But at what point do you begin to worry that what's going on in France is going to become a similar problem in America?

I think there's a very important difference.

I think all of these countries face this challenge, but the growth rates in the US Are much higher.

And when you look at the technology, the investment, what's happening with AI, you're seeing it lead to a lot of capital flows in, and that higher rate of growth gives you a little more room.

Now, ultimately, the US is gonna have to face tough choices, but I think now this is more of a France, UK, continental Europe challenge just because there you have much lower rates of growth approaching, call it, one percent, but also very large deficits.

And what we've seen over time is these get addressed when there's crisis.

We saw this in Greece, and unfortunately, that feels the way this is going.

So where is the puck going for Blackstone next? What is the next trend that you anticipate will become a big business for you?

It faced setbacks along the way, but it learned and adapted, and today it's one of the largest foreign private equity and commercial real estate investors in the country.

I would say it was not a fast start.

Um, we had sort of a skeleton crew.

We didn't really have a great defined strategy.

And then I think what really catalyzed things was after the financial crisis, so many investors were disheartened.

There was a line India meant, "I'll never do it again." And they packed up, they went home, and we said, "You know what? We just need a better approach." And so we got the right people in place.

We said, "We're gonna be a control investor.

So how did that REIT develop?

How did you navigate through such a tough start? So we started

as doing a few larger portfolios and so forth.

And then the dot-com bubble came along.

And Alan Greenspan, as you recall, cut rates.

The commercial mortgage-backed securities market sort of emerged where you could go to banks for financing at scale in real estate and put a bunch of properties together and access lower cost debt as opposed to using leveraged loans and high yield from the corporate world.

And what we started doing was buying real estate companies because at that point, as rates came down in the early mid-2000s, prices started going up.

And we said, you know, it's cheaper to buy the whole company on the screen than it is to buy the individual properties.

How do you lead this large global organization through that, particularly when you're in a grieving mode yourself?

Rarity, yes.

Even after we sold our stake.

But it reflects my loyalty to him and the company because...

We got through this.

Now, how did we do it? We ended up putting in an extra $800 million to help deleverage the company and get some additional term on the debt.

The management team did an amazing job.

They kept growing the business, particularly outside the United States.

Give us one that didn't work

When you're looking just at this landscape as a whole, what's your framework for assessing risk and volatility? How do you sort of separate the noise from the signals that truly matter for shaping Blackstone's strategy?

Well, you know, we live in a world where everything seems to be amplified.

The social media world, the speed at which information travels, and there tends to be then a cycle that accelerates.

And so, you know, it's like breaking news.

When I was growing up, there wasn't often breaking news.

Now, when you turn on the TV, there's breaking news.

Every minute.

But in an industry that traditionally values discretion over spotlight, what inspired both your own individual brand building and what you guys do at Blackstone to build the Blackstone brand and tell the Blackstone story?

Were there any major leaps in your development and growth? You know, if you look back and analyze any pivotal moments in your career?

Yeah, there were definitely a few.

I mean, when I started, I was in our M&A and private equity business for the first year, which was unbelievable training because I got to learn a lot about the LBO business, discounted cash flows, looking at companies, public markets things.

And then the real estate business had collapsed.

And our visionary founders, Steve Schwarzman and Pete Peterson, decided to go into that business.

And they found a great guy in Chicago named John Schreiber.

And there were no junior people on this.

How are you incorporating artificial intelligence into Blackstone's operations and investment strategies?

Was there a moment where you weren't sure that Blackstone would survive, number one? And number two, was there a moment when all of a sudden, because of a fund you'd raised, a deal you'd done, a team you'd brought on, that you realized that Blackstone was not only going to be a very successful firm, but was going to be the firm in your industry?

So I'd say there are a couple of things that I would point to.

I mean, clearly the scariest moment in this firm's history, and I think most investment firms history of the last couple of decades, was the financial crisis.

Because we were engaged in private equity.

We obviously moved into real estate.

We had a private credit business.

We invested in hedge funds.

You had to literally rip the rear view mirror off your car at that point to go and have conviction to go buy 50,000 single family homes before anyone else had gotten through the fact that we'd just gone through a massive single family housing crisis.

What say you?

So on real estate, B-REIT, which you and I have talked about a number of times, I just start with that.

We've delivered 9.5% returns to our customers for eight years, beating the public REIT index by 65%.

We're incredibly proud of that.

We've made great decisions by investing in logistics and rental housing and data centers.

We focused in the Southeast, Texas, Florida, Georgia.

We hedged out the debt before rates went up.

There had been a collective gasp, I think, across many industries and sort of how you have thought about it going forward.