The Long View: David Solomon, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs

“The Angle” Music

Cold OPEN “Humanity and human interaction is going to get more valuable, not less, in this world.”

Eric Veiel

Welcome back to The Angle from T. Rowe Price, a podcast for curious investors. Just a reminder that outside of the U.S., this podcast is for investment professionals only. In this episode of The Long View, we're joined by David Solomon, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, one of the world's leading global financial institutions. We explore his leadership journey, how he sees the future of global finance, and the long-term forces shaping the economy, markets, and the investment landscape.

David, thank you for being on The Angle. We really appreciate it.

David Solomon

I'm happy to be here.

Eric Veiel

So I'd love to start, you know, one of my favorite details about your story is that Goldman initially turned you down for an analyst position. I'm sure something you've heard before, but now you're running the place. And along the way, you know, Drexel, Bear Stearns. It's really kind of a non-stereotypical Goldman route. So, I'm curious, when you look back, like what shaped you the most in those early years, you think that really kind of drove the, the, success you ultimately had at Goldman?

David Solomon

Well, I, I think candidly, you know, the factors in our industry that have played, you know, toward long successful careers have, have, been the same for a long time. And I think they continue. I mean, this is an industry where you have to really have passion for finance and for investing and for markets and for all those things. Whatever part of the business you're in. You have to be a constant kind of career learner. You have to have commitment and, you know, really have dedication and work very, very hard. It's a very competitive business. I think you've got to be able to interact with people and build relationships. I mean, at the end of the day, this is a business of relationships, there's no question. That doesn't change. And then you've got a whole bunch of luck and serendipity.

So, I mean, I could have, I mean, you know, the likely outcome is I worked very hard for a long time and was lucky enough to have some success and have a good career. The more likely outcome and the more broad distribution is, I'd have a very, very nice career. The fact that I'm sitting in the seat talking to you as the CEO of the firm, you know, having been in the job for the last eight years, a lot of that is serendipity, luck, timing. There are a lot of people who could have run Goldman Sachs. It just so happened at the time there was a CEO transition. I was one of the ones, and then in that distribution, I was lucky enough to be picked and they decided to, to, give me a test drive. So, and but it's, it's, you know, it's a long journey and you just, you know, you just you just don't know. But you've got to love the business. And it's a great business to be a part of, whether or not you get to the top job.

Eric Veiel

Yeah, I can actually look back. In my own career and I've told many people the same thing. There's, there's, just like these twists and turns you can never anticipate. So, if a young person's asking me like, how did you get to where you're going? It's almost like it doesn't matter what my path was, your path will be unique to you. Was there a moment that you could look back on where you're like, oh, that was like one of those breaks that serendipity really played a hand in my career development?

David Solomon

Well. I think I think the, I mean, the, the big serendipity was, you know, working on a transaction with a guy named Jon Winkelried, who now runs TPG, who was a partner at the firm. He and I worked collaboratively when I was at Bear Stearns to finance Sheldon Adelson in the development of his flagship casino, The Venetian, back in the late 1990s. And through working on that deal, at the end of that deal, Jon Winkelried turned to me and said, hey, you know, you should, you should really come work at Goldman Sachs. And that started a process over a six-month period where, where, the firm recruited me to come. And ultimately and, I was, I had a very good job at Bear Sterns, and I was in a relatively senior position. I was on the management committee at a relatively young age, which was a 10% management committee. But ultimately I decided that, you know what? I really wanted to play for the Yankees. I always, I'd always had, you know, for lack of a better term, kind of envy of Goldman, the franchise, the people. And, you know, I decided at the time, which was a pretty, you know, not without risk move. I was 37 years old, to kind of step off the path where I was and step on to.

Eric Veiel

Yeah, because you're star was high. If I recall at the time you were doing great. It was big change.

David Solomon

I was doing great. And I was in a very, very senior leadership role. And so, you know, it, it, was a step back at a much broader platform with a broader set of opportunities. And, you know, I had talked to a handful of people, and I had really come to the conclusion that if I really was in this for a long-term career, this was a great opportunity to give myself a much broader long term opportunity, and that turned out to be a very good bet. But it was, you know, it was it was serendipitous, that particular transaction. Build that particular relationship. And that's what ultimately brought me to the firm,

Eric Veiel

Let's pivot to the current environment. You and I had dinner at the end of 2025 at your, at your house with a group of people. It was great. And at the time you were rightly bullish. I remember the table had a fair number of bears around the table, but you were, you were rightly bullish. How are you feeling as we're sitting here today?

David Solomon

Well, when we had that dinner, you know, we were coming into, we were coming to the new year. And I, you know, I think what I got right in my analysis at that dinner when we were talking was you had very significant fiscal stimulus; we were early into a deregulatory, you know, movement that would have significant compounding effects in terms of freeing up capacity for businesses as the regulatory infrastructure came down to reinvest in growth. We had a technology supercycle going on, and we were also in a monetary easing cycle at that point. So, I kind of looked at that and I said, this is a pretty good cocktail for risk assets and markets as we head into, you know, into 2026. And you know, certainly the first two months, you know, were that.

What I certainly didn't anticipate, as you know, unfolding the way it unfolded is the conflict in the Middle East. And, you know, the conflict in the Middle East now has put some sand in the gears. You know for sure. We're operating with higher oil prices and probably more inflationary pressure. And I think the market so far have kind of brushed it off. But I'm more cautious from a risk management perspective, and also from a market performance perspective. Now counter to that, you know, this AI supercycle is very, very powerful. Think as you get into 27 and 28, you're going to see more productivity gains actually in enterprises more broadly that will have a more constructive effect. So it's a hard one to predict. Because you have these countervailing things. And, but I would just say I think about this as we run the firm, we're more cautious from a risk management perspective. You know, right now, more cautious on risk assets than we were when we had dinner at the end of the year.

Eric Veiel

So, you get to spend a lot of time with other CEOs across many different industries. As you're sitting down with those folks now, what is the, what is the number one topic that comes up in those conversations?

David Solomon

Well, there are a handful of topics that come up and they're the topics de jour. So, people want to talk geopolitics. People want to understand what's going on in the Middle East. People want to talk AI, and implementation of AI in the enterprise and productivity, and, and, how to implement. So that's a big, big topic. But I would say the thing that doesn't get enough attention is, you know, the large, the broad CEO community, especially the larger enterprises. Let's talk Fortune 100. Fortune 250. Are very, very convicted on the importance of scale in their business and how important, or how much scale leads to better moats, better protection, better growth trajectory, better operating leverage. And we've really been in an environment where it's hard to do things inorganically to strengthen your scale position. And now we're an environment we actually can.

So, there's an enormous amount of strategic M&A focus that's geared toward, how do I expand my scale. And lots of dialog with the CEO community. And one of the things that's cool about AI implementation into the enterprise is it's not just about better margins and efficiency. It's about freeing up capacity to invest in growth and scale, or accelerating scale adds to competitive positioning for growth for a lot of these businesses. And so, there's a lot of dialog with CEOs on those topics as they kind of wrestle with the way their position relative to the competitors.

Eric Veiel

Well, let's, let's, talk a little bit about as we think about AI and your, your, vision for, for, Goldman.

David Solomon

So you know a couple of things just to talk about in terms of, you know, AI and Goldman Sachs. First, we have a lot of real, we are a human capital business and we have a lot of really smart people. And one of the things we've done really well for decades is we get really smart people, technology tools and applications, and they figure out how to use them to expand their productivity and be better at what they do. And so there's a whole avenue of work that's going on where we're getting these tools into the hands of our people, so they can expand their productivity, change the way they work, and expand their ability to serve our clients. I mean, that's really true north is serving our clients. So how do these tools help them do a better job to serve our clients, to have more capacity to serve more clients, to have more of an ability to get our clients what they need. And we can all see, obviously, how helpful, you know, these tools can be if you give them to really, really motivated smart people and focused on getting information, advice, content, context to our clients. And so, they're very, they're very focused on all that.

That is completely separate from something that I think all CEOs are wrestling with, and I've been wrestling with, with my leadership team, which is how do we deploy this in the enterprise to change operating processes so that we can create more efficiency and more productivity in the organization. I think this is an incredible, incredible opportunity. I would observe talking to a lot of CEOs. There are two ways that enterprises are doing this. The first is the way we're doing it. We have picked a handful of processes, and we are very focused on delivering and executing against those processes really, really well. Top down, looked at a lot of processes, picked six and said, let's go after these and prove that we can do this.

There are other organizations that are taking more of a bottom-up approach. They're empowering broadly across the organization for people to work in their businesses to try to find, you know, these productivity gains in their operating processes, but without, you know, a straight directive. We've chosen the first. I see companies that are doing both. I think for our organization, the way we operate, driving organizational change in this organization requires a lot of top down, you know, focus and accountability. And so we're taking the top-down approach. But when I look at it and you know, this includes, you know, our whole engineering coding processes, this includes KYC and onboarding processes. This includes sales enablement. There are a bunch of things. I see an enormous opportunity for us to really create additional capacity to invest in growth, because the productivity gains that we'll take out of these processes can be redeployed in places where we want to expand our scale and our footprint. So and so we're excited about that.

Eric Veiel

So this is, really hard stuff though. When you've got an organization as large as yours, people who've been doing things the same way for a long period of time, and maybe a little hesitant to think about what these new tools might mean to their little pocket of the enterprise. Do you have a team that comes in, sort of like a separate SWAT team to examine this, or are you asking the leaders within those divisions to sort of disrupt themselves?

David Solomon

Well, we've basically put together a, you know, a transformational change group that's under the leadership of some very senior people at the firm, including our CFO, Denis Coleman. And, and, that group is partnering with individual teams that we've taken in each of these six operating processes. Those teams come from the business but also include people that are particularly focused on driving these operational changes, and they're working collaboratively. And, you know, they're meeting, we're creating metrics. We're creating, you know, we're trying to get to a point that we have clear KPIs that we can communicate on. You know, what we're doing on, each of these processes, and we're making good progress. But you're, you're, right. It's hard. It requires focus, commitment, and, you know, I think it's hard to do this in our organization, certainly without a real top-down push. And so we've got that going on quite effectively I think at the moment.

Eric Veiel

Yeah, I think a lot of organizations are wrestling with how to, to, execute this. Everybody sees the potential. And then that execution I think will be the real differentiator.

David Solomon

People hate change. Organizations hate change. But we're really trying to, you know, to drive it is to find the right way to collaboratively drive that change. And I, you know, I think when we set our mind to it, this is one of the reasons why we wanted to focus on a certain number of processes. If we get this organization focused, we can make good progress.

Eric Veiel

What I've observed is people hate change when it affects them. They love to point out other people that should change and how they should change.

David Solomon

I think that is. I think that is well said.

Eric Veiel

I'm curious, if we could talk a little bit about just the evolution of the capital markets and maybe let's take this technology angle into that. We're seeing a rise of more quant, more ETF trading, lots of trading happening at the very end of the day. As you think about the way technology is evolving and potentially going to, you know, tokenization, what are you all doing to prepare for that kind of an eventuality?  

David Solomon

Yeah, we're, spending a lot of time on digitization and tokenization. You know, I think the regulatory infrastructure is very complicated for that, to try to create a level playing field for both regulated and less regulated participants, to be able to think about, you know, how a tokenized ecosystem around equities would, would, work. I think we're in the early days of all of this, but it's something we're spending a lot of time on and we're very focused on. I think there's a tendency with some of this digital technology around markets to overstate how quickly it will come or how necessary it is, but I think the direction of travel is clear that there will be an evolution in most markets. There'll be an evolution to the rails through which money or value stocks potentially move. And so we're, we're, quite focused on this. But I just don't think the narrative that all this is changing. It's changing so quickly I think it's going to be slower and more complicated. You know, with, with, with stocks, you've got, you know, an infrastructure around how stocks trade. And I think, you know, you need to think carefully about what you're trying to do, what you want to have happen, how you want it to work. But I you know, I think the opportunity set to use technology, to create less friction and make markets more liquid, more open, more 24/7. Those are all things that I think are things that are worthy of significant, you know, focus and exploration.

Eric Veiel

Another big market structure change. It's happened over the last decade plus, is the rise of private markets and certainly the, the, convergence between public and private. And we're seeing it in equities. We're seeing it in fixed income. Maybe, let's start on the on the credit side, since everybody seems to want to talk a little bit about that environment. But your thoughts on what's happening in private credit right now.

David Solomon

Well, the narrative on this, I think, has been a little bit confusing for most people, based on the way it's, it's, you know, deployed in the media. And so obviously there are big public bond markets that include, that include obviously government debt. They also include mortgage debt. They include corporate debt. And, you know, most of the corporate debt’s investment grade, but some below investment grade corporate debt.

There are a variety of reasons why direct lending to below investment grade companies has grown in a private context. But when people talk about private credit, I think mostly what they're talking about is the direct lending, the below investment grade, the direct lending market, especially when they're talking about credit risk and private credit. That market is, you know, 1.7 trillion. So it's pretty small, you know, there are 150 trillion of, you know, public equities. So, it's pretty small.

And, you know, credit and lending broadly, public or private is, is generally a portfolio business. You, you, you know, there's a reason why people pick stocks sometimes. But you know, when you when you're a lender in whatever form you want a diversified portfolio and portfolio construction theory is very important in general. The general thing about lending activities, you have a diversified portfolio. You collect. You collect a rent, which is your net interest margin, your spread. And generally speaking, it's hard if you put your portfolio together, right, to have a poor portfolio when you have a comfortable economic environment. And so, in the United States, we haven't had a real economic recession. We turned the economy off for Covid for a short time. But you really have to go back; you got to go to the GFC to have a recession. So, it's not surprising that credit lending has continued to accelerate.

Whenever you have a long cycle, you know, if these cycles typically have been 7 to 10 years, you know, this one's been 17 years. So, when you have a long cycle, people get more aggressive, credit spreads get historically tight. And so therefore, you know, over time, as the cycle stretches, chances are when you do have an economic slowdown or a recession, the losses will probably be larger than they might have been if they were in a short cycle. But what the hope would be is you've been earning all these rents over a long period of time, and the rents cover your losses in that part of the cycle.

Now, what could give you a worse outcome, if you have bad portfolio construction? So, if some people are too heavily weighted toward, you know, towards software, and they don't have really good diversified portfolio construction and they're overweighted to something that's going to underperform, you know, that can have an impact. But, but, broadly speaking, it's hard to see really poor performance in private credit until we have more of an economic slowdown or recession. We will have one eventually. There will be a cycle where there'll be losses and then you'll, you'll, see how, how people performed and you'll sort it through. But I don't think there's anything systemic with that.

You know, look, this has been a long credit cycle. My guess is when we do have a recession or a slowdown, it'll be a bumpier, you know, remake. You also have a lot of people that are operating hasn't been a real cycle in 17 years. They're operating without a lot of restructuring, you know, recessionary experience. And so, you know, that'll also come into play. But, you know, there's nothing here that I think is out of the ordinary of what we'd expect.

Eric Veiel

Let's take a look at the the equity side, where we've got some unbelievably large private companies gearing up to come public in the next year plus, let’s call it. Nobody knows exactly when, but certainly it sounds like they're coming. What do you think that's going to do to the, to the markets, more broadly when we start to see some of this supply reach the public markets?

David Solomon

That's a really, that's a really hard thing. That's a really hard thing to gauge. I think there's some great companies there, obviously very, very large kind of, unprecedented in their size, when they're, when they're going public. You know, you and I have been around this for a long time. We know, you know, if you take liquidity for one thing, you know, it's got to come from somewhere. It's got to come from somewhere. So, this this can have an impact. But, you know, the fact that everybody is, you know, speculating on it before seeing it, I think you're right to raise the question because it's a good question. But anybody tells you they know, they don't know because it's unprecedented.

Eric Veiel

And it also depends on the timing, how close to the timing.  

David Solomon

And I'd also say, look, you know, one of the things that's in the, you know, in the backdrop here, and as long as we have a reasonable economic environment; I think this continues, is that retail investors want to participate in this stuff, and they've been kind of boxed out as these companies have been formed. And so, I think you're going to have very, very strong retail demand. I'm not saying that that's a good thing or a bad thing. I'm just saying it's a fact. I think it's important for market health and market structure to get these listed well and to have them trade reasonably well for, for, an extended period of time, not for ten minutes. But I think it's great that these companies are coming to market. I think it's great. That these are great companies doing really interesting things. And I think it's gonna be a very interesting period.

Eric Veiel

Yeah, it's going to be exciting to watch. Let's pivot a little bit to leadership and sort of how you think about that topic. I'm going to start in a little bit of a different spot here. So, your background was on the banking side. Historically before you, it was the CEO had been more of a trader or trading background. Anything in that background do you think that's changed the way Goldman functions today or how you lead the company today?

David Solomon

Well, it's, it's, interesting. One of the things that I think has helped me a lot in my job is I feel very lucky that I did a lot of different things in my career. So, you know, I started, I was trained first in a commercial bank as a credit lending officer. So I got a deep credit training. Now I will tell you, to your question specifically, you know, how my experience is shaped. You know, the way I looked at things for the, for the, ten years before I became president of the firm, and then and then CEO, I spent a lot of time in boardrooms advising CEOs. And, you know, one of the things I believe deeply is public companies have to grow. They have to grow. And if you don't have a strategy to kind of grow your business and perform on a relative basis through growth, you're going to have a very, very tough time as a public company. You know, Goldman Sachs went through a very long transition from a partnership to a public company. And, you know, even when this leadership team came in, in 2018, we were still closer to the partnership model even though we had been public for almost 20 years.

Today, I'd say we're much more of a public company with a growth mindset that's focused on growth. And, and, so I just believe that, and I think strategically, everything that this leadership team has tried to do is to try to grow the firm. And that, really you know my, my, strategic view, the leadership team strategic view collectively, comes from the fact that a lot of us worked as bankers. We spent a lot of time in boardrooms and we really understood this dynamic about large scale public companies, and we really felt that we had to continue that journey for the firm. That journey had started, but we had to continue it. Yeah, and we worked. We worked hard to try to continue it.

Eric Veiel

Yeah, that's, that's, really interesting. I remember when I first started covering the company as the analyst at T. Rowe on the stock back in sort of 2005, 2006. It was very much still talked about as the partnership. And not in a bad way. Like it was a great culture, very unique.

David Solomon

By the way. I think one of the great things we've done is; the partnership is still alive and well, and very strong in a public company and very aspirational, which is it's hard to do. And it's also, it's unique. I don't think you can name another public company that operates, you know, with a group of 450 partners, you know, in this way as a public company. And so we've worked hard at that. And I think it's something that culturally distinguishes the firm, and it's been worth fighting for. But, you know, our number one constituency, you know, is our shareholders. We have to deliver for shareholders. And we, you know, we went through a period after the financial crisis where the firm really didn't grow for a 10-year period after the financial crisis; our revenues were flat, our balance sheet was flat; our capital was flat. But we also, during that period didn't really think about ways that, even with those constraints, we could accelerate forward. And, you know, I think it's much more embedded in the culture of the firm now that we've got to be investing in growth, and we've got to have a strategy that allows us on a relative basis, you know, to perform better from a growth prospect in terms of growing our earnings.

Eric Veiel

One of the things that I've really enjoyed in this podcast, in talking to different CEOs like yourselves, is sort of probing on when they've run into those decisions where they’ve known that they weren't the right decision and then having to make the really tough call to pivot from there. Talked to multiple CEOs about this, most recently Jim Farley at Ford, and the decision they had to make on their original EV plans, and to pivot that away. As you think about trying to deal with that, what is the process that you use to assess the strategic decisions you've made and then, importantly, to make a change if it's not going to come out the way you wanted it to?

David Solomon

Well, you know, we, we, we, have a large swath of KPIs that we report to the board, and the board holds us accountable to that we update every year. We add to it. I mean, I'm a big believer in accountability and transparency and KPIs help with that. But look, the example that fits with Goldman Sachs is we entered, you know, we entered back in the 2015/ 2016 business. We entered some digital consumer businesses. And you know, we had a pretty ambitious plan to grow those. We made some good progress, but we ran into some headwinds, certainly on the regulatory front and also a difficult period of time where the investment that was required was creating headwinds for the business. And you know, when you say a process, there's not, you know, it's not like a formal process. You know, it's not rocket science. It was clear that there were headwinds to this, that a bunch of the assumptions that we had made around how this would unfold, what the regulatory environment would be like, what it would cost for us to get to the scale that we thought was necessary. The scale became different because of the regulatory constraints. We looked at it and said, you know, we're going to put a lot of effort and a lot of time into this. It's going to create headwinds. And you know we debated it and we made the decision.

And I think one of the things that as a leadership team we feel very good about is we debated it. We made the decision, not over three years, but over like six months. We made the call. It's a tough call. Tough call. But we made the call and I, you know, I think it's, I think it's important for leadership teams and enterprises to try things and take risk. You have to. But you also have to be willing to say, okay, this isn't working out or I have different facts, and so we're going to change or we're going to pivot. You've got to be willing to do that. And I think, you know, the market, the market will tolerate choices that don't work. What the market will not tolerate is letting them languish and not being decisive when something's not working about, you know, clean it up or pivoting.

Eric Veiel

Being intellectually honest about it is, in the end, what the markets crave. Because markets are smart, right?

David Solomon

Yeah, absolutely. Always. Always.

Eric Veiel

What's your advice for the next generation of leaders, either within Goldman or just when you know you're talking to people in different settings. How do you think people should be preparing for the, for the future leadership transitions that are coming?

David Solomon

Well, I mean, I think all of us are on a crash course to really understand this technology and potential of this technology, and how the technology is going to affect our enterprises and the way we work, etc. And so, I think it's super important to, you know, to do that. I also think that, you know, good leaders recognize that organizations have to evolve. But, you know, evolution is a good thing. Revolution is generally a bad thing. There are a lot of, you know, people in the world creating narratives that it's different this time, or the world is going to be fundamentally different. You know, I'm not a big believer in those things. And so I think, you know, thoughtful, patient, you know, medium and long term, you know, investing in a strategic plan, being willing to say - I'm wrong on this, I'm going to pivot on this.

But, you know, leadership has to be patient because anything that's worthwhile takes time. You have to be willing to change if you've got something wrong and make adjustments. And, but I think, you know, leaders today have to be much more fluent in the technology, understanding how the technology is going to remake processes, because I think of changes in the next 5 to 10 years are going to be real, but I don't think they're fundamentally going to change the way we interact. And one of the things, you know, I'm on the page for sure is, you know, humanity and human interaction is going to get more valuable, not less, in this world. And, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, more in the camp that we have a very, very versatile economy. Yes, there will be jobs destroyed, but there'll be a lot of jobs created.

You know, it's something that people don't recognize. But over the last 25 years, on average, every year for the last 25 years, we've created about 30 million jobs and we've destroyed about 29 million. And it's basically, it's between 25 and 35 for each. And so the net job creation is about a million jobs.

Eric Veiel

Big chunk of the overall number.

David Solomon

It's, it's, a big. We create and destroy a lot of jobs every year. It's a very versatile economy. And it's, you know, it's quite nimble and adaptive to, you know, to complex things. And, you know, that will continue. The pace of change is quick here. So that might create some more volatility in the short run because of the pace of change.

Eric Veiel

I think that's what, actually scares people more than the actual change, is just the pace at which this stuff is happening. And that's totally.

David Solomon

Even when things happen quickly, you know, it's always good to, to look at, you know, to just look at some data points for, you know, for perspective that even with quick change, change can be slow. So, and not everybody wants change. So, it's great that you have these technologies, but that doesn't mean everybody adopts them. So it's, you know, it's great that that, you know, autonomous technology is absolutely accelerating. But just because it's here, it doesn't mean everybody's not going to want to drive. Right. And so the, you know, the change process in these things sometimes is slower even when the pace of change is very quick. So, there's no question the pace of change on these models is extraordinarily, it's extraordinary. And that's going to create bumps and volatility etc. But, but, people move you know slower than the technology sometimes, and enterprises move slower. And so, I think it's an exciting time. It won't be without, without, you know, some bumps and some issues. But you know, I think the end result is this can really unlock, you know, productivity gains and growth in the economy that can really create a lot of upside for everybody.

Eric Veiel

Yeah. So, we usually like to end these, these, sessions with a little bit about your, your personal life and what, what people do to sort of unwind and, and, relax. And you know I think creativity.  Music's been a part of your life and  exercises, I think you've said it exercises a different part of your brain. What are some areas that you find like really help you when you're away from the work, if you can ever get away from the work?

David Solomon

Well, I mean, I do get away from work like anybody else. I, you know, the thing, the thing that I've, I've, I've talked a bunch about when I'm asked questions about this is, you know, I'm 64 now and my kids are in their 30s. It is very different being a 64-year-old with kids in their 30s, now with one grandchild.

Eric Veiel

Congratulations.

David Solomon

Thank you very much. That, that, when I was in my 40s, I was raising two kids because kind of where I was, when I was in my late 30s and 40s and I was working hard and, you know, I told you, I joined Goldman Sachs at 37, I mean, I was working, working, working basically. My priorities were family first, work second, family third, work fourth, family fifth, work sixth, and kind of like I was seventh. Like I was. What did I want to do. Like I was seventh.

Eric Veiel

Didn't even have to think about it.

David Solomon

Most weeks we didn't get anywhere close to getting to what I wanted to do. You know? Now, you know, I work very hard, I travel constantly, I'm moving around. You know, I'm always thinking and working at Goldman Sachs. But, you know, if, if, you know, if I have time, I can do the things that I want to do. And so first of all, I'm not a sit on the couch guy. I'm a doer. You know, you mentioned music. Music has been a great creative, you know, passion. And, you know, I haven't done it as publicly in the last few years, but I still do it. I still love it. And I'm also, you know, I'm an adrenaline jockey. I, I, I play golf, I play tennis, I ride bike, I kite surf, I'm into food and wine, I mean, I. And anything that I do, I try to do at a level of proficiency, you know, that's the highest level of proficiency that I can muster with my tools or capabilities.  And so I like to do things. I like to learn. I like to try to new things. I ski too. And so, you know, I'm a doer and I, I find that doing is relaxation for me. Sitting on the couch is not relaxation.

Eric Veiel

Work just creeps into your mind.

David Solomon

Sitting on the couch isn’t relaxation for me. Doing is relaxation. And so I try to, I try to do to relax.

Eric Veiel

That’s great. Okay. We're going to end with a couple of rapid-fire questions. We've done this past several episodes. People really like it. So just first word or two that that pop into your mind, and we'll just we'll just whip through a couple of these, okay.

The best thing about being the CEO of Goldman Sachs?

David Solomon

The people.

Eric Veiel

Describe Goldman Sachs in one word?

David Solomon

Excellence.

Eric Veiel

The single most important lesson from the GFC?

David Solomon

25 to 30 times leverage is much, much, much, much too much leverage.

Eric Veiel

All right. Well, let's end on a couple lighter ones, then. Best city in the world for vacation.

David Solomon

How about town?

Eric Veiel

You can do town.

David Solomon

Okay. You know, Positano, Italy.

Eric Veiel

There you, great one. Last one. The food that is your secret guilty pleasure.

David Solomon

Chocolate covered pretzels.

Eric Veiel

All right, all right.

David Solomon

They are good. Basically, put chocolate on anything. Put chocolate on a peanut. Put it on an almond. Put it on a pretzel.

Eric Veiel

That’s like the perfect combination. That's pretty good I agree.

David Solomon

That's a, that's a, that is a bad habit, is the way I would describe it. But I'm not ready to give it up.

Eric Veiel

You need to have at least one of them.

David Solomon

That's a bad habit right.

Eric Veiel

Thank you so much David. This has been great. Thank you. Really appreciate it.

David Solomon

Thank you.

Eric Veiel

Thank you. Again. I'm Eric Veiel. Thank you for listening to The Angle. We look forward to your company on future episodes. You can find more information about this and other topics on our website. Please rate and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. The Angle. Better questions, better insights. Only from T Rowe Price.

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