YouSaid · the spoken record

David Solomon

lines on the record: 86
first: 2026-06-04
most recent: 2026-06-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Put these models against a clean data set, it is extraordinary. Like it is mind-blowing to me, what you can do, the speed with which you can do it, the information that you can accumulate, and how powerful that is when you have a clean data set. It wouldn't surprise you. Goldman Sachs has an extraordinarily amazing data set that we're working very hard on to make as clean as possible on everything we've ever done from a trading and investment banking perspective over the last 40 plus years. We happen to build a system 40 years ago called SecDB that was a trading system. So we have data from all our trading that goes back long before most other firms kept data. On this stuff. And so we're working very hard on that. But these tools, extraordinary when you have a clean data set.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that we really have for a long time it's been part of the culture, but we really have a culture of sharing and collaboration. It is not a star system. People share, share, share. It's just such an ethos at Goldman Sachs that I think we have less of this problem than other organizations have. But what's interesting to me about your question. It makes me really think about it's something that I deeply believe you started with, and I'd frame it in three buckets. This technology is incredibly powerful when you have a clean data set”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's an insightful question, and I start with the fact that one of the things I'm really proud of about Goldman Sachs is Goldman Sachs is less what you describe. I believe than any other.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On a per person basis, but we definitely are allocating more capital to the business and the capital is helping and creating leverage, but there's no question they have better tools they can do more. We've found ways for them to do more. We also have collaborative power going on inside the firm in the context of 1GS, 1.0 and 2.0 that are adding to revenue growth. It's very hard to pull it apart. But I think every five years we can directionally say, is it more productive? Yes, it is because you go back when the firm went public, the firm had $6 billion of capital, I believe, and we had 16,000 people, something like that, order of magnitude. Today we have 45,000 people and $110 billion of capital. The firm is much more productive against producing reasonable returns on that capital than it was 27 years ago. I mean, that's clear, but that's a 27-year look, not a year-to-year-old look.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now one measure is I can look at the revenues we have in investment banking and the earnings in investment banking and the number of investment bankers we have and the amount of capital we allocate to that business over the last 10 years. And you know what? Our people are more productive because we're making on a per person basis more revenue, more profit.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a great question, Tracy. I can tell you some examples of things we're doing where I know we'll be able to quantify some significant productivity gains, but they're more in the category of remaking operating processes. So what we're doing under what I know you guys have read about OneGS 3.0. So if we redo our clienting, anti-money laundering KYC processes and we had a process that had 3,800 people touching it, not 100% of their job touching it. And now we'll have a process with a few hundred people touching it. That's a productivity when it's done. I can measure the productivity gain of that process. Okay, that's different than saying to me, okay, you've got a bunch of people who work in investment banking, okay, how much more productive are they?”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I don't want to be predictive because if I throw out a number, everybody's going to start holding me to the number. But I just told you we were running it at 2,500, which by the way looks similar to what we were running at pre-COVID. But lower than the 3,000 plus we were running in 2021, okay? My guess is it's going to be in the next three years that will contract a little, but not in a way when you and I would say, wow, this is a huge, huge change.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very long time absolutely. So if you ask me a question, I'm like, okay, 2022. Yes, but that's the wrong starting point. Because if you look at 2022, a bunch of what we've done from 2022 to 2025 and now in 2026 was correcting the stupid things that we did in 2020 and 2021. And so I think you've got to look at it through a 10 year lens. And what I would say is at this point, if you look at a 10 year lens, it shifted to more heavily weighted engineering. My guess is that's going to shift differently going forward given the power of these tools and our ability to code And you're going to see nuanced changes that probably to some degree reduce the number of people that we start with over the next few years, but probably not what you and I would call dramatically.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look over the last 10 years, I'd say what's happened is the amount of engineering talent we had at the firm grew materially. A relative basis to operational talent or client talent. Okay. There are a variety of things that happen because of the pandemic that bloated or inflated hiring across all large enterprises. And so if you say, since ChatGPT, Like, if you take 2022, that was like the high watermark of the bloat.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Subtle changes, but you can't look at it in a vacuum. So you said to me, I can be very detailed with you. Yeah, please. You know, I think with all this stuff, it's nuanced. Details matter.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely. Okay. By the way, I don't think that's going to change. You guys can go look. I gave a commencement speech at Wharton last month. And one of the lines in the commencement speech was. The phone. The telephone is one of the greatest pieces of technology in the world. Use it, a telephone call to someone is 10 times more valuable. Than a text or an email. My daughter says that's an unverified statistic, but I know that's true. And it is if I call you personally on the phone, it's going to have a completely different impact.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I had to go to the microfiche and look at the different stocks and see how they were trading, actually put it on graph paper and absorb the differences and do the math to explain what the percentage compounding differences were, I was learning something. That now, if you ask for it, you get it instantaneously. Has your brain really absorbed what's actually happening? And so the challenge is how do we apprentice and give people the base of knowledge, but how do we also allow these tools to allow them to get out into the world so that they can really have a bigger impact faster? And we don't have the answers to this yet, but we're really thinking about it.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've now over 40 some years accelerated that enormously. And so the productivity level of all these people is going up, up and up and up. We haven't had fewer people. Now, maybe this technology is accelerating in a way where over time we will actually fundamentally have fewer people. But what I would argue is the real challenge for us is we've got to find ways to apprentice them and teach them a variety of things that they're not going to intuitively learn because they don't actually have to work as hard to get the answer.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They didn't know. They didn't have a quotron, or you could call your stockbroker if you had one, or go outside your office and find a Merrill Lynch or an E.F. Hutton or a Dean Whitter office on the street and look at the ticker tape and wait until your stock would buy him the ticker tape. Okay. Or you could wait until the next day and open up the Wall Street Journal and see where your stock traded that day. So we were offering a huge value service by simply having this technological machine that allowed us to tell them where their stock was trading. So if you think about what young people were doing when I started, a lot of what we were doing was taking very primitive technology and giving information to people that were trying to run their businesses and the pace of everything was very, very slow.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the technology, it makes it more leveraging. I mean, I think you guys saw it, because I've used this example of when I started doing a common stock comparison, took six hours. Go, Microfiche, Wall Street Journal, the only source of historical stock prices, put it on graph paper, take a picture of it. If you really think about that example, what that example is actually saying is if you were a company and you wanted to know where your stock was trading during the day, you had two choices. You could call it with three choices, I guess, technically. You could call your investment banker and say, hey, where is my stock trading right now? And the fact that we had a quotron in our office, we could tell them.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, and advertising. I mean, there's, you know, there's a wide, wide range of jobs. All the experiences are different. All the opportunity sets are different. When I was talking to you about out with clients, I was talking about the people that are on the client-facing roles. And one of the things I truly believe in, look, I see this. I sat with a group of. Venture-backed founders at dinner in my apartment the other night. The average age was like 28. So impressive, so smart. By the way, the people who are hiring at Goldman Sachs are so impressive, so smart. Their peers with these people that are going and starting businesses. They can't go out and talk to clients and have an impact.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know thing because this goes to the op-ed and kind of the labor force. There's a lot of the labor force that has nothing to do with what we're talking about. I think that's something that we've got to keep coming back to in the discussion. So coming to Goldman at this point in time, we hire, we just right now, okay, we just have 2,500, it might be 2,400 interns starting. And in July, we have approximately the same number of permanent new hires that are starting. The first thing is there are a bunch of them that are in, quote, client-facing jobs and roles. There are a bunch of them that are in operational roles. There are a bunch of them that are in technology and engineering roles. There's a wide, wide range of jobs. I mean, there are a couple of them that are working in marketing.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A narrative about jobs and entry level jobs and what I mean. I don't even know what it all means. What I know is you want to be a learner through life. You go to school to get educated and to broaden yourself and to meet people. Not everybody should go to a traditional school. There should be lots of different paths. But the goal is to start on the journey of figuring out what you're passionate about, what you enjoy, how you're going to make money, how you're going to support yourself, how you're going to support hopefully the family that you have. And there are lots of different paths. There are lots and lots of different paths.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are so many, but there are so many different things you can do. I've got great friends I went to college with, I have one friend that I went to college with that basically graduated from college. He had studied science, you know, physical sciences, and he decided he wanted to be an electrician. And he had his own electrical business in upstate New York where I went to college. But then ultimately he got pulled into other kinds of businesses where the skills he had developed over 10 or 20 years building his electrician business could be put into other things and his career evolved.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of social narrative of what the right kind of job is when you're coming out of college Which, by the way, I think is a very faulty lens to look through. And that group is declining by 16%. Okay. But if you want, what if you want to go by? What if you graduate from college and you say, you know what? I really think I can do something really cool and entrepreneurial by making the world's best sub-sandwich. I'm going to go open a store and start a sub-business and try to grow a sub-business. And over the next however many decades you grow a huge sub-business value.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a really, really good question. And I want to get to that. But I just want to comment on one of the things that you said that I think is a really interesting thing for us to think about. Because I did quote that statistic. But I think it's important for us to think about and see that statistic for what it is, okay? Because when I graduated from college, it was very, very hard to get a job. But not everybody wanted to get a job in the white-collar professions. Are defined by the 16%, but I'd also argue even today, if you graduate from a liberal arts college and you want to go be a school teacher, okay, that's not counted in the 16%. There's not a decline. What they've done is they've taken a handful of industries that they're looking at that fit this.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was a great experience. I don't think that's the way it was the perfect culture. Sure. Cultures evolved, but I do think there's something here. And one of the things we're talking about a lot of Goldman, I think it's really important. I still think human to human contact matters a lot. And I think one of the great opportunities we have with this technology expansion is to get our young people out with clients, talking to clients, broadening our client footprint. They're incredibly capable. They're incredibly capable. This shifted over the last 30, 40 years. And it really, I don't think it shifted for the better. And now we're going to shift it back. And I think it's a real opportunity.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I just started making it a game. But what did it teach me? It taught me to pick up the phone and talk to anybody. And when I got to Drexel Burnham and here there were real financial incentives for picking up the phone and talking to people, I mean, they weren't paying me anything and they just wanted me to do this. And I was doing it to learn. You put financial incentives in place. I found I could call anybody. I could get people on the phone. I could keep people on the phone. I could go see people. I could relate to people, even though I was very young and I could bring business into the firm. And very quickly, I became At that. And when I arrived at Bear Stearns after Drexel Burnham went out of business, I very quickly became a very significant producer and a culture that was kind of eat what you kill.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, it was brutal, brutal. And after the first week, I said to my dad, I was like, I don't know that I can do this for the whole summer. And he said, yes, you can. You took it on You got to finish it. And I started thinking about, and this is the seminal thing that I'm trying to point to, I started to think about how am I going to make this more fun because it is very difficult to cold call. Now, this was a time when people would answer the telephone”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said, Why don't you come and do an internship for the summer? And I said, What would you do? And he said, you'd call on clients. I really had no idea what he was talking about. So I show up at this Maryland office and they plop me down and they give me a zip code list. Okay, basically, and it was the zip code 10028 and 10128, basically the upper east side of Manhattan. This is 1800. Okay, they give me a zip code list. And they say, make 100 phone calls a day and ask people if they're interested in talking to a Maryland broker. And during the course of the summer, okay, for eight weeks, I made 100 phone calls a day. I got five people to talk to a Mary Lynch broker, and we went and had one meeting and opened one account.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the great experiences, I have this experience I've talked about a little bit, but I haven't talked about a lot, but a seminal experience in my personal development was the summer after my freshman year in college. I got an internship in a Merrill Lynch office. That happened to be the office that was, I think it was like 10-pen plaza. It was by Madison Square Garden. And I got the internship because my high school girlfriend's father ran that Maryland office.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As many other Wall Street firms have in the history of Wall Street. But for the four and a half years that I was there, basically, I was told, go find a way to build relationships and make money. Go find a way to build, you know, I was 24 years old. Go bring business into the firm He sat at a desk. I golfed a little bit, but we sat on a desk and we called people and talked to people. And it was a time when it was a time in the world when if you picked up the phone and called someone, you would get them on the phone and you would talk to them. And if you were an effective salesperson, you could do a lot of business.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was definitely an area of finance that was accelerating. And it was very entrepreneurial. And I said to my dad, this is taking a risk because everybody else is going to business school. My dad said, Go try it for two years. If it doesn't work, you go business school in two years. I mean, it was really, it was a pretty. A pretty simple Piece of advice, but I went to Drexel Burm, who was very entrepreneurial, and the culture, there were good things and bad things about the culture at Drexel and some of the bad things are the reason why in 1990, on February 14th, 1990, Drexel Burnham went out of business.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It also happens to be a little less than two years before. I landed at the Irving Trust Company at One Wall Street to start my career. And at the time, you got trained to do analysis. But the business was very entrepreneurial. There was very little structure. And there was so much open running room to go out and participate that young people, especially when you got away from the most white shoe firms, which at the time were Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, were really encouraged to go make their way. And so I was working at Irving Trust. And this was a time when almost everybody in finance went to business school. I was applying a business school in 1985. And I got a job offer to work in the junk bond business at Drexel Burnham. And I decided to take it because it appeared. Lucrative and my dad.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finance has evolved I started in 1984. I recently referred to that as the prehistoric days of finance, when, by the way, I have long flowing hair. It's just a very different world. And so let's just start with the fact that finance was a relatively nascent industry. For 15 years, because we really went through a period from the late 60s to the early 1980s where interest rates were going straight up. September 15th, 1982 is a very, very important day in the history of financial markets because that is the day that the 10-year treasury hit 15.9%. And it also happens to be.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are things that are always different, but I generally, you know, if you want to talk about kind of fundamental principles that I have after 40-some years of doing this, it's never different this time. Meaning, I don't think we're going to wake up in a world where nobody works and there has to be universal basic income and we have massive unemployment. I just don't think that's the way our economy works. And when people start talking about those things or postulating about those things, I don't think they're being thoughtful about really looking in a grandeur way at the labor force and how job creation works in our economy and how technology disruption in the past has changed and shifted the nature or the makeup of labor and the economy in the US.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We, as an important company and governments also do too, play a role in thinking about what's the best way to make this go as well as possible. But with the ultimate goal of having the technology make our society more productive and therefore allow for more economic growth and more participation by everyone. And I was listening to a variety of things that were being said and they didn't really make sense to me. And I thought it was important for Goldman Sachs to get into the discussion. And so”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About this technology and the impact that this technology can have on large scale enterprises like Goldman Sachs and the productivity gains that it can create, which I do believe can increase economic growth, create more prosperity, and more impact on our economic system broadly. And a very, very positive way. I am hugely optimistic. And I think about things in five to tenure time bites. Like what should we expect to see over the next 10 years? That's the way I think about things. When I make a statement like that, at the same point, I'm extraordinarily cognizant about the fact that it's not going to be a straight line. There's going to be disruption. There are going to be jobs displaced, as there have been with any other technology acceleration over the course of history.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Took a little heat for this very emphatically that oil and gas was going to be a significant part of the energy supply chain for decades to come. Goldman Sachs would be financing fossil fuel companies for a long, long time. And, you know, in looking at the lens now, I think that it is very important that we have a thoughtful and detailed discussion about the change that's going on. And let's just start if you don't mind if I can step back. I am hugely, hugely optimistic.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I wrote the op-ed. I haven't written a lot of op-eds. I think in my eight years, I've written two. And the last one was back in 2019 before COVID. And it was around, it was around energy where I was trying to talk about the fact that I thought there was going to be real change in the context of the energy supply chain. And it was very important that we made investments and things that were greener and we moved in that direction. But I also stated at the time.”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm trying not to be in the media industry, but I'm glad I wrote the op-ed. By the way, not my title, The New York Times title, but I'm glad I wrote the op-ed. Why did you?”
2026-06-04 · Odd Lots · Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on Running a Bank in the Age of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source