Goldman Sachs President & COO John Waldron: What’s the Real Wall Street Superpower? 

Christine Anderson, Global Head of Corporate Affairs, Blackstone: Hello, and welcome to Inside Blackstone, where we bring together data and insights from across our companies to offer you a fuller picture of what's happening in the real economy right now. I'm Christine Anderson, Global Head of Corporate Affairs, and here's the lineup. In the Monday Morning Meeting, we have Amit Dixit, Blackstone's Head of Asia Private Equity, to talk about the physical AI buildout happening across Asia, including one of the most fascinating developments right now, humanoid robots. Then it's the Economic Weather Report with Winfield Sickles, followed by the main event, my conversation with Goldman Sachs President and COO, John Waldron, on how AI is reshaping banking. And finally, the debrief with our Global Head of Private Equity, Joe Baratta. Now, over to Amit.
 
Christine Anderson: A few days ago, we hosted a special event for our institutional investors, representing $39 trillion in assets, some of the most sophisticated investors in the world. One of the presentations I found most fascinating was from my colleague Amit Dixit, who oversees our Asia private equity business and has been at the firm nearly two decades. Amit had a presentation on all of the shifts taking place in Asia right now and how that's creating massive investment opportunities. Since Amit was in New York, I thought I'd bring him on the show to share the highlights. Amit, great to have you with us. 
 
Amit Dixit, Head of Asia Private Equity, Blackstone: Great to be here. 
 
Christine Anderson: All right, hit me with the highlights on your presentation. What were the major themes? 
 
Amit Dixit: There are three big disruptions in Asia. One, physical AI. Two, energy security. And three, defense, drones. 
 
Christine Anderson: So, take physical AI for me for a second. Why is Asia at the center of the story? 
 
Amit Dixit: I'll give you a data point. The total data center capacity in India is about one gigawatt. To put that in perspective, that's less than one city in America. That's less than the city of Phoenix or Chicago. India has 850 million people below 35 years of age. Major consumers, largest users of Instagram, of WhatsApp, of use, number one in the world, right? At Blackstone, we own the largest data center company, AirTrunk. And data center buildout is, I would say, starting in India, it's already quite advanced in developed Asia, like Australia, but the potential for that is enormous. 
 
Christine Anderson: You've been saying it's still underpenetrated. 
 
Amit Dixit: Because, you look at autonomous vehicles, you look drones, you at look data centers. Everything requires physical components and those physical components, guess what? Come from Asia. 
 
Christine Anderson: One of the things you spoke about was the robotics industry and what's happening in Asia. What are you seeing?
 
Amit Dixit: In the first half of 2026, 97% of humanoid robots were produced in Asia. 80% of the bill of materials of any robotic application globally, 80% of the cost, the bill of materials, comes from Asia. 
 
Christine Anderson: Wow. So, we're going to see a major robotics story play out across Asia, I presume. 
 
Amit Dixit: Absolutely. 
 
Christine Anderson: So, one of the other themes you mentioned was defense. Talk to me a little bit about what's happening right now in the dynamics. 
 
Amit Dixit: The war first in Ukraine, then now in the Middle East, has woken up all governments because these drones, which are relatively cheap, are so effective. Think about it. You are the government of Japan. You buy an aircraft for $50 million, or you buy a thousand drones for $50,000. 
 
Christine Anderson: Right.
 
Amit Dixit: Every government is making that decision. 
 
Christine Anderson: And this is playing out in India?
 
Amit Dixit: It's playing out in India. 
 
Christine Anderson: In all of Asia? 
 
Amit Dixit: It's playing out in Japan. It's playing out in Korea. Everywhere, the answer is, of course. A thousand drones, right? But, it has been underinvested. So that's been the big aha like the aw-shucks moment for the government saying let's invest in this area and that's creating a huge opportunity. 
  
Christine Anderson: Well, thank you so much for sharing the highlights and joining us on Inside Blackstone. 
 
Amit Dixit: Thanks, Christine. Enjoyed it. 
 
Christine Anderson: And now it's over to Winfield Sickles with the Economic Weather Report. 
 
Christine Anderson: We're gonna do it Q&A style today, Winfield. 
 
Winfield Sickles, Co-Head of Global Private Wealth Investment Strategy, Blackstone: Looking forward to it, Christine. 
 
Christine Anderson: All right, let's start with the Fed. They met last week. Big news with rates moving higher, as expected. What's the key thing investors should be taking away from that? 
 
Winfield Sickles: So, they hiked rates by 25 basis points. That was well priced into the market, but we're pretty excited about this meeting for two reasons. Number one, Kevin Warsh seemed to really find his feet. He was confident at the podium, and it was a unanimous decision: 12 to 0. Sounds like a score of a sports game. 
 
Christine Anderson: Some people have fantasy football; other people have Fed watching.
 
Winfield Sickles: There's the fantasy football Fed watching, so he brought the whole committee along. That should put to rest issues about the Fed being politicized. More importantly was how he characterized higher rates, which was around stronger growth and competition for capital, which is born out of this CapEx cycle you hear me talk a lot about. 
 
Christine Anderson: Okay, strong Fed, which is good, but most people, when they hear higher rates, they think that's bad news. Why not this time? 
 
Winfield Sickles: I know it feels, it feels off to some people to have a rate hike and attach it to positivity, but it's been a long time where we've been in a cycle where growth was strong enough to hike rates and still have, and this is going to sound very jargony, but have financial conditions still be buoyant, to have equity markets, capital markets in a good place. It's just a different situation frankly than we've been in since probably the 1990s. 
 
Christine Anderson: We also had new consumer data out last week. What did that tell us? 
 
Winfield Sickles: So, we have an amazing trove of consumer data that we can tease from. And if you went back a year, we were seeing some weakness in our hotel assets, our leisure assets, our theme park assets around the low-income consumer. And, as we fast forward to today, this retail sales print we had last week, being positive was huge because it shows that things are broadening out from not just high-income consumers, but low-income consumers. And that's certainly what we've been seeing in our portfolio. 
 
Christine Anderson: So previously seeing spending at the higher levels and now seeing broad-based spending across all segments. 
 
Winfield Sickles: That's right. 
 
Christine Anderson: So, zoom out for me. What does that mean for the macro? 
 
Winfield Sickles: It's critical for the macro, because, again, to go back to the consumer, you know, when we're looking at these real assets that we own to try and get that gauge, and we're looking at, you now, I mentioned the hotels, it's something like 160,000 keys in terms of what we're able to gauge that around. But I want to zoom out even further, because I think what people may be missing is the interconnectivity between all of these trends. If you think about, in our portfolio, it's the strength in revenues and earnings,¹ which we've talked a lot about, Jon's talked a lot about it, leading to more CapEx, because profits tend to lead CapEx by two to three quarters, you've heard me say that too, that then leads to more hiring, and a lot of that is blue collar driven, like at QTS, where we had 13,000 people on site at the beginning of '25. 
 
Christine Anderson: That's our data center company. 
 
Winfield Sickles: 40,000 at the end of this year, going to 70,000 next year, high-paying jobs, then feeds back into the consumer. So, there's this flywheel developing in the economy, the circularity that I think is very positive, and self-reinforcing. 
 
Christine Anderson: Super helpful take. Thank you so much. And now over to my conversation with John Waldron.
 
 Christine Anderson: John Waldron may not be a household name, but among the people shaping global finance, he is one of the most consequential. John joined Goldman Sachs 26 years ago and, today, serves as its President, Chief Operating Officer, and a member of the Board. Together with David Solomon, with whom he has worked for more than 30 years, he has helped steer Goldman Sachs through one of its most successful and transformational periods in its history. Now today, as AI is transforming industries and rewiring the economy, there are few people better positioned to tell us where capital will flow than John Waldron. John, welcome to Inside Blackstone. So, you're game for a few, few fun questions. 
 
John Waldron, President and COO, Goldman Sachs: I’m game. Yeah.
 
Christine Anderson: All right, we'll start easy. We'll work a little harder. 
 
John Waldron: Okay.
 
Christine Anderson: Favorite restaurant? 
 
John Waldron: Marea.
 
Christine Anderson: If you had an unscheduled day, you could do anything you want, what would you do?
 
John Waldron: Ski with my kids, because then you can spend a lot of time together and just, you know, really enjoy the outdoors. 
 
Christine Anderson: Productivity or travel hack?
 
John Waldron: I'm working hard on hacks on sleep, which is like natural supplements and drinking a lot of water and not drinking alcohol when I'm traveling. Those boring things that help me sleep. 
 
Christine Anderson: Most enduring lessons from your parents? 
 
John Waldron: Humility and to be a good listener. 
 
Christine Anderson: Okay, and what lessons are you most adamant about imparting to your kids? 
 
John Waldron: I would say humility, kindness, to be a good, a good friend, you know, to be able to create real friendships with people as opposed to the more superficial relationships. 
 
Christine Anderson: Right. What are you paying attention to right now that most people on Wall Street aren't? 
 
John Waldron: Well, I don't have the ego to assume that I'm figuring things out that other people aren't thinking about. I think that we all need to pay more attention to cyber. So, it's in everybody's list of risks. But I am trying to pay more attention to cyber at the top of the list, as opposed to in the middle or the bottom of the list. 
 
Christine Anderson: When I heard I was going to be interviewing you, I called around Blackstone to a bunch of friends and partners at the firm. I called around to people in the industry, in our industry, and beyond. And it's so fascinating to me how consistent the response was. Everybody trusts you, everybody likes you. And even more than that, in this sort of complicated world of Wall Street frenemies, everybody wants to do business with you, and they also want to be your friend. I thought it was just amazingly consistent, you have this incredible reputation. How have you managed to navigate that? 
 
John Waldron: Well, it's nice to hear. They probably are just being nice to you because they want us to have a nice discussion. 
 
Christine Anderson: No, it was very genuine. 
 
John Waldron: So, I have really, personally, seen the benefits of gaining people's trust and then treating it with the right care. And we're in a very leaky world, we're in a world where information travels faster, people have access to it all over the place at a moment's notice. And so, I think having the ability to be someone who people believe if they say something to you, it's going to stay with you. I think that has helped me a lot in terms of getting people to believe that they can tell me things that they otherwise might not tell somebody else. It's helped me figure out how to actually help them and be more valuable to them. 
 
Christine Anderson: So, you've been at Goldman Sachs 26 years. I'm told you and David Solomon split up something like one thousand client meetings a year. So that has to mean that you two sit across from more CEOs and founders than probably most people on Earth. That must give you incredible signal. What is it that you're hearing from clients most right now? 
 
John Waldron: I think people we meet with are very off balance right now. There's optimism, but there's also pessimism. You know, it's a period of fear. It's a period where people are unsure of the future. So now we have a lot more geopolitical crises out there and not to be overly dramatic, but you can see the underpinnings of how if you wanted to really construct what would World War III look like, you can sort of see how it could happen. I think it's still very low probability, but it's definitely a period where geopolitically, it's off-putting for people. And if you're running a business, most companies we talk to are global companies, and so you've got to navigate all that geopolitical risk in a sensible way, which is not the easiest thing to do. Then we have the advent of a technology revolution and generative AI, which hold enormous promise, but also tremendous risk. And I think most companies are trying to figure out, you know, how to invest, where to invest, how to navigate the labor dynamic of that. Navigating a company and figuring out how to execute against that is not easy, so that's another dynamic we could talk some more about. 
 
Christine Anderson: What tends to be the top question they ask you? Clients and CEOs. 
 
John Waldron: If I were to rank order the questions, it's how are you deploying AI, followed by inflation, followed by geopolitics. It's interesting. They'll ask us a lot about, are we in a bubble? What about the financing and the capital spend? But the question they're really asking if I'm really listening for the signal is, what are you guys doing in terms of deploying this technology? Is it working? Are you getting returns on that investment? How are you thinking about token spend? 
 
Christine Anderson: Where do you see Goldman's growth going from here? 
 
John Waldron: We really have two businesses. We have Global Banking and Markets, which is about 75% of the firm, and we have Asset and Wealth Management, which is about 25% of the firm. In the ultra-high-net-worth wealth segment where we have our own private wealth business, we serve the wealthiest people in the world, large family offices and ultra-high-net-worth wealthy folks. But we also have solutions and capabilities for the high-net-worth segments and the mass-affluent segments. 
 
Christine Anderson: How do you see that private wealth landscape evolving from here? 
 
John Waldron: I think that we're going to see a significant amount of growth around the world. Obviously in the United States, we've seen enormous accumulation of wealth. I think we're now at $80 some trillion of household wealth in America, which is close to 10 times household income, which is creating lots of opportunity, but also lots of challenges and I think some societal and political issues to deal with. The optimistic scenario in AI is we're gonna get a big productivity boom around the world if we get that growth in, accumulation of wealth will accelerate, and I believe that will that will be the case. I don't think we're gonna see a big job destruction wave. I think we'll see a lot of productivity gains which will accrue to the benefit of those that are that are, you know rising in society, and I think that's a big opportunity. The question is can we lift more people up as we're trying to do that. 
 
Christine Anderson: So, let's talk private credit just for a second. It's been just a heck of a year in terms of the noise around this particular topic. Just curious to get your take on sort of the fact and fiction there. 
 
John Waldron: Yeah, I have strong views on private credit.
 
Christine Anderson: Let’s hear ‘em.
 
John Waldron: I think private credit is a great asset class. I think that it's been around a long time before it was known as private credit. Both Blackstone and Goldman Sachs as an example have been doing this for a very long time. Lending is a great business. It's been around from time immemorial and private credit is fundamentally a lending business. The important thing is to be diversified, to have good standards, good underwriting standards, good documentation. You know focus on the fundamentals, and I think what's important is to make it clear to those that are buying private credit instruments that they're fundamentally private, and they're not fundamentally particularly liquid. They deserve a place in someone's asset allocation depending on their wealth picture and their risk appetite, and you have to think about them as part of the, in my opinion, as part of the private bucket not as part of the liquid bucket. It just means that you ought to think about it as you're going to get your money back over time. If it's something that you want to access near term, you shouldn't think of that as an opportunity set in your liquid bucket. 
 
Christine Anderson: I would say our firms are very aligned in if it's done the right way with sophisticated investors, with sophisticated advisors and transparency and education and all this, it can be done really well and over the long term can be really additive. 
 
John Waldron: I think the responsibility that firms like ours have is to invest even more heavily in education. I think we both do. 
 
Christine Anderson: Well, that's part of what we're doing here today. 
 
John Waldron: We should continue to invest in education and make sure people understand what they're getting in a private credit offering. 
 
Christine Anderson: So, at Blackstone, we call AI the main thing, right? And we have reoriented many of our communications to just sort of help people understand what we're going to see there. When do you think we're gonna start seeing that showing up in the numbers? 
 
John Waldron: So, I'll just say at Goldman Sachs, we didn't come into 2026 expecting a lot of productivity gain. We came in with a mindset of, we're gonna learn this year what we like, what we like less, what looks really expensive, what looks less expensive, what models work for which purpose. So, I think '27, you're gonna start to see some real productivity unlock. We all are getting some excess capacity back. I'm getting some capacity back in my day, you're getting some capacity back in your day. 
 
Christine Anderson: Where are you getting that most? 
 
John Waldron: I'm getting it in preparation. My preparation time is shorter to get to information that I deem necessary to have the right briefing for a meeting. So that's freeing up. That's probably, to me, if I were thinking about my time chart, I'm getting a lot of time back where I don't have to brief as long for a meeting or an engagement. 
 
Christine Anderson: Still just early innings of understanding how this all plays out. I mean, even at Blackstone, we've seen sort of a nine times monthly increase in the amount of token spend, right? And so you're just starting to sort of see the real economic impact of this across our portfolio and across the broader economy. So still, I think more to come and we'll all be curious to see how that plays out. Our firms were both part of this $500 billion NVIDIA consortium, curious to get Goldman's take on where this goes.  
 
John Waldron: My fundamental premise is look at supply and demand and it's pretty obvious to me when I look at my own firm and when I have the benefit and privilege of talking to so many clients about what they're seeing and what they're doing in terms of their spend on compute and their use cases. It's pretty obvious to me that there is more demand at the moment than there is supply. And I don't think that the $500 billion that NVIDIA is having us all work on together is necessarily the tipping point, whether we're gonna go too much supply versus demand. I think what NVIDIA's doing that is smart is they're trying to figure out, can we build a new model for financing compute, a la what's been built in years and decades in the past in autos, auto loans or mortgage securitization or other forms of financial innovation. To finance an important asset in the economy. And so, I think that that's a smart thing for them to do. And firms like ours have been speaking to them about how to think about doing that because we come from the world of financial innovation. Our job is to help them create that innovative opportunity set and set of structures. 
 
Christine Anderson: And meet the needs of a, sort of, shifting technological landscape.
 
John Waldron: And meet the needs. I mean the fact is that Goldman Sachs and Blackstone can afford to buy the compute but not every enterprise in the world is going to be able to afford to buy the compute. And so, coming up with a way to finance the compute, I think is an intelligent thing for us to be doing. The challenge for us is gonna be to do it in a responsible way, not to end up in structures where there's excess leverage or poor protections. That's gonna be our job collectively is to figure that out. But I think we will be thoughtful about it as a group and NVIDIA is a great client for us all to work with. And the opportunity set is enormous. 
 
Christine Anderson: I think the feel on our end is that just the need for capital is going to be staggering. And we're both positioned to help provide that.
 
John Waldron: We absolutely are. 
 
Christine Anderson: ...but, changing world order. Obviously, technology has made a lot of businesses capital light over the years, but that may be shifting a little bit now where the need for the technology also comes with the need for land and for energy and all of these hard assets that go with being able to use the technology and deploy it. So curious to get your take on that. 
 
John Waldron: Well, I think that physical AI is a real thing. I think that the infrastructure build is formidable. Obviously, it includes energy and power. It includes, increasingly, autonomy in terms of how you actually efficiently build these large infrastructure sites, data centers, and the like. And so, I think there's going to be a tremendous amount of innovation and investment around physical AI. What I find extraordinary is the speed of the technology, whether it's the speed of the models improving themselves, and, you know, the speed with which you announce new models that are better than the old models. You know, it's something we've never seen before in our lifetime. 
 
Christine Anderson: So, is the market undervaluing or overvaluing AI risk right now? 
 
John Waldron: That would be an example of something I think the market is probably not paying as close attention to as the more headline supply demand dynamics. 
 
Christine Anderson: So, you have a particular focus and interest on China and have for years. Curious to get your take on the biggest thing most Western investors misunderstand about China's position in the AI race. 
 
John Waldron: China is focused, to my mind, much more on deployment and efficiency and productivity than, let's say, the race to AGI. Their mission is to make high quality at low price. So when I visit China, I see two Chinas. I see a domestic economy that if it were America, we would say we can't suffer that. We would not suffer what they're allowing to happen here. And then the second part of the economy is this innovation economy. Which looks a lot more like Silicon Valley or Cambridge, Massachusetts. And they're somehow able to run both of those at the same time. The question I have is, if they become the low-cost winner in the innovation economy, what is the impact that that has around the world? And I don't have a good answer to that question. But that's the way I would describe China, it's kind of two Chinas. 
 
Christine Anderson: Let's shift a little bit to AI in the workforce, because we've talked a lot about this in the past, but I think there's some things here that we could all learn from you. Does the way that Goldman recruit in an AI world change? 
 
John Waldron: I would say we don't know the answer to that question yet, but we're spending a lot of time examining it. I don't want to be overly simplistic about our thesis, but I think our thesis would be thinking and analytical problem solving and intellectual curiosity. Old-fashioned elements like that are gonna be back in vogue. And, those kind of core mathematical skills are really important. And they are important, of course, but I think the blend is now gonna be really important. I'm rooting for the English majors, and the history majors, and the philosophy majors. We've always done, I think, a pretty good job hiring a lot of liberal arts kids, I would be a good example, although I didn't get hired by Goldman Sachs initially. They really are intellectually curious and they wanna learn, that's the most important thing that they're focused on and they evidence that in their background. We're more focused on what's the well-roundedness of your background and have you proven that you actually are on a little bit of an intellectual journey. 
 
Christine Anderson: Why did you not get hired at Goldman Sachs initially? I don't know if I know this. 
 
John Waldron: I don't think I was sufficiently mathematical with enough accounting. 
 
Christine Anderson: You might have more luck today. 
 
John Waldron: And I may have more luck today, yeah. I didn't do well in the financial modeling test. When I first, I went to Bear Stearns. And when I first got to Bear Stearns, my big buddy, who was my second-year analyst mentor, essentially taught me how to do a financial model. 
 
Christine Anderson: That's great. 
 
John Waldron: Because I had no idea when I got there. I mean, I had ideas about a lot of other things, but not about how to balance a balance sheet. 
 
Christine Anderson: I'm curious in an AI world where the sort of lower-grade work, you know, the grunt work, that always comes with some of these entry-level jobs where you work adjacent to more senior people that have been around longer and you learn just through osmosis right, because you're sitting right there. What happens when that grunt sort of can be done by machines and you don't need the young people to do it and sit there and learn from the person next to them? 
 
John Waldron: Yeah, we wrestle with this question a lot. The word we use in our firm is ‘toil.’ We're trying to eliminate as much of the ‘toil’ as possible. My experience was the best learning was not actually building the model. The best learning was sitting in a meeting with somebody senior saying, okay, here's the 27 pages we have for the meeting we're about to go to. Here's the question or the set of questions we've been asked by the client. This is what we're going to do in the meeting. This is how we're going to address those questions. That's super valuable. 
 
Christine Anderson: So I've heard that one of your kids said to you, you're here, but you're not really here. This is something I sometimes struggle with, as you might imagine. What did that feel like, and did it change anything? 
 
John Waldron: Yeah, that was, that was, I just get emotional thinking about it. I mean that. That was, that was like a dagger. And I mean, I think it was right and it's probably still right in some respect because I mean. You're a parent. You're raising kids, you're trying your best. We have significant responsibilities in our jobs. 
 
Christine Anderson: Ten kids among us. 
 
John Waldron: Yeah. I mean, I travel incessantly. And I try to be home on the weekends and like really be home because during the week it's going to be catch as catch can just by definition. So yes, that was a dagger. It hurt. But the truth hurts. 
 
Christine Anderson: It is in these big jobs. It's the thing you grapple with the most, right? Because you just, what's it all for? 
 
John Waldron: Yes. 
 
Christine Anderson: Right, if not to, you know, be there. Since we're almost out of time, is there a quote that speaks to you? We've had a few guests on that have given us these amazing quotes that guide them. Is there one that you think about? 
 
John Waldron: I'm a huge Eisenhower fan. And his quote about leadership, as I remember it, is ‘it's the art of getting someone to do something you want them to do because they want to do it.’ And I feel like I spend a lot of time in my job trying to figure out how to do that. His superpower was the EQ of being able to, you know, get a bunch of people to do a bunch of things that they otherwise might not have wanted to do, but ultimately they decided it was in their interest to do, and it was the right thing to do. And so, he obviously had an ability to navigate that. So that's probably the quote that most sticks with me. 
 
Christine Anderson: John, it's so wonderful to have you with us. 
 
John Waldron: Thanks for having me. 
 
Christine Anderson: Thank you so much. 
 
John Waldron: Appreciate it. 
 
Christine Anderson: This is the part of the show where we sort of break down the insights we heard. John Waldron obviously gave us a lot. Joe, thrilled to have you with us. 
 
Joe Baratta, Global Head of Private Equity, Blackstone: Great to be here. 
 
Christine Anderson: You two have known each other a long time. 
 
Joe Baratta: Yeah, we've known each other almost 25 years. We met when he was a young partner at Goldman. I think he was covering financial sponsors in Europe and I had just moved to Europe. John's annoying in that he's good at virtually every sport.
 
Christine Anderson: Oh, that is annoying. 
 
Joe Baratta: Whether it's tennis or golf or bowling. Whatever it is. 
 
Christine Anderson: Those people are —
 
Joe Baratta: Yeah, he's annoying because he beats me at virtually everything. 
 
Christine Anderson: So, John painted a pretty constructive picture about growth and outlook for IPOs and capital formation. As Global Head of our Private Equity Strategies, you obviously are very close to this. What's your take? 
 
Joe Baratta: I think the market wants good, larger, market-leading, market-defining companies that are diversified because of course if you invest in the S&P, you have exposure in large part to one thing, it's been a very good thing to have exposure to. But when we can bring a Medline or a Jersey Mike's, or hopefully one day soon Copeland to the market, that is a category defining market-leading business. The markets there for it. And the public markets are very important sources of liquidity for private equity. They have been over many decades. And, you know, we had a lot of confidence that the market would open as it has. 
 
Christine Anderson: So, you see it picking up. 
 
Joe Baratta: I do. 
 
Christine Anderson: So, he also talked about AI in the workforce, right? How he thinks it might change that, how we might be hiring more liberal arts students in the future like yourself, right? Yes?
 
Joe Baratta: Well, I was a finance major, but a government minor from Georgetown. 
 
Christine Anderson: I thought maybe. Ok, government. Ok, alright. 
 
Joe Baratta: But I identify as a liberal arts major. 
 
Christine Anderson: I thought you were, okay. So, John talked a lot about how AI is likely to change the way that Goldman recruits, hires, trains people. How do you think about AI's impact on talent within the financial services industry? 
 
Joe Baratta: Well, I don't think it changes it much. I was with our summer interns, and we were talking about AI and what it means for them. And I said, you know, 35 years ago I was an analyst at Morgan Stanley, and my job then looks very different than your job now, but there are far more analysts at Morgan Stanley and far more analysts at Blackstone. It's just that between midnight and 3 am when I was literally photocopying pages. 
 
Christine Anderson: That was my first job too. 
 
Joe Baratta: And punching holes. 
 
Christine Anderson: Yes, exactly. 
 
Joe Baratta: They're not doing that now. They're contributing more to the serious discussion about should we make this investment? What things should we be thinking about? 
 
Christine Anderson: Inadvertently, John got a little choked up talking about his family and how challenging a time it is to balance that. Something I think a lot about, I'm sure you do as well. How have you managed to do this? 
 
Joe Baratta: I say this to our younger people, which is you have to be successful outside of work if you wanna be successful inside of work. And so you have be a successful partner, you have a successful parent, you have to be a successful friend. And I think he's found that balance to be successful. 
 
Christine Anderson: You certainly do it well. Thanks so much, Joe. Appreciate having you on. 
 
Joe Baratta: Thank you. 
 
Christine Anderson: That's a wrap for this week's episode of Inside Blackstone.
 
Notes:
1. Reflects Blackstone proprietary data for Q2 2026 (as of July 13, 2026, from 80 BCP portfolio companies). Excludes select public investments, select FIG investments, certain new investments, investments where YoY growth rates are not comparable due to divestitures and certain other companies for which timely forecasts are unavailable.
 
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