How the Ex-Goldman CEO actually invests his own money

7:15Sam Parr:you guys were like really nervous of making mistakes.

7:19Lloyd Blankfein:when, you know, we had, you know, the big financial crisis, the one that was like in 07, 08, when the regulators wanted to make sure that this kind of thing never happened again. Well, the only way you can make things sure that, you know, once you're in the risk-taking world, anything can happen. You know, risk is risk. And you don't always know the consequences of it. And if you try to legislate risk, you know, you may think you're protecting the world from the 100-year storm but you're also going to forego the 99 years of in-between when there was growth.

7:53Sam 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. And you were like, 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, they have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple, easy to read wealth guide. It's 35 principles from the top investors. We're talking guys who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Manish Pabrai, Morgan Housel, Kathy Wood, and a ton others.

8:28Sam Parr:So 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 the ideas and everyone around here is saying like, oh, we can't do this because like, what the hell? Why aren't we trying some stuff? Let's get after it. And I think you said the best traders are the ones who have resiliency. They bounce back and they look at the new information that they have, not the past, and they adapt quickly.

8:53Lloyd Blankfein:You know, the firm at that point had just gone through a period where it had, you know, big losses and people were gun shy. And, you know, 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. And if you don't take risk, you don't move forward. There's no growth. You can't be an entrepreneur. You've been 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.

9:22Lloyd Blankfein:That's a terrible situation. But the alternative to never taking any risk will give you the comfort of not losing money for yourself or anybody else, but you also won't make progress.

9:32Sam Parr:Yeah, and as you get more successful, at least I have, and I think you said Goldman did, you take less risk.

9:38Lloyd Blankfein:Well, I think that 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 going to be repulsed by the idea of making more? Making more is another way of saying advancing, creating wealth.

9:57Sam 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, all right, I'm going to go take my grandkid at Dairy Queen.

10:08Lloyd Blankfein:You know, Warren is one of those great men, which he's brilliant in a way that I can't put myself in his shoes and see the world through his eyes. And during the financial crisis, he offered to, at a very important moment, invest money in Goldman Sachs. Do you remember how much? I think it was$5 billion or$10 billion. And what did you do? You just called them? We had talked before that. And, you know, with him, he decides to do something. He doesn't. It's all going to be with him. I didn't have to ask him. it would serve no purpose to ask him two or three times.

10:41Sam Parr:So what you said, you said, hey, Warren, we're going to this thing. We might need a little liquidity.

10:45Lloyd Blankfein:No, and I'd done that before. Would he be willing to do this? And at the time, he wasn't grabbing. And then eventually he called in and was willing to do it for his own reasons. And 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. But he was trying to help his own shareholders. and, you know, he saw in us what I saw in us, which was a good investment that was being beaten down by, you know, circumstances that it would reverse. And I think he wanted to make an investment before it got better.

11:14Sam Parr:Well, I think that, and the story was cool because you were like on the phone with him. You're like, hey, Warren, you want to do this thing? Or maybe he called you and he's like, hey, let's, you know, I'm willing to do a$5 billion investment or a loan. I'm not sure if it was a loan or an investment.

11:26Lloyd Blankfein:It was preferred stock. It's something between a loan and a stock.

11:30Sam Parr:And 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 like sign some paperwork? And he's like, no, no, no. I'll just send the money. And, you know, I got to go. I'm going to take my kid to, I'm taking my grandkid to Dairy Queen. Just figure it out and let me know where you want me to send the money.

11:46Lloyd Blankfein:Well, it helped the fact that, yes, that was actually the flow of the conversation, but he's a pretty rigorous guy and he knows that we're pretty rigorous people. And at one point he said, you know, and I said, you know, I would feel better telling you all the things, you know, before you make this investment, and I would feel better telling you all the things I'm worried about. And he said, you know, Lloyd, I know you well enough to know that you're worried enough for the both of us. And then I pushed a little bit, and he said, look, Berkshire,$5 billion. It's not even, you know, again, Berkshire is an insurance company.

12:18Lloyd Blankfein:And so in their real business, Berkshire insures, among other things, property. And he said, look,$5 billion, 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 billion wasn't a big number to him. That was a joke, and I took it that way. Nobody wants to lose$5 billion, not even him. But, you know, he was very good, and it was a 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 we didn't have the confidence of the world because at that point, people, you know, some institutions that were similar to ours were kind of failing.

12:57Lloyd Blankfein:Others were in distress. We weren't failing and we weren't in that much distress. But people didn't know that. And if you just assert that, it scares people even more.

13:06Sam Parr:Yeah, and 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. Like, let's be in lockstep on this.

13:15Lloyd Blankfein:Oh, no, it wasn't even a favor. It was he asked for that. He asked for our commitment for that.

13:19Sam Parr:Yeah.

13:20Lloyd Blankfein:He didn't ask for it in writing.

13:21Sam Parr:And 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. And that's pretty amazing.

13:28Lloyd Blankfein:You know, in our world, in my world of buying and selling stuff, most of the stuff we do is not written down, is not a written contract. People buy and sell bonds and things and 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, you know, or something. But you'll never eat lunch in this town again. And if people rely on their reputations for probity, it doesn't mean that things don't get documented. so that each side really understands what the other person's perception is, making sure you're literally on the same page.

14:03Sam Parr:Did you see the text between, I think it was like Ellison and Elon? Elon was like, hey, I'm going to buy Twitter for, you know, whatever, I think$30 billion. Are you in? And he was like, yeah, I'm in for five. Or like, you know, it was like a fairly casual conversation for like a pretty huge thing.

14:20Lloyd Blankfein:No, but that sounds right. Just because something is big doesn't mean it's tricky or complicated. Some, you know, 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 stuff. 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. And so there's no reason why you have to document something that will be accomplished before where you could ever dot the I's and cross the T's in a document.

14:57Lloyd Blankfein:But it's always, you know, all things equal. It's good to have a document, but it's largely not necessary. And most of the transactional world works without documentation.

15:07Sam 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 as a pie chart, what does it look like right now?

15:16Lloyd Blankfein:I invest in risky assets. That's what's fun for me. And that was what I did my whole career.

15:21Sam Parr:1 % is in just index funds or boring stuff.

15:25Lloyd Blankfein:Well, index funds are risky. They're just, they're diversified across different things. But if you're in a diversified equity ETF, you're in equities.

15:33Sam Parr:Yeah.

15:33Lloyd Blankfein:And equities is a lot different than being in debt. And it's a lot different than being in short-term money markets, which is more safe. And so it's still risky. I would say that I am 98 % in risky assets, of which, you know, 95 % of the 98 % are equities. Probably a quarter is in ETFs and 75 % is in single stock. And if I'm wrong, it's 10 % are in ETFs and 90 % are in single stocks because that's what I like to do.

16:08Sam Parr:Okay, I'm so curious about this. So I'm in 90 % just a Vanguard fund and then 10%.

16:14Lloyd Blankfein:Well, that's sensible because you're not doing investing for a living.

16:18Sam Parr:Of course. And 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? Well, I would say that right now I'm very heavily focused in tech and have been for a long time for good reason. Which companies?

16:34Lloyd Blankfein:All the big hyperscalers and second-tier ones.

16:38Sam Parr:What's a second-tier one? What's an example of a second-tier one?

16:41Lloyd Blankfein:You know, if you have a big hyperscaler like, you know, like the Googles of the world and the Microsofts of the world and NVIDIAs of the world, maybe a second-tier version down the, slightly down the footnote. No insult intended to Larry Ellison, maybe Oracle. I don't have to. I change my things all the time, so it doesn't matter, you know, specific names. I'm just giving you, I'm speaking in terms of category. That's how I think of it as, you know, not necessarily the bluest of the blue chip ones, ones that are a little bit riskier. And by the way, they're companies that are probably going to be gigantic companies that some people know about today and are investing in.

17:16Lloyd Blankfein:I never heard of them because I'm just not always, you know, I'm not walking around the corridors of Silicon Valley shops and I don't know the new, new thing. And it might be commonplace knowledge over there, but it's not with, you know, everybody knows the world's a big place and everybody always knows their corner of it.

17:31Sam Parr:So you're bullish on big tech? Anything else?

17:34Lloyd Blankfein:I'm generally bullish. And by the way, it's been good to be bullish on big tech. And I'll stop being bullish on it when it stops going up.

17:42Sam Parr:For the foreseeable future, that's what you're thinking.

17:44Lloyd Blankfein:Yeah, my foreseeable future is when I finish this conversation with you and then I'll check it again.

17:48Sam Parr:Are you trading every day?

17:49Lloyd Blankfein:Yes.

17:50Sam Parr:That's crazy.

17:51Lloyd Blankfein:No, it's not.

17:52Sam Parr:I don't think it's really crazy. It's just crazy for me. Oh, no, no.

17:56Lloyd Blankfein:Multiple times, it's taking a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while I'm talking to you. Right now. It's background noise. It's like, you know, some people like to listen to music. You'd say, how much time do you spend listening to music? Well, they're not sitting at a desk slumped, hunched over, just listening to music and doing nothing else. Maybe if you're a record producer, you'd do that. But normal people are listening to music while they're doing other stuff. To me, the market is like music. It's out there. It's going on.

18:23Sam Parr:What trades did you make today?

18:24Lloyd Blankfein:I think today I may have, you know, I'm not sure what I did because I put in orders because knowing that you were going to tie me up and I wasn't going to be able to look at stuff. What orders?

18:35Sam Parr:I told people what to do. I'm so curious.

18:36Lloyd Blankfein:You know, to sell, you know, maybe sell some, you know, energy is rising. You know, I buy and sell a lot of stuff. I don't want to talk about specific things because people listen to these things on different days and they'll start, you know, sound smart or stupid depending on what day it is.

18:50Sam Parr:Do you have a team?

18:51Lloyd Blankfein:Oh, just me.

18:52Sam Parr:Just you?

18:53Lloyd Blankfein:Yeah.

18:53Sam Parr:And so you're at your computer doing it on your own?

18:55Lloyd Blankfein:No, no, I'm not at a computer. I don't have a computer. I have an iPad.

18:58Sam Parr:So you're on your iPad doing it? And a phone. What's your source of information to make decisions?

19:04Lloyd Blankfein:I chat with people. Texting?

19:06Sam Parr:What? You're texting them?

19:08Lloyd Blankfein:Yeah, usually I call. Somebody will text me, I'll text them, and then I'll get tired of tapping things out, and I'll be tired of fixing the typos because of my fat fingers. So I just call people up.

19:17Sam Parr:And you're doing that all day?

19:18Lloyd Blankfein:Some people follow. I follow the news, but I also follow business news. and I like, you know, companies are like little stories and it's like gossip.

19:26Sam Parr:What do you read?

19:28Lloyd Blankfein:I read, you know, all the newspapers. Of course, I start with the New York Post, the paper of record.

19:33Sam Parr:Yeah.

19:34Lloyd Blankfein:And, you know, when I read papers, like, you know, like the Journal, the Times, the FT, you know, Bloomberg, I look at, you know, very financially, you know, finance oriented. You have some scripts and all of them? Yeah. No, I don't steal them, yeah.

19:47Sam Parr:Well, you know, how many paywalls do you hit and you're like, oh shit, I'm not going to read that. I got to go find a different article.

19:51Lloyd Blankfein:Oh, that happens. Every once in a while, there's something esoteric where I, you know, I click on something and it turns, you know, it turns me down. So I don't read it. There's a million other things. But I do this and I have to think of, gee, why am I quibbling about this? You know, I will tell you, I am still watching commercials on Netflix.

20:06Sam Parr:Are you really? Yes. That's hilarious. Have you outperformed the market significantly?

20:10Lloyd Blankfein:Yes, I have for a while. And I'm not, that's not because of, it's because of where I focus. So I started to say I'm mostly and have been in tech, energy. Don't forget, I have a background in trading energy. 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. I haven't.

20:34Sam Parr:Well, I'm sure you still own a bunch of Goldman.

20:36Lloyd Blankfein:I do. I tend to have some affection for the organization that I spent almost 40 years in. So, yeah, I kind of like that company.

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21:15Sam Parr:It's the most simple stuff.

21:16Lloyd Blankfein:It'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, you know, fixed income. But if I were in equities, and by the way, this is the same advice that a Warren Buffett would give, I would be in a diversified portfolio of equities like the S &P 500s, which is SPIs or VOLOs.

21:37Sam Parr:And then I would

21:38Lloyd Blankfein: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, you know, on more tech oriented ones that, you know, so that would give me disproportionate. Although the general ones, the ones that are the broadest index are very heavily in tech because just tech are such a, the market cap of tech companies are so heavily weighted in those, that you do get a fair share of tech, even in a very broad index. And, you know, frankly, that has gone well for a long time.

22:15Lloyd Blankfein:And every once in a while, something doesn't work, it goes down a lot, and you have to be able to do that. That's why I say at your age, the older you get, the more conservative, 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 to, you have time, you'll outlive your mistakes.

22:32Sam Parr:What's your opinion on what's going on with like the Robin Hoods of the world and all these like the Cal She's and things that promote like day trading, but also betting and things like that.

22:44Lloyd Blankfein:I think those things that kind of democratize investing and make it very, very accessible to people is in its own terms a very good thing. So people should be aware of assets they could buy and make it easier to do some and maybe, you know, receive advertising promotion so that they focus on it more than they would. Maybe they would never focus on it, but for those companies. You know, 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 and you can lose, and that people who don't have a lot of money can lose more than they can afford to lose.

23:17Lloyd Blankfein:So that's the risky thing. So, you know, when you have some of these sites and they show confetti dropping because you did a trade and, you know, had a boy and high five and, you know, you should gamble and make that look too attractive. You know, for some people, that's a disservice. And for other people, it's exactly what they need. They won't go overboard, but it needed to be more attractive for them to develop an interest in it.

23:39Sam Parr:Are there any interesting things that you didn't invest in that ended up turning out right? And it was because you had poor input or you just let emotion control you?

23:49Lloyd Blankfein:No, a million things.

23:50Sam Parr:What's an interesting one? Yeah.

23:52Lloyd Blankfein:Well, I thought SpaceX was overpriced at$100 billion market cap.

23:57Sam Parr:What's it going to go for now? I don't know.

23:58Lloyd Blankfein:It'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. I'm not involved. Obviously, I'm not involved in any of this.

24:06Sam Parr:And what did you say? What you thought was expensive,$100 billion?

24:08Lloyd Blankfein:Yeah. So one instead of, you know,$175. Wow. I mean, I could pick any number. I mean, 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'm thinking, why would anybody want to carry a cell phone with you when there's, you know, 20 million or 200, you know, 30 million? I'm not sure the exact number of telephone booths are in. Why would you want to carry? At that time, cell phones were bulky and the batteries lasted 15 minutes or something like that. Why would anybody want that? So I showed them how smart I was. And so I didn't make early investments in cellular opportunities or things.

24:46Lloyd Blankfein:Let me tell you, I missed a lot more stuff than I got. And, you know, Goldman doesn't miss as much as I miss, but that's because Goldman has a lot of people in it, not just me. But if it were just up to me, I would have missed, you know, nobody's great about, you know, predicting the future.

25:03Sam Parr:I try to, like, talk to, like, some of the younger people who listen to the show where I'm like, man, having a supportive partner is, like, without a doubt, more game-changing probably than anything.

25:14Lloyd Blankfein:Yeah, and let's take the opposite side of it. And, you know, statistically, this is going to happen to a lot of people and it'll happen to good people and it doesn't make you a bad person, but people have bad marriages and they have breakups and 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, that you have to work out of and deal with, you know, kids and property settlements. That's worse.

25:42Sam Parr:I'm a very emotional person. I think a lot of people who are entrepreneurial tend to be quite high up and downs. And I think people like you who are good CEOs tend to be a little bit more steady and optimistic. And I think that having like a great wife, it's really been like a one plus one equals five type of situation.

25:58Lloyd Blankfein:And by the way, I'm not just saying this for completeness, but it's worth saying, and wives to have great husbands, and that's a tough, you know, there's a lot of people I know, partners of mine and things where the husband in the relationship takes a less stressful job because needs to support his wife in her stressful job. And sometimes that's even harder because, you know, as much as we want to think things are calibrated and equal, guys don't have babies.

26:24Sam Parr:Yeah, yeah, yeah. You also, like hanging out with you now, you seem super happy and optimistic. But in the book, you're like, I'm prone to anxiety. And that was like, I think, a polite way of saying it. But like, you seem like a pretty anxious person occasionally.

26:38Lloyd Blankfein:No, well, I'm wired that way a little bit. You know, I inherited from my dad was an anxious person. You know, I made my kids anxious. You know, unfortunately, there's benefits and burdens to every situation. Being anxious and looking around corners for problems and seeing things that could go wrong, I think that suited me and my job. I mean, not all of life is about your job. You could be happy in other things. You should be happy in other ways and other parts of life besides just your job. But just looking at that narrow point, I was in a, you know, I was in a risky business with a firm with a big balance sheet that had a lot of investments and that bought and sold and price risk and took on other risks that other people didn't want to have for a price.

27:17Lloyd Blankfein:And you know something, 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. And in my life, I generally upbeat that I think things will tend to work out, but I know that before they work out, they go wrong. A lot of things go wrong.

27:34Sam 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?

27:41Lloyd Blankfein:Well, when you ask me any, of course, I will say yes, but not enough that would be reasonable to most people. No, I traveled a lot. And then here's, again, where having a supportive spouse, you know, it was very helpful. And look, my wife, Laura, I was a lawyer, worked in big law firms. And, you know, now she's, you know, the chair of Barnard College and other things. She helped to oversee a charter school. You know, she's, you know, very involved, you know, 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.

28:12Lloyd Blankfein:And I'm going to tell you, when we moved overseas, she's the one who got the car, got the house, you know, 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, you know, all the work that made it possible.

28:25Sam Parr:Yeah. I think about my wife now, she's a stay-at-home mom right now. And, uh, it's awesome, man. Having someone like who has your back, it's pretty great. Like, I don't even know how we pay a lot of our bills. We were talking the other day, we were talking last night and I was like, look, I'm not trying to be morbid, but like if you died, I wouldn't know how certain things happen at all. Like how does our rent get paid? Or like, do we pay utility? Like I didn't do anything.

28:49Lloyd 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.

28:56Sam Parr:Really? She does it all. Laura does it all.

28:58Lloyd 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.

29:05Sam Parr:That's it. Can I ask you about that? That's actually interesting. Do you guys meet to discuss finances at all?

29:10Lloyd Blankfein:I'm in charge of generating the money, and she's really in charge of distributing it.

29:15Sam Parr:You told the story. I think you were close to 40 or maybe you're late 30s, and you were like, we bought a vacation home, and it was like maybe 300 grand, I think. And you're like, that was all of our money.

29:26Lloyd Blankfein:No, it was more than all of our money.

29:28Sam 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 -

29:34Lloyd Blankfein:Yeah, it was probably a new partner. But in the early days, the way, I mean, too much, 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.

29:43Sam Parr:Yeah, you were like, you know, I don't have a lot of like cash.

29:47Lloyd Blankfein:I had no, like no money. And, you know, we barred. And so we were driving to the closing. And now I'm a different kind of guy. I can buy things. I don't even go to the closing. Lawyers do it. But in those days, you know, we were angsting about everything. and we bought, you know, we had a very small apartment in the city and we were having kids. And at that point we had just had our second kid and there was no place for them to, you know, breathe or run around in our little apartment. So instead of getting a bigger apartment in the city, we bought a relatively small place out in the, you know, at the beach.

30:18Lloyd Blankfein:And we were going through the math, or my wife was really, my wife was doing this and she was going through in her mind, where the money for the closing and she had to come up to a certain amount. And so we borrowed this much. And, you know, I had this much in this account and that much in that account. And she couldn't make it work out to the total we needed to close. And she was freaked out. And so we drove like, you know, 30 miles where she's going over and over this stuff and doing it. And finally, we realized she forgot to count the down payment that we'd made on the house, which was 10%.

30:53Lloyd Blankfein:So she kept coming short.

30:55Sam Parr:So you guys were like really on the edge.

30:57Lloyd Blankfein:Yeah. Yeah, we were. I mean, we were able to buy dinner that night. Of course. You know, it wasn't a question of survivability.

31:06Sam Parr:I just don't think that I—

31:07Lloyd Blankfein:We exhausted more than all of our savings.

31:10Sam Parr:We do a monthly meeting. I learned this from my friend Ramit. He's a personal finance author. And we've been doing this since, you know, I started dating my wife when we were 25, probably at 26. We moved in together. And we would do like a look back where we're like, here's what we spent this month. is that in line or not in line with our expectations and our budget? And are we happy with it? Do we want to spend more? Do we want to spend less? Are we happy with what we spent on? And that discipline has been nice, and we've never, ever, ever worried.

31:37Lloyd Blankfein:Look, I grew up in a household when my dad worked nights at the post office, but before he got that job, he'd worked in a private thing. I think he drove a truck for a while, and he worked in a dry goods store as a clerk, and he actually lost his job, was unemployed for a while. So I grew up in a household where, you know, where the rent was, you know, very scarce and stuff. So I'm used to that kind of fretting and being, you know, and being nervous about, like really nervous about money.

32:06Sam Parr:What age did that stop?

32:07Lloyd Blankfein:You know, probably in my, you know, in my 30s. You know, so that's a privileged position. You know, I'm lucky that way. But I grew up, but, you know, listen, I was pretty scarred growing up in a household where money was scarce. And so I'm familiar with what people think. Like, you know, it's very funny because people, you know, I'm a, you know, CEO of Goldman Sachs, blah, blah, blah. I'm a real fat cat kind of guy that's at Vivo. But, you know, a lot of times people will assert that. I remember being with some politicians where they were saying, what do you know about this or that? And what do you, you know, and I'm going, listen, I, you know, I did some research on you before this conversation.

32:40Lloyd Blankfein:But your dad went to Yale. My dad went to the post office. So why are you telling me what, you know, that I don't know?

32:45Sam Parr:And that stuff doesn't go away either. Like the way that the first 20 years that you experience, it's like a lower T trauma a little bit. Not to be too woo-woo, but like I felt the same way. My mom and dad told me they were like, when I think they said like when I graduated high school, they were like, we had like$8 ,000. That was our situation. And I was like, weren't you nervous? And they were like, yeah, we were nervous all the time.

33:07Lloyd Blankfein:When I got to college, after I bought books and did this, and I remember bought a sweater, which was a very big deal for me. because when I got to college, I wasn't dressed the way everybody else was dressed. And, you know, I just didn't know. I came from Brooklyn. I never saw it. And so, you know, I went out and I bought a sweater to put over a tennis shirt because that's how everybody dressed in those days. And then after I bought, and at one point, I had, I remember this, I had$11 left over.

33:32Sam Parr:What year?

33:34Lloyd Blankfein:Freshman year, this would have been like 1971 or two.

33:37Sam Parr:Yeah, so it's still only worth like, what, 50 bucks?

33:40Lloyd Blankfein:And I was on financial aid, like full financial aid. But full financial aid doesn't cover, you know, going to movies or things like that. And, you know, just, you know, buying a beer. And then, so somebody said, you should go to the financial office and tell them that, you know, in this situation, can they help you out? And I went to the financial aid office and they said, here, fill out this form. And on one side, put what you have. On the other side, put what you need and see whether there's a difference between that. And I did that and I turned it in. And I remember making it so that there was a difference of$500.

34:09Lloyd Blankfein:Like my life cost$500 more than what I had. And so a clerk looked at it and said, oh, okay. And right there while I waited, she made out a check for$500 and gave it to me. And I said, whoa.

34:24Sam Parr:I want more of that. No, no, I didn't want more. You should have said$5 ,000.

34:27Lloyd Blankfein:I know you've heard the jokey reaction is I should have asked for a thank. No, but the point was it was the first time in my life that I wasn't really nickled and dined. It was like unbelievable. And by the way, that 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. But as a result of that, you know, my commitment to, again, university is I, you know, I co-chaired the campaign for financial aid. And I did, you know, that was a big deal because it was not only that I got it, but I got it in a way that had a generosity of spirit to it.

35:00Lloyd Blankfein:And so I didn't feel bad. I wasn't made to feel bad about it. And that was, so I think, you know, everyone, you know, my category thinks about giving, but I also think about how it feels to receive.

35:11Sam Parr:Yeah.

35:12Lloyd Blankfein:And so I came away with a feeling that, you know, it's not just enough to give people what they need, but you have to give them, you have to get to it in a way where it's a positive experience also.

35:24Sam Parr:Yeah. Where it feels a little dignified.

35:26Lloyd Blankfein:It's dignified. And again, that$500, I hope I've repaid a lot, 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 that I think about that moment when I got, because I was relieved I got the money but I was also, I didn't feel bad about it.

35:47Sam Parr:This is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least$3 million a year in revenue because around this point, that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company and you realize two things. One, you've done something great but you're still a long way from your final destination. And two, you look around and you realize, I am all alone. I've outrun my peers, which means you're now making$10 million decisions alone by yourself. And that is when mediocrity can creep in. My company, Hampton, we solved this problem by giving a room of vetted peers, of other entrepreneurs who are going to hold you accountable, call you out on your nonsense, and help show you the way.

36:26Sam Parr:Because the fact is, is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there. And they're hard to find. And if you can't find them, it's hard to have this explicit time, this explicit place where you sit down, where the rules are clear, that we are here to help each other and to be one another's board of directors. The biggest risk is not failing. You have a company and it's working. You're going to be fine. But the biggest risk is waking up 10 years from now and saying, Shit, I barely grew in business and in life. And for people like you who are ambitious, wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid.

37:00Sam Parr:We have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members. And I know this stuff actually works, whether you work with Hampton or you get your own group on your own. But having a group like this, a group of people who you meet with in real life once a month, it can change your life. It changed mine and I know it will change yours. So check it out, joinhampton.com. There's this book called Die With Zero. Have you ever seen that book?

37:22Lloyd Blankfein:No, but the title tells me everything.

37:24Sam 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 like spend while you're alive because when you're dead, like who cares? And so the premise is if you're going to give, if you can pull it off, give now. Because at least you can experience it with the joy.

37:43Lloyd Blankfein:There's another way of expressing it that I didn't originate, that somebody said it to me but it resonated with me. He said he wanted to give with his warm hand, not his cold hand. That's cool. That was a very good visual for me. You know, to feel. Give with your warm hand, not your cold hand.

37:57Sam Parr:Is that what you intend to do?

37:58Lloyd Blankfein:Yeah, I have to work things through. And I joked in the book, and it's kind of only half a joke. So putting aside philanthropy and stuff and just thinking of kids, sometimes I give things, you know, I give stuff to them, and then I feel ambivalent that they have what I gave them.

38:18Sam Parr:What do you mean ambivalent? Like you don't feel good?

38:19Lloyd Blankfein:that, you know, I sort of, you know, I'll give stuff to my kids because I can afford to do it. And they're great kids and they work really hard. They're super. There's nothing, you know, nothing wrong with them. You know, it has not ruined my kids that they get stuff far from it. But, you know, I'll give them stuff. Then I'll say, you have no idea. I've got, you know, I didn't have what you have and I live like this and you're living like that. And I'm saying, well, the reason why they're not living, they're living so well is because I gave it to them.

38:45Sam Parr:Dude, I had the exact same conversation with my wife yesterday.

38:47Lloyd Blankfein:So if I gave it to them, Why am I then acting, you know, regretful that they have it?

38:55Sam Parr:I had the same talk with my wife yesterday. I remember saying, telling her, we had just hung out with someone who was born into a wealthy family and I was envious. I was like, that asshole hasn't worked hard for this and that. And it was rooted a little bit in jealousy of like, you know, I'm better than them because I worked for it and I wasn't given nothing. And then like, I was like, well, but I intend to give to my kid. It's like, I'm going to create, my children are going to be the people that I dislike. And I thought that was really strange for me to think that way. Well, your kids will turn out,

39:23Lloyd Blankfein:kids turn out the way they turn out for a variety of reasons. One of which could be, you know, their neediness or the surpluses they have, but that could be a small part of it. And there are other things that make your kids. I have no issues. My kids, you know, you know, terrific. They worked hard. They went to good schools. They applied. They were at Goldman? No, at each work, you know, Goldman's a kind of firm that doesn't discourage people from bringing their kids into the business. It's like, you know, it was an old partnership, family firm. You know, it was a good thing to big. So all my kids worked at least briefly at the firm, but it was too complicated.

39:55Lloyd Blankfein:It was complicated for them to work there. You know, my name was Smith. They could have hidden out. But if your name is blind, fine. You know, it was just too. And by the way, the burdens of being that were very heavy. You know, I can't tell you, I'm not in my kids' heads totally, so I can't tell you what they feel. So I'll just say generically, if you're the son of a very senior or the daughter of a very senior person in the organization, You have to worry that people think you didn't get your job by merit. And they'll think, you know, you don't work hard. And they'll think this. So there's a lot of pressure on kids to come in earlier, stay later, show their moxie.

40:26Lloyd Blankfein:Yeah, there's some baggage. There's baggage that they have to overcome. And so it would have been too oppressive for them to say.

40:31Sam Parr:Yeah, I saw someone, I think it was like, I was researching it. It was like an old Gawker article.

40:35Lloyd Blankfein:Yeah.

40:35Sam Parr:And you seem pretty tough-skinned. I would have been very upset about that, about people writing that stuff. That would have been really bothersome.

40:43Lloyd Blankfein:Sorry, it turns out I had a thick skin. Look, if I didn't have a thick skin, I wouldn't have survived there and 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.

40:54Sam Parr:It's still hard.

40:55Lloyd Blankfein:Oh, I didn't like it, but it turns out I could take that. I could take a punch. To be the CEO of a firm as high profile as Goldman, going through the stressful times that we went through, to survive that, you needed a thick skin, and I had one.

41:11Sam Parr:Was there a point where you thought, this isn't going to work?

41:14Lloyd Blankfein:No.

41:14Sam Parr:It felt good the whole, or it felt not good. No, no, it didn't feel good.

41:17Lloyd Blankfein: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 challenged more to get to the point where I can't 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 could take a punch and people who can't take a punch. And so 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, it doesn't make them a bad, people have different wirings. Some people are athletic. Some people aren't.

41:45Sam Parr:Do you think you're born a great investor?

41:47Lloyd Blankfein:I don't know. I certainly wasn't, so I can't tell you. You don't think you were? No, I ran a firm that contained a lot of great investors. I'm not a bad investor. I can read balance sheet and plans and proposals, and I have opinions on the future. A lot of times I'm right, but I didn't, again, I didn't climb the ranks because specifically I was an investor. Goldman Sachs has great investors and great salesmen and great traders and great bankers and this. And fortunately, I didn't have to be the greatest at any one of those things. I was a pretty good manager and I was a pretty good strategist for the business.

42:20Lloyd Blankfein:And I was a good partner to other people. And that was what was required of my job. Just look, maybe once upon a time, the captain of the ship got to be captain because he could do every job on the boat. I'm not sure that's true in a nuclear Navy. And so I will tell you, maybe there was a time that the person who ran a financial firm could do was best at every job in that firm. But I couldn't have been. No one could be at a firm as complicated and as big and diverse as Goldman. And so I didn't have to be.

42:49Sam Parr:My last question, you had this really cool thought. It was awesome, actually. And I wrote it down and I've been thinking about it a lot. This idea that someone said it to you when you became a partner. You were like, or they were like, you know, our goal here is that you become successful enough that when you die, there'll be a really long multi-paragraph obituary about you. And we hope that your time at Goldman is only a sentence or two.

43:11Lloyd Blankfein:Yes, that was when I got, when you made partner, you had a conversation with, you know, senior partner there who was sort of assigned to acculturate new people to the firm. And he gave you some rules of the road, you know, things like make sure you don't get anywhere near anything that today would be called Me Too kind of activity. You know, the warnings of that kind of stuff, then a warning to, you know, make sure you're very rigorous and conservative on your taxes.

43:37Sam Parr:Yeah. And then there were two other things that they advised, one of which is they set up a charitable foundation for you.

43:43Lloyd Blankfein:And they said, we expect you to do this, to use it, and to give money away. And 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. And as a result of being on philanthropic boards and other things, you'll engage with a set of people that's broader than the people you might need in your business life. So it's good for you, good for the firm, do this. So that was another topic that was broached. And then the final thing they said was, and as far as, you know, your balance in your life, you know, think of it this way.

44:12If you live the kind of life that there's an obituary written about you and it's nine paragraphs long, make it so that you do enough so that there's no more than three of those nine paragraphs about your life at Goldman.

44:24Lloyd Blankfein:That's the best. You know, that may be the best, but it's not going to be the case for me because I stayed too long.

44:29Sam Parr:That's what I was going to ask you. You have to do something now. Well, okay. What do you hope that—

44:33Lloyd Blankfein:Maybe I'll join the Foreign Legion or go up in a space—

44:35Sam Parr:Well, what do you hope the rest of the paragraphs will be? Do you have, like, a goal? I think at this point, you know, every hive has a queen bee.

44:43Lloyd Blankfein:You know, the other guy, the worker bees and the others, they go off. And, you know, the queens stay. I was caught up, you know, as a CEO in 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. And look, I wrote a book called Streetwise, Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs. So when I wrote a memoir, it even has Goldman Sachs in the, in the subtitle. So I'm never going to, 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 and I do other activities and I'm interested in other stuff.

45:17Lloyd Blankfein:I retired early enough with enough gas in the tank that I could go out and learn, you know, I tried teaching a little bit and I said, you know something better than teaching, I want to learn. And so I, you know, take some courses online and do some, you know, things. And that's the luxury of my position now. So, you know, I'm feeding my curiosity about things away from business. But I also like business. And I like markets. And so, 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.

45:51Lloyd Blankfein:And I'm interested in linguistics and anthropology. and I read a lot of history.

45:57Sam Parr:I think you said you were like, if a trader asked me what to study, I tell him to study history. I do. What do you read?

46:02Lloyd Blankfein:You know, a while ago, for some reason, I eschewed medieval history because it's hard to follow.

46:08Sam Parr:Yeah, it is.

46:09Lloyd Blankfein:It's very hard to follow, but then I sort of got caught up in it because of, you know, the way people fought in those days, relationship with religion and the church. And I sort of got interested in reading it. And sometimes you pick up good authors that you really like the way they write. And so you're less interested in the topic they pick to write about than the fact that they're writing it. I tend also to, I like reading a lot of biographies.

46:32Sam Parr:Which one moved the needle for you most? For me, it was Titan. And I know you did a thing with Ron Chernow.

46:36Lloyd Blankfein:Actually, I read Titan. I didn't love it as much as that. I mean, you know, the rock, obviously about Rockefeller. And I've read a lot of his, I've read a lot. You know, when I read like an author, I tend to read all of his stuff. There's a book I write. There's an author I always like. She's been dead a good number of years now named Barbara Tuchman, who wrote—she won actually two Pulitzer Prizes, so I didn't actually discover her. She's been discovered away from me. But she wrote Guns of August, about the origins of World War I, a great book, not a biography, but a fantastic book. And by the way, very influential book.

47:06Sam Parr:World War I, it's about? Yes.

47:08Lloyd 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. But she wrote a book that I found really fun that I'm not sure. It's not her most famous book, but it's called A Distant Mirror. And it's a history of a life that was led in the 14th century. And 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. And the 14th century, the reason why it was called A Distant Mirror, she wrote this book like in the middle of the Cold War when everybody was worried that the world was going to be blown apart in a nuclear war and stuff.

47:43Lloyd Blankfein:and actually in the 14th century was a time when they had the Black Plague and the Papal Schism and the Hundred Years' War 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 and that's why it was called a distant mirror. It was sort of like a mirror on the 20th century and the jumping off point for telling the story was this particular guy, Baron Cousy was a French aristocrat, but he fought in the Hundred Years' War He ended up marrying an English woman. And so he appeared, it was like Zelig. He popped up in a lot of places.

48:18Lloyd Blankfein:And so it gave you the opportunity to write a history of a lot of different, of what was going on in that era. And that was, I enjoyed reading that book. That was one of the few books I've read twice.

48:26Sam Parr:That's awesome.

48:27Lloyd Blankfein:I also liked, totally different, I liked reading The Power Broker about Robert Moses.

48:31Sam Parr:By, uh. Carrow. Robert Carrow. He just had a thing at the American History Museum. Yes. It was awesome.

48:37Lloyd Blankfein:And I'll tell you, the interesting thing is, the reason why I reread that, I read that book once when I was starting. And, you know, there's no reason why they should know him, but it was a guy, you know, basically built New York. And, well, the power broker, because he asserted power that on paper he shouldn't have had, but by dint of his personality and different offices he held and clever things, he really was a power broker to the point of dominating even the elected officials who were nominally his boss. And there were aspects of, he did great things. You know, he built, you know, from the Long Island Expressway to all sorts of things.

49:10Lloyd Blankfein:But he also had personality flaws that today look worse than they did in that era.

49:18Sam Parr:Yeah, I mean, he's accused of being a pretty big racist.

49:21Lloyd Blankfein:Yeah, he was accused of that, and he was accused of rolling over, building, cementing parks that were otherwise green that people today wouldn't do, but he did. So think of the founding fathers who created the template for a democracy when none had existed. you know, and yet they had slavery. And so how do you evaluate that? And so people have different, you know, how do you look at that? Does that disqualify the good things that they did? Or, you know, it gets very confusing and hard to fathom. And different people have different views about these things. And he was kind of a personality like that in a different way.

49:56Lloyd Blankfein:But, you know, when I first read the book as a young guy, I was focused on the flaw part.

50:03Sam Parr:Yeah.

50:04Lloyd Blankfein:And I said, oh God, this is a, you know, you know, this was a tough human being. I didn't think terrible, but tough and, you know, this. And then after 40 years of trying to get stuff done and build in a business and, you know, try to influence people to do what I wanted them to do when they didn't want to do it and the sacrifice I had to make and evaluating what I got done and the effort it took, I reread that Robert Moses book and all of a sudden his achievements started to go up. Yeah. And the other flaws kind of stayed the same. They didn't get better, but I became, I kind of valued him more.

50:44Lloyd Blankfein:What it showed was, again, it was less about Robert Moses at this point than it was about me because I had changed because as a result of trying to get things done and it made me appreciate the degree of difficulty of his achievements more than I had.

51:00Sam 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, he was like 28 or 30 years old when he wrote this.

51:10Lloyd Blankfein:No, 33 or 30, yes, I think.

51:11Sam Parr:When he wrote this document. And how much wisdom.

51:15Lloyd Blankfein:And there was no template for it, really. And, you know, the idea of something that, you know, we can get, you know, because democracy was a pejorative, demos. It was anarchy.

51:23Sam Parr:Yeah, and I think about that revolution, because Ken Burns has this American Revolution documentary, and it's just, I didn't realize how consequential the American Revolution was, and how, like, for the most part, there had never been democracy at such a large scale. And they made this document that was self-amending, like this idea that you can, like, we are flawed, and you can fix it. And that's just, like, crazy.

51:46Lloyd Blankfein:And by the way, that was, if you read a book, I just read a book on the Constitution, that was even debated.

51:50Sam Parr:There's a cool one by the guy who did the Brooklyn Bridge one where it talks about how it was the most important words of the Constitution was we believe these truths to be self-evident. And it just like goes –

52:02Lloyd Blankfein:And yet despite the self-evidence of the rules, they still had – they debated slavery. And by the way, it's not that they didn't know it was wrong at the time and they missed it. No, they knew. They knew. But by the way, another good book to read is, it's part of, it will ultimately be a three-volume scene by Rick Atkinson on the American Revolution. But 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. And of course, people debate it because then you have views, you know, people, you know, revise history and say, you know, these people were all evil.

52:40Lloyd Blankfein:they were, you know, they were, you know, it's like Columbus, you know, they don't want it. They renamed Columbus Day because he was, you know, 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, you know, in the 15th century, steered that ship to a continent that he wasn't sure was there for crying out loud. Give a guy, you know, let's have some credit on this stuff. You know, in other words, you can't, You know, nobody's going to be perfect. But, you know, we have those, you know, all these revisionary histories that stop admiring characteristics and achievements that are worth admiring just because there were other flaws in the person that delivered the achievement.

53:22Lloyd Blankfein:It's crazy.

53:23Sam Parr:Yeah, I've ignored the American Revolution for a long time, and now I've gone down this path because of that Ken's Burn documentary. And 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. And now that I'm in New York, I walk by all these bodegas that are owned by Vietnamese families.

53:44Lloyd Blankfein:Oh, spectacular.

53:45Sam Parr:And I'm like, this is the greatest place on earth where someone can come with nothing. And my favorite part is walking around here, you see these bodegas, and they're called American Cowboy or American Ink. And someone was so proud, but they didn't speak English enough to know, but they just knew that Cowboy in America was cool.

54:02Lloyd Blankfein:I know this is going to be controversial. I don't know who I'm going to upset. But, you know, it's like I would say that most of the people who are prominent social Democrats grew up in prosperous families here. Of course. And let me tell you, the people who grew up under communism don't wish the country was socialist.

54:16Sam Parr:Of course.

54:17Lloyd Blankfein:I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy. But, you know.

54:19Sam Parr:But I love like this immigrant. I'm like particularly like the immigrant journey. You know, I think I freaking love that. And, you know, I think like the American dream shouldn't be to move here and buy a home. It should be move here and start a small business. And I just think it's really cool.

54:33Lloyd Blankfein:But not everybody's competent. Everyone's capable. But the fact that people can do it. Look, I agree with you. And we're going through a moment where people, I guess people always question. Again, I grew up, I was a young guy during the Vietnam era. So I grew up and everybody was disgusted with the country and stuff. And listen, here's another good thing about the country. You can live here quite happily, quite comfortably while you express your contempt for the country.

54:58Sam Parr:Of course.

54:59Lloyd Blankfein:Where else can you do it?

55:00Sam Parr:The way that I describe America is I'm like, it's mostly good and we can improve.

55:05Lloyd Blankfein:And you could talk about all the bad stuff and you generally won't be arrested for it. Yeah, it's mostly great and we can improve. No, God, I am. But look, everybody has to rediscover these things. And maybe it's a function of age.

55:18Sam Parr:I could talk to you about history all day. I'm so happy that you're into that.

55:22Lloyd Blankfein:No, no, but I think—

55:22Sam Parr:That's why I like the Upper West Side, by the way.

55:24Lloyd Blankfein:No, but I like the history part. And I'll tell you why it relates to the commercial life. is that history, again, doesn't repeat, but to paraphrase a remark attributed to Mark Twain, is it doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And so patterns happen again. So we're going through these tough times, and oh, it's none like anything, but it's not that different from the late 60s when the country was very polarized. Or the McCarthy era, where we sort of went off the rails and then got back on the rails. So people will say, oh my God, I don't like, you know, the norms of society, you know, the norms of political, proper political behavior are gone forever.

56:03Lloyd Blankfein:Well, you know, we did have a civil war. We did have a McCarthy era. We did put, you know, Japanese American citizens who were Japanese descent in camps because we were freaked out by world, you know, by Pearl Harbor. And then we 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.

56:26Sam Parr:Yeah, I think Warren Buffett or you, I think, quoted Warren Buffett in the book saying like, you know, I wouldn't bet against America.

56:34Lloyd Blankfein:Well, I think a lot of people have said that. I wouldn't bet against America. And, you know, so if you watch the evening news, you read the newspaper, you'd walk away with one set of views.

56:43Sam Parr:Well, I think there's a lot of lazy phrases. For example, I see people online and they'll make comments. They're like, well, in this economy, blankety blank. Or it's so crazy out there. Like there's like these lazy phrases and I hate those phrases because it's sort of, I think the way that the words that you use shape how you think. Like it's hard to feel a certain demotion if you don't have a word to describe that emotion. And so I think that when people use phrases like, well, in this economy, it's hard to do blank. It's like, well, that's a pretty defeatist attitude. This economy is actually quite good.

57:13Sam Parr:And it doesn't matter what the economy is that shouldn't prevent you from exercising the action that you want to try to, I mean, it will always be hard.

57:21Lloyd Blankfein:I'm thinking today, you know, when I was crossing into adulthood, they were drafting people, Vietnam War, literally the body count coming out of, you know, they would read every Friday evening. They, you know, they would read, you know, scroll down the TV, you know, 350, 450, 600 died. And then, of course, compare that to World War II when, you know, when tens of thousands. A million people over four years. 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 maximizes the challenges that people face today because they're still scared of them because they're not resolved.

58:05Lloyd Blankfein:And so, you know, that's why it's good to read. That's why I think it's beneficial to read history because if they can go through that period, then we can get through ours.

58:13Sam Parr:Yeah, I do that all the time. I 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.

58:22Lloyd Blankfein:That's a good book, too, Undaunted Courage.

58:24Sam 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.

58:31Lloyd Blankfein:Sure, you know that coming from St. Louis. Of course.

58:34Sam Parr:And I'll tell you a funny story. That's where they started from. But they started in St. Louis where I'm from, and they basically said, just go west and figure out if there's a passage. And they didn't know what the hell they were doing.

58:41Lloyd Blankfein:Now they go to Portland, and then they find a progressive mayor. Yeah, it's a lot different now. Do you think Lewis and Clark would have been impressed by the progressivism?

58:48Sam Parr:Well, what's crazy is they went with 30 people and like none died. And so they go there and they find this woman named Sacagawea who spoke a variety of languages. And they're like, hey, come with us. Well, a lot of people don't talk about this. She had a three-month-old kid. And if you actually, there's a Sacagawea gold dollar. Have you ever seen one of those? Yes. Her kid is strapped to her. And I'm like, if she could do that, I don't need a baby thermometer for my bathtub. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't need all these gadgets if Sacagawea could carry this kid.

59:15Lloyd Blankfein:She had a kid, and I don't know how the kid turned out. I hope very well.

59:17Sam Parr:He turned out great. His name was Joseph. He went to my high school, by the way. He was in the first graduating class of my high school.

59:21Lloyd Blankfein:But I will tell you, the infant mortality rate was a lot higher then. So keep—

59:25Sam Parr:Don't let facts get in the way of a good story.

59:27Lloyd Blankfein:Keep the thermometer.

59:28Sam Parr:Don't let facts get away.

59:30Lloyd 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—

59:40Sam Parr:She ended up dying of illness at like, at her early 40s. So my story doesn't exactly hold true, but I appreciate you so much. This is awesome.

59:46Lloyd Blankfein:Yeah, no, my pleasure.

59:47Sam Parr:All right, that's it. That's the pod.

59:49Lloyd Blankfein:I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

1:00:00Sam Parr:All right, let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast. Because if you're listening to this, you like podcasts. And what's better than one podcast? Another podcast. And let me tell you, another podcast you should check out. It's called Success Story. If you like hearing about different success stories and hearing Q &A sessions with successful business leaders

1:00:15Lloyd Blankfein:or hearing keynote presentations or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics, this is a great podcast for you. So check it out wherever you get your podcasts.