Tony James

Now, insurance has regulatory restrictions to keep it lower, although there are increasingly structural ways to kind of nudge that boundary.

But those seemed like there was just as much insurance assets as there was pension assets and just as much 401k or retail assets.

So how do we tap?

We're living with one third of the market.

How do we open up those other thirds?

And again, it's all about how do we use our scale and our size?

There's no other firm that could have afforded to build the retail distribution.

We have 500 people in that.

Wow.

And we started off not just by hiring salesmen.

We started off because the wire houses, they need training.

So we ran Blackstone University and people would come through.

And every broker, every wire, the only place they're going to come and learn about alternatives is Blackstone University.

There was no other alternative university.

And then we had a master class.

We'd go back and get the equivalent of a master's in this.

And then we built our own proprietary data center.

CRM system and data systems.

So we knew more about every Merrill Lynch client and whatever question they've ever asked us than Merrill Lynch knew about that client.

And we did that across the board.