David Solomon

Or you could call your stockbroker if you had one or go outside your office and find a Merrill Lynch or an EF Hutton or a Dean Witter office on the street and look at the ticker tape and wait until your stock would buy on the ticker tape.

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.

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.

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.

Definitely.

Okay, that's what I figured.

By the way, I don't think that's going to change.

You guys can go look.