David, thank you for both having us here at the conference and joining me for an interview. Well, I'm delighted to be with you, David, and I have to start by thanking you for being here. I mean, this is a super conference. We've got over 2,500 investors here for a couple of days, 200 companies, you know, a lot of good dialogue. There's a lot going on in the technology space. And, you know, it's great to be out here.

It's great to have you out here.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

Great to both of us fly across the country so we can talk to each other when our offices. Well, I flew across the country to be at the conference and talk to a bunch of clients, but I'm delighted to talk to you. I'm so glad you're with me as well, David. All right, now that we were laughing a little bit, I do want to start off on kind of what rarely seen in my career, sort of this highly unusual avalanche of stories

focused really, David, on your personality defects.

I mean, it's been bizarre.

New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, New York Magazine.

Why has this happened?

You know, I can't give you a good reason why it's happened. What I can't say to you, David, is it's not fun, you know, obviously watching some of

the personal attacks in the press. Obviously, we're a big organization. We're doing a lot of

things in the world. And, you know, we should be scrutinized, and we are scrutinized, and we watch that, you know, that scrutiny very, very carefully.

I don't recognize the caricature that's been painted of me.

I have a lot of colleagues and clients I talk to.

They don't recognize that caricature either.

And I tell you a lot of them, particularly my colleagues, are not shy about expressing their personal views. But look, I always reflect on it. You always look at it. And we're focused on doing what we're doing. I think we've made a lot of progress in the last five years. Growing the firm, serving our clients, executing on the strategy, and we're going to stay focused on that.

Yeah, and I want to, obviously, we're going to talk about that, but I mean, do you feel, you know, to your point, it's a rare thing to see these personal attacks.

You know, you run a company, like a lot of guys run a company and ladies run companies.

Do you think it's an orchestrated campaign of some kind? Is it based simply on the

frustration of your partners because they didn't get paid as much in 2022 as they did in 21?

Goldman Sachs is a very visible organization. If you go back and you look historically,

there have been lots of times where the person sitting in this job has been scrutinized by the

press.

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