YouSaid · the spoken record

Rob Goldstein

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2026-04-30
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2026-04-30
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  1. “I've checked it. It's actually true because I didn't believe it. But you wonder, how is that possible? Now that said, the flip side of it is you see for these companies like OpenAI Anthropic Space. They're raced to go public because at some point the public markets provide a lot of value propositions that are beyond what the private markets can provide. So I think you see this sort of tale of two cities that's happening. But there will be a spectrum, including a spectrum of certain end investors and institutions that want to have a digital wallet and certain end investors and institutions that want to have a traditional custody account. And it's not a binary thing. It's about technology enabling that personalization.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Is that technology enabling those lines to be less discreet and more blurry across spectrums and across how do clients build portfolios? How do these LEGO pieces get put together to actually achieve their objectives? I think that there's a lot going on embedded in your question, including you see, and to me this is one of the most remarkable things that is happening, is that two, three, four years ago, the whole narrative was private for longer and certainly, I don't know how this is true that there's fewer public companies today than when I started.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's a great question, I think over time it'll be more of a spectrum. I think that when I look at the broad industry over the past multiple decades, The lines, one of the defining themes, the lines almost across everything you could imagine have been getting more and more blurry. And I would argue that's been because of technology. So if you think about the old style boxes that existed, they were convenience technologies because you couldn't bottom up model things. You basically said, okay, mid-cap equities have this attribute. And like that's a LEGO piece. As opposed to, let me model what the individual stocks are. And then I could think of it in the context of a whole portfolio. So I think that what's happening.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, can I just say one thing before you ask your question? Going to get confusing. It already is, but importantly, AI and digital assets. Are very related topics, extremely related topics.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “That again, I don't think that started. I think right now it's a bit of a brain teaser, a lot of experiments, but it has not started. Almost every great company, if you walk in in the year 2030, is going to be fundamentally different than today. And the way I think of this, this is not an overnight reimagination, but it's not a five-year reimagination. It's somewhere in between those two.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It's interesting, I hope so. I know the questions I'm asking people are. I hope that's at scale. Maybe I should follow up on that. But the questions I'm asking, I couldn't be more excited about the opportunities ahead for BlackRock, but I couldn't be more aware of the requirement in today's world. Everything needs to be reimagined. And what we need and what I think leaders are going to be faced with, and ironically, I think a lot of the reimagination is going to come bottom up. How do you reimagine what you do? How do you reimagine how you grow? How do you reimagine how you interact with clients in this new world? And I think”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Within portfolios going forward, I think that requires like on the ground networks, as much as it requires technology. And it's interesting, I'm sure you guys have had a similar experience. I read the paper. I read Bloomberg. I watch a lot of stuff, but when you talk to, and I was actually supposed to be traveling last week, In the Gulf region, and instead I did a virtual tour, when you speak to our clients there, you get a very different picture of what's going on than what you're reading. And I think those networks are going to become more important in terms of edge as we look forward. Nothing will replace being on the ground”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And literally, if it used to be like years, now it's like days. So the ability to have those ideas, the implementability of those ideas is going to be different than any point. So that creativity and imagination. And then lastly, obviously, the world is becoming very complicated. You basically have this collision between national security, technology, and capital. You have this fragmentation of geopolitics. You have the changing demographics of the world. You have what's happening with this alien technology that's now been found on the planet Earth. So if you think about the global connectivity that's required to really manage portfolios and how geopolitics is going to implement.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think that the ability to use these tools is going to be an edge in and of itself. So notwithstanding coding is going to be easier and there will be multiples more like the ability to build technology is going to become more not less important, even if the frictions to build technology go down. I would argue I was at a conference and someone asked me like, who would you like to hire coming out of university? And I said English majors. And that was a big mistake because then like thousands of people emailed me that their children, their child's an English major while I speak to them. But the reason I said English major is, and I believe this, like we're living through a time where those who could have imagination and articulate it The ability to implement that. Has never been as fast.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “A very significant, I would say, evolution aspect of the asset management industry is that the industry organized itself inconsistent with how clients built portfolios. You had fixed income shops, you had equity shops, you had index managers, you had active managers, you had systematic managers, you had public markets, you had private markets. And then you forced the client to put all this stuff together. So the industry is going to pivot more towards helping with the whole thing. Which is a different type of edge”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “It's a great question. And I think across industries, if you think of them as a treadmill, everyone's going to have to run faster. There's no question that that's the case. I think the edge you could break up into three categories. First, I think the edge is going to be helping clients with their whole portfolio. As opposed to just pieces. And I think if you look at the asset management industry,”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “The end asset owner is going to wind up with less transparency. So I think this is just the direction of travel. I do think over time certain components of it will start to become more standardized, very similar to things that happened in the public on markets and the public equity markets. And then there will be new innovations in other ways. But I believe that things will become much more transparent. It's a certainty.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It is certain that if you say in 10 years of the private markets more or less transparent, they're certainly more transparent. And I think if you think about your life, almost everything in your life is becoming more transparent. Like it's funny, I don't think any of us, I try not to affix technology on my body, but it's very rare that three people would be together where someone doesn't have some device that's monitoring their blood pressure in real time. So, like everything is pointing towards more transparency. I have a hard time below that as private markets exposures in portfolios growth.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I think of it as an effort premium. There's a liquidity element to it, and then there's like an effort premium. If you have to do more work, presumably, you need to be compensated for that. But I also believe that, and I feel so old as I talk like this, I'm only 52, but I feel so old. As crazy as it sounds to many people, when I started, the way you would get information about public bonds, because even Bloomberg back then was a bit nascent. You would read a prospectus and you would type into a computer is the maturity, this is the syncing schedule, this is the call schedule. Now today you say that to people who entered the industry in the past 20 years and they think you're nuts. So I think there's no fighting technology. That's my own opinion. So I think”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So that was the first point. The second point he had, which relates to this topic, he said, just remember there's a bunch of graduate students here and everywhere else that right now we're working on like the most boring aspects of this too, including how to have these models be more efficient. So right now it's all about the quest for intelligence. I think we're going to see it pivot slightly to the quest for enterprise use cases. And then I think it's going to pivot very quickly to the quest for efficiency of how you're accessing things. We're not there yet.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It is a certainty that not only will that exist, but one of the gentlemen who, the person who actually leads our AI lab, a gentleman Stephen Boyd, I had called him in the early days of this happening. And I'm like, what are we missing? Like, Stephen, help me understand what are we missing? He said two things. And he is a professor of engineering at Stanford. He said, you're missing two things. One is that articulate language is very, very powerful. And I'm like, okay, like what does that mean? And he's like, think about it. I'm a professor. If I'm reading a paper and it's like not in great, it's not written that well, you check everything. And if you're reading a paper that's written really well, you just assume it's right.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And I think that we're still at a point, again, as a company, but also at a broad industry level, where I don't really think the game has started yet. So I don't think anyone really knows what the token consumption is going to be. And equally as important, I don't think anyone has really started optimizing their token consumption.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “In terms of their insatiable appetite for compute. In the old days, you had a physical data center that was the constraint. You would have to order hardware at some point. People would say we're outgrowing our data center. You'd say, let's wait a year and see what happens. So in today's world, the elasticity is obviously very different. But as a starting point, There are a group of people within BlackRock, and I think this is true in any sort of great financial services company, that if you leave them unconstrained from a compute power perspective, 20 years ago they would have bankrupted the company, 10 years ago, and today they will. So part of it is how do you think about where to invest? I don't know offhand the number of tokens we're consuming today relative to a year, but it's multiples. It's multiples higher.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, I think that you have to sort of go back in time a little bit. So one of the key, key, key lessons learned that I've experienced. And I remember one of the near founding partners, a gentleman Charlie Halleck, who unfortunately passed away, what he instilled in me, among many other things, was If you have the right modelers and engineers and you leave them unconstrained, they will bankrupt the company.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It's interesting. My intuition is it doesn't. My intuition is this would be a great exercise in those who talk most are probably most reflected.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “But if you press enough the shell cracks, like this wasn't a prototype. This was like the real deal. And when you look at that cycle, We effectively collapsed what would have taken the unit of measurement would have been months. Now the unit of measurement was days. Now it will still go through our software development life cycle. It will be tested all of those things. But when you look at that as a productivity tool, This goes back to the 10xing The amount of lines of code in the world every year, there's just going to be an explosion in the ability to engineer things.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Group of people that included portfolio managers, risk professionals, engineers, product managers, a group of people sat in a room for multiple hours talking about how this capability should work. That discussion was recorded. That discussion through the recording of it created a functional document. That functional document was lightly tweaked. That functional document was then put in some of the AI coding tools that we use. That document through the AI coding tools led to a prototype. There was a debugging process that you lived through that we just described. And on Friday, I've seen a lot of prototypes before in my sort of 32 years So I know the questions to ask where you see the prototype is like a thin shell.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I will give you a productivity enhancement from Friday of last week. And by the way, what I'm describing, I think is the future. Everywhere, I hope BlackRock gets to that future faster than others, but I believe it's the future. So we have been doing a lot of work enhancing a lot in many ways. And one of the big themes that we have is how do we provide more transparency in the private markets? To be as close as possible to the public markets in pursuit of this whole portfolio. So we have a large program. So I try to spend hours every Friday getting demos of things we're working on. So my Friday afternoon demo along the theme that I just described was a demo of a tool that was awesome. But let me go through how it was created. And this was the first time end-to-end that at least I've been shown this so”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “They don't really have proprietary data. They're not really in the workflow. They're a convenience technology. I think those convenience technologies They're certainly going to be looking for ways of reimagining their value proposition.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Is a lot of work, no matter what the system is. So there are long tails, but there are certain technologies that are really, and we all use them, there are certain technologies that are about collating public information and making it easy for you to access. And I think it's fair to say that the AI tools that exist are the ultimate oracles in being able to do that, in being able to scour all public sources and give you back information in the way that you're most comfortable with. So particularly that segment of SAS, which is that convenience layer.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Absolutely. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, first of all, sort of. These things have long tails So, like, actually going through the process of retiring a system.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “That whole control plane and layer is an incredible value proposition. And the more you have people coding and the more you have people interacting with systems in more technical ways, the more valuable those control planes. actually wind up being.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Open within a closed ecosystem. And that is a critical element. Because open within a closed ecosystem, one of the things and it's like obvious after the fact, but one of the things that we realize like, oh my God, this is amazing and it's so valuable is that when you call our APIs, for example, in Aladdin, Your permissions go through. So if you think about the complexity of managing permissions, In an asset manager with thousands of people. Could see some portfolios, you could see some portfolios, they're different portfolios. You could trade, you're not allowed to trade, you could only confirm trades. The complexity of those permissions, so the fact that when you call an API, it knows what you can and can access.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “No, I think it's important, and I think that technology 10 or 20 years ago. Certain technologies were designed to be closed systems. You know where I'm going. Certain technologies were designed to be closed systems. Aladdin was one of those technologies. And roughly 10 years ago, we started this open Aladdin campaign well before anything to do with this round of AI we're in, which was all about the future of technology is going to be some people are going to want to interact with it through a keyboard and a mouse, and many people are going to want to interact with it through code. Because even if you're graduating with an English major, if you're graduating at most schools at this point, you've taken a coding class. So just the amount of technical expertise that you come in.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “And then what you're doing in terms of workflow is highly, highly, highly idiosyncratic and requires this combination of people, process, and technology. It's a hard time in this world, in my opinion, to predict what 2050 looks like But when you look forward 10 years in our industry, These platforms, if anything, are going to do more, not less. And I think what really is going to be unlocked is that users like Joe are going to access these platforms through their own coding tools, but these coding tools are going to be central to those platforms. I didn't forget your black box comment. Going back to”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Well, but this is an important dimension because 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 times 10. So if you believe, which it's going to be a multiple, you could argue, is it 3? Is it 7? Is it 10? Is it 14? But it's going to go up every year by a multiple given these tools So, the amount of code in the world is going to go up dramatically. And I think that when you look at a platform like Aladdin, And in many regards, I think it would be like things with Bloomberg. They're at centers of an ecosystem. The ecosystem is highly regulated. The ecosystem has zero tolerance for fault or error. The processes you do not only leverage tremendous amounts of proprietary data, so it's not within these models or accessible by the models, but importantly, clients are putting their most sensitive data into these platforms.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Let me start out. Let me provide a little context broadly about what we think is going to happen or what a group of us think are going to happen. And then let me go into Aladdin because I think that they're somewhat related. So one of our portfolio managers, one of our technology portfolio managers is a gentleman Tony Kim. A year ago, two years ago, I said, Tony, if today there are a hundred lines of code, In twenty thirty how many are there? And he said a million. And I was like, you're out of your mind. And he said, no, no, no. Like, I was quite thoughtful about that. I didn't make up a number.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “In X months or maybe a year or two, tools like this will re engineer every website on the planet Earth and they will all be more user friendly.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “People who want to do it themselves. I saw a demo yesterday of a tool from one of these AI companies that I hope I could articulate it well enough, but it will look at a website and it showed it looked at one of our websites and redesigned it to be more like optimal user friendliness. So it was the opposite of it was using AI to almost do the opposite of what you said, make it easier for humans. And it was one of these things where, you know, in the demo, because websites are public. So they were able to do things with our own stuff that we didn't know about. And as they're showing what they would do, and when I say they, what a computer would do after 10 minutes of processing with their own website. You're like, hmm.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “It's a great question. We debate this a lot. And I'll tell you about something I saw yesterday. But I think it has to. But at the same time, I think there will be people who will want to do it themselves. I think there will be people who want to do it themselves. You know, it's interesting, even in this age of everything being on the phone. You still need a website that people could access. So I think there still will be.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “So the ability to take an expert system that today requires a lot of knowledge and keeping up with it and instead just type in what you want it to do. And an agent will be the ultimate real-time user of Aladdin that will then do those activities all the same controls will exist. The four eyes principle, all of those controls will exist. But that ability to have users, to have clients access all the untapped capabilities that today they don't know about, I think the value enterprise technology is going to provide going forward allowed in other enterprise technology is actually going to be much greater. Then at any point previously. It's actually extremely exciting to me because there's nothing more frustrating than being in a meeting where someone is complaining you don't do something when you actually do it.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “And they'll be like, Aladdin's done that for seven years. And you're like, okay, the ability for people to keep current in technology is very hard. And, you know, as much as we like the technology, most people, their goal with technology is to just interface with it to do their jobs and then go home.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “The second component, and this is one of the challenges of these enterprise expert systems, is that the number of times I've been in a meeting with a client where they say, you know, why doesn't Aladdin do this? And I'm like, hmm, I think Aladdin does that. But I don't want to like blurt it out. Let me sort of follow up. And then I'll leave the meeting. I'll call the people smarter than me.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I knew this was going to come up in this conversation. The fair point. So if you think about these technologies, first, the reward for good work is more work. So the to-do list for these technologies is infinite, like genuinely infinite. Every year BlackRock winds up having more engineers. We have roughly 5,000 engineers, data analysts, modelers. Every year we wind up having more engineers. And every year we wind up having a bigger to-do list of enhancements we could put within Aladdin. So the first element of the AI capability, and I would argue the most mature use case that exists at an enterprise level, is coding. So the ability to go Through that to-do list, the velocity of that is off the charts.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “But importantly, AI is a technology is not new. I wish I knew the exact year, but like the AI lab at MIT was created in the 1950s. We started our AI lab in 2018. So these methods have been used for a long time at a very sort of simple level that I'm sure would offend a lot of people. You could think about old AI was about numbers, new AI is about language. And the language element of it creates all sorts of humans communicate much more through language than numbers. So it creates a whole host of other unintended consequences. But when you look at a platform like a Laddin as an enterprise platform, and by the way, I would make a cohesive argument, everything I'm saying you could make the same case with regard to the Bloomberg terminal.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “And I think that the actual overhang between what the models can do and the fact that this is technology that needs to be implemented, it requires organizational design, business process re-engineering, like implementing technology is hard and takes time. And we haven't even started that enterprise implementation yet.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Whether it be a client presentation, an internal document, a prospectus. And the reason why you're very deliberate about saying first draft is because we have 16 people who check the first draft. And that ability as a starting point is a very sort of strong catalyst towards leveraging and getting to know the technology. But I would actually argue that today the technology has provided a lot of people like individual productivity. But at an enterprise level, if you look at the case studies, it's not clear to be we've entered the first inning of the actual enterprise implementation. I still think the national anthem is sort of being played.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “We need to be certain that we have the appropriate processes and controls in place. So through one lens, that's a big friction. Through another lens, I think it's actually a competitive advantage to the industry because if you think about it, we have so many controls. We have so many controls as a natural part of the process. So for example, one of the first things we did with MlackRock when the technology became available, we created this rule that we call this principle that we call the first draft principle. Why can't we have a first draft of everything we produce be created through AI?”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “It's much more like a person. It's much more about thinking than this binary zero and one structure. We've become used to for computers. And I think one of the remarkable, if you spend time with any of the big technology firms or the big AI companies, the frontier model providers, they use this term regulated industries. And needless to say, regulated industries like financial services.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “This is like alien technology has been found on the planet Earth, and now we're figuring out how to use it. And one of the remarkable things about the technology, even if, and I know from listening to you, you've played with a lot of the coding tools, if you look at the coding tools, they write code. And then there are bugs in the code. And then they find the bugs and they fix the bugs. So like the way we've been trained to think about a computer is how could that happen? Wouldn't it be smart enough to write the code without the bugs? Right.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “No question. Absolutely no question. And just to give an analogy I am sure there have been many, many, many people who sat in this seat through the years and said buy X, X being years ago, there will be self-driving cars. You won't need driver's licenses and so on and so forth. I think the tolerance people have for computers to make mistakes is very different than the tolerance people have for humans to make mistakes. So that's just a societal starting point. For all intents and purposes, I think you could make a cohesive argument. I love Marvel movies as a family. That's one of our things.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “And I think there's a real question about whether or not this is a very expensive technology, or if this will ultimately wind up being five guys at home in a garage with a handful of Mac Minis can accomplish miracles. I don't know if that's certain yet which one is going to prove true.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Well, it's interesting though. I think that's a real question in terms of where we are right now because. I don't know the answer to this, but I could make two good arguments. One is along the lines of what you're saying. The other is We are living in an age right now if you really just think about what's happening with AI, you could convert energy to intelligence. And the more money you spend on energy, the more intelligence you have. You could argue different than many technology trends that we've had over the past couple of decades. This is a technology trend that requires capital. And it requires spending a lot of money.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “But when I started at BlackRock in 1994, when we had roughly 80 people, $19 billion in assets under management, I was in the data analytics team. I was effectively a data analyst. And like today, data, technology, analytics are where the cool kids are. Back then, it was not where the cool kids are. Trust me. And the whole concept of recognizing very early on that the asset management business at its core is an information processing business today is so obvious. But if you rewind back 10, 20, 30 years ago, that was a very unique novel concept.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Do. So the founding thesis of BlackRock was really about how do we bring those technology capabilities, which were not really available on the buy side. How do we use them as the core of building an asset manager? That was the founding thesis. And I think one of the real success factors, and I think that when you look today, what I'm about to say seems like very odd, but I guess this is odd loss. So it's perfect.”

    2026-04-30 · Odd Lots · BlackRock's Rob Goldstein on the Next Megatrends in Finance · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source