written a 500-page book called In Good Faith: Questioning Religion and Atheism. Do you bring religion and faith into Signature Bank?
Scott Shay:		I do do that and we do it. Two things, first, I believe that the Golden Rule comes from the Bible. Don’t do unto others what you wouldn’t want done unto yourself.
Scott Shay:		So when PPP happened, we immediately knew some of the mega banks were prioritizing clients. If you were bigger, if you were in the private bank, if you were this, if you were that, we’ll take care of you. We had the saying, and I sort of hinted at this before, no compliant client left behind. We moved everybody from the bank. We stayed up all night. I was up, even myself. I wasn’t even that productive in the middle of the night, but we were up in the middle of the night. If you looked at my emails from two to 5:00 AM, you wouldn’t know it was two to 5:00 PM. We said, everybody, if they need a $25,000 loan, they’re going to get the same attention as the company that needs a $9 million loan. So it’s the Golden Rule.
Scott Shay:		We have, like every bank… Well, you’re familiar from your father and your brother, a standards of conduct. You can’t see it, but I’m holding up mine. It’s like a half an inch thick, right? I looked at this and I said, “You know what? Let’s change it so that people get this.” The first paragraph says, this is a very long standards of conduct, “You’re going to have to read it because required to do so by bank regulation. But if you do one thing, you’re going to keep yourself out of trouble and the bank out of trouble. Don’t treat any colleague, client, vendor, counterparty, or anybody you come into contact within your role in the bank other than the way you would want to be treated.”
Scott Shay:		The rest is the commentary of the next 50 or 75 pages. You got to read it and sign it. But if you just do that, you’re going to be okay and we’re going to be okay. It’s not that we don’t turn down loans. We turn down plenty of loans, but we do it in a way which is humane. We try very hard not to treat anybody, not to mislead anybody, not to do anything that other people wouldn’t expect. The answer to every question isn’t going to be yes, but they want to be treated like a human being. They don’t want to be treated like a dust rag. And that’s the way that I try to bring my faith into the bank.
Scott Shay:		And that’s not to say that people who aren’t believers can’t do the same thing, because anybody who believes in the Golden Rule, I can make common cause with. I think they can be moral. But I think the essence of idolatry is essentially, and self deification, is saying, “I’m a little more important than the other person.” That’s clearly what Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein, “I can do stuff to other people that I wouldn’t want done unto myself.” And of course, Stalin, and those other people, the world leaders who killed millions wouldn’t have wanted what they did done to them. And so I think there’s a real essence there. And hopefully that comes through. Hopefully that comes through.
Scott Shay:		I mean, I will say this too. We unfortunately had a number of people stricken with COVID in the bank and I called everyone personally, because that’s the time you need to do things like that. You need to call if they were senior vice president or a teller. I tried to reach them at home. I don’t know that it helped them, but they at least knew that they were as important as anybody else.
Ryan Serhant:		How did you keep your level of confidence in your ability to get all of this done, and take care of your staff and take care of your people, and manage your assets when going through a complete market reset? Like at the end of March, right, when the Dow is selling off 10,000 points. Everyone’s freaking out. There is no PPP yet. There’s talks of it. It’s not getting approved. Was there a moment of being scared at that time? And would you compare it at all to when you started in 2001? Because 2001 was also a very tumultuous year. I mean, you started this bank in 9/11.
Scott Shay:		If you had told me that the World Trade Centers would befell, that interest rates would go from six and a half or six and a quarter percent when we open to 1%, which is what happened, and we would go through the worst recession we had gone through ever in New York… It’s was much worse than 2001 than in 2008 here in New York, I don’t know. I might’ve had second thoughts personally.
Scott Shay:		But I will say this, it was a continuing emergency when we opened the bank and I really felt like it was a continuing emergency. And I was so focused and in the flow of what needed to be done, frankly trying to put one foot in front of the other, as was the whole management team, that it helped us get through it. Had we sat back and taken in a lot of deep breaths and panicked, that would have been bad. We thankfully didn’t do that, but there were plenty of opportunities to panic just because of the state of the world.
Ryan Serhant:		Do you think your level of focus is what helped you stay confident? A big part of what we do as brokers and salespeople and entrepreneurs and part of this podcast, right? It’s called Big Money Energy because I, in my head, when I was young in New York with no money and I was trying to figure out what to do, and it was figure it out or move home. A big difference that I saw was the people who are successful and who were making it, they were very focused almost like they had blinders on, one foot in front of the other, like you just said, and they had a level of confidence to them, even if they had no confidence.
Ryan Serhant:		And so I’m thinking about you starting a bank, 9/11 happens, right. And then you’ve got interest rates tank, and then New York slowly comes back and then Lehman falls. And then you go through the Great Recession and then everything’s kind of okay. And then a few years later, then COVID happens. You seem to me like you have an unshakeable confidence as well as a strong energy to you. And I can tell from your book, which is also why I wanted you to come here and we meet and tell your story for all the listeners. But were you born that way? How did you get there? How you convince yourself to do these things that you’ve done and get through these three very difficult times in New York and in banking?
Scott Shay:		Well, first of all, my father’s memories a blessing to me, he modeled resilience. I mean, there’s nobody, he was next to death and came back and built a life. He did something, which was… I was growing up if ever I would complain, and I would occasionally, I’d complain about this, that, or the other thing, he’d look at me and he’d say, “It’s not the concentration camps.” So that sort of set the standard where, okay, I will have to get on from this because this is clearly overcomeable.
Scott Shay:		I will say this. I do look at these downturns as an opportunity. So when we opened the bank, we had a little party for everybody who started the bank with us. And I got up and spoke and I gave a rah rah. And this just came out extemporaneously, I said, “My goal is in five years we’re going to be a $5 billion bank. And in 10 years we’re going to be a $10 billion bank.” And of course that meant we would be even growing slower in the second part, but it didn’t… That’s what I said.
Scott Shay:		Fast forward five years, we’re $3.8 billion bank, so we hadn’t hit our goal. But then during the great financial crisis, we had been doing the right things, we’d stayed conservative, and we grew from 3.8, we grew to be a $14.8 billion bank by 2011, May 1, 2011. In the worst time, we had grown $11 billion in that second, from 3.8 to 14.8.
Ryan Serhant:		Because you made yourself the choice.
Scott Shay:		We made ourselves a choice. So fast forward to what happened now, December 31st of 2019, we were $49 billion bank. And we were really proud of that. June 30th, we were a $61 billion bank and the reason is that because we had done PPP. Because people… I have to tell you-
Ryan Serhant:		They need to go to you.
Scott Shay:		… I’ve never seen business come in so fast as after PPP, because, A, the people that we got loans for said, “I got to move the rest of my accounts here.” B-
Ryan Serhant:		Yeah, we heard.
Scott Shay:		… [crosstalk 00:28:47] They heard about it. And so people would start coming to us. We have never opened as many accounts as we did when we started. The pace was just ridiculous. Because during these sorts of times, got to be.. And look, people were calling me at all hours-
Ryan Serhant:		And customer service.
Scott Shay:		Yes. Client service. We actually have a term. We don’t actually call anybody a customer. We say everybody’s a client. We want to promote-
Ryan Serhant:		The phrase, when we reached out to you, said this is called Big Money Energy, what did you think? What does that phrase mean to you, that big green phrase right behind my head?
Scott Shay:		Look, I personally I don’t idolicize money. I think that what’s important about money is what it can accomplish. And I think having money so that you can do good that’s what gives me energy. Otherwise, I could just hang out and have piña coladas. I mean, thank God, but I don’t want to do that. I want to do more. And that gives you the energy and power to do more, and to do more philanthropically, to do more in all sorts of different ways.
Ryan Serhant:		I love that. It’s do-good energy. What would you tell your 20-year-old self if you’d go back in time and talk to you at 20?
Scott Shay:		Always make sure to treat people right. I mean, there were a few times when I wish I had taken a deep breath and said, “Let me look at it from the other person’s perspective and not reacted in the same way.” I definitely wish I would have done that a few times, and that’s my big regret. I did it a few times where I did put myself first in terms of relationships or others, with folks, and I regret that deeply. And I would tell everybody to do it. It’s that Golden Rule. I had it in mind, but I didn’t really abide by it every time I should have.
Ryan Serhant:		Do you mind if I hit you with some random personal questions?
Scott Shay:		Go for it.
Ryan Serhant:		What’s your favorite movie?
Scott Shay:		Oh, The Castle.
Ryan Serhant:		The Castle?
Scott Shay:		It’s an Australian movie. Every single line is-
Ryan Serhant:		You just jumped to that movie so randomly.
Scott Shay:		… just so great. I mean, there’s not one line that’s not-
Ryan Serhant:		Who’s in it?
Scott Shay:		I don’t remember actually.
Ryan Serhant:		It’s your favorite movie.
Scott Shay:		It’s my favorite movie, but nobody big and nobody that you would know. You can get it on Netflix or wherever.
Ryan Serhant:		The Castle.
Scott Shay:		It’s a great movie.
Ryan Serhant:		Okay. What’s your favorite quote?
Scott Shay:		Clearly, “Don’t treat anyone else the way you wouldn’t want to be treated yourself.” Hillel the sage said that.
Ryan Serhant:		Who’s the worst boss you’ve ever had?
Scott Shay:		Oh boy. Thankfully, I haven’t had really bad bosses. I had one boss who, I don’t want to mention his name, he’s passed away, who I think didn’t treat folks the right way. But I’ve actually been blessed to have good bosses. That certainly helped my career and my life a lot.
Ryan Serhant:		What’s your favorite word?
Scott Shay:		Good.
Ryan Serhant:		Good, got it. If you could be an animal, what animal would you be?
Scott Shay:		I’ve read a book about, and I’m blanking on the author’s name, about trying to imagine being something other than human, trying to be a bat, but the problem of hard consciousness. And so actually, I have to tell you, I don’t know. It’s impossible for me to imagine to be you and much less imagine to be me. And the one thing I have learned in life is that people think they understand other people. They don’t even actually understand themselves really that well. And so to imagine me being any other being, I can’t really do that.
Ryan Serhant:		My last question for you, for the man who started a bank a handful of months before 9/11, and has grown it into something that has been pretty monumental, what’s your guilty pleasure?
Scott Shay:		Oh, it’s something I call a Special. It’s a hot brownie-
Ryan Serhant:		Is this your breakfast?
Scott Shay:		… chocolate chip ice cream or vanilla cream, but really good ice cream, topped with some great dark chocolate chips and chocolate liqueur. I like Haven Chocolate. It’s dark chocolate liqueur. There’s others. That’s my guilty pleasure.
Ryan Serhant:		Is this like a once a week thing?
Scott Shay:		Oh, it depends on the week. In the beginning, I think I was having it… During March, April, May, I was having a nightly.
Ryan Serhant:		Yeah, I remember those times. I remember those times. But listen, thank you so much for coming. This has been great getting to know you. And for all our listeners, please check out Scott Shay’s book, In Good Faith: Questioning Religion and Atheism. And if you are a small or medium-sized business, make sure you check out the bank. Scott, it was an honor. Thank you so much for coming through.
Ryan Serhant:		If you’re ready to take action today based on Scott Shay’s entire blueprint for how he got to where he is, go to bigmoneyenergy.com/podcast to download an action plan I put together for you, as well as the show notes. That’s bigmoneyenergy.com/podcast. Find more podcasts like Big Money Energy on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Big Money Energy is hosted by me, Ryan Serhant, and it’s produced by Mike Coscarelli and Joe Laresca and executive produced by Cristina Everett.

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