All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us. We'll get started with our next session. Hopefully everybody's well-fed. Next up, it's my pleasure to introduce John Gray, President and COO of Blackstone. With more than $1.2 trillion in assets under management, Blackstone is the world's largest and most diversified alternative asset manager, distinguished by its expertise across effectively all major sub-verticals within private markets. The firm also has had an enormous amount of success, growing in the wealth channel, as that market continues to expand as well. So, lots to talk about, hopefully lots of good cyclical things to talk about as well, looking out into 2026. So, John, thank you for being here. Always fun to have the conversation with you.
Alex, I'm happy to be back.
It's great. Look, why don't we start with a bit of question on the macro side first with economic outlook. Given Blackstone's breadth of investment capabilities, you always have very unique perspectives in terms of what's going on on the ground, real-time, with respect to corporate health. So, talk to us a little bit about that and what 2026 looks like for the corporate world.
You know, I think we're a little more optimistic than most people are. The U.S. economy has been incredibly resilient. We had Labor Day, we had a government shutdown, we've had pretty high absolute level of short rates, and yet in Q3, our private equity companies saw 9% revenue growth. I'm sure we're gonna get into private credit. Default rates among non-investment-grade borrowers have been low, profit margins have been increasing, and globally, it's a pretty good picture too. I would say, you know, the things powering it obviously are this AI CapEx cycle. That is clearly the biggest engine of growth, and it's been a great thing, obviously, for our business, I think for the alternative space overall. I'd say the weakness is in Europe and then also, around some of the consumer businesses we have, particularly middle and lower income.
So, water parks, theme parks, hotels. If you looked in the November Smith Travel data for hotels, revenue in luxury was up 6-7%. It was down the same in economy.
You're definitely seeing a bit of this K-shaped economy, but overall, I'd say it's a pretty good picture when I look at it net from our company's vantage point. I'd say the other encouraging thing is the inflation data, to us, has continued to look better than what you read about, and I—we often find that our 270 companies and the 13,000 pieces of real estate give us better insight, so rental housing, inflation is running well below the 4% that's in the CPI data today. In the labor market, what I would say we see is basically the difficulty of hiring has gone way down. 93% of our CEOs three years ago would've said it's hard to hire. Today, it's 30%. Hourly wages have gone from 4.1% a year ago to 3% at our U.S. companies.
So, there's a bit of stickiness in goods inflation, but I think the Fed will actually get data here over time that will allow them to cut rates, so if you've got a resilient economy, cost of capital coming down, obviously we have spreads that have tightened a bunch in investment-grade and high-yield, that's helpful, and then we're on the cusp of this massive both investment boom followed by what I think will be a very significant productivity boom from the technology, and I think it's hard to get really negative in aggregate when you overlay that with the other set of facts, so that makes us all more inclined, which is why you see us active investing.
Great. Let's translate that into the investment activity, which has really accelerated for you guys over the last couple of quarters. I think about $140 billion of capital deployed over the last 12 months, and again, the pace of that deployment has really accelerated. I guess looking out into 2026, can we talk a little bit about key themes and investment areas where you're finding the most attractive, risk-adjusted returns, and also by the same token, talk a little bit about areas you're trying to avoid?
Yeah. I mean, if you subscribe to our worldview that bringing superintelligence at scale at very low cost is gonna be transformative, you try to figure out how can I invest in that and take the least amount of risk. And I think we've become the leading investor in the infrastructure around this. Massive investments on data centers, but long-term lease data centers where you don't put a shovel in the ground until you have a 15-plus-year lease with a very large market cap company. Huge investments in energy and power. So that's generation, transmission, utilities, electrical equipment, everything we're gonna be doing, the data centers, the robots, the autonomous vehicles, it's gonna plug into the wall. So, making huge bets. And in our business, what's great is we can express it in infrastructure, in energy transition, in real estate, on the equity side, on the debt side.
So, I would say that infrastructure around what's happening continues to be a huge theme for us. I would say, coming to alternatives, we really like the secondary space. We're the largest player in that. There's a lot of push, obviously, for DPI. Alternatives continue to grow. Being able to provide liquidity there at scale is a real advantage. We like that area. I would say, some of these big corporate solutions deals we're doing on the private credit side. We've done with Rogers and EQT in the midstream space and Sempra Energy, where you're helping them in very capital-intensive businesses do things that are capital-efficient for them and lower their cost of capital, and that at our scale on the credit side is an area that is. There's a relatively small number of competitors to do that.
I would say commercial real estate, which I'm sure we'll hit on, has had a tough three-and-a-half-year run, but you can sort of see the pillars of this recovery starting to come in place, and we're definitely getting closer to that, and then geographically, I would point out in Asia, two places we love, India, which has been hugely successful for us, both in real estate and private equity. That is an economy that I think will continue to be the fastest growing of the big 20 economies out there, where the physical capital markets, legal infrastructure continues to improve, and then Japan, where the growth won't be as high, but there's a real openness to foreign capital coming in, and that is unlocking all sorts of assets. We bought a $3 billion luxury real estate complex from a railroad Company this year.
We did a couple of privatizations, and that is a market we also like, so one of the great things about our business is having global scale and being able to play in different markets, different parts of the capital structure. What I don't love, I would say, emerging markets generally away from India and maybe the Middle East, that has been a tough place. We haven't done a lot of it, but we just haven't, over time, achieved real return premiums for the risk, and perhaps, and definitely much more importantly, businesses at risk of disruption from AI. Everybody's talking about bubbles in AI, and yes, there'll be plenty of losers in AI, but in the race, what's happening to legacy businesses?
Yeah.
If autonomous vehicles continue to gain share, which I suspect, well, what does that mean for an auto insurance company? What does that mean for a company who's focused on collisions? And yes, it may take 15 or 20 years, but what begins to happen to multiples? We saw that in the media business. Or we've seen that in other industries. So, I would say disruption around, you know, horizontal enterprise software companies, IT services businesses, and then lots of rules-based businesses, legal, accounting, transaction processing. I think you've got be very mindful. And if I was giving one piece of advice as investors, this is the main thing to focus on.
Yeah. No, lots, lots to unpack there. Thank you for that. Why don't we double-click, only leave that first theme and probably the biggest theme, which is around AI. Blackstone was very early in identifying the secular opportunity. We've talked about it, feels like for years, but it's finally kind a here. Talk to us, I guess, maybe a little bit more about how you envision this market evolving from an investment perspective, where it feels like other people are onto this as well and the opportunity set is still there, but there's a lot more capital, obviously, chasing that around right now. So what are the parts of the market where you still feel comfortable deploying capital? What do you see in terms of performance of these assets relative to your expectations? And then within AI, what are the risks?
Yeah. So, this has been the best-performing area for our firm. There's no question, you know, we bought QTS in 2021 for $10 billion, and its lease capacity's up 12-fold. And we did that in our infrastructure business. We did that in BREIT and our institutional real estate core plus funds. That turned out to be a really good decision. We bought the biggest data center player in Asia. I would say, surprisingly, despite the capital that's moved there, because of the constraints of power, it's still an attractive place to deploy capital. And as I said, you're not really investing the capital at scale until you have a long-term lease. So, these are not condos in Miami. This is a much safer underlying activity. And so, I continue to believe that's a really good way to invest in this.
I do believe, and by the way, again, both on the equity side and the debt side, we talked about the energy. I just, if there was one theme you could believe in, it is power.
Yeah.
I just, I can't come up with a scenario where we're not using significantly more power five years from today, 10, 15 years. It feels like we're going to a world where there's a lot of need for electricity. I'd say, as you move up into more of the direct business, we are investing, but obviously we recognize the risk. It's with different pools of capital. We've invested in a couple of large language models, companies. We have begun to invest in a few of the application software companies, companies like OpenEvidence in the medical field or Norm Ai in the legal field. And some of these companies have the opportunity, if they're able to execute, to grow to be very big and very profitable, but we recognize not everyone's gonna win.
What we're trying to do is figuring out how to play this, recognizing what's coming, and again, not taking too much risk. On the traditional sort of private equity side, we're also looking at businesses where we think we can potentially transform them.
Have sort of an AI or DIE strategy where you could buy a healthcare claims processing business or an accounting firm and bring this technology to bear and make them much better in serving their customers and much more productive. So, every investment memo, in the first two pages of the memo, there's at least one paragraph about the AI risk for that business. We've gone through all our portfolios, yellow, red, green, where do we have the most risk? We just see this. Look, it's taking time. That it's a little bit like basic science where they've invented some unbelievable therapies, but getting 'em to the hospital, the clinic is hard. But it's going to happen. And when it does, it's gonna radically change, like we saw with yellow pages and taxi cabs. And I think usage is gonna continue to go up.
So, I think for us as a firm, it's a great opportunity because the needs in capital around the chips and data center and power are so enormous, and we're really uniquely set up to go after that. And then in some of our growthier strategies, we can also make some very interesting investments on things that have a lot of upside. And at the same time, we've gotta look at our legacy portfolios and try to limit the risk and push to get those companies to transform.
Great. Well, it'll be fascinating to watch for sure, so all right. Another hot topic, credit, not surprisingly, and it feels like the news flow around that has died down a little bit, but it's clearly still very much top of mind for investors. When we sort of take ourselves out of the day-to-day news flow related to this topic, talk to us maybe a little bit of what you guys are seeing as far as credit trends across the portfolio, not just in direct lending, but maybe in your private credit holistically. That's part one, and then part two, the development with Bank of England. You and I think some of the others are effectively volunteering to participate in this stress test, which might be.
Yeah.
Quite helpful to the ecosystem.
Yeah.
What do you think it's gonna look like?
Well, I would step back and try to focus on what's happening and why is it happening here? What we've really seen is an innovation that's been taking place now, really in an accelerating way over the last five, seven years, but started earlier than that. We've been at direct lending now for two decades. You know, we have a private credit business that doesn't use balance sheet. That between corporate and real estate credit is $500 billion and is growing very rapidly, and we have competitors who are obviously growing as well. They may be using a different approach in how they do things. Why is it happening? It's happening because what you're basically doing is bringing investors directly up to borrowers. It's not that much different than what Amazon did to revolutionize the delivery of goods to consumers.
And obviously, we still have a large brick-and-mortar retail world, but we have other players now who do this online at scale. And why are borrowers embracing this, both on the investment-grade and non-investment-grade side? It's because we're able to do things with speed and flexibility that at times you can't do in the public markets. Why are investors embracing it? Well, they're producing higher returns. So, for our insurance clients on the investment-grade side, year to date, they've earned 170 basis point premium over comparably rated securities. It's not a surprise. Our insurance business is growing at 20% a year. When you're able to deliver that premium, it becomes even more important, by the way, as base rates come down. So, on the non-investment-grade side, similar dynamic. We've produced in our non-traded BDC 300 basis points of premium return. And that is the reason why this is happening.
And by the way, as a side note, it's also deleveraging the system. Our non-traded BDC is probably one-tenth as leveraged as you would see in a financial institution. And you also get better duration matching. You don't have daily deposits and so forth. So, it's helpful for the financial system. Obviously, banks are hugely important and play a valuable role, but we've added something that is helping consumers and businesses and investors. Now, your question is, what's happened to credit quality? And I'd say, in general, credit quality looks pretty darn good. You know, if you look across, again, our non-traded BDC, the average loan to value we made was 40% at origination, so a fraction of what it was back in the 2006, 2007 days. EBITDA this year at the companies in the portfolio is up 9%.
And of course, we've got a Fed now that's cutting rates, which is helpful for the borrowers. Now, will there be isolated credit incidents? Sure.
Right.
Could there be disruption given what's going on? Yeah. But the question is, will we have higher losses, higher defaults than and therefore lower returns than the leveraged loan and high-yield market? We don't believe that at all. And so, ultimately, this is gonna be about delivering enduring premiums and returns without taking on incremental risk. That's what we've done in both investment-grade and non-investment-grade. That's why I think it'll continue. To your point on the stress test, you know, if they show up and say, "Hey, you're doing non-investment-grade lending and using BCRED as an example, $80 billion balance sheet, $50 billion of equity.
They compare that to the financial institutions, they rate who would have $5 billion of equity. It seems a little different to me.
Right.
And so, I think whenever you have this kind of innovation and change in a market, it's obvious, you know, people are gonna wanna ask questions. You also are creating some disruption to existing business models. But in my mind, this is a structural change that will continue, and you will continue to see more capital allocated. Yes, you are trading away some liquidity, and so you're not gonna see this for the full fixed-income market. There are plenty of things that will continue to be done by banks. But private credit is not some sort of short-term blip. It's not adding enormous risk to the system. It is a fundamentally sound change in the system that's helping the overall financial market. It's helping borrowers. It's helping investors.
Yeah. That all makes a lot of sense. Why don't we spend a couple minutes on another kind of mega trend out there, which is the wealth market? Enormously powerful from a growth perspective for you and many of your peers. But I do think Blackstone is still by far and away the leader. I think you have roughly 50% market share of the industry fee pool in this market. So, let's spend a couple of minutes there. First, I'd love to get your perspective on the roadmap for additional product innovation. So, you guys were early with BREIT and BCRED. You obviously have a product in private equity. You have one in infra. What does the makeup of this product set look like over the next couple of years?
What else are you working on that'll be rolling out in the next one to two years?
Again, the why, why have we had so much success? Why have we gotten to $290 billion in the wealth space? It's because we started a long time ago, 23 years ago, in drawdown funds, 15 years ago in building a dedicated team, almost a decade ago with creating semi-liquids with BREIT, and bringing the fees down and the quality of investing way up, and it's all performance-driven. Again, you're asking investors to make a trade. You have to deliver a premium performance. You have to give them something different in terms of diversification, access to things they couldn't otherwise have. We've been very successful at that in both good times and bad. That gives me a lot of confidence. The keys to me and the market to us are that what we introduce, delivers those returns.
And we're not just creating product because that's what can sell, but we can have an enduring advantage. We have, we have generally done things that are broad-based and scale because we know certain markets can go in and out of favor pricing-wise. We've made decisions over time where we've chosen, in the case of private equity and infrastructure, to sell only to qualified purchasers because the 40 Act limitations we thought would've made it harder to deliver, in those asset classes the kind of returns and scale we wanted. To your question, I think you'll see us find ways to put some of these products together, simpler solutions. You'll see us do some things in collaboration. We announced our alliance with Vanguard and Wellington. I think you'll see some of that introduced in the new year. We've done a multi-asset credit product.
There are a couple of other things I think I'm gonna hold off on the announcement, just like what the theme of this year's holiday video will be. We're gonna.
I was gonna try for that later, but you already shut me down on this one, so.
Yeah. What I would say is there is a lot of Enthusiasm, but again, just like with our institutions, just like with our insurance clients, we've got a deliver performance. And so, when you look at individual investors, they're probably about 1% allocated to private assets versus a third for institutions. That still feels like it has a long way to run. And I think our positioning in the market, given the strength of the brand and the strength of the performance and then the breadth of the product offerings, that feels like a really, really good combination. And, you know, in Q3, we saw a doubling of inflows over last year's levels. In a better market environment, given the breadth of what we're doing, it feels pretty good to us.
Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more, what's going on on the ground, I guess today. Obviously, lots of focus on credit, like we talked about earlier. It's really the first time that, you know, the growth in this private credit part of the market with wealth, gets tested, like we are seeing now with a lot of headlines and the barrage of headlines on the, you know, this part of the market for the last couple of months now. Obviously, BCRED had a, you know, filing out this morning. Redemption picked up, you know, not quite to 5%, but close, but also gross sales slowed down as of December 1st. So, what are you hearing on the ground from financial advisors, the wirehouse, the gatekeepers in terms of this being either a short-term reaction to the news flow, or something more substantive?
There's obviously been an enormous amount of noise out there around private credit, much of which we would push back with the facts. But I would point out a little differently, Alex. We've been through a couple of these tests before. In fact, we've gone north of the 5% in 2022, went north of it in 2023 after Silicon Valley Bank. We saw a pretty meaningful spike after Labor Day. Whenever you get a lot of negative headlines, particularly among the individual investors, you can see a shift in sentiment. What matters ultimately, again, is performance.
In October, we produced 70 basis points of performance. We feel really good about the underlying both credit quality. We talked about the growth in the EBITDA in terms of the companies here, the low loan to value. To me, that's ultimately what is determinative here. And so, you know, as I said, you could be in an environment where you'll have a couple you know, several companies with defaults. The question on those things are, have you marked those appropriately? Do you know how to handle it? Are you senior secured? We feel really great about what we've been doing. And by the way, on the flow side, despite relentlessly negative press, in the fourth quarter, we had $3.3 billion of gross inflows, and we still had implied $1.2 billion of net inflows. I think, again, what matters is performance.
I think, interestingly, you know, we went through BREIT, which was a different sort of environment, obviously a much harsher downturn in the underlying asset class. We significantly outperformed, and my confidence in that product is extraordinarily high.
And so, again, if we show that we can outperform the leveraged loan market, the high-yield market, and enduring premium in returns, then I think financial investors will continue to subscribe to these products. That's, to me, the key focus.
Great. That's all that makes sense. Okay. Let's talk about another important area for Blackstone, which is obviously the real estate business. We talked a little bit about that before we got on stage, but clearly feels like the sentiment from some of your peers and then marketplace broadly around real estate is starting to improve. It's something you talked about as well in the past. So, give us your expectations around sort of growth in your real estate franchise for the next 12-18 months.
Well, it's been a difficult three and a half years, no question about it. COVID hurt the office market. You had this huge step function increase in cost of capital. So, Cap rates went up a bunch. Values came under pressure. And investors, you know, not surprisingly, don't feel great 'cause they haven't had a great experience during this period of time. But when you look under the hood, the pillars of a recovery are coming closer, right? So, you've seen values fall. This is definitely not your bubble asset class, that's for sure. And yet, underlying demand for housing will continue, logistics for going to a resort hotel. So, it's an asset class that has fallen out of favor but has long-term strong demand profile.
Supply is down almost two-thirds, new starts in terms of logistics and rental housing, which takes time to play out but is very beneficial. Cost of capital, base rates down, spreads down. Borrowing costs are probably down about 40% from their wides of a couple of years ago, and you're beginning to see transaction activity pick up.
It can take some time, but it certainly feels like we're getting closer, and so I think, for us, we focus on these, the picture that's coming, and we're trying to invest ahead of it, so not a surprise. We've been privatizing a bunch of REITs. We announced a commercial real estate REIT in Hawaii, Alexander & Baldwin this week for $2.3 billion. This reflects our view of real estate and what we do believe will be a coming recovery.
Great. Okay. Let's pivot from kind of the themes to maybe some of the financial KPIs for the business, really starting with fundraising. Again, I think over $225 billion over the last 12 months of inflows across the franchise. As you look out into 2026, what are your early expectations for fundraising?
I think it should be a very good year. You know, we talked about wealth, a lot of momentum there, given the introduction of new products and the success of existing products. I feel very good about that. When I think about our insurance business, again, more and more insurers are beginning to recognize to be competitive. They need this additional yield. Our open architecture model, not competing with them, is a very helpful space to be and to be able to do it broadly. I think that should continue to grow. Again, I mentioned 20% growth in the last quarter. And then our institutional business, where people have always said is a mature business, you know, it's grown 60% the last five years. I think over the last 12 months, it's about half of our flows in.
It's a, you know, a number of those things are drawdown, so you send the money back. You don't get that perpetual compounding thing, but the strength of our franchise in energy transition, in Asia, private equity, in secondaries, in credit, in so many areas, in real estate, you know, in life sciences, we have so many areas where we've delivered for clients that it feels to me we will continue to have another good year. We have a good fundraising cycle ahead of us, so I would say right now, with this kind of market backdrop, it feels pretty good.
Yeah. Well, speaking of market backdrop, you know, the outlook for realization and broadly capital markets activity has definitely been a bright spot in these conversations for the last two days. So, you've been also pretty bullish on that for a couple of quarters. I think one of the points you made is that Blackstone's IPO pipeline is the highest it's been since 2021. Talk to us a little bit more about your expectations for realizations over the next 12 months and maybe help us frame that in some sort of a historical context because it does feel like there's a lot of pent-up demand on the exit side.
Well, you know, we saw M&A and IPO activity basically crater during that sharp increase in rates, and it's still running today, you know, well down versus historical levels as a % of the market cap of the stock market, and so, to us, it feels natural now as you get cost of capital coming down, spreads coming down, a strong equity market that you begin to see an IPO market that's emerging. Yes, we did three in the quarter. In the third quarter, we have a large one in the market today. We've got an active pipeline for next year. M&A activity in the U.S., I think quarter to date, up almost double, and I wouldn't underestimate the power of the regulatory environment changing.
And so, I think the ability to have confidence that you can buy or sell a business really matters. I still think we're operating, you know, well below historic levels. This year, you had Labor Day, the government shut down. I think if you have smoother sailing next year with lower cost of capital and some confidence, I think you'll see a meaningful pickup. So, I would be in the camp that we've sort of moved from sort of taxi to takeoff as it relates to transaction activity, the IPO market. That feels pretty good to us, and obviously, that's good for our business. It should be good for our shareholders.
Great. With a couple of minutes left on the clock, I'd love to wrap up with a couple of thoughts on evolution of the business, given the fact that you guys celebrated your 40th year anniversary this year. You've been there, I believe, for 33 years of those 40. Couple that with real performance of the stock, and it's not just you, but the whole space obviously struggled a bit this year, coming off a phenomenal two-year run, and I think that's important to acknowledge. But how do you think the company's evolving if you see further points in the cycle where there's a bigger disconnect between the value and what your forward looks like? How are you thinking about capital management in that context? Or any other thoughts around that would be helpful?
Well, I feel great about the underlying business. We did have this 40th anniversary. We brought all our partners together around the world. When we talked about all the potential markets, all the potential growth, we feel really good. We still think alternatives, even though they've grown a lot and it seems big, it's a $13 trillion industry. When you think about public equities and corporate fixed income, asset-backed fixed income, infrastructure, residential, commercial, real estate, I don't know, it's a $300-plus trillion market out there for us potentially to invest capital into. The total business is equal to the market cap of, I don't know, four stocks in the United States today. I think there's still a lot of room to go here. And to me, the key continues to be delivering for the customers, making sure we get right these technological changes.
We're able to intervene in businesses. We've got a really rigorous discipline process that we attract and retain amazing people, that we have an entrepreneurial spirit. I mean, Steve Schwarzman has really sort of pushed that into the firm, this idea. We're constantly thinking about what we can do better. We are not a place, despite our size scale, that is sitting around saying, "Hey, we're there." You know, I, I described recently at our CEO conference, our boardroom meetings, you would think we're a failing company. I mean, the conversation is a relentless focus on, "We miss this market. This competitor's done this." This, I, I feel for us, we have this vast expanse in front of us. The key thing is we've got to maintain the quality of our people, our integration, and process.
And being able to be a full-service capital solutions provider in the private markets, we can give you super low-cost investment-grade debt. We can give you more junior debt. We can give you pref equity. We can do control. We can co-invest as a minority. We can do stakes, secondary, everything across the platform. That is really powerful and do it increasingly on a global basis. And of course, do it without a balance sheet. All the capital we're managing is third-party capital. We don't owe it back to anybody. It's not an obligation. If rates and spreads tighten, our business is to deliver returns. And so, the way I feel about the business is we are in exactly the same business we've always been. Our plan is to continue to be in that business and to be excellent in it.
And things come up and down and cycles and this and that, but if we continue to deliver premium returns in these different areas, our relationships and the strength of our brand, which is really, really powerful and allows us to grow without capital, if we have that, then we can expand a ton in our original institutional business and in a very profound way with insurers and individual investors. So, my optimism about the future is extremely high. And then back to your earlier question, it's nice to be coming to a part of the cycle where things are starting to turn up. So, the long-term, we feel great about, and obviously, the short-term pickup in deal activity, that's also very good.
Great. Well, we talked about a lot of themes over the course of the day today. I was hoping you could hit on one more theme, which is your holiday video. So, if you're willing to share anything with us today, that would be of great interest to the crowd.
You know, it's, I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you. It's basically what it is, Alex. It's so funny. We're so crazed about it because we don't want it to get out. We don't even tell, you know, our colleagues, partners. They just get their role, like, "Show up. Wear this ridiculous outfit at this time, and we're gonna film you," and I will say, you know, the broader point for us is we wanna be great at what we do. We demand a lot of our people, but we want it to be a human-scale place. We wanna make fun of ourselves, which is what the holiday video is. We wanna have a really integrated culture. It's why every Monday we do our internal Blackstone TV where we connect with people. It's why I do these sort of ridiculous running videos.
It's all in an effort to humanize what we do for all our constituents out there, and obviously we've got a lot more, both shareholders, investors. We have 300,000 investors these days. You're reaching a broader audience, and I couldn't be more proud of the quality of the people, what they do, how they give back. We've had a very difficult year because of what happened. We had this horrible shooting, but the pride I have in our people is immense, and so my optimism going forward is very high, but I would say the video will be cringe-worthy, so please don't hold that against me.
On that note, thank you so much.
Okay.
It's great to see you.
Thank you all.