How the Ex-Goldman CEO actually invests his own money

- June 16, 2026 (1 day ago) • 58:03

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Lloyd Blankfein	The difference between somebody who's really, really good and somebody who can't make it is not that great.
00:05	Sam Parr	Goldman Sachs senior chairman and former CEO Lloyd Blankfein: "Your portfolio as a pie chart—what does it look like right now?"
00:11	Lloyd Blankfein	I invest in risky assets—that's what's fun for me. I would say that 98% are equities.
00:17	Sam Parr	What are some of your biggest holdings?
00:18	Lloyd Blankfein	This is going to be controversial. I don't know who I'm going to upset, but, you know... it's like...
00:22	Sam Parr	"Are you trading every day?" "Yes — that's crazy."
00:24	Lloyd Blankfein	No, it's not. It's taking a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while I'm talking.
00:28	Sam Parr	Right now.
00:28	Lloyd Blankfein	"It's like that."
00:30	Sam Parr	"So, you're bullish on Big Tech. Anything else?"
00:32	Lloyd Blankfein	It's been good to be bullish on Big Tech.
00:34	Sam Parr	"I'll stop being bullish on it when it stops going up. What did the people who couldn't outperform—what did the bottom half have in common?"
00:41	Lloyd Blankfein	The bigger takeaway is that...
00:50	Sam Parr	The reason why it's interesting to talk to you is because I'm pretty good at building companies. I built a company that was doing almost $20,000,000 in revenue by the time I was 31. But I'm like, "I don't know anything when it comes to investing" — my portfolio is basically 80...
01:01	Lloyd Blankfein	Nobody knows anything.
01:02	Sam Parr	Well, that's what I've learned, but it seems like—because you know...
01:06	Lloyd Blankfein	I'm so on the inside, unlike a lot of people I know. Nobody knows anything, whereas every other person—everybody else—just wonders.
01:13	Sam Parr	Well, that's cool. So, I'm going to have to ask you a ton of questions, and it's going to come from a perspective of, like, "I actually don't know what I'm doing." The majority of my portfolio—which I actually think is smart—is just 90% index funds and 10% bonds. </FormattedResponse>
01:24	Lloyd Blankfein	Well, that's sensible.
01:25	Sam Parr	But you day-trade, which I thought was hilarious, too.
01:28	Lloyd Blankfein	"Things: one, I'm a pro at it. I mean, this is what I did — you know, for the last four or five decades. The other thing is that nothing hugely positive or hugely negative is going to affect my life. So, to me, it's like a hobby."
01:40	Sam Parr	What age were you when you felt that?
01:42	Lloyd Blankfein	You know, I grew up in the project. I wouldn't say that I felt poor, but I certainly was incapable of feeling well-to-do. I can't even say the "R-word" — rich. It's hard for me to even say it. By any metric, I have been that way for a long time, but I never feel that way. I mean, I'm still trapped in that mindset, you know, of the kid from the projects.
02:06	Sam Parr	So, your father was a postal worker, I think. You said you were an "urban hick", which I liked.
02:12	Lloyd Blankfein	I grew up in East New York, Brooklyn — at the end of two subway lines and a bus in the eastern part of Brooklyn. Growing up, I think I went to Manhattan three times. I never left the country; I didn't fly on an airplane until after I left school. Yeah, I was pretty provincial. It turns out that if you look at the lists of the most successful or wealthiest people in the U.S., you're not seeing a lot of Morgans or Rockefellers or any of those classical family names. You're seeing basically people—not necessarily growing up in poverty, but kind of middle-class people—who did well. These are not generationally wealthy people. A lot of people were socially mobile in their lives, created wealth for others, and a piece of it stuck to them.
03:06	Sam Parr	"What I'm curious about is, because you have this perspective of knowing world leaders—potentially the most powerful people on Earth—is there anything that would shock them about what it's like to be around some of these?" </FormattedResponse>
03:18	Lloyd Blankfein	I think what's shocking—well, not shocking—but what would be good if everybody understood is that, you know, look: there are very, very few geniuses in the world. I don't know if I've ever met one.
03:28	Sam Parr	"You don't think that you've met, well, a genius? Like—meet Jeff Bezos. You're not—this guy just has more horsepower."
03:33	Lloyd Blankfein	Yeah. For most of the people I meet, I can't—I'm not saying I can do what they do, but I can see how they can do it. Very few people I've met in my life are such that I can't even see the world through their eyes or can't see how they do what they do. Elon Musk may be a guy like that; I don't know how.</FormattedResponse>
03:52	Sam Parr	Have you met him?
03:53	Lloyd Blankfein	Oh yeah — a lot. Don't forget, we underwrote his... a lot of his stuff.
03:57	Sam Parr	When you met him, didn't you think—when you, you know, you know him—I guess you didn't think, "This guy's different"?
04:05	Lloyd Blankfein	Oh, no, no — I'm saying he's very different. I'm giving you an extreme case where a guy... but when people toss around the word "genius", there are a lot of words that get tossed around, like "superstar", and they get diluted. The bigger takeaway is that I've known people who've done very, very well and held high office. And guess what? After they finished speaking, they asked, "Did I do okay?" — like they want affirmation. They're insecure, and their kids don't always like them. People are a lot more normal than you think, and people are a lot more insecure. Sometimes the most successful people you know are driven by insecurity and their flaws. You also have to be lucky — the ball has to bounce. You could be the fastest runner in the world, but the Olympics are once every four years, and if you peak in the wrong year you'll never medal in the Olympics, even though you were the fastest. I got to be CEO of Goldman Sachs because my predecessor got nominated to be Treasury Secretary. Had he not been, maybe he would have lasted five more years in the job, and maybe I would have been too old for it then.
05:10	Lloyd Blankfein	Or something. So, there's a lot of fortune—there's a lot of luck. But I wouldn't exaggerate the skill set required or the degree of work required. I wouldn't say it's beyond the grasp of many of your listeners—it's not.
05:23	Sam Parr	So you've had teams of traders. You were like a commodity salesman, but you eventually became the leader of traders. What did the people who couldn't outperform, or who were not the best, have in common?
05:36	Lloyd Blankfein	The difference between somebody who's really, really good and somebody who can't make it is not that great. When you think of a golf tournament and somebody wins by one stroke, and there are six people tied for second one stroke behind the winner, that's a very low margin of victory. A lot of life is like that. Sometimes it's "winner-take-all," where somebody is just ever so slightly better and that difference stands out. The difference between a great actor who will get any part he or she wants in Hollywood and the second-best one may be that the second-best has to wait tables at night. I wasn't cursed by being a great athlete, so I wasn't tortured into thinking, "Do I dedicate myself to sports and athletics, or should I strive to do well in classes and school and get another job?" I didn't have that dilemma. But imagine the unfortunate person who's the best athlete his high school ever produced and who gets a minor-league baseball contract. From the minor leagues, something like 2% eventually make enough money to become professional. You get into a very rarefied area when you're talking about people who are the best at what they do—where the market only rewards and can only give a full-time job opportunity to people who are in the 0.001% of that field.
07:06	Sam Parr	You had this funny bit where, I think, something had happened with Goldman — you guys were really nervous about making mistakes.
07:16	Lloyd Blankfein	When we had the big financial crisis—the one in 2007–2008 [the 2007–2008 financial crisis]—the regulators wanted to make sure this kind of thing never happened again. Well, the only way you can make things sure is... once you're in the risk-taking world, anything can happen. Risk is risk, and you don't always know the consequences of it. If you try to legislate risk, you may think you're protecting the world from the "hundred-year storm," but you're also going to forego the ninety-nine years in between when there was growth.
07:51	Sam Parr	But you said, even inside of Goldman, you were like: > "We were meeting with the 20 partners or something, and people were throwing around ideas, and some of the ideas were pretty good — what the hell, guys? We're talking ourselves out of everything." On this show, we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive. Well, lucky for you, the team at HubSpot has pulled out the principles that matter most and turned them into a very simple, easy-to-read wealth guide. It's 35 principles from the top investors. We're talking about people who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Mohnish Pabrai, Morgan Housel, Cathie Wood, and a ton of others. These are all their frameworks, their mental models, their rules — basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin. You can get it in the link below. Everyone's throwing around these ideas, and everyone around here is saying, "Oh, we can't do this because... what the hell? Why aren't we—why aren't we trying some stuff? Let's get after it." I think you said the best traders are the ones who have resiliency: they bounce back, they look at the new information they have — not the past — and they adapt quickly.
08:50	Lloyd Blankfein	You know, the firm at that time had just gone through a period where it had big losses, and people were gun‑shy. You'd think a risk manager is always trying to repress people from taking risk. Sometimes a good risk manager has to promote the idea that people take risk, because that's what you're there for. If you don't take risk, don't move forward: there's no growth. You can't be an entrepreneur — you can't be an entrepreneur unless you take risk. If you take risk, there's a not‑insignificant chance that you'll fail and you'll lose money for all the people that backed you. That's a terrible situation. But the alternative — never taking any risk — will give you the comfort of not losing money for yourself or anybody else, and you also won't make progress.
09:29	Sam Parr	Yeah. And as you get more successful—at least I have... I think you said Goldman. Did you take less risk?
09:36	Lloyd Blankfein	Well, I think that's what makes people more conservative. Think of the word "conservative": you conserve. You become interested in not losing what you have, as opposed to making more. Now, when I say "making more," are people gonna be repulsed by the idea of making more? Making more is another way of saying advancing — creating wealth.
09:54	Sam Parr	Can you tell that story about Warren Buffett in the book? That was amazing — where he loaned you a bunch of money basically over a handshake and a phone call, and was like, "Alright, I'm gonna go take my grandkid to Dairy Queen."
10:06	Lloyd Blankfein	You know, Warren is one of those great men. He's brilliant in a way that I can't put myself in his shoes and see the world through his eyes. During the financial crisis, he offered to—at a very important moment—invest money in Goldman Sachs.
10:21	Sam Parr	Do you remember how much I think it was?
10:23	Lloyd Blankfein	$5,000,000,000 or $10,000,000,000
10:25	Sam Parr	And what'd you do? You... I can call them.
10:27	Lloyd Blankfein	We talked about that before. And, you know, with him—if he decides to do something, he does it. It's all going to be on him. I didn't have to ask him; it would serve no purpose to ask him two or three times.
10:38	Sam Parr	So, what you said — you said, "Hey, born, we're going through this thing. We might need a little..."
10:41	Lloyd Blankfein	Liquid, and I'd done that before. Would he be willing to do this? At the time, he wasn't grabbing, and then eventually he called in and was willing to do it for his own reasons. He saw it as a good investment to make. He wasn't doing it because he was trying to help us — although it had the effect of helping us — he was trying to help his own shareholders. He saw in us what I saw in us: a good investment that was being beaten down by...circumstances...that would reverse. I think he wanted to make an investment before it got better.
11:11	Sam Parr	Well, I think that, and the story was cool because you were on the phone with him. You're like, "Hey, Warren — do you want to do this thing?" Or maybe he called you and said, "Hey, I'm willing to do a $5 billion investment or a loan." I'm not sure if it's a loan or an investment.
11:24	Lloyd Blankfein	It was preferred stock. It's something between a loan and...
11:28	Sam Parr	You were like, "Yeah, cool — that sounds great. We would love to work with you. Do you want to do some due diligence, or do you want to sign some paperwork?" And he's like, "No, no, no. I'll just send the money and I gotta go. I'm taking my grandkid to Dairy Queen. Just figure it out and let me know where you want me to send it."
11:43	Lloyd Blankfein	The money.
11:43	Sam Parr	To no. Stop.
11:44	Lloyd Blankfein	I love the fact that—yes—that was actually the flow of the conversation. He's a pretty rigorous guy, and he knows that we're pretty rigorous people. He said, "No." I replied, "You know, I would feel better telling you all the things... before you make this investment. I would feel better telling you all the things I'm worried about." He said, "Lloyd, I know you well enough to know that you worry enough for the both of us." I pushed a little bit, and he said, "Look, Berkshire—$5,000,000,000. It's not even..." Berkshire is an insurance company, and in their real business Berkshire insures, among other things, property. He said, "Look, $5,000,000,000—if it all goes bad, that's not even a bad hurricane on the East Coast. So put me in my place." So, in other words, $5,000,000,000 wasn't a big number to him; that was a joke. I took it that way. Nobody wants to lose $5,000,000,000—not even him—but he was very good. It was very important. It wasn't just the money. In fact, frankly, the money was irrelevant to us because we had the money. What we didn't have was the confidence of the world because at that [time]. </FormattedResponse>
12:50	Lloyd Blankfein	Some institutions similar to ours were failing; others were in distress. We weren't failing, and we weren't in that much distress, but people didn't know that. If you just assert that, it scares people even more.
13:03	Sam Parr	Because, yeah, I think he said something like, "Oh — and hey, by the way, do me a favor: don't sell any of your shares until I sell mine," or something like that. "Let's be in lockstep."
13:12	Lloyd Blankfein	Oh no — it wasn't even a favor. It was... he asked for that. He asked for a commitment for that. Yeah, he didn't ask for it in writing.
13:18	Sam Parr	You were like, "Yeah, I'll put that in the contract. That sounds good." He goes, "No, no, no — no need. It's cool. Just tell me you commit." And that was it. That's pretty amazing.
13:26	Lloyd Blankfein	You know, in our world — in my world of buying and selling stuff — most of what we do is not written down. It's not a written contract. People buy and sell bonds and things. If they don't get delivered for two days, I suppose somebody could lie and say, "I really didn't do that," or "I didn't intend it," or "I'm confused," or something. But you'll never eat lunch in this town again. If people rely on their reputations for probity, it doesn't mean that things don't get documented. It's so each side really understands what the other person's perception is — making sure you're literally on the same page.
14:01	Sam Parr	Did you see the text between, I think, Ellison and Elon? Elon was like, "Hey, I'm gonna buy Twitter for, you know, whatever — I think $30 billion. Are you in?" And he was like, "Yeah, I'm in for 5," or, you know... It was a fairly casual conversation for a pretty huge thing.
14:18	Lloyd Blankfein	No, but that sounds right. Just because something is big doesn't mean it's tricky or complicated. Some—there are big things that are simple and little things that are complicated. I think, all things considered, it's always good to document stuff. But in a trading room, you don't document stuff when people buy and sell. Also, sometimes the execution of what you've agreed to is so near in time that it's pointless to document it, because in two days you're going to perform. So there's no reason to document something that will be accomplished before you could ever dot the i's and cross the t's in a document. But, all things equal, it's good to have a document. It's largely not necessary, and most of the transactional world works without documentation.
15:05	Sam Parr	So, you're no longer the CEO, but in the book you're like, "I now like to trade on my own." If your portfolio were a pie chart, what does it look like right now?
15:14	Lloyd Blankfein	"I invest in risky assets. That's what's fun for me, and that was what I did my whole career... my..."
15:19	Sam Parr	What percent is in just index funds or boring stuff?
15:22	Lloyd Blankfein	Well, index funds are risky. They're diversified across different things, but if you're in a diversified equity ETF you're in equities. Equities are a lot different than being in debt, and they're a lot different than being in short-term money markets, which are more safe. So it's still risky. I would say that I am 98% in risky assets, of which 95% are equities. Probably a quarter of that is in ETFs and 75% is in a single stock. And if I'm wrong, it's 10% in ETFs and 90% in single stocks, because that's what I like to do.
16:05	Sam Parr	Well, okay — I'm so curious about this. I'm 90% just in a Vanguard fund, and then 10%...
16:11	Lloyd Blankfein	Well, that's sensible, because this is what — you're not doing this. You're not doing investing for a living.
16:16	Sam Parr	Of course. I'm not—I'm probably not going to change that—but I'm always interested in seeing how other people like to invest. So, of the 75%, what are some of your biggest holdings? </FormattedResponse>
16:24	Lloyd Blankfein	Well, I would say that, right now, I'm very heavily focused on tech and have been for a long time—for good reason.
16:31	Sam Parr	Which companies?
16:32	Lloyd Blankfein	All the big hyperscalers and second-tier ones.
16:36	Sam Parr	"What's a second-tier one? What's an example of a second-tier one? Let me know."
16:38	Lloyd Blankfein	You know, if you have a big hyperscaler — like the Googles of the world, the Microsofts of the world, and the Nvidias of the world — maybe a second-tier version down, slightly down. No insult intended to Larry Ellison — maybe Oracle. I don't have to have specific names. I change my things all the time, so it doesn't matter. I'm just speaking in terms of category. That's how I think of it. Not necessarily the bluest of the blue-chip ones, but ones that are a little bit riskier. By the way, they are companies that are probably going to be gigantic — companies that some people know about today and are investing in. I never heard of them because I'm just not always walking around the corridors of Silicon Valley shops; I don't know the new, new thing. It might be commonplace knowledge over there, but it's not everywhere. The world is big, and everybody always knows their corner of it. [Note: "hyperscaler" refers to a large cloud provider or very large-scale technology company.] </FormattedResponse>
17:29	Sam Parr	"So, you're bullish on Big Tech?"
17:31	Lloyd Blankfein	Anything else? I'm generally bullish, and, by the way, it's been good to be bullish on big tech. I'll stop being bullish on...
17:38	Sam Parr	It's when it stops going up for the foreseeable future — that's what you're thinking.
17:42	Lloyd Blankfein	Yeah. My foreseeable future is when I finish this conversation with you, and then I'll check it again.
17:46	Sam Parr	"Are you trading every day?" "Yes. That's crazy."
17:48	Lloyd Blankfein	No, it's not. It's not.
17:50	Sam Parr	I don't think it's really crazy. It's just crazy for me, yeah.
17:52	Lloyd Blankfein	Oh no, no. Multiple times—it's taking a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while I'm talking to you.
17:57	Sam Parr	Right now.
17:57	Lloyd Blankfein	It's like background noise. Some people like to listen to music—you'd ask, "How much time do you spend listening to music?" Well, they're not sitting at a desk slumped and hunched over, just listening to music and doing nothing else. Maybe if you're a record producer you do that, but normal people listen to music while they're doing other stuff. To me, the market is like music: it's out there; it's going on.
18:21	Sam Parr	"What trades did you make today?"
18:22	Lloyd Blankfein	"I think today I may have — I'm not sure what I did — because I put in orders, knowing that you were going to tie me up and I wasn't going to be able to look at stuff..."
18:32	Sam Parr	Told people what to do. So curious.
18:34	Lloyd Blankfein	You know, to sell—maybe to sell some. Energy is rising. I buy and sell a lot of stuff. I don't want to talk about specific things because...
18:41	Sam Parr	That's right.
18:42	Lloyd Blankfein	People listen to these things on different days, and they'll start—you know—to sound smart, or...
18:45	Sam Parr	Stupid? Depending on what day it is, you have a team.
18:49	Lloyd Blankfein	Oh, just me.
18:50	Sam Parr	Just you? Yeah. So you're at your computer doing it on your own.</FormattedResponse>
18:53	Lloyd Blankfein	"No, no—I'm not at a computer. I don't have a computer; I have an iPad." </FormattedResponse>
18:56	Sam Parr	"So you're on your iPad doing..."
18:57	Lloyd Blankfein	It.
18:57	Sam Parr	And a phone — are you? And, you're mostly... what's your source of information to make decisions?
19:01	Lloyd Blankfein	I chat with people.
19:03	Sam Parr	Sometimes, you're what you're texting them.
19:05	Lloyd Blankfein	Yeah. Usually someone will text me, and I'll text them. Then I get tired of tapping things out and tired of fixing the typos because of my fat fingers, so I just call people up.
19:14	Sam Parr	And you're doing that all day.
19:16	Lloyd Blankfein	Some people follow... I follow the news, but I also follow business news. I like, you know, companies—they're like little stories, and it's like gossip.
19:23	Sam Parr	What do you read?
19:25	Lloyd Blankfein	I read all the newspapers. Of course, I start with the New York Post — the "paper of record."
19:30	Sam Parr	And</FormattedResponse>
19:31	Lloyd Blankfein	When I read papers like The Wall Street Journal, The Times, The Financial Times, and Bloomberg, I look at very finance-oriented...
19:41	Sam Parr	Insist all of them.
19:42	Lloyd Blankfein	Yeah, no—I don't steal them.</FormattedResponse>
19:44	Sam Parr	Yeah. Well, how many paywalls do you hit where you're like, "Oh shit — not this; I'm gonna read that," and then you have to go find a different article?
19:48	Lloyd Blankfein	Oh, that happens every once in a while. There's something esoteric where I know I click on something and it turns— you know— and it turns me down, so I don't read it. There are a million other things, but I do this and I have to think, "Gee, why am I quibbling about this?" You know, I will tell you, I am still watching commercials on Netflix.
20:04	Sam Parr	"Are you really? Yes — that's hilarious. Have you outperformed the market significantly?"
20:08	Lloyd Blankfein	Yes, I have, for a while. That's not because of it; it's because of where I focus. I started to say I'm mostly — and have been — in tech energy. Don't forget, I have a background in trading energy.</FormattedResponse>
20:22	Sam Parr	Yeah.
20:23	Lloyd Blankfein	And I'm also in financial services, because I know a lot about financial services, having been in the financial services. So those are the three areas that I've been focused on.
20:31	Sam Parr	Haven't been... well. I'm sure you still own a bunch of Goldman.
20:33	Lloyd Blankfein	I do. I tend to have some affection for the organization I spent almost 40 years in, so I kinda like that company.
20:41	Sam Parr	Do you... So, like I said, I'm boring, and it's 90/10. It's the most simple stuff.
20:45	Lloyd Blankfein	That's the advice I would give to people. I think at your age it pays to be in riskier assets, like equities, as opposed to fixed income. But if I were in equities — and, by the way, this is the same advice that Warren Buffett would give — I would be in a diversified portfolio of equities, like the S&P 500. [referring to the S&P 500 ETF, e.g., SPY]
21:05	Sam Parr	I do voo.
21:07	Lloyd Blankfein	And then I would also, because of the importance of tech and being on the threshold of great changes in technology, I might be mostly in those generic, diversified things. But I might also have ETFs that were focused on more tech‑oriented ones. That would give me a disproportionate exposure. Even the general, broadest indices are very heavily weighted in tech because the market cap of tech companies is so large. So you do get a fair share of tech even in a very broad index. Frankly, that has gone well for a long time. Every once in a while something doesn't work, it goes down a lot, and you have to be able to handle that. That's why I say: at your age, the older you get, the more conservative you should be. The older you get, the more concerned you should be about not losing money as opposed to maximizing the money you make. But as a young person, you have time — you'll outlive your mistakes.
22:02	Sam Parr	What's your opinion on what's going on with Robinhood and similar platforms, and all these "cal sheets" [unclear—did you mean "call sheets"?] and other things that promote day trading but also betting?
22:13	Lloyd Blankfein	I think those things that kind of democratize investing and make it very, very accessible to people are, in their own terms, a very good thing. People should be aware of assets they could buy, and it should be easier to do so. Maybe they receive advertising or promotions that make them focus on it more than they otherwise would. At the same time, if you make it too much like a video game, you can mask the fact that there's danger associated with it. People can lose, and those who don't have a lot of money can lose more than they can afford to lose. That's the risky thing. When some of these sites show confetti dropping because you did a trade, and now have a "buy" and a high-five, and make gambling look too attractive... for some people that's a disservice. For others, it's exactly what they need — it makes the activity more attractive so they develop an interest, and they won't go overboard.
23:09	Sam Parr	Are there any interesting things you didn't invest in that ended up turning out right? Was it because you had poor input, or you just let emotion control you?
23:18	Lloyd Blankfein	Or no — a million things I didn't want. </FormattedResponse>
23:20	Sam Parr	Interesting one, yeah.
23:21	Lloyd Blankfein	Oh, well. I thought SpaceX was overpriced at a $100 billion market cap.
23:26	Sam Parr	"What's it going to go for now, like...?"
23:27	Lloyd Blankfein	Too, I don't know what's in the market. People are discussing that now. I think they were proposing something that would make it worth, you know, a trillion and three quarters ($1.75 trillion). I'm not involved. Obviously, I'm not involved in any...
23:35	Sam Parr	Of this? And what did you say — what you thought was expensive: 100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion)?
23:38	Lloyd Blankfein	Yeah. So, one—instead of, you know, 175... wow. I mean, I could pick any number. I missed a lot of things. I remember a million years ago when they were auctioning off bandwidth or something for cell phones, and I thought, "Why would anybody want to carry a cell phone with them when there are 20,000,000 or 30,000,000 telephone booths around?" I wasn't sure of the exact number of booths. At that time, cell phones were bulky and the batteries lasted about 15 minutes. Why would anybody want that? So I showed how smart I was and didn't make early investments in cellular opportunities. Let me tell you, I missed a lot more stuff than I got. And no—Goldman doesn't miss as much as I do, but that's because Goldman has a lot of people in it, not just me. If it were just up to me, I would have missed... nobody's great at predicting the future.
24:32	Sam Parr	"I try to talk to some of the younger people who listen to the show. I'm like, 'Man, having a supportive partner is without a doubt more game-changing—probably more than any [other factor].'"
24:43	Lloyd Blankfein	Than anything, let's take the opposite side of it. And, you know, statistically this is going to happen to a lot of people. It'll happen to good people, and it doesn't make you a bad person. People have bad marriages. They have breakups. They have children and they fight over custody and visitation and all those kinds of things. Life's a lot better if you can avoid those problems. And, by the way, being lonely is not the worst thing in the world. A bad marriage is — you know — something you have to work out of and deal with: kids and property settlements. That's worse.
25:11	Sam Parr	I'm a very emotional person. I think a lot of people who are entrepreneurial tend to have quite high ups and downs. I think people like you, who are good CEOs, tend to be a little more steady and optimistic. Having a great wife has really been a "one plus one equals five" type of situation.
25:28	Lloyd Blankfein	And, by the way, I'm not just saying this for completeness — it's worth saying that wives have great husbands, and that's tough. There are a lot of people I know — partners of mine and others — where the husband in the relationship takes a less stressful job because he needs to support his wife in her stressful job. Sometimes that's even harder. As much as we want to think things are calibrated and equal, guys don't have babies.
25:54	Sam Parr	Yeah... when I'm hanging out with you now, you seem super happy and optimistic. But in the book you were like, "I'm prone to anxiety," and I think that was a polite way of saying it. You seem like a pretty anxious person occasionally.
26:07	Lloyd Blankfein	No — well, I'm wired that way a little bit. I inherited it from my dad; he was an anxious person. I made my kids anxious, unfortunately. There are benefits and burdens to every situation. Being anxious and looking around corners for problems and seeing things that could go wrong, I think, suited me in my job. Not all of life is about your job. You can be happy in other things; you should be happy in other ways and in other parts of life besides just your job. But, looking at that narrow view: I was risky in business with a firm that had a big balance sheet, a lot of investments, and that bought and sold price risk and took on other risks that other people didn't want to have, for a price. If you're going to do that job and preside over other people doing that job, it helps to be somewhat focused on things that could go wrong. In my life I'm generally upbeat — I think things will tend to work out. But I know that before they work out, a lot of things go wrong.
27:04	Sam Parr	Did you have any... It didn't seem like it when I was reading about it — your travel schedule was crazy. Did you have any work‑life balance when you were doing it?
27:10	Lloyd Blankfein	"Well, when you asked me any, of course I will say yes, but not enough that would be reasonable to most people. No — I traveled a lot. Then here's, again, where having a supportive spouse was very helpful. My wife, Laura, who’s a lawyer, worked in big law firms and now she’s the chair of Barnard College and other things. She helps oversee a charter school and is very involved in the world. But I’ll tell you one thing she did: she was very supportive of my career. When I needed to move overseas, she took care of everything. And let me tell you, when we moved overseas she’s the one who got the car, got the house, and made sure the kids got to school. I took victory laps because I was doing a good job at work, but she was doing all the — all the work that made it possible."
27:54	Sam Parr	Yeah. I think about my wife a lot now. She's a stay-at-home mom, and it's awesome, man. Having someone who has your back is pretty great. I don't even know how we pay a lot of our bills. We were talking the other day—actually, last night—and I said, "Look, I'm not trying to be morbid, but if you died, I wouldn't know how certain things happen at all." Like, how does our rent get paid? Do we pay utilities? I didn't know anything.
28:18	Lloyd Blankfein	I think we... I hope we're exceptional. But I will tell you that I haven't paid a bill in well over 40 years.
28:25	Sam Parr	Really—she... she does it all. Lord, she does it all.
28:27	Lloyd Blankfein	Yeah, we have a bill-paying service that she manages, and she does it. And I think, you know, "what the hell—how much could she steal? It's all hers anyway." </FormattedResponse>
28:34	Sam Parr	That's it. Can I ask you about that? That's actually interesting. Do you guys meet to discuss finances at all?
28:39	Lloyd Blankfein	"I'm in charge of generating the money, and she's really in charge of distributing it."
28:44	Sam Parr	You told the story: "I think you were close to 40, or maybe in your late thirties, and you're like, 'We bought a vacation home and it was like maybe $300, I think, and you're like, that was all of our money.'" </FormattedResponse>
28:55	Lloyd Blankfein	"No, it was more than all of our money."
28:57	Sam Parr	"Yeah, you were like, 'I'm supposed to be this *big shot.' I don't remember if you were a partner or not — I think you were. But you were like..."
29:03	Lloyd Blankfein	That was probably a new partner in the early days. I mean, it would take too much time for your purpose here. But in a partnership, you don't take money out of the firm, so even when you own money, it stays in the firm. </FormattedResponse>
29:13	Sam Parr	"Yeah, you were like, 'You know, I had a paper—well, I don't have a lot of cash.'"
29:16	Lloyd Blankfein	I had no money, so we borrowed it. We were driving to the closing [real estate closing]. Now I'm a different kind of guy — I can buy things without even going to the closing; lawyers do it. But in those days we were angsting about everything. We had a very small apartment in the city and we were having kids. We had just had our second child, and there was no place for them to breathe or run around in our little apartment. Instead of getting a bigger apartment in the city, we bought a relatively small place out at the beach. We were going through the math — my wife was doing it. She was working out where the money for the closing would come from. She had to come up with a certain amount and said, "We borrowed this much, I had this much in this account and that much in that account," but she couldn't make it add up to the total we needed to close. She was freaked out. So we drove about 30 miles while she went over and over the figures. Finally, we realized she had forgotten to count the down payment we'd already made on the house, which was 10%, so she kept coming up short.
30:24	Sam Parr	So, you guys were really on the edge.
30:26	Lloyd Blankfein	Yeah, yeah. We were able to buy dinner that night. It wasn't a question of survivability.
30:35	Sam Parr	I just don't think that I...
30:36	Lloyd Blankfein	"We exhausted more than all of our savings."
30:39	Sam Parr	We do a monthly meeting. I learned this from my friend Ramit; he's a personal finance author. We've been doing this since I started dating my wife. We were 25 when we started dating, and at 26 we moved in together. We would do a lookback where we review: "Here's what we spent this month — is that in line or not in line with our expectations and our budget? Are we happy with it? Do we want to spend more or do we want to spend less? Are we happy with what we spent on?" That discipline has been nice, and we've never, ever worried. </FormattedResponse>
31:06	Lloyd Blankfein	Look, I grew up in a household where my dad worked nights at the post office. Before he got that job, he'd worked in private... I think he drove a truck for a while, and he worked in a dry goods store as a clerk. He actually lost his job and was unemployed for a while. So I grew up in a household where the rent was very scarce. I'm used to that kind of fretting and being nervous about — like, really nervous about money.
31:35	Sam Parr	What age did that stop?</FormattedResponse>
31:36	Lloyd Blankfein	Probably in my thirties, so that's a privileged position. I'm lucky that way. But I grew up—listen—I was pretty scarred growing up in a household where money was scarce, so I'm familiar with what people think. It's very funny because people will say, "I'm a CEO of Goldman Sachs, blah blah blah—a real fat cat kind of guy." That's a placebo. But, you know, a lot of times people will assert that. I mean, being with some politicians, where they're saying, "What do you know about this or that? What do you—" and I'm like, "Listen, I did some research on you before this conversation, but your dad went to Yale and my dad went to the post office, so why are you telling me what you know?"
32:14	Sam Parr	It doesn't go away either. Like, the first twenty years that you experience it, it's like a low‑grade trauma a little bit. Not to be too woo‑woo, but I felt the same way. My mom and dad told me — I think they said when I graduated high school they had about $8,000. That was our situation. I asked, "Weren't you nervous?" and they said, "Yeah, we were nervous all the time." </FormattedResponse>
32:36	Lloyd Blankfein	When I got to college, after I bought books and did this, I remember I bought a sweater, which was a very big deal for me. When I got to college I wasn't dressed the way everybody else was dressed — I just didn't know. I came from Brooklyn; I had never seen it. So I went out and bought a sweater to put over a tennis shirt, because that's how everybody dressed in those days. After I bought it, I had $11 left over. I remember this.
33:01	Sam Parr	What year?
33:02	Lloyd Blankfein	Freshman year — this would have been around 1971 or 1972.
33:07	Sam Parr	Yeah, so it's still only worth... like, what, $50?</FormattedResponse>
33:09	Lloyd Blankfein	I was on financial aid—full financial aid—but it doesn't cover small expenses like going to the movies or buying a beer. Someone said I should go to the financial aid office and explain my situation to see if they could help. I went to the financial aid office, and they said, "Here, fill out this form: on one side put what you have; on the other side put what you need, and see if there's a difference." I did that and turned it in. I remember making the difference $500—that my living costs were $500 more than what I had. A clerk looked at it, said, "Oh, okay," and right there, while I waited, she made out a check for $500 and gave it to me. I said, "Whoa."
33:53	Sam Parr	"I want more of that."
33:54	Lloyd Blankfein	No, no.
33:54	Sam Parr	Did she want more? She said, "$5,000."
33:56	Lloyd Blankfein	The jokey reaction is, "I should have asked for no," but the real story is different. It was the first time in my life that I wasn't really nickel-and-dimed. It was unbelievable. By the way, it had a big influence on me because I later went to Harvard — I was lucky enough to get in there. That's another whole set of stories. As a result of that, my commitment to the university deepened. I co-chaired the campaign for financial aid, and that was a big deal. It wasn't only that I received aid, but that I received it in a way that had a generosity of spirit to it. I wasn't made to feel bad about it. I think everyone in my category thinks about giving, but I also think about how it feels to receive. I came away with the feeling that it's not just enough to give people what they need. You have to give it in a way where it's a positive experience.
34:53	Sam Parr	Yeah, where it feels a little dignified.
34:55	Lloyd Blankfein	"It's dignified, and again, that $500—I hope I've repaid it a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of times over. But that was still something. Look, I'm telling you the story today—how about that? That was well over 50 years ago, and it's still something I think about. The moment when I got it—because I was relieved I got the money—I also... I didn't feel bad about it."
35:16	Sam Parr	There's this book called Die with Zero. Have you ever seen that book?
35:18	Lloyd Blankfein	"No, but the title tells me everything."
35:20	Sam Parr	Yeah, and the truth is I haven't read it either, but the title does tell you everything. It's a great title. The guy, Bill Perkins, he seems like a great guy. But the premise is: "spend while you're alive," because when you're dead, who cares? So the premise is—if you're gonna give, if you can pull it off—give now. Well, there's nothing [unclear: "experience with joy"].
35:39	Lloyd Blankfein	This is a way of expressing that I didn't originate it—somebody said it to me, but it resonated with me. He said, "I wanted to give with my warm hand, not my cold hand." </FormattedResponse>
35:47	Sam Parr	That's cool.
35:48	Lloyd Blankfein	That was a very good visual for me. You know—give with your warm hand, not your cold. </FormattedResponse>
35:53	Sam Parr	"Hand is you that intend to do."
35:55	Lloyd Blankfein	Yeah, I have to work things through. I joked in the book — and it's kind of only half a joke — that, putting aside philanthropy and stuff and just thinking of your kids, sometimes I want to... I give things, like, take — you know, I give stuff to them, and then I feel ambivalent that they have what I gave them.
36:14	Sam Parr	What do you mean by "ambivalent"? Like you don't feel good?
36:16	Lloyd Blankfein	"That, you know... I sort of, you know, I'll give stuff to my kids because I can afford to do it. They're great kids and they work really hard — they're super; there's nothing wrong with them. It has not ruined my kids that they get stuff. Far from it. But, you know, I'll give them stuff and then I'll say, 'You have no idea. I didn't have what you have. I lived like this and you're living like that.' And I'm saying, well, the reason why they're living so well is because I gave it to them."
36:42	Sam Parr	Dude, I had the exact same conversation.
36:43	Lloyd Blankfein	My wife said, "If I gave it to them, why am I then acting, you know, regretful that they have it?"
36:52	Sam Parr	I had the same talk with my wife yesterday. I remember telling her we had just hung out with someone who was born into a wealthy family, and I was envious. I said, "That asshole hasn't worked hard for this." It was rooted a little bit in jealousy — like, you know, I'm better than them because I worked for it and I wasn't given anything. Then I thought, "Well, I intend to give to my kid." It's like I'm going to create my children; they're gonna be the people that I dislike. I thought that was really strange.
37:18	Lloyd Blankfein	The way kids turn out is influenced by a variety of reasons. One of those could be their neediness or the surpluses they have, but that might be only a small part of it. There are other things that shape your children. My kids are terrific. I have no issues. They worked hard, they went to good schools, and they applied.
37:35	Sam Parr	They work at Goldman.
37:36	Lloyd Blankfein	No. Goldman’s is a kind of firm that doesn't discourage people from bringing their kids into the business. It was an old partnership, a family firm. It was a good thing to begin with, so all my kids worked there, at least briefly. But it was too complicated for them to work there permanently. My name was Smith [unclear]. They could have hidden out, but if your name was Blind [unclear]—fine. It was just too... By the way, the burdens of being that were very heavy. I can't tell you—I'm not in my kids' heads totally—so I can't tell you what they feel. I'll just say generically: if you're the son of a... </FormattedResponse>
38:08	Sam Parr	Very senior, or the daughter of a...
38:09	Lloyd Blankfein	If you're a very senior person in the organization, you have to worry that people think you didn't get your job by merit. They'll think you don't work hard, and you'll think this. So there's a lot of pressure on kids to come in earlier, stay later, and show their moxie. </FormattedResponse>
38:22	Sam Parr	Yeah, there's some baggage.
38:23	Lloyd Blankfein	There's baggage they have to overcome, so it would have been too oppressive for them to see.
38:28	Sam Parr	I saw something—I think it was an old Gawker article when I was researching you. You seem pretty tough-skinned. I would have been very upset about people writing that stuff... that would have...
38:39	Lloyd Blankfein	No — it was very... It turns out I had a thick skin. Look, if I didn't have a thick skin, I wouldn't have survived there. I wouldn't have the joy of sitting opposite you now. There'd be somebody else in this chair talking to you instead of me.
38:50	Sam Parr	It's still hard. I mean...
38:52	Lloyd Blankfein	Oh, I didn't like it, but it turns out I could take that. I could take a punch. Look, to be the CEO of a firm as high-profile as Goldman, going through the stressful times that we went through—if you know, you know—you needed a thick skin, and I had one.
39:08	Sam Parr	"Was there a—where you thought, *'This isn't gonna work'?" "No. It felt good the whole time... or it felt—no."
39:13	Lloyd Blankfein	No, it didn't feel good. But the things that would feel bad to anybody would feel bad to me. I just could take it. I mean, now I don't want to test it. I don't want to get — I don't want to get challenged more to get to the point where I can take it. But certainly everything that I've endured so far, obviously I could take because I took it in life. There are people who can take a punch and people who can't. It turns out I didn't know that until I got punched, but it turns out that I could take a punch. Not everybody can, by the way. That doesn't make them bad. People have different wiring: some people are athletic; some people aren't.
39:42	Sam Parr	"Do you think you're born a great investor?"
39:43	Lloyd Blankfein	"I don't know. I certainly wasn't, so I can't tell you."
39:46	Sam Parr	You don't think you were...
39:47	Lloyd Blankfein	No, I ran a firm that contained a lot of great investors. I'm not a bad investor. I can read balance sheets, plans, and proposals, and I have opinions on the future. A lot of times I'm right. But, again, I didn't climb the ranks specifically because I was an investor. Goldman Sachs has great investors, great salespeople, great traders, and great bankers. Fortunately, I didn't have to be the greatest at any one of those things. I was a pretty good manager, a pretty good strategist for the business, and a good partner to other people. That was what was required of my job. Maybe once upon a time the captain of a ship rose to that position because he could do every job on the boat. I'm not sure that's true in a nuclear navy. Similarly, maybe there was a time when the person who ran a financial firm could do what was best at every job in that firm, but I couldn't have been that person. No one could be at a firm as complicated, big, and diverse as Goldman Sachs, and so I didn't have to be. </FormattedResponse>
40:46	Sam Parr	My last question: you had this really cool thought — it was awesome, actually, and I wrote it down. I've been thinking about it a lot. It's the idea that someone said to you when you became a partner. You were like, or they were like: > "Our goal here is that you become successful enough that when you die there'll be a really long, multi-paragraph obituary about you. We hope that your time at Goldman is only a sentence or two."
41:08	Lloyd Blankfein	Yes. That was when — when you made partner — you had a conversation with a senior partner there who was sort of assigned to acculturate new people to the firm. He gave you some "rules of the road." One was: make sure you don't get anywhere near anything that today would be called Me Too–type activity — warnings of that kind of stuff. Another was a warning to be very rigorous and conservative on your taxes. There were two other things they advised. One was that they set up a charitable foundation for you and said, "We expect you to do this: use it and give money away." It's good for your personal life and it's also good for your professional life to be thought of as somebody who gives back to the community. As a result of being on philanthropic boards and other things, you'll engage with a set of people broader than the people you might need in your business life. So it's good for you, and good for the firm. Do this. The final thing they said about balance in your life was framed this way: if you live the kind of life that there's an obituary written about you and it's nine paragraphs long, make it so that no more than three of those nine paragraphs are about your life at Goldman. That may be the best advice — but it's not going to be the case for me, because I stayed too long.
42:25	Sam Parr	"That's what I was gonna ask you. What are you gonna do? You have to do something now."
42:28	Lloyd Blankfein	Well, good. Are...
42:28	Sam Parr	Gonna... what? You hope that?
42:29	Lloyd Blankfein	"Maybe I'll join the Foreign Legion or go up in a space well."
42:32	Sam Parr	"What do you hope the rest of the paragraphs will be? Do you have—do you have, like, a goal?"
42:35	Lloyd Blankfein	I think at this — you know — every hive has a queen bee, the other guys, the worker bees and the others; they go off and the queen stays. I was caught up as the CEO a long time. I stayed a long time, and you do other things, but I don't think I'm ever going to be too separated from my experience at Goldman Sachs. Look, I wrote a book called Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs, so when I wrote a memoir it even has Goldman Sachs in the subtitle. I'm not going to comply with that piece of advice, but I knew where the advice was coming from. The important thing is — and I do — I serve on boards, I do other activities, and I'm interested in other stuff. I retired early enough with enough gas in the tank that I could go out and learn. I tried teaching a little bit and I said, you know, "something better than teaching — I want to learn." So I take some courses online and do some things, and that's the luxury of my position now. I'm feeding my curiosity about things away from business. But I also like business and I like markets. As I said to you, I still trade; I watch markets as background noise. I read a lot of financial stuff, but I also read about cosmology and the physics of small stuff. I'm interested in linguistics and anthropology, and I read a lot of history.
43:53	Sam Parr	I think you said, we're like: "If a trader asked me what to study, I tell him to study history." I do—what? Read? Do? </FormattedResponse>
43:59	Lloyd Blankfein	You know, a while ago, for some reason I eschewed medieval history because it's hard to follow. </FormattedResponse>
44:04	Sam Parr	Yeah, it is.
44:05	Lloyd Blankfein	It's very hard to follow, but then I sort of got caught up in it because... the way people fought in those days and their relationship with religion and the Church. I got interested in reading it. Sometimes you pick up good authors that you really like—the way they write—and so you're less interested in the topic they choose to write about than the fact that they're writing it. I also tend to like reading a lot of biographies.
44:28	Sam Parr	Which one moved the needle for you most? For me, it was Titan. I know you did a thing with Ron Chernow. </FormattedResponse>
44:33	Lloyd Blankfein	Actually, I read Titan. I didn't love it as much as that. I mean, it's obviously about Rockefeller, and I've read...
44:40	Sam Parr	A lot of his. I've read a lot.
44:42	Lloyd Blankfein	You know, when I find an author I like, I tend to read all of their work. There's an author I always like — she's been dead a good number of years now: Barbara Tuchman. She actually won two Pulitzer Prizes. I didn't discover her; she had been discovered long before me. She wrote The Guns of August about the origins of World War I. It's a great book — not a biography, but a fantastic and influential one.
45:03	Sam Parr	World War I. It's about... yes.
45:05	Lloyd Blankfein	And very influential because it shows how you can get caught up in a vortex. Forces started to mobilize; it almost couldn't be stopped. She wrote a book that I found really fun. I'm not sure it's her most famous book, but it's called A Distant Mirror, and it's a history of a life that was led in the fourteenth century. The guy was a very influential person—not a king, but kind of an aristocrat—and he moved back and forth between England and France in the fourteenth century. The reason why it was called A Distant Mirror is she wrote this book in the middle of the Cold War when everybody was worried that the world was going to be blown apart in a nuclear war. In the fourteenth century, they had the Black Plague, the Papal Schism, and the Hundred Years' War. It was a very stressful time in Europe and the world in general, but certainly in Europe, and people were very, very fatalistic in their attitude. That's why it was called a distant mirror—it was sort of like a mirror on the twentieth century and the jumping off.
46:02	Lloyd Blankfein	For telling the story, this particular guy, Baron Cusi, was a French aristocrat, but he fought in the Hundred Years' War. He ended up marrying an English woman, and so he appeared—he was like "Zelig." He popped up in a lot of places, and so it gave you the opportunity to write the history of a lot of different things that were going on in that era. I... I enjoyed reading that book. That was one of the few books I've read twice.
46:23	Sam Parr	"That's awesome."
46:24	Lloyd Blankfein	I also liked — totally different — I like reading The Power Broker about Robert Moses. </FormattedResponse>
46:28	Sam Parr	By Caro — Robert Caro. He just had a thing at the American History Museum. Yes, it was awesome.
46:33	Lloyd Blankfein	I'll tell you the interesting thing: the reason I reread it is that I had read that book once when I was starting. There's no reason why they should know him, but it was a guy who basically built New York — well, The Power Broker — because he asserted power that, on paper, he shouldn't have had. By dint of his personality, the different offices he held, and clever things he did, he really was a power broker, dominating even the elected officials who were nominally his bosses. There were aspects—he did great things. He built the Long Island Expressway and all sorts of other projects. But he also had personality flaws that, today, look worse than they did in that era.
47:14	Sam Parr	"Yeah, I mean, he's accused of being like a pretty big racist."
47:17	Lloyd Blankfein	Yeah. He was accused of that, and he was accused of "rolling over" — building, cementing parks that were otherwise green; things that people today wouldn't do, but he did. Think of the Founding Fathers, who created the template for a democracy when none had existed, and yet they had slavery. How do you evaluate that? How do you look at that? Does that disqualify the good things that they did? It gets very confusing and hard to fathom, and different people have different views about these things. He was kind of a personality like that, in a different way. But when I first read the book as a young guy, I was focused on the flaw part.
47:59	Sam Parr	Yeah.
48:00	Lloyd Blankfein	"I said, 'Oh God — this is a tough human being. Instincts terrible, but tough.' And, you know, after forty years of trying to get stuff done and build a business, and trying to influence people to do what I wanted them to do when they didn't want to, and evaluating the sacrifices I had to make, what I got done, and the effort it took, I reread that Robert Moses book. All of a sudden his achievements started to go up. The other flaws kind of stayed the same; they didn't get better, but I kind of valued him more. What it showed was, again, it was less about Robert Moses at this than it was about me, because I had changed as a result of trying to get things done. It made me appreciate the degree of difficulty of his achievements more than I had."
48:57	Sam Parr	I feel that way about the Founding Fathers. I'm angry at them for a bunch of stuff, and then I'm like, "Man—Thomas Jefferson was, like, 28 or 30 years old when he wrote..."
49:07	Lloyd Blankfein	33 or 30. Yes, I think.
49:08	Sam Parr	"When he wrote this document and how much wisdom."
49:11	Lloyd Blankfein	And there was no template for it, really. The idea of something that we could get... because "democracy" was a pejorative—"demos"; it was anarchy.
49:21	Sam Parr	Yeah, and I think about that revolution because Ken Burns has this American Revolution documentary. I didn't realize how consequential the American Revolution was—how, for the most part, there had never been democracy at such a large scale. They made this document that was self-amending: the idea that we are flawed and we can fix it.
49:41	Lloyd Blankfein	Yeah, and that.
49:41	Sam Parr	By the way — just like, and by the way.
49:42	Lloyd Blankfein	That was... If you read a book — I just read a book on the Constitution; that was even debated.
49:47	Sam Parr	There's a cool one by the guy who did the Brooklyn Bridge piece. It talks about how the most important words of the Constitution were, "We believe these truths to be self-evident," and it just goes...
49:58	Lloyd Blankfein	Through—and yet despite the self-evidence of the rules—they still had slavery, you know; they debated slavery. And by the way, it's not that they didn't know it was wrong at the time and missed it—no, they knew. By the way, another good book to read is the three-volume series by Rick Atkinson on the American Revolution. The first one is called The British Are Coming, and the second volume is out. People don't learn enough about history in general, but Americans don't learn enough about the American Revolution and why it was fought. Of course people debate it because people revise history and say these people were all evil. No—they weren't. It's like Columbus: people want to rename Columbus Day because he was bad to the Indigenous people, which I'm sure he was. But in a ship that was not as long as your backyard swimming pool, in the fifteenth century, he steered that ship to a continent he wasn't sure was there. For crying out loud, give the guy some credit on this stuff. In other words, nobody's going to be perfect. But we have all these revisionary histories that stop admiring characteristics and achievements that are worth admiring just because there were other flaws in the person who delivered the achievement. It's crazy.
51:20	Sam Parr	Yeah, I've ignored the American Revolution for a long time. Now I've gone down this path because of that Ken Burns documentary. I think it made me feel like capitalism in America is almost a spiritual thing. I married into an immigrant family, and they are small business owners. Now that I'm in New York, I walk by all these bodegas that are owned by, like, Vietnamese families or like...
51:41	Lloyd Blankfein	Oh, it's fantastic.
51:42	Sam Parr	And I'm like, "This is the greatest place on earth"—where someone can come with nothing. My favorite part is walking around here. You see these bodegas, and they're called things like "American Cowboy" or "American Inc." Someone was so proud, but they didn't speak English enough to know the exact meaning. They just knew that cowboy in America was cool.
51:59	Lloyd Blankfein	"I know this is going to be controversial. I don't know who I'm going to upset, but, you know, I would say that most of the people who are prominent social democrats grew up in prosperous families here."
52:07	Sam Parr	Of.
52:07	Lloyd Blankfein	Of course. And let me tell you: the people who grew up under communism don't wish the country was socialist.
52:13	Sam Parr	Of course.
52:13	Lloyd Blankfein	I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy, but you know...
52:15	Sam Parr	But I love, like, this immigrant journey. I'm particularly drawn to it — I freaking love that. And, you know, I think the American dream shouldn't be to move here and buy a home. It should be: move here and start a small business. I just think it's really cool.
52:29	Lloyd Blankfein	Not everybody's competent; everyone's capable. But the fact that people can do it—look, I agree with you. We're going through a moment where people—well, I guess people always question. Again, I grew up; I was a young guy during the Vietnam era, and everybody was disgusted with the country. And listen, here's another good thing about the country: you can live here quite happily, quite comfortably, while you express your contempt for it. </FormattedResponse>
52:55	Sam Parr	Of course.
52:55	Lloyd Blankfein	Where else can you? </FormattedResponse>
52:56	Sam Parr	"The way that I describe America is: I'm like, it's mostly good, and we can improve." </FormattedResponse>
53:01	Lloyd Blankfein	You could talk about all the bad stuff, and you generally won't be arrested for it.
53:05	Sam Parr	Yeah, it's mostly great, and we can improve.
53:07	Lloyd Blankfein	"There would be no God. I... I am. But, you know, look: everybody has to rediscover these things, and maybe it's... maybe it's a function of age."
53:15	Sam Parr	You know, I could talk to you about history all day. I'm so happy that you're into that. </FormattedResponse>
53:18	Lloyd Blankfein	No, no, but I think...
53:19	Sam Parr	That's... I like the Upper West Side. No — "side by" [unclear].
53:21	Lloyd Blankfein	I like the history part, and I'll tell you why it relates to commercial life. History, again, doesn't repeat, but—to paraphrase a remark attributed to Mark Twain: > "History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes." So patterns happen again. We're going through tough times now, and people say, "Oh, it's none like anything," but it's not that different from the late sixties when the country was very polarized, or the McCarthy era when we sort of went off the rails and then got back on the rails. People say, "Oh my God — the norms of proper political behavior are gone forever." But we've had extremes before. We did have a Civil War. We did have a McCarthy era. We did put American citizens of Japanese descent in internment camps because we were freaked out by Pearl Harbor. Then we overcame those things and regretted them afterwards. So even at the worst, there's hope. There's always hope for America, and America has always fulfilled those hopes eventually.
54:22	Sam Parr	Yeah. I think Warren Buffett—or you. I think you quoted Warren Buffett in the book, saying, "I wouldn't bet against America."
54:30	Lloyd Blankfein	Well, I think a lot of people have said that I wouldn't bet against America. So, if you watch the evening news or read the newspaper, you'd walk away with one set of views.
54:39	Sam Parr	Well, I think there's a lot of lazy phrases. For example, I see people online and they'll make comments like, "well, in this economy..." or "it's so crazy out there." There are these lazy phrases, and I hate them because I think the words you use shape how you think. It's hard to feel a certain emotion if you don't have a word to describe that emotion. So when people use phrases like, "well, in this economy it's hard to do ___," it's a pretty defeatist attitude. This economy is actually quite good, and it doesn't matter what the economy is — that shouldn't prevent you from taking the action you want to try to. I mean, it will always be hard.
55:17	Lloyd Blankfein	Now I'm thinking today. When I was a child — you know, I was crossing into adulthood — they were drafting people for the Vietnam War. The literal body count coming out... they would read it every Friday evening. They would scroll it down the TV: "350, 450, 600 died." And then, of course, compare that to World War II when, you know, people had, yeah, over... [speech trails off / unclear].
55:45	Sam Parr	Four years.
55:45	Lloyd Blankfein	And so, you know, every generation has its challenges. Every generation minimizes the challenges of the past because they're resolved and can't get worse, and it maximizes the challenges people face today because we're still scared of them — they're not resolved. So, you know, that's why it's good to read. That's why I think it's beneficial to read history: if they can go through that, then we can get through ours.
56:09	Sam Parr	"Yeah, I do that all the time. Remember, I was reading about Sacagawea when she was with Lewis and Clark, and I purposely read that book before I had my kid because a lot of people don't remember."
56:18	Lloyd Blankfein	That's a good book too — Undaunted Courage.
56:20	Sam Parr	Stephen Ambrose — the best. And, people, this is way under-discussed: Sacagawea. For the listener, basically Lewis and Clark went west from St. Louis, and they...
56:28	Lloyd Blankfein	So, you know, coming from St. Louis.
56:29	Sam Parr	Of course. Yes. It's... it's— and I— I'll tell you a...</FormattedResponse>
56:31	Lloyd Blankfein	Funny story: started from...
56:32	Sam Parr	But they started in St. Louis, where I'm from, and they basically said, "Just go west and figure out if there's, like, a passage." They didn't know what the hell they...
56:37	Lloyd Blankfein	We're doing now: they go to Portland, and then they find... a progressive mayor.
56:41	Sam Parr	Yeah, it's a lot different now.
56:42	Lloyd Blankfein	"Do you think Lewis and Clark would have been impressed by the progressivism of that?"
56:45	Sam Parr	Crazy is, they went with 30 people and none died. So they go there, and they find this woman named Sacagawea, who spoke a variety of languages. They're like, "Hey, come with us." A lot of people don't talk about this: she had a three-month-old child. If you actually look, there's a Sacagawea gold dollar [U.S. Sacagawea dollar]. Have you ever seen one of those? Yes — her kid is strapped to her.
57:03	Lloyd Blankfein	"Don't let..."
57:04	Sam Parr	"And I'm like, if she could do that—I don't need a baby thermometer for my bathtub. You know what I mean? I don't need all these gadgets if Sacagawea could carry..." </FormattedResponse>
57:11	Lloyd Blankfein	This kid — and I don't know the kid — turned out, I hope, very well.
57:14	Sam Parr	He turned out great. Joe—his name was Joseph. He went to my high school, by the way. He was in the first graduating class in my... </FormattedResponse>
57:17	Lloyd Blankfein	High school. I tell you, the infant mortality rate was a lot higher than... so keep...
57:22	Sam Parr	"Don't let facts get in the way of a good story."
57:24	Lloyd Blankfein	Keep the thermometer.
57:25	Sam Parr	"Give them — don't let facts get in the way of —"
57:26	Lloyd Blankfein	Give them vaccines according to the schedule and take good care of them, because you don't want... There has been progress on infant mortality, so just because her kid made it through, I would—
57:36	Sam Parr	She ended up dying of illness in her early forties, so my story doesn't exactly hold true. But I appreciate you so much — this is awesome.
57:43	Lloyd Blankfein	Yeah, no—my pleasure.
57:44	Sam Parr	Alright, that's it. That's the pod.

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How the Ex-Goldman CEO actually invests his own money

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