Let's kill her and let's go. Fire.
That's a top one.
That is one of the most interesting conversations you and I have ever had.
Unbelievable. This is a guy who grew up in the housing projects in Brooklyn. Somehow at 16 years old, goes to Harvard on a full scholarship, navigates his way through Harvard, then law school. And again, this is not someone who has this major plan. He's kind of just like trying to figure it out like us. A little bit anxious, a little bit unsure, but cares a lot. He's very thoughtful, always thinking about strategy, and navigates himself into a small commodity trading firm, trading gold, backdoors his way in to the most prestigious firm on Wall Street, and within like a decade becomes the CEO, one of the most powerful, legendary firms in the planet, and has to navigate through the great financial crisis. You know, one of the things I loved about this interview is he talks about the different culture shocks he had where he constantly felt like an outsider. Even when walking to the elevator, he's like, you know, I didn't know I was short until I went to Harvard. Everyone was much taller. Well, I also didn't really know I was short until I went to a big public high school in America and I was like, whoa, everyone was much taller than me. He was constantly trying to figure out this culture shock. He said a couple times, he's like, well, they had this code, but I didn't know what the code was and I had to figure out what the code was. And that goes for Harvard, that goes for Wall Street. He is not the traditional CEO of a legendary bank, but he figured it out.
And the other thing I loved also we talked about is something that you and I struggle with, but also we talk about a lot, which is this anxiety that we all have as Jewish entrepreneurs or frankly just Jewish people that we're always kind of waiting for the shoe to drop and what's the worst case scenario. And, you know, we don't call it this, but he articulates it well as sort of risk management. I mean, he's the consummate leader. You know what I took away was first of all, he has one of the most incredible combinations of intelligence and emotional intelligence I've ever seen.
His IQ EQ ratio is off the chart.
And I mean, he drops these snippets of wisdom. I mean, this is a man who led a room of 40 potential CEOs. Any one of them could have been CEO of these are the greatest executives in the world. And he was the top executive amongst top executives. And he led them through not only a difficult time but an existential time.
And there were a couple of them too, right? He talks about 94, he talks about 98, 2001 and then obviously the 2008 global financial crisis. He has this line that I keep thinking about which is like when you have no choice, there is no problem. Right.
Right. No choice, no problem. That's kind of how we live. Right.
But he almost convinces himself of it. He actually has choices.
That actually, well he also convinces himself that he had no choice and he also talks about the fact that that actually could be an advantage that those of us that don't have legacy families where we can go to any school we want or connections on Wall Street but actually we may all be at an advantage if we don't have those things.
This was a favorite. I mean this was an incredible episode. We had a ton of fun. We had so much fun. We laughed. It was just we went into deep detail about it. The jokes kept going. Ladies and gentlemen, Lloyd Blankfein. Let's go.
Started from the bottom, now the whole team here. Started from the bottom, now we started from the bottom, now my whole team in. Started from the bottom, now we here. Started from the bottom, now the whole team.
My one of my media advisers, Warren Buffett, once told me that he never did interviews that would be edited. He only did live broadcasts.
Because in a live thing, he knows what he's doing and he knows the impression he's trying to create, right? Anybody could do anything to whomever they want with editing.
Yeah, that's right. I will tell you though that I will probably ask you for an introduction to someone who you're friends with in a couple months from now to do the show as well. So my your experience here has to be incredible otherwise you're going to say no to me.
Yeah, I might say no to you anyway.
You might say no to me anyway. That's true.
Oh, you're not going to tell me now.
I want to. He doesn't need you because this is going to be the best interview you've ever done. We've literally had guests say that to us. Yeah, everybody. And they're like this is the greatest interview ever and this is the greatest. I'm telling you, have with you having said that,
It would have to be so far ahead of number two before I would say it to you that this is the best. That's right. So, it's a high bar. Hold that thought.
I want to talk about Seymour.
I would say that the snacks aren't so good.
So, it's on my office. This is. We're just born in this office. I will complain to the Kushners about this. I want to talk about.
Of course, you could have brought in snacks. You know, it didn't have to be your office.
We're on a boat. There's no advertisers. A man asked if they could advertise here. We said no. We fund this ourselves and we're a guy with humble roots now measure.
You grew up in Lynon houses project.
In the depth of our poverty, my mom would offer Danish to whoever came to the door.
That should be the name of your new book.
I did not. My mom offered Danish.
I wasn't asking for caviar.
I want to start with that. I want to start about your mom and see where your dad.
Sure. You grew up in Brooklyn in housing projects. Lynen houses, very well-known housing projects now. Notorious. And well before you became valedictorian, champion swimmer and all the other stuff you did professionally. I want to talk about what you guys talked about at the dinner table.
Well, I'm still stuck on champion swimmer. I was hardly a champion swimmer.
Well, you were a swimmer.
You swim. You're a Jewish champion swimmer.
You didn't drown. So that bomb.
I could tell you all the great basketball players and football players that came from my neighborhood. They didn't produce great swimmers. Okay.
In the projects of Brooklyn. What did you guys talk about at the dinner table? Was dinner a thing in your house?
No. My dad had two jobs. One of which was working nights at the post office as a mail sorter. So he worked nights. So we didn't. I barely saw my dad. I feel bad about that because I don't have a lot of memories of having conversations with him. I tell this to my kids all the time. You know, one day you might want to talk to me. So, stop and talk to me because I wish I'd spent more time talking to my dad, but he was working. And when he wasn't working, he was sleeping.
And it was a small house, so he had to be quiet. So, we were always aware of him being around, but really never engaging that much.
Right. And then when he retired, they moved to some place called Yokaboka number four in Vista in what they would call Boca Raton or Palm Beach except it wasn't. It was like 200 miles inland in a field.
Yes. It was 200 miles inland. But they did that and so I didn't see them that much.
Also, I left home early because of the recognition of my brilliance but rather because of the public schools in New York.
You were able to skip eighth grade, I think.
You could automatically almost skip eighth grade.
Because they had a two-year program that was set in but what was extraordinary was not part of the protocol is that at some point you ran through your courses the requirements. New York has regents. If you took all your regents and you passed it, you could continue to go to school, but you met all the requirements. You didn't have to. I got there a year earlier than I left when I was 15. And I kind of red shirted because I was really trying to get into an out of town school.
Okay.
Did that mean Harvard at that point or not?
No, no, out of town. Something not here. I would otherwise have gone to Brooklyn College or Queens College which looked as good, because Queens was better than Brooklyn. And then I started having aspirations to a state school and now that gets to the complication of paying for it and living away, not living at home. And then later I had aspirations for private school. I thought I was going to go to a state school and then I went to college night at Midwood High School, which was I went to Jefferson High School, but.
It wasn't even your school's college night.
No, I don't think we had a college night. We had penitentiary night or something at our school.
Which jail are you going to end up in? We'll tell you all about the food situation at those jails.
Yeah. And I went to a booth for Ivy League schools and I collected applications. The guy who was there representing the school, I thought it was a real guy. For all we know, he might have been 19 years old. He might have been a student from there, but they had a booth. I took an application and I must have filled out those applications.
I'd love to get a copy of it if they ever had it on microfilm. I think I filled it out like you'd fill out a landing card on a plane. It asks a question and you write the answer. So these essay questions, I was just doing it.
And I got accepted to some. I didn't get accepted to all but I got accepted to Harvard and so.
Okay. Were your parents? Everyone around. Were your grades good?
My grades were good. I had a reflection of the background. My board scores were, I took all my achievement tests. I took my SATs in the morning and my achievement tests in the afternoon because that's what you did. Now I know how it's really done because my kids went through this and you have tutors and you game it and you can count this score and count that. We didn't know about those things. So I had near-perfect scores in math and very poor in verbal because I hadn't read a book. Now I'm more of a verbal person than a mathy person. I'm good intuitively in math. I had to have been for my job, otherwise I wouldn't have done well, but I'm not trained in it. I did very well in math aptitude and very poor in verbal skills. So you could have made a case for taking them or a case for not. It would have been easy either way. And some people went.
And Lloyd, was it a typical Jewish family household like mom wanted you to be a doctor? What was the messaging around education?
No one had gone to, I don't know. It's typical for my background and neighborhood. I'm still friends with people that I grew up with. They did well but well was... I never met anybody that had no, none of the parents had suits.
Okay.
We read the story that the only person with a suit was your rabbi.
Yeah, the rabbi had a suit.
Which associated with that, right? So, if you have a suit, you must be a rabbi.
I think some of the teachers may have worn suits.
So, it wasn't education, education, education. That wasn't the messaging you got.
You know? My mother worked, my father worked nights. She was sort of on her own. The most important person in my life growing up was my older sister who was nine years older than me. I can't say. I hope she had a happy, my sister passed away. But she had a tough life. Got married at 19, had a baby at 20, got divorced at 21, back in the house with the kid. It wasn't easy in a small apartment. Very small apartment. My grandmother lived with us. She slept in the living room. I shared a room with my grandmother. My sister.
Wow. You shared a room with your grandmother.
I did till I went to college. Well, originally when my sister.
Being a teenage boy and sharing a room with your grandmother. I mean.
Yeah. It was motivating to get out of the house.
It was. I think now, look, in my life being involved in a global industry, I've met people who walked across deserts and worked their way into Oxford and ended up in the same places that you or I ended up with and doing other things. So I'm not going to win a hardship contest, and at the time I didn't think of it as hardships, right? I grew up in the projects. Everyone around me was very similar. Now the neighborhood started to disintegrate and we were sort of the last. There was a lot of upward mobility at that time and we forgot to mobilize. So we were there for a long time. When I left to go to college, by then a lot of the people who I started high school with, their families had moved to a nicer place.
One of the nicer places, Co-op City in the Bronx was a big place.
Yeah, they weren't sharing a room with their grandmother anymore.
But it wasn't like I didn't know about these things. I didn't know how people lived.
So you get into Harvard, and there's such a contrast between the way you're describing your upbringing. What did grandma and sis say about this?
It was kind of shocking. I'm trying to remember what I thought at the time. Now looking back at what they thought, it must have been kind of scary. There was some concern about paying for it, but it's need blind so they offered me full everything. Not because of scholarship but because of need, which I had. And they tried to be helpful. They took me, I had never seen it. It was only after I got accepted that I went up with my sister on a Greyhound bus. My sister never went to college. In fact, she had a general diploma, a GED. She went through high school, but they routed you. There was an academic path or something, it was called business but it was really teaching typing and stenography.
Like a trade kind of thing.
Yes. So she took that program. She was nice, we went on a Greyhound to Boston, told no one we were going up there, got off the bus, went to Harvard, didn't know what it was, went to the statue of John Harvard and then essentially went home.
So you're at Harvard, you've now got in, you're 16 years old. This must have been such a different world for you.
Yeah. First of all, none of us knew. I remember thinking back. Do you remember the book that everybody reads in high school, A Separate Peace? Those kids are in prep school. I didn't know what a prep school was. I thought a prep school is what you went to after high school.
Yeah. For better preparation. I went to South Florida public school, but I knew people that went to a prep school. So I at least knew what that was. You didn't even know that world. And it was kind of innocent. None of this was bad and I don't feel bad about it. I'm a little detached from it. I'm looking at it, but my parents took me to the mail shop on Ralph Avenue in Brooklyn for a suit.
Literally. I Googled this to go back and it's really true. Things to advertise and to give, like two sports jackets, three pairs of slacks, mix 16 outfits, a transistor radio for $99. I mean, go Google it.
What was the radio for? Just the bonus?
So, I started in 1971. This is really the last fumes of the 60s on campuses. Think of what was going on at Harvard. They shut down Harvard in 1969. Those kids are still there. The smoke is still coming from tear gassing people. I go up to Harvard and from the mail shop, I bring up my wardrobe, which included a double-breasted rust-colored sports jacket and powder blue slacks, which is what the salesman at the mail shop thought would look nice, is what people are wearing to college. I get there and my roommates who are from prep schools are dressed in loin cloths and I'm coming in looking like a lounge act or something. So it was tough. I was from Mars.
And they were taking, my course, the kids from public schools always start slow and then they accelerate. I was taking Math 1A which was calculus.
Mhm.
And they were taking Math 55 which was a graduate course in math because they had gone through that and they knew all this stuff. They pick up my homework and say look at this bay. Why do you say the kids in public school end up doing better later?
I assert that it was said to me and so it may have been said to me just to make me feel better at the time, but I think statistically they can look at who comes in and how people perform in their careers. I wouldn't give it as testimony but I had heard. If it's true, I can understand why because the people who get themselves there from public school, they're not necessarily higher, they're the people who kind of hack their way through 10,000 other kids who might have wanted to do that.
But where the kids, it wasn't destined for them. They had to really work at that.
Well, but at the same time, I'm reminded listening to your story of this concept of Exodus, a very Jewish concept. This concept of Exodus and arrival. Everybody focuses on the Exodus like poor kid growing up rough neighborhood, you're on the rise. But then you have to arrive. You get to Harvard, you are in a different world.
It's bad and you have to go. But it's like the hardiest salmon that make it back. I'll fast forward and I've had another parallel to that. I look at the people when we're recruiting at Goldman and we recruit all these, we take in like 3 or 4 thousand people a year out of school in all our vast empire. It gives you an opportunity. My president is Gary Cohn who went to American University, my successor who's doing awful went to Hamilton, and my CFO went to Rutgers.
Wow. They didn't go to Harvard.
Goldman didn't want us. We went to public school.
Yeah. By the way, Goldman didn't want me either. We'll get there.
I got acquired into Goldman. I look at that and I've evolved this thought. I don't know if it's right or not, but I'm thinking to myself, if you go in, the average is going to be higher at these great schools, which are very hard to get into and the average person may be higher and certainly the bottom quartile is going to be a lot higher. But if you're going to look at the tippy top of Harvard or the tippy top of the University of Minnesota, where you're the top of 50,000 as opposed to the top of 1,600, and you've gone through that, I would say that having gone through that, they're at least as good, maybe better. And plus they have the history and the background to be that person.
And probably more grit, probably a little more life experience.
I would say statistically you're swimming upstream against a much bigger current. Whereas if you go to Chad or Pillsbury or Andover, the current's going with you.
Yeah, I mean it is difficult not to go from Andover to Harvard. You have to do something.
I don't want to minimize. It's not difficult because people get disappointed that they don't get in. But you're not swimming against the tide. You're swimming with it.
How was the Harvard experience generally? After year one, did you find your footing? I heard talk about almost like a secret code there that you didn't know, but eventually did you figure it out?
Every year it gets better in my memory. Probably not in actuality, I'm sure. It gets better in my head. I get most of my friends from Harvard. I say most of my friends from Harvard, I didn't meet at Harvard. I met doing alumni events post Harvard and like Zelig I've been drawn into people's memories and we talk about the good time we went here or there. And I go along with it and I said, 'Yes, that was really a lot of fun. Remind me again what we did?' Because I wasn't there. It was still very stratified. I imagine it's that way today. But however it is today, it was more so in the early 70s.
And what was it like going back home after summer breaks, for example? It must have been a bit of a mindfuck. Here I'm Harvard, now I'm going back to...
Yeah, in a way maybe different than when you think. If I think about it now, I'm sort of embarrassed at myself. Of course I was in that world, but really not of the world. I was an observer of it. And I would like my friends back home to think it. Today I wouldn't want them to think it. I'd want to be accessible to them, not make myself inaccessible by imagining some mode. But I was a little screwed up and young. I would go back and I dressed, when I got to Harvard, the first thing I did was I bought a Lacoste shirt and a sweater that I put over it.
Tied around your neck and like, Zaro version of would. Yeah.
Yeah. I didn't wear the sweater because the second thing I did after I got my sweater is, not being well versed in how to take care of myself, I naturally washed it in a washing machine, put it in a dryer, and it looked like Mickey Mouse's sweater after that.
You started calling your friends old sons of bitches.
Yes. No, I called him old sport. Like Jay Gatsby. It wasn't that bad because I didn't think of it. Had I thought of that, I might have done it. The point was, I would be embarrassed to watch myself because I did that. But really, I didn't quite fit there and I didn't quite fit in the other place. It was kind of bad. I was kind of looking jerky.
And talking about how great it was even though I wasn't thinking it was that great.
At this time, were your parents like, 'Okay, Lloyd, we're so proud of you. You're the first in the family.' They were kind of apprehensive. Now as an adult at my age now and with kids, they were undoubtedly very happy and proud but very nervous about the different direction and the differences. Could I engage in the right way? I didn't help that process by acting a little bit full of myself for having gone. Full of himself is maybe too much.
You had a bit.
Trying to project my belonging in that other place, which of course I didn't.
So I was a little bit off in each of the places I was going to. I wasn't the well adjusted person you see.
When did that sort of melt away for you?
A couple years ago. I'm sort of in the second quartile of getting to the right place. These in the long run are, I talk sometimes about somebody overcoming the burden of great wealth. It sounds funny to people and I mean it to be kind of funny, but it only is kind of funny.
We think about that too. There is a burden. That's back to the kid thing, right? The grit that all three of us are public school kids. I didn't grow up in a house like you did but a public school kid. There is something that comes from that. There is a certain chip on your shoulder that is very valuable in career, business, entrepreneurship, running a big company, that our kids don't have.
When my chip was at its biggest, my brick on my shoulder, I didn't think about, 'Gee, I have a chip on my shoulder.' I just think.
That's the thing with the chip on the shoulder.
Right. I'm just thinking I'm living. And it was very motivating. My first job out of law school, I was very attracted to firms that paid you more money because I needed the money. I had to repay loans. I wanted to live in an apartment. I didn't have to source my motivation. I just had to be able to effect it and execute. If you grow up wealthier, you have to not only execute, you have to source your motivation. I'm faced with that every day. I'm retired. I get up some days and say, 'God, it's so great, nothing in my calendar. What should I do today?' Sometimes it takes me till dinner time to figure out what I was going to do with the day that is now over.
Why did you go to law school? That seems relative to what we said about your parents not necessarily pushing that sort of career track. Why law school after college?
I think it was a couple of reasons. One, it felt like an extension of liberal arts. I didn't know what I wanted to do. Maybe today somebody would go to business school in the same way. But then it was going to law school. And you thought that's a useful thing for anything you might want to do in your life, ignoring that it takes 3 years of pain to get through and cost. An extension of liberal arts. I think there was also a suggestion given to me early in school. I was pretty glib in classes and I would argue with the teachers and I tended to engage with the teachers more than the students. One of my teachers always called me a Philadelphia lawyer. I guess going back to the Zenger trial or something, Philadelphia lawyer had some meaning, and so it was always in my head that I might be a lawyer, and I went to law school.
And you had some suits already in your closet, so law school would have been perfect for you.
Yeah. You can rub the two arms of the suit together and make a fire.
But Lloyd, sometimes that can be off-putting, right? If you grow up with wealth, you have to find your ambition. But often that chip on your shoulder can be too much over the top for those around you. You're a guy who's led and inspired all these people. When was a moment for you where you realized how to channel that in the appropriate way?
I just think I had embedded in me. I'm not the most ambitious. Even now I'm not trying to kill everything. We can talk about that. What's the meaning of life? What are you supposed to do after you accomplish certain goals? Should you keep on going till you drop dead in your chair? In golf, I'm a lousy golfer. I don't know why I use metaphors from golf, but sometimes, if you're trying to putt the ball 30 feet, you look at a target 5 feet away because that's within your field of vision. I wasn't thinking about where the hole was 30 feet away. I was just looking at a target that was 3 feet or 5 feet away. What was that target for me when I was growing up was going to an out of town college. When I was going to law school, it was getting a job, paying off student loans, helping my family if I could, but otherwise becoming a real person. I've always been like that. I don't look too far ahead.
I try to have targets that are closer in the general direction of too far ahead.
When you finished law school, you went to work at a law firm. You didn't last that long at the law firm.
I lasted four and a half years.
Four and a half years, which I guess is pretty typical. I lasted 10 months at the law firm until I rage quit. I went to law school to become a better entrepreneur. I thought law school was a better finishing school for entrepreneurship than business school.
I went to law school to be a lawyer. I thought I'd be a lawyer.
So you lasted four and a half years at this firm. Are you enjoying the work? Is it gratifying?
No, I hated it. It was a paycheck. I went into tax law, corporate tax. So it wasn't M&A or corporate. That was a very narrow field in those days. The tax lawyer would be on an M&A, there wasn't a specific M&A specialty. It was corporate tax, a lot of documentary.
So you lasted four and a half years. That's a real stay.
