Now we can get started. I'm Craig Siegenthaler from Bank of America, it's my pleasure to introduce a man that probably hasn't needed an introduction in 30 years, Steve Schwarzman. As pretty much all of you already know, Steve is the Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Blackstone, and a legend within the financial services community. After running Lehman Brothers investment bank at age 36, Steve left and started Blackstone in 1985. Steve wasn't just instrumental in building Blackstone into the firm it is today. He was involved in every phase of the firm's growth and development from the very beginning. This includes the firm's first-mover evolution from a buyout and advisory shop into a global alternative asset manager with strong businesses across all asset classes and all distribution channels, institutional, insurance, and individual. Outside of Blackstone, Steve has dedicated much of his wealth and resources to giving back. In 2020, he signed the Giving Pledge, committing to give the majority of his wealth to philanthropic causes. Some of his largest recent donations have been with the educational vertical, including a $350 million gift to MIT and a GBP 150 million donation to the University of Oxford. He also founded the Schwarzman Scholars program in 2013 at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which is modeled to be the Chinese version of the Rhodes Scholars program. Steve, on behalf of all of us at Bank of America and Merrill, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks. Thanks, Craig. Thanks for having a great conference. I read all the stuff. A lot of people here. Okay. I'll provide a real quick intro on Blackstone. AUM is about $1 trillion. It's the largest alts manager in the world. It also has the largest individual investor business, which it started much earlier and dedicated significantly more resources than its peers. Last year, Blackstone generated about $7 billion of free cash flow, and the firm has grown AUM by about 14 times since its 2007 IPO. Despite this growth and track record, the stock is still offering a 5% dividend yield today versus about 2% for the average S&P 500 name. The firm is highly diverse with leading and scaled businesses across real estate, private equity, credit, and hedge funds. Let's start with the macroeconomic backdrop. Some thought we were never gonna see high inflation and interest rates again. Here we are. Steve, how do you think interest rates and the economy will trend over the next year? Well, I think it's tough to kill inflation when you have a full employment economy. You saw that on the last day or two with the announcement of what the inflation numbers on CPI were. I guess around 6%. You can't get to 2% from 6% just by having a stock market rally. That doesn't work like that. You're gonna need higher interest rates. Usually it takes at least six to nine months to have higher interest rates play through an economy to really get the results that somebody's looking for. It's not an instantaneous type of thing. You know, I'm not a liquid securities person. I don't know exactly what's gonna happen, but the bias will be to move interest rates up to a point where the Fed thinks they're really gonna be able to slow things down. You know, I guess the market's looking for 225 basis points increase. I would think that would be a minimum. You know, the economy's slowing. In the first quarter earnings announcements I think were viewed as being somewhat disappointing. That should be no surprise. When you have interest rates up, you should grow slower. If inflation stays up, your business will have a margin squeeze, which is what's happening. You know, I look for, it's an interactive thing. You have to keep seeing how much inflation's going down. It's clear it's down. It was 9, now it's 6. you know, but you know, it's relatively easy to take something down to 4. you know, with interest rates getting from 4 to 2, that's pretty painful. you know, I watched the 1980s, 81, when Volcker basically really had to crush the U.S. economy to get inflation down. you know, there was a lot more inflation then than there is now. we're on a good path, but this doesn't get an instantaneous resolution. Steve, given this view of higher rates uncertainty, how does this impact the alt industry, and how does it impact Blackstone specifically? Well, it depends, you know, what part of our business you look at. You know, this is like a golden moment for credit. You know, we have one product called BCRED, which is, you know, 100% floating rate senior secured loans. You know, Today's value, you know, the investor's getting a 10% return. If you look at 10%, in terms of risk, it's really quite modest. I mean, if you, if you think you're buying senior secured debt and that's a high risk, you know, venture, then you're not thinking right. It's close to riskless, actually, and based on the historical look backs. You get 10%. We're actually earning 12, and we're keeping 2% back to basically make sure we have adequate loan loss reserves and things like that. If we were to just let this go, it's like a 12. Imagine, you know, on a longer term basis, doing that with senior secured debt. This kind of cycle will really accelerate, I think, investors interest in floating rate credit. That's how we've positioned our firm. We're the leader in the world, actually, at making those types of loans in the alternative area. In real estate, it's gonna have a very interesting effect. You know, there are lots of different types of real estate, they're not correlated in terms of how they behave. It's going to make office even more difficult. It's not going to particularly help malls because consumers over time will spend less, the mall business isn't so good. It won't particularly help business travel if you own hotels, that's not as good. If you own resort hotels, they're booming. Everybody wants to, like, live their life after the pandemic. You know, that doesn't get in the way of that. Our warehouse business is frankly fantastic. You know, it's going up. Rents are still probably going up 12%. When we, it's got 3% vacancy. Specifically to the question you asked, how does this affect you? What happens is those higher rates discourage new construction. What occurs is, like already, that construction of new warehouses is down 40%. That's setting the base for a new cycle where the existing stuff, where we're the biggest private owner in the world, that's gonna get another boost for rental increases over time. The same thing's starting to happen in rental housing, where still growing around 5%-8%, depending on what type you have. You know, the cancellations of new projects is very high. When you have inflation plus higher interest rates, people don't wanna build new things. If you own old things, that's a good thing for you, right? As long as you're financed correctly, you're financed with longer term debt, because it's a long-term asset, you'll do very well with that. I think, you know, I could keep going on asset class by asset class, because we do, like, not everything, but most things, and tell you how it'll affect other things. It'll lead to lower prices over time for private equity deals. That's a somewhat cyclical business. You try and sell your stuff when the prices are up, you try and buy a lot of stuff when the prices are down. It's not a big brain business, right? Finance. That's gonna put pressure on pricing. Usually, it takes a year to year and a half before that happens. People tend not to like to sell assets at prices a lot lower than they used to be, because they keep remembering the old price. In a year and a half, they forget the old price. You know, they'll take a premium and think that was a good thing. That cycle's only happened every time I've been doing this for over 40 years. So that'll swing around. So we look at these things and, you know, there's a time to be a buyer and a time to be a seller. You know, our business as a whole, imagine this, with today's interest rates, our private equity companies last quarter grew their revenues 14%. They grew EBITDA 16%. I know this is against what's supposed to be happening. I mean, I read media also. What's happening to us couldn't be happening. It happened. It's always interesting when you go into a cycle, but there are always ways to make money. Steve, I have a background question for you. You're 36. You're a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. At the time, Lehman's one of the best investment banks, trading platforms on Wall Street. You decide to leave and you start a business that, you know, really hasn't been invented yet. What caused you to do that and take that risk? Actually, it was a ethical decision. You know, there was, you know, the reason Lehman got sold in 1984, I was the person that actually sold it to American Express. What was because, you know, some of the people at the business took a restricted subsidiary that had a specific guidance as to it could only own 30, 60, 90-day commercial paper. They took it out to five years, which was against the charter, and they got caught in an inverted yield curve, and basically, it crushed the equity of the firm. The firm had to either have a major capital injection, or sell itself before people found out that the firm had no net worth, because borrowing repo, once people understand you have no net worth, firm will just almost instantly collapse. During that drama, you know, there was, in my view at least, a need to change the senior management and the other partners of the firm were scared to do that. They just watched it all happen. That wouldn't have been my way of handling that issue. I decided I didn't wanna be with those people anymore. That's why I left. I mean, it's sort of an odd thing. I mean, the company was, like, 150 years old and, you know, this should've been able to be solved some other way. You could have brought in capital and, you know, dealt with it. I left 'cause I didn't wanna be with the people. You know, I went into business with the former Chairman and CEO of Lehman, who I had worked with. You know, we were sort of like a buddy movie, you know. He knew everybody in the world, and I was the young guy who did the deals. You know, we sort of almost didn't need to talk 'cause he didn't like doing deals and never did deals. I didn't know all those people because I was in my early thirties. Where would I meet all these people? That was, like, the partnership, and we took that on the road, basically. Started a new business. I wanted to name it Schwarzman Peterson or Peterson Schwarzman. He didn't want his name on something 'cause he started another business that fizzled with his name and somebody else's on it, so he wanted an impersonal name. That when the third person joined, we didn't have to make it like a law firm, right? You just keep adding these names. What we did is we took the German of my last name, Schwarz, in German means black. His family was Greek, his father, before they changed their name to Peterson, it was Petropoulos. Petros means rock or stone. We just took that. I had the delusion that my name was on the door, but the only people who knew it was the two of us. You know, we started out with a business plan that said we were gonna do M&A advisory work because I ran the M&A department at Lehman, I knew how to do that. It's, it's a great business because you don't need any capital. You talk to people, and they give you millions of dollars. I talk to people today, I'm not gonna get anything, right? I'm used to talking to people and getting nothing. In that business, they give you millions of dollars. It's good talking. We went into that business. At the same time, our strategic plan, secondly, was to go into private equity, which was really just starting as an industry. I used to advise the relatively few people who were in that business. I was at the same table. I saw what was going on. You know, they were basically my age, three, four years older. Why couldn't we do this? I mean, it wasn't splitting the atom, right? Wanted to do that. The third thing we wanted to do was start other businesses that we, at that point, called affiliates, which would be owned 50/50, to go into areas that we thought were gonna boom, in finance. We didn't know which they would be. We knew that finance is cyclical. Things fall out of fashion. Nobody wants to own them. That's when you go into them. The criteria we needed was, you know, catching that wave, coming up and going into business with somebody who was a 10 on the scale of 10, who really knew that business. Together we grow it, as long as we controlled it. I wanted control to stop people from doing things in a bad time, that might not be good for customers. You know, because sometimes people in finance don't always do the right thing. We know what the right thing is. Sometimes it's painful to do it, but you have to always do the right thing. That was our strategic plan. We had no assets. We had never done an investment, and now we're almost at $1 trillion. We raised $226 billion last year. I used to be begging for $5 and $10. I still remember that. Now somebody will give us, you know, a few hundred million dollars for a commitment is not abnormal for us. We've had commitments as big as $20 billion. I've watched this industry grow from when we started. It It was 3% alternatives in the institutional world. It's 25% now. If you look at retail, which we're highly, you know, interested and involved with, it started 12 years ago. That's an $80 trillion bunch of money, and there's almost no alternatives that are owned by this group. Our performance is so good. That's why institutions went from almost nothing to a quarter. Why should individuals not have the same opportunity as institutions? I mean, our real estate business has, you know, over 30 years, something like that, has averaged 700 basis points better than the stock market. Why should people at retail not have the opportunity to have that kind of investment? We lose almost nothing. Over that period of time. You know, I, you know, we've taken this little idea of a business, not through acquisitions. We're not a roll-up like some money manager, you know, who've gotten big. This is all internal growth. It's going back to people and saying, "Here's our performance, and here's our style of doing business, and here are our values. You know, sort of come on this journey with us. We're having a good time. You, you should join us and have a good time too. Why not?" They do. We, we've become by far the biggest in the world. You know, we're like 3 times the market cap of, you know, next 3 people together, next 3 competitors. You know, we're bigger than those 3 together. You know, the way you do this is by continually innovating, coming up with new products that don't have downsides, that just have upsides. That's our philosophy. Don't lose people's money. They don't like you when you lose their money. Forget you've outperformed somebody else who's lost even more. That relative approach, I've always felt, is ridiculous. People just don't like losing money. I don't like losing money. I started with no money. Why would I wanna lose what I have? Nobody does. That's sort of our baseline when we go to invest things. Then, we gotta have a really good upside. Then we go forward. It's tough to get us to go forward because there aren't that many things around like that, but we always find them. In finance, you can scale up, but we now have 60 different strategies. We started with 1 private equity fund, and now we do 60 different things. At the end of the third quarter, and also the fourth quarter last year, when markets were down, finished the year down 18, the S&P, I think Nasdaq was down like 23, 4, something like that. We were flat. Can you imagine, like, not losing people's money? I know at Merrill that never happened. Any client ever lost money. In fact, almost every client lost money last year, unless you were doing, you know, sort of business with us. Our philosophy, it's like a good thing. And we have a whole trained group of people who believe what I just said. In other words, I'm not out here as an evangelist. This is actually what we believe. Believe in what we do and how we're set up with our investment committees. We keep coming up with new things that we find, and people get used to buying things from us because they work. As long as we keep being an innovation, you know, sort of machine, if you will, we just don't let that stuff happen. To introduce a new product at the firm, You basically have to come before the senior people at the firm and prove that this is a good thing. It isn't. We don't have like, good luck down there kind of management, right? That's not what we do. Everything rolls up, you know, we work cooperatively, but we always bring on critical things. We bring the entire senior management of the firm, because every time we do something, we're betting our reputation. What you can't lose is your reputation. You sort of zealously guard that. It's been a really interesting adventure over the last 37 years and we're actually accelerating now. You know, we're not like leveling out. It's actually fun. You know, if you have a chance to work at Blackstone, you should do that. It's really. We have a good time. People laugh a lot. We get best place to work awards, you know, because people are very positive and we also only hire nice people. I learned at Lehman Brothers, you know, my first day at work, you know, I had my new suit. Those are the days when you had a briefcase 'cause it was paper, right? You put stuff in it. Proudly walked into the office, our building, the elevator opens, and, you know, somebody gets out who was, you know, was working there. Found out later it was a partner. He looked at me, he said, "First day, isn't it?" I said, "Yes, this is my first day." He said, "You're really gonna love it here at Lehman Brothers." I said, "Why is that?" Knowing I was gonna love it, I decided to work there. He said, "Because if you work at Lehman Brothers, nobody will ever stab you in the back. We'll just walk right up to you and stab you in the front." That was my first interaction, my first day at work in finance. They actually made good on that promise. It was a tough place. When I started Blackstone, I said, "One thing we're not gonna do is a lot of these bad behaviors." We only hire nice people. When people come to work, when we recruit them from other people, you know, I like to talk to, you know, people who make that change after a few months. I say, "What's the biggest difference?" They say, "Everybody here is so nice, and they want me to be successful." I said, "Of course, they do." They said, "But that's so different." I said, "Different from what?" "Different from where I came from." I said, "Well, it shouldn't be, because people are precious. If you've gone to the effort to hire them, of course, you want them to be successful. You want them to be happy. You want them to be productive. Why wouldn't we want that?" They said, "Well, I'm just telling you, it's different from where I came from." Anyhow, we have a good sort of philosophy, and we have amazing people at the firm, which is really what creates the success. Thanks for that. I always used to be, is it better to be stabbed in the front or the back? The front might be better. Well, it's bad both ways. Let's just hit on innovation. You know, one thing Blackstone's always done very well is product innovation. You've moved into areas faster than peers. You innovated products that didn't exist before. I mean, this is very important for your long-term growth trajectory. You know, maybe you could talk about your approach to innovation and also business building. Well, one of the things I observed very early in my career, is that there are no patents in finance. Anything you invent as a new product, if it's really good, your competitors will come in and imitate, and as the capital just keeps pouring in, they'll crush the margins. Most products have limited lives, when they can really perform well. I was involved in one of the first interest rate swaps. We got a 1% fee for doing that. I thought I died and gone to heaven. We could make a fortune just giving all this up. Now they're doing interest rate swaps for 1 basis point or something. It's turned into a nothing burger, you know, business. That's like the prime example of why innovation and creation of new products isn't a theory. It's not an option. We knew from the first day we opened that we had to keep coming up with new things to take advantage of new market conditions and also to protect the business from the possibility that other people would be doing the same thing and that capital could make a difference in a negative way as it came in and squeezed. We just have always done this. Now each of our big verticals, whether it's real estate or private equity or credit or hedge fund business and some of our other ones, every year we... I used to do this stuff myself when we were small, then I realized, oh my goodness, I'm not that clever, and there's so much to do. What we do with each of our business lines is we have a strategic planning thing once a year, and they have to come with up to three new ideas for things that they could be doing. Each one, you know, like, what's the return for the investor? You know, how big can we make it? How expensive is it for us to build it in terms of hiring people and space and all that kind of stuff? How fast can we get to breakeven? The idea that it takes years, I've seen a lot of these white space things that people talk about. Really? If you can't be profitable in a year in finance with a new product, you should give it up, because the world keeps changing so much that whatever you started, by the time you hire the people, it may not be that good anymore. You gotta hit it right away. Whenever I see these reports that somebody says, "It's gonna take me 5 years to break even, and I'm gonna..." That's usually an unsuccessful approach with people who don't understand how to grow a business. We look at how fast can we get to, you know, profitability. Then we look at our own business line and say, "Do we have the people to do this without hurting the original business?" Even if it looks like there are three good ones, that may be too much to launch, so we'll knock out the least good, maybe the second, and only do one. We'll keep that other idea, see if it still works. You have to control your own business. Make sure you don't do any harm to what you're already doing. This is like a way of life at Oaktree. You know, from really just when we started 37 years ago, and everybody else in my industry pretty much did the one thing that worked for them. You know, they decided after we went public in 2007, and they saw what we were doing, they said, "Geez, I wanna be one of those." You know, 'cause we had a $30 billion market cap, and they had none. So they started to try and replicate that. It's very hard to replicate that as people are finding. Steve, I wanted to talk about your private wealth business. You started it maybe 11 or 12 years ago, much earlier than your competition. And this is a business that addresses many different channels, IBG, REA, but also- Right. -the wirehouses like Merrill. What really caused you to start this business early in the years and put a lot of resources behind it, building a big distribution platform? Yeah. It was actually somebody else's idea at the firm. We'd been selling private equity funds through retail distribution systems, but it was a very episodic business. Somebody came to see me and said, "You know, we should really do this on a structural basis and build it out." It was the first time in my career I ever knowingly lost money because I said, "How much does this cost?" I think at the time it was somewhere between $10 million and $12 million a year when we were, like, a small business. You know, with the objective of just being better at what we were doing episodically. Sort of looked at the retail channel and I really sort of hesitated doing it because I don't like losing money. At the end of the day, I said, "Okay, well, let's make that investment, build it out under one criteria, is that we have to have the same quality people in that part of the business," which is basically service center, if you will, for the retail channel. Same quality people as we do for the rest of the business. I said, "I don't wanna run, you know, sort of different types of citizens at one firm. I mean, they gotta be really terrific people doing that work." We just started doing it, and we spent the money. 6 years ago, interestingly, John Gray, who's in Asia today, he's president of the firm, absolutely amazing, terrific person, came up with this idea of doing what's now called BREIT, which is bringing retail to the high net worth channel, you know, our institutional quality real estate. That became very successful business with returns 3 times higher than investing in public or REITs. So that's been big success. You know, the customers have done very well. Somewhere between 12 and 12.5% returns over that 6-year period, so 4.5%, roughly current income of 3% shields from depreciation. So you're getting in the sevens, and, you know, sort of an average 12+. This has been very good, and that scaled really well, and, you know, it's enabled us to do a second big product, called BCRED, Blackstone Credit. That one was the one I mentioned that's yielding more than 10. If the Fed keeps going up, we'll keep going up. That's done really well. We'll have a whole family of products way ahead of everybody else. I mean, they just watch, "Oh, Blackstone did this again. Maybe I should do something." You can't just do something. You know, this takes years to build a, you know, sort of a first-class capability. You always have new things. You know, this cycle may be a little difficult over the next few months 'cause when interest rates go up, the stock market goes down. High net worth people wanted more liquidity. That's a short-term thing, and we're already seeing that redemptions are down substantially in BE this month compared to last month so far. You know, I think the future of introducing products there is great. We're doing a lot of stuff in the insurance area. Got like $150 billion-$160 billion now, but it's meant to be increased to $250 just by contract, if you will. We've got some other things we're working on that'll make us much larger over time. To do this, you have to keep coming up with new products and new reasons to be relevant. You know, we're global, and people like giving us money. I mean, $226 billion in a year is unimaginable, except we did it. And we were in the 200s the year before. You know, we look like we found a zone that's really, really different than anybody else in the world. I find it a lot of fun because I actually don't have to do any of it anymore, right? Because the firm's, you know, got so many amazing people that I used to, you know, be like a door-to-door salesman, like many of you. And now I don't have to do that because other people, you know, sell the products. That's a sign of something. I'm not sure what. I guess they call it your business has been institutionalized. Mm-hmm. That's a good thing. Institutions, three out of four are still staying the same or increasing their new monies going into alternatives. The high net worth is a huge opportunity. The insurance has got $30 trillion of AUM, and we increase when we manage money for an insurance company, they end up making, so far, like 140 basis points more than they were doing. If we can do that, then they can sell the way that business works. If they're earning more, you know, they can either price their products more aggressively, you know, because they can offer more to the person buying their products, or the insurance company's profits will go up as a result of that. We've become somewhat popular. No surprise. There's so many trillions of dollars there that we could handle over time that that's turning into a lot of fun also. We have a terrific group of people at the firm doing that. We're quite positive on our business. You know, we're lucky we found this niche, you know, that many years ago. You know, we don't wander enormously into other types of areas because it's hard to be successful in liquid securities. It's a really... I did that with my first job. I couldn't figure out how could I win. There are all these other smart people with limited information you're allowed to have, and it's almost like they want everybody to have the same information. I always like an information advantage. Mm-hmm. You can do that with private securities. Steve, you have so many businesses that are growing right now. You know, when you talk to John, Michael Chae, some of the senior leaders of the firm, what one or two businesses are you the most excited about from a growth standpoint over the next 5+ years? Well, I mentioned credit, I won't do that, beat that drum again. Infrastructure is doing really well for us. You know, our infrastructure business last year was up 19%. People should put their hands up. Who else was up 19%? Any hands? No hands. That's why I like this, right? That's why customers like it. We see, you know, significant growth over time with that business. You know, because that business is basically US business now, and that can be grown in Europe, where we've done two very large deals, and Asia. So that's a real growth engine. You know, we have between that and credit as of today, those are sort of two areas that sort of look like they're doing particularly well. Steve, when you get a question out there, maybe from the financial advisors, whether they should buy the Blackstone stock or one of the Blackstone funds, how do you respond to that? I respond they're both good, right? I mean, people obviously buy these funds. We're almost at $1 trillion with that. Our stock over the last 10 years has compounded at 25%. If you can do better than that, you really should. 25% is not so bad. It's like double the S&P over that time. We've grown our earnings around the same kind of, you know, some 19% over that time period. You know, our multiple goes up and down like all stocks. Sometimes it gets really frisky and you make a lot, and then sometimes the multiple goes down. It's not as amusing. The business itself has performed very well. We're the largest company in the country that isn't in the S&P. We're 74th or something like that on market cap. We started with nothing, right? We're going to somewhere for sure. I think that the stock over time, we pay very high dividend. I think you said it was like five. It's either five or 4.8 or something like that. That's pretty high. That's like three times higher than the average S&P star. You get like a high current income. You get this growing company that's much more robust than... You know, it's one of the fastest growing stocks in the S&P, if you were comparing it with that. I think the stock is an interesting investment. Always has been, you know. The funds are great too. It depends how much money you have, right? Where you put it. I do both. I own a lot of stock, and I invest in all of our funds. The firm is my family office. Steve, you own 20% of the stock today. Yeah. The firm is $1 trillion roughly. Yeah. It's a big firm. Might be tougher to put up high growth rates going forward. Maybe you can push back on that. How do you feel about the firm today versus 5, 10, 20 years ago with the product breadth you have, with the distribution scale you have? Yeah. The firm is pretty amazing, because what happens in our business, we're really in the intellectual capital production and management business, right? We're trying to see what's happening in the world before other people do and act on it. Identifying trends, that's how you really make money. You don't make money just sitting at your desk running numbers. You have to know where the world's going before it goes there. With the scale that we're operating at now, it's so much fun because on Mondays, you know, there are probably five of us, six of us, seven of us who sit in a room, and each of our business groups come in. We talk about everything they're doing, every deal they're working on. They'll tell us if something around the world or in that industry is changing. Imagine having real-time feeds on the world and almost every type of company or real estate asset or, you know, our hedge fund area, what's going on with credit. We can see changes, you know, in one country or one vertical, I'd call it. As soon as we see that, we can figure out whether that's going to spread all over the world or what's going to happen as a result of that one piece of information. That gives us, you know, like in real estate, for example, we literally have the world. We can... If, if we know what's happening at a certain asset class, you know, if warehouses are getting good in one place, that trend most likely will occur in others. We could start buying when other people don't even know they should be buying. Scale works for us. To have it work, it has to be harvested correctly, which means you need it all feeding into a central location. You do it every week. You know, and you have to be completely open so that everybody is telling everybody else what's occurring. This idea that scale doesn't work, I've only been asked that question since 1992. People say, "Well, you can't be right. We know, you just have to be small to win." I said, "No, you have to know more stuff. You could be small and win if you have amazing domain expertise. You don't have much money to invest. You do two deals, and they work. On the other hand, you can create this remarkable generator of intellectual capital and take that. We started seeing that in the United States, it was like 2012, that home shopping was starting. You know, people didn't quite know what it was, and you could just see this thing. Winning at home shopping, it was only a matter of time before it spread all over the world. It'll spread at different rates, but they'll all get there because it's got some advantages. We sold our malls. We basically concentrated in warehouses that are used in that distribution system. We did it all over the world. We're the largest owner, private owner in the world. The asset class just like exploded. Other people were buying office buildings, which have basically collapsed. We were 50% office. We sold all of our office buildings because we could see something was going wrong with that. That's the way you build an enduring company with great performance. The advantage isn't like one person being a genius. You know, I don't know that we have geniuses. We have a system that manufactures data. That's what they call it now. At the beginning, I wasn't the smart kid in class, so I always needed to see stuff, right? Once I saw it, I knew what it meant. If I couldn't see it, I couldn't invent it. You know, some people could just sit in a room and sort of speculate what's going on. I can't do that. I need these feeds. Now we've created this remarkable system, and that's why we're gonna keep going, and we're gonna keep creating new things. You know, and we're all on the same team doing it. Just fun. I mean, I've been doing this a long time. It's actually more fun now because it's easier. Great. Well, we will stop there. We are out of time. Steve, on behalf of all of us at Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, thank you very much. Thanks, Chris.