CEOInterviews.AILloyd Blankfein with Hortense le Gentil: Streetwise, From Brooklyn to Boardroom

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Tony Marx0:30

Good evening, good evening, and welcome. I'm Tony Marx. I'm the president of the New York Public Library. Thank you all for being with us. Tonight, it is my real pleasure to introduce our friend, Lloyd Blankfein. Lloyd was, as you all know, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs from 2006 to 2018. He's now the author of a really compelling, excellent new memoir, Streetwise, From Brooklyn to the Boardroom. The book is, indeed, a candid memoir of global leadership in an age of extreme turbulence, to put it mildly. You're going to hear more from Lloyd, and you'll enjoy that, and then you should grab the book. You could borrow it from the New York Public Library, or you could buy it. I will just say that in addition to what you're going to hear from Lloyd, at seven, he got his first library card at the New Lots Library and took out three books a week. So he's been serious for a very long time. The other, I want to draw, this quote from the book I think says so much about Lloyd. I'm not surprised when someone without polish or academic credentials turns out to be really smart. I'm surprised that other people are surprised. Lloyd will be in conversation with our great friend, Hortense le Gentil. Hortense is a world-renowned executive leadership coach, speaker, and author, including of The Unlocked Leader, a magnificent book about how to bring one's humanity to leadership, truly inspiring. She guides CEOs and senior executives on their journey and has been recognized as one of Inc.'s top 50 leadership and management experts. She is a coach extraordinaire, including my coach. She is an inspiration to so many with her warmth and her wisdom, a rare combination. At the end of the conversation, Lloyd and Hortense will be glad to take some of your questions. You could write them down on the note cards as your spot with those cute little pencils that we distribute. Some of my colleagues will come around periodically during the talk to collect them. Before the audience questions, we have two very special guests who are going to join us to ask Lloyd a couple of questions. Halima Jame and Ashleen Lia, who are two members of the library's Teen Center Ambassadors Program. This program offers internships to teens to help develop job readiness and leadership skills with a focus on library resources and peer-to-peer engagement. They create fun and exciting events and resources for teens, and they help their peer teens learn about the library and become part of the library community. They are also, as you'll see with Aisleen and Halima, completely brilliant. If you or someone you know wants to learn more about the program and apply, go to the Teen Center Ambassador Program at the Library's website, nypl.org. Live from NYPL is made possible by the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos, Mahnaz Espahani Bartos, and Adam Bartos, and of course, by all of you. Thank you for your support and thank you again for being here. Now please join me in welcoming Lloyd Blankfein and Hortense le Gentil.

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Lloyd Blankfein4:29

Well, nice to see you this way.

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Hortense le Gentil4:30

Yeah, nice to see you too. So thank you for being here, being here with us tonight.

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Lloyd Blankfein4:36

No, I feel like an author. I'm in the library for crying out loud.

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Hortense le Gentil4:39

At least, you know.

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Lloyd Blankfein4:40

At least, yes, at last.

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Hortense le Gentil4:41

At last, at last, sorry, yes, exactly. So thank you, Tony, for this wonderful introduction. You're way too kind with me. And thank you for being here, Lloyd. And okay, I have to keep my microphone there. I'm going to try to follow the rules. So last time we talked, Lloyd, it was difficult to stop the conversation. So today we have 30, 35 minutes.

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Lloyd Blankfein5:10

Let's go when I talk.

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Hortense le Gentil5:12

Let's go? Okay, we start. So you had an impressive journey and from public housing in Brooklyn to the boardroom. But tonight I want to focus on you, the human being you are and the leader you are. So what drives you? What is your purpose? So shall we.

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Lloyd Blankfein5:35

You know, gosh, you're an executive coach. I'm going to get a lot out of these questions. What drives me? I think at different points, it was when I was starting out, I'll tell you what drove me. What drove me is I wanted to get out of the projects in Brooklyn, and I was very focused on it. When I hear myself say that, it sounds terrible because there are people still in the projects in Brooklyn, and I'd like them to be happy there too, but I was unhappy. We lived in a small place. We were three generations living there. My grandmother, my parents, my sister, her baby lived there. And I was very young going, again, in the projects, going to Thomas Jefferson High School in East New York, Brooklyn, which was a failed high school on triple session and blah, blah, blah. And so I was very focused on just getting out. And I tell you, I did not have a long-term vision of becoming, I wouldn't have known what Wall Street was. I wouldn't have known what any of it was. I just wanted to go, my goal was to go to college out of town, whatever that was. And then of course, when I went from one lily pad to the next one, then my horizons opened up and I got more ambitious as things went on.

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Hortense le Gentil6:52

Yeah, I understand that. And thank you for sharing. But back today. Okay, we will go back to the purpose. But back today. So we are here at the New York Public Library. And to your words, there is only one New York Public Library. So I think Tony, you know, shared a little with us. But I mean, what does the library mean to you?

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Lloyd Blankfein7:20

Well, well, I tell you, when you talk about a library, one of the things is I could ask that, I would like to know the library, everybody's library now is sitting on their iPhone or on their desktop. But if you're talking about the concept of a library, I mean, obviously it's information and now information today is organized. And so information is available and organized. When I look at, I don't know, I think the really interesting question is what is the library going to be? Because when I think of a library, I think of people, scholars coming in here, getting help and finding books. And now the library is not just a destination, the library is a cloud.

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Hortense le Gentil8:03

Yeah, it's, yeah, it's a cloud, exactly. And, but, okay, but take us back when you were in Brooklyn, you were a kid, and you came every week, to pick up a book. So take us back there. So where did you come? What did you do?

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Lloyd Blankfein8:21

I was a striver. I was saying, Tony said, you know, you could buy a book or you could borrow it. I think, do people borrow a book still? Because everything is so available and online. I don't know if that, I don't know. I don't know if it still persists that way. But for me, anything that exposed, you know, I like to go to the library and I like to read about things. I like turning on TV and then watching you know, watching TV shows where people lived in houses and had lawns. And I like watching Let's Make a Deal on TV where somebody would win a boat, motor, and trailer for guessing the right door. And I'm thinking, where would you put a boat, motor, and trailer? I lived in the projects. So thank goodness I didn't win one. But everything for me was a matter of getting exposure to the outs, to a different world. And so eventually, you know, I kept climbing into those different worlds.

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Hortense le Gentil9:15

Yeah. And did you find any role model in the books or people that you met in the library back then or not? Maybe.

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Lloyd Blankfein9:22

Not specific. Well, I had, I had along the way, look, as I was growing up, I got a job one year, you know, some teacher in school was a waterfront counselor. And so he gave me a job as a junior waterfront counselor at some camp. And that was a lot of exposure for me because I met kids whose parents went to college and whose parents went to work in suits and they went to their summer camp. This was camp in upstate New York and they brought their own canoe paddles and had their transistor radios. And so that was an exposure that I hadn't had before. And everything opened up the world. I'll tell you one thing it did. It made me sensitive. And when you see kids, it made me sensitive to be thinking about what other people, how other people must regard me at this point and what they must be thinking. So it's a useful experience to have gone through.

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Hortense le Gentil10:19

Yeah, that's a human experience.

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Lloyd Blankfein10:21

Yes.

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Hortense le Gentil10:21

Yeah, so community experience. So now imagine that, so we are still at that time, Brooklyn. So now imagine you, Lloyd of today, you just so run into your young Lloyd. Can you imagine that one minute? So you today, you know, meeting you, your young self, you know, then what would you tell him?

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Lloyd Blankfein10:51

Well, you know, I don't know, maybe I'm strange, but I don't really feel dissociated. I mean, I carry with me, I'll tell you --

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Hortense le Gentil10:59

It's not dissociated.

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Lloyd Blankfein10:59

-- different insecurities.

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Hortense le Gentil11:01

It's just an exercise.

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Lloyd Blankfein11:02

Different insecurities, but they rhyme. I always found myself in situations that I felt ill-prepared for, that I felt a little bit odd to be in. That people, like I always dressed like I was from Brooklyn when I was meeting people who went to private schools, when I went to college, and after, and I always felt a little bit. And guess what? When I was working my way up the letterhead of a big firm, first I went to a law firm, then I worked at a big investment bank, obviously, and even working my way up the letterhead of that, I always felt myself, I always walked into a room, and I think, I said, once in the book, I said, sometimes I have to remind myself, what am I going to be for this meeting? Am I going to be the kid from Brooklyn, or am I going to be the head of an elite, influential firm, a member of the establishment? And the bottom line is, it wasn't always my decision to make. I think anybody talking to me would think, you know, he's both, but I've always been both. And so when I go back and talk, if I went back and met my old self, I don't think I'd find him that much different than my current self, frankly.

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Hortense le Gentil12:12

But you were not, you worry about something or you were, I couldn't imagine that.

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Lloyd Blankfein12:20

Look, I worried about it. When I was growing up, I was made to worry in the household because my father had gotten laid off, eventually got a job in the post office, worried about money, worried about all sorts of things. I think that was very, very good training for my eventual life. You know, running a big firm that took a lot of risk in the markets and that had a big balance sheet where nothing could go wrong anywhere in the world without it affecting you, and half the time they'd accuse you of causing it. And I would say that I always was a worrier. And at one point I said, you get into a room with a lot of tough guys who are trying to say, I know this, I said, look, I'm a worrier, not a warrior. And by the way, and that's suited because at the end of the day, all the good things, you know, good things and easy things and success. People know how to deal with good things. Some people could be worse at it than others, but it's easier to deal, most of the time you had to deal with problems. And I think I was a very good, I dealt well with problems. And I think I was pretty good, and probably because of my childhood, I was pretty good at looking around corners and finding the cloud around every silver lining.

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Hortense le Gentil13:33

So yeah.

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Lloyd Blankfein13:34

Yeah, I was a good spotter of impending risk events. Nobody's perfect, believe me, and we weren't perfect at it, but I would say that we were, my ear was very attuned to the indications of something going wrong.

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Hortense le Gentil13:51

Makes sense, yeah. And then what do you think young Lloyd would tell you today?

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Lloyd Blankfein13:59

By the way, I'm not sure there ever was a young Lloyd. To be perfectly honest.

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Hortense le Gentil14:02

You were not young?

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Lloyd Blankfein14:03

No, I was young chronologically, but I was, you know, I was --

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Hortense le Gentil14:08

It's amazing. You feel like you didn't change and --

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Lloyd Blankfein14:11

No, I didn't. No, I was always, I mean, I was always, you know, I lived in a household where, you know, there was nobody really, nobody went to, you know, nobody went to college, nobody had the experiences I wanted to have. I did a lot of stuff on my own initiative, you know, stumbled away along, made mistakes. But I don't know. I wish I would have, you know, my next childhood won't be my second one. It'll be my first one.

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Hortense le Gentil14:36

Okay. Okay, so we'll try. So we come back, you know, 10 years or?

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Lloyd Blankfein14:43

Yeah, well, let's move it up.

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Hortense le Gentil14:45

Okay. Okay, throughout your life, you talk about feeling, not feeling, sorry, feeling like you don't fit in.

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Lloyd Blankfein14:57

Well, I mean, I did, you know, I did climb the greasy pole of Goldman Sachs so I did fit in. I don't want to overdo it. But like a lot of people, I think, I found a lot, look, when I wrote the book, I get emails every day, long emails from people I didn't meet and also from some people I'd met 30 years ago sometimes and saying, oh gosh, these are my experiences too. I also felt like an imposter. I always felt that they were going to discover that I don't know anything. I always, why should I be making this decision? There must be better people to do this. And it turns out that must be, I can't say that everyone is like that, but I think it's more general. I would say that in my time, I have met some people that look to me like they were voted most likely to succeed every year from kindergarten on. But I'd say most people are strivers, made their way, took advantage of opportunities, not geniuses necessarily, but some combination of IQ and EQ and hard work and, you know, the commitment of some important mentor that paved the way. And, you know, of course you find and make the most of opportunities. But I would say I would say that one of the things I wanted to accomplish is to make it clear that these things are accessible. That there's a few people, there are very few people that are geniuses. People throw that word around quite a lot. But most of the people I met who've been very, very successful, they could be at the margin smarter, at the margin less smart, but they have some combination of things that other people could have too. And again, there's opportunity that comes some people's way that doesn't come others. But generally, by and large, they made the most of it. Look, everyone, like people who play poker, you know, the guys who win in poker are not the luckiest because over enough hands, everybody statistically is going to get the same kinds of cards. It's just who plays them better. But it's not because they're geniuses. It's because they're applying themselves well, generally.

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Hortense le Gentil17:10

Yeah, and sometimes it's also because you don't know the codes. So some, you know, back when you were at Harvard and to country club or to Wall Street, there are codes there. The people are, you know, the way they dress, the way they talk, you know, sometimes we don't know the code.

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Lloyd Blankfein17:31

Yes, but yes, and there are ways of adjusting to it. So for example, even now when I speak to you, I'm carrying myself and I'm making, you know, you make the best of what you have. And so guess what, I would humbly brag about how I didn't know the code, yet here I am. You know, you are who you are and you deal with it. But I decided a long time ago that I'm not going to be the guy who stepped out of GQ. I'm not going to be, if they were casting the role of a big time CEO, they probably, I wouldn't be central casting's first choice. But somehow, there I go. I teetered my way through it for like a lot of years.

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Hortense le Gentil18:10

I think it's your superpower somewhere. Don't you think?

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Lloyd Blankfein18:17

Well, I always thought I was more, the best I could be was Batman, not Superman, because Superman had, being the nepo baby that he was, he was born on Krypton. He had advantages that no one else had. You could never be him because you weren't going to be born on Krypton. You couldn't fly and you didn't have super strength. But Batman, he was just a normal guy that worked hard.

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Hortense le Gentil18:43

Okay, so ready, everyone.

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Lloyd Blankfein18:46

So I was always a Batman fan, not a Superman. Superman was not accessible. Batman was.

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Hortense le Gentil18:51

Batman was.

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Lloyd Blankfein18:52

Yes.

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Hortense le Gentil18:52

I know someone also who is a fan of Batman. So now, let's talk one minute about your dad. And, you know, your dad worked at the post office. You were visiting the workplace for his retirement party. And at one point, you tell the story of seeing the new electronic mail sorting machine who is going to replace the job of your dad. And you said, so I quote, I feel so sad when I think about the waste of my dad's brain and effort. Wow. That's a heavy reflection.

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Lloyd Blankfein19:36

Well, it was a moment that I carried with me. And by the way, it speaks to the present when people are doing things that don't need to be done. So my dad got a job in civil service, which by the way, he thought was the greatest thing in the world because you couldn't laid off in civil service. And he worked nights at the post office sorting mail for the 10% night differential that you got by working at night. And there was consequences to the family because we never saw him. He had a job in the day and he worked nights at the post office sorting mail. And the only time I ever saw his workplace, because it was the post office, it wasn't private industry, people couldn't go in there, except the day he was retiring, we, his immediate family, could go in and see for the first time where he worked, when he said goodbye to his friends that he worked next to for a couple of decades. And I noticed when I was there, there was this big machine wrapped in plastic behind him, and I said, what's that? And it turns out that that was a mail sorting machine that had been there for years, that had it been turned on, would have done the job that he was doing many times faster and never make a mistake, but it wouldn't be turned on because it was the post office and they wouldn't fire anybody. And they were waiting for attrition to occur. They were waiting for my dad to decide to retire so they could turn on the machine that would make. And so I thought, oh my God. you know, you're doing this, and that really is a job, and his pay really was compensation in the sense that you're being compensated for drudgery, I guess. And to look over your shoulder and realize you didn't even have to do what you were doing. And I thought and, you know, that has, I don't bring that up. I told the story because I was going through certain key moments, but I think about that time, even now, as technology evolves and people are doing things that are surely not going to need to be done. Look, in my life, I'm sure there's lawyers in the room. As a junior lawyer, I spent my time Shepardizing cases. What does that mean? I was looking every time a case was cited, you had to go to the library, pull up every case that ever cited that case to make sure it wasn't critically commented upon or overruled. And that was drudgery, hours in the library. You know, today you push a button, nobody does that. People do that as often as they use a slide rule. And so there's always that in life. And so one of the things I said, let's make sure that we're not spending our time doing things that don't need to be done.

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Hortense le Gentil22:03

That's a very good point. And I was thinking about, of course, today and AI and how people can feel. Do they feel like that? And do you have any advice for them, you know, if --

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Lloyd Blankfein22:15

Yeah, I would say my advice at this point, I have a lot of advice. I don't know if anything is apt because this is a future with which people are going to not be particularly good at predicting it. I think the best you can do is continuously plan for it because a lot of things, we're going to see, AI is going to replace a lot of things we do today. And it's going to also, once we finish replacing the things we do and do it quicker and faster and better, we're going to do things with AI that you couldn't contemplate doing today. Just like every change in technology, you replace what used to be done and then you discover new things and new things will be created and old things will become irrelevant and be displaced. And there'll be some dislocation. And there's no point to arguing about whether it's a good thing or a bad thing because it's going to happen. You're not going to unlearn it. You could talk about, as we read now and we go into war, prevent people from getting nuclear weapons and stuff, you could think to yourself, was it a good thing that we split the atom and created atomic power because we have, there's certainly value in it, because we have electricity made by atomic plants. But we also have the anxiety of nuclear bombs and everything. You could spend your time talking about it, but guess what? We have it. We're not going to unlearn it. We're not going to unlearn AI, and we're going to keep going forward in it. So I think we need to adjust to it. And by the way, if asked whether it's a good thing, I can't be against anything that creates, that makes people more leveraged, creates greater efficiency. It's up to, frankly, the political sector to figure out how to contingency plan for the dislocation that's going to happen, and which is inevitable and almost upon us.

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Hortense le Gentil24:01

Yeah. And also, I think that AI, so the more they will go, will do with the machine, and the more we have to think about to keep the machine in service of the human being and us to try to increase our humanity.

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Lloyd Blankfein24:19

I think so. That's my opinion now. But, you know, 40 years from now, there's a couple of machines up here in these chairs talking to other machines in the seats.

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Hortense le Gentil24:26

So maybe there is a machine to replace you and me. So what are we going to do?

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Lloyd Blankfein24:31

I don't know. You turn the clock back. There could have been two dinosaurs here chatting to a room full of dinosaurs, but things have evolved.

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Hortense le Gentil24:38

Exactly. Maybe there would be time, you know, to be keyed again.

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Lloyd Blankfein24:41

I know that I'm going to pass away five minutes before we're all going to be loaded up into laptops.

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Hortense le Gentil24:48

So we'll see.

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Lloyd Blankfein24:50

No, we just don't, you know, you just, you know, I think the future is, you know, again, I was in the risk business, my career, that the future is unknowable. I try to, I try to, I try to predict the present. I think knowing what's going on at any given moment is hard enough, let alone the future.

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Hortense le Gentil25:08

To stay in the present moment.

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Lloyd Blankfein25:09

I think the future is all about planning for what could happen in contingencies, and if you're a good contingency planner, you'll get off, when things happen, you'll get off the mark so quickly, people will think you foresaw it. But really, you're just kind of planning, doing a very good job of planning for the contingencies that could happen. And AI is one of those important contingencies. It helps to have experts. It helps to be on the right track, not on the wrong track. But I will tell you, I'm as close to the middle as anybody could. And I know nothing, so I know they know nothing. The future is a very hard thing to figure out where things are going.

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Hortense le Gentil25:52

So stay in the present moment as much as possible.

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Lloyd Blankfein25:55

Well, you know, try to get it, but I'm just saying, look, it doesn't relieve you of the responsibility of trying to get it right. But I wouldn't be killing myself. You know, I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be going, if I were running the company today, I wouldn't be committing myself to one path and one direction. I'd be going in a lot of directions at the same time, by the way, which is what's happening in the world. Different people are pursuing different routes of the technology, because you just don't know. Certainly, when it gets resolved, we'll look back and saying, gee, we wasted time here, we wasted money there, because you don't know. But, you know, you just have to, from where we are, things can go in a lot of different places, and you just have to plan for it.

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Hortense le Gentil26:37

Exactly. So, okay, very fast, because we are behind. So 2008, very quickly, so this is, of course, the financial crisis and the big leadership moment for you. So one question only, it's looking back on that moment, what did you learn about human beings?

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Lloyd Blankfein27:01

Okay, well let me say --

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Hortense le Gentil27:03

Two minutes.

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Lloyd Blankfein27:04

-- before I got there, in my firm we had the crisis, not my firm, in the financial markets in that period, we had the crisis of the century roughly every four or five years. So I can name them people, we had the dot-com bubble and the Asian currency crisis and long-term, you know, and so you learn about, of course, you learn things along the way. I think mostly going back to the way we started the conversation, you could decide that, you know, you're an imposter, you're not, look, you're not the right, but guess what? You're there, you have to step up and you have to do this stuff. And if not you, then who? It might as well be you. And I learned also that the most important thing in a crisis, of which we had many, is to get the organization functioning well. It's just like on an airline when the stewardess or the steward gets on and says, you know, remember, if the oxygen mask come out, put the mask on yourself first, then you're a kid because you're not doing anybody any good if you go, you know, if you suffocate.

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Hortense le Gentil28:12

Of course.

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Lloyd Blankfein28:13

And so you learn about how to deal in a crisis. You learn how to communicate with your staff, get them to be focused. In our organization where companies that looked to the outside world a lot like ours were going bankrupt and other things were happening. And of course, the press was all over and terrible. Everyone is stopping and standing and staring at the TV set all day. And no, I said, you know, get on and say, I need everybody in this company to do their jobs because the best thing, if you want to make a contribution and to the long-term success of our firm, do your job better than you could ever, than you have ever done it before. Take care of your clients. I need 2% of the firm to focus on ourselves. And in return, I'll communicate with you all the time, and I'll tell you what's going on. I'll express my anxieties, what I'm optimistic, pessimistic. You'll know more than you need to know. And that's what we did. And so one of the issues for the firm, and spent a lot of time in the book talking about it, we got through that crisis better than just about everybody. And of course, one of the rewards for getting through it better than just about everybody was to get pummeled for having gotten through it. You know, it went from how did you do it in an admiring way, an admiring way to how did you do it? Because at the end of the day, there needed to be some reaction to the financial class of which I was one. And it was very difficult. It was pointless to go after the companies that went under or the companies that lost tens of billions of dollars. We were one of the few standing, and also we had what some people thought the benefit but turned out to be a disadvantage of. My predecessor was Secretary of Treasury, half the financial, half the economists and financiers in the administration dealing with everything were ex-Goldman, which, by the way, happens a lot in Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States and other countries, which is one of the things about Goldman. And so we had to deal with those situations. And, you know, it was, again, the financial crisis had its existential part. Are we going to get through this? And then it had its reputational part, which took a very long part of my tenure to manage through.

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Hortense le Gentil30:35

Thank you for that. Okay, so now, 2015.

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Lloyd Blankfein30:42

Twenty?

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Hortense le Gentil30:42

2015. So you learn you have a blood cancer. And suddenly, your life changed, I suppose. So in a minute, you have to leave, you know, the airport and everything and to stay at the hospital. I know that those moments are very important in our life. And I just have a question because you told me you had a lot of time to think, of course. And did you think about how you want to be remembered and what was very important for you?

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Lloyd Blankfein31:22

You know, I never thought about how I want to be remembered. I always thought, so, you know, again, being in the risk business, I always, you know, and being kind

I was fatalistic about getting my exams. Every time I got the reports of tests that I took, I felt mostly okay all the time, except never sleeping, always traveling. And finally, I got a call from the doctor, and he gave me a report, and he said, 'Oh, God, brace yourself, we have bad news.' And I had to say, I didn't welcome it, but it was always a surprise to me when you said there was nothing wrong with me. And here it was, and he said, 'Oh, you have something, you have a lot of tumors, it's a blood cancer of some kind, we have to type in and go through it.' And I don't know, it wasn't like I was hit in the face with a shovel or anything. I mean, let me tell you, it was pretty unwelcome. I don't want to suggest anything other than that, but I dealt with it and it occurred to me. And by the way, you do think that, you know, I had one of those that when I had the initial indication, it had a 50/50 outcome, which got better over time. Because, you know, once you can decide, once you have some experience taking the chemo, I had 600 hours of chemo in connection with it, but once you can take it and you're not getting sick from the chemo, then already your odds of recovery are going, so incrementally the odds kept improving, but I would lie at night, I would roll dice in my head. Believe me, in my line of work, you compute odds and probabilities all the time and largely in your head, and I was doing that with myself. But I didn't, it wasn't like I felt like I was an immortal and suddenly I became mortal. I was always thinking about that kind of stuff. I thought about some things differently. I thought about how I wanted to, in some ways, deal with my family, deal with things I cared about. Should you give things with your cold hand or your warm hand, if I get through this, I'll do this differently. I was visited every six, I had six three-week cycles in the hospital four nights and people would visit me and I'd say goodbye to them while I was spending four days in the hospital. But you know, I had my job, which I continued to do, which was a blessing because it was what I thought about. And it was like a lot of things I did. It was not, I had no choice, no choice, no problem.

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Hortense le Gentil33:55

Yeah, this is your mantra, right.

L

Lloyd Blankfein33:57

Yeah, you know, again, if you, my wife comes and says, you know, which, you know, we want to paint the wall and she shows me two identical colors of blue and she says, which one do you like? And they're both identical to me. That's, that's hard. Taking chemo for cancer decide is not hard. It's unpleasant, but it's not hard. So no choice, no problem.

H

Hortense le Gentil34:22

No choice, no problem. Okay, so I take that.

L

Lloyd Blankfein34:25

Yeah, and by the way, going back to the crisis, a lot of that also was no choice, no problem.

H

Hortense le Gentil34:30

No choice, no problem. Yeah, absolutely. So I like this one. I'm going to keep it. So, okay, so we don't have time anymore, so I go to the last one. So what makes you feel hopeful about the future?

L

Lloyd Blankfein34:48

God, well, the thing that should make everybody feel hopeful is that every generation has gone through its share of problems and distress. And guess what? We continue to motor on. Things work out. I always tell people in a crisis, you know, this will work out. It won't be the end of the world. And you know something? When it does work out, everybody's going to think back and say, think to themselves, who behaved well and who behaved poorly. And you're going to be, even junior people in the organization, you know, roll the clock forward 30 years, and you're all going to, even that dopey guy sitting next to you, you're going to be part of the cohort that's running the world 20, 30 years from now, and your reputation with each other is going to come from how well your thought of having responded at this moment. So act well, because you never know how important your reputation is with whoever is who's observing you. And I would say things tend to work out. If I was woken up out of a deep sleep and I didn't know how long I was asleep for. And somebody put it and said, what do you want to be, long or short? The country, the world, go long. Because most of the time, things are in an uptick. And by the way, that doesn't mean we're not going through anxious, we're not going to go through anxious times. It doesn't mean we're not going through bad times. But generally, things work out. And you make your contribution to how that works out, and that's how you'll be thought of. So what should you be optimistic about? I can rattle off things that everybody's worried about in the world today, which I don't even have to talk about, the Gulf and all this stuff.

H

Hortense le Gentil36:28

No, we don't have time.

L

Lloyd Blankfein36:29

And here we are with all that misery and all that distress. The economy is in generally good shape. Now, I know there's a [inaudible] to it and some parts of it are doing poorly, but on a macro basis, the whole of the economy is doing well. Even though the distribution of the wealth that's created is not uneven and is creating polarization. That we're not, you know, let me tell you, I point out we've gone through tougher times than this. And I say joke, you know, we did have a civil war, but you don't have to go that far back. I was a sentient human being in the late 60s when the National Guard was, you know, shot kids on campus, kids were fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft. Tanks were literally rolling through Czechoslovakia, that was the foreign affairs that were going on today versus a Ukraine. There was literally, we were at DEFCON 2 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, stopping Russian ships on the on the high seas, not just a blockade of Iran. I would say we navigated through those times. This is not worse than that. And we got through that. If our parents got through that, we'll get through this.

H

Hortense le Gentil37:37

We can make it.

L

Lloyd Blankfein37:38

Of course we can.

H

Hortense le Gentil37:39

Of course.

L

Lloyd Blankfein37:40

We will. And so when we get through it, think of how you want to be thought of yourself. Do you want to be thought of yourself as someone who is wringing your hands and complaining? Or do you want to be thought of as someone who is making a contribution to get us to a better place?

H

Hortense le Gentil37:54

Yeah, choose how you want to show up, right.

L

Lloyd Blankfein37:57

That's the legacy that people should be thinking about. How you want to be thought of in that way?

H

Hortense le Gentil38:01

Yeah, how you want to show up. So a little last question, but really last one. So I know you like stories. So, finish the sentence for me, please.

L

Lloyd Blankfein38:13

Oh, I finish everybody's sentence all the time.

H

Hortense le Gentil38:15

Okay, I know. So, it's hard.

L

Lloyd Blankfein38:17

It won't be hard for me to finish your sentence.

H

Hortense le Gentil38:19

Almost there. So, Lloyd Blankfein, the story of a man who --

L

Lloyd Blankfein38:25

You know, had made the most of the luck he had.

H

Hortense le Gentil38:31

Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you.

Thank you very much. So, we made it.

L

Lloyd Blankfein38:44

You know, you can't make yourself --

H

Hortense le Gentil38:46

Thirty-nine minutes.

L

Lloyd Blankfein38:47

You can't make yourself smarter, but you can be on time.

H

Hortense le Gentil38:52

Exactly. Okay, thank you, thank you. So we are going to turn to the audience now. And to start, I want to introduce you to two special guests with us tonight. So I know Tony already introduced them.

L

Lloyd Blankfein39:08

It's not my kindergarten teacher, is it?

H

Hortense le Gentil39:11

Yes, it is.

L

Lloyd Blankfein39:12

Okay.

H

Hortense le Gentil39:12

It is your young one. Yes.

L

Lloyd Blankfein39:15

Oh, my younger self, go on.

H

Hortense le Gentil39:17

Yes, exactly. So say hi, please. So Halima and Ashleen. So, our two high school seniors here in New York, and they have two questions for you. They read your book, and they are also part of the New York Public Library Teen Ambassador Program, as Tony mentioned it. And they are ready, you know, to come here and ask the questions. So, I think Halima, would you like to go first? Oh, here she is.

H

Halima Jame39:53

Hi, good evening. As a senior in high school heading off to college in a few months, I'm wondering what should young people focus on when pursuing a career? There's pressure to have the most impressive title quickly, but what might that approach be missing?

L

Lloyd Blankfein40:09

Well, if I were to advise, which I do from time to time, advise people what to study. I would say, look, there's a portion of the world which you don't seem to be in that's going to really benefit from learning a trade. People understand that and focus on it for whom the investment that one makes in college may not be the best thing for them to do. But clearly you are in the category of people who's going off and getting an education. We don't know how the world is evolving. We talked about AI. And you don't know how you're evolving. So my advice is not to focus too early. I would say there are people out there that think everybody should drop out of college, pursue your career, which is kind of ironic since, you know, your life expectancy is to 100. Since you're going to live longer, I don't think you should be in a super rush to start your career and make yourself narrow. I would say, again, given the uncertainties of the world and the uncertainties of what you yourself will grow into, take a liberal, get a liberal arts education. That's what your college is for. You have plenty of time to learn the narrow technicalities of your career when you start your job.

H

Halima Jame41:25

Thank you so much.

H

Hortense le Gentil41:26

That's a very wise one. So Ashleen, what is your question?

A

Ashleen Lia41:36

Good evening, everyone. Reflecting upon your career, how has your definition of success changed from early in your career to now, after leading one of the world's most influential financial institutions?

L

Lloyd Blankfein41:49

You know, at different ages, success for me was getting, you know, every time I got to a place, when I got to college, when I got to Harvard, I said, oh my God, let me get through this place. And then when I got to Goldman, let me survive for two years in this place. And then when I became a partner, I said, oh my God, can I make it, can I be a partner for two years before they discover the mistake? And so I spent, my definition of success was, you know, I was lucky in a way, because I didn't see, it wasn't some long-term goal I was ever striving to. I was trying to get to the next place unburdened by some higher expectation of what I should do in the longer term. That was a blessing. And so I just wanted to get to the next place. I wasn't burdened. I will tell you, and so at different stages was different things. Now, my definition of success or the validation that I get is the fact that I discovered, and by the way, the book has revealed it because I'm getting a lot of incoming from a lot of people who've read it, who I never knew, and some people who I knew 30 years ago, who I made impression. The fact that I helped, was a mentor to, in some cases was a tormentor to other people who somehow think at this stage, and I didn't realize it at the time, that I helped them. That I inspired them, that I taught them, that I took an interest in them. I didn't always know I was taking an interest in them. I was trying to get stuff out of them, maybe for my own benefit. But what stacks up today as a success for me is the friendships and the appreciation that I managed to accumulate. And that's success for me.

A

Ashleen Lia43:41

Thank you.

H

Hortense le Gentil43:43

Halima and Ashleen, thank you very much for your question. And thank you for everything you do for the ambassador also. So now, in your last few minutes, so I have some questions here. So we have.

L

Lloyd Blankfein44:02

Twenty minutes.

H

Hortense le Gentil44:04

Let's pick one.

L

Lloyd Blankfein44:06

Give me those cards.

H

Hortense le Gentil44:07

No, no, no, I choose. I like to choose. So, okay, where do we start? So, let's start here. If I had 500 million of dollars to invest.

L

Lloyd Blankfein44:26

Go on, go on.

H

Hortense le Gentil44:26

Let's imagine, let's imagine, right, so.

L

Lloyd Blankfein44:31

I would say, where's the rest of it?

H

Hortense le Gentil44:36

Okay. So, what would you suggest behind that?

L

Lloyd Blankfein44:43

Well, it depends on your wiring. I would say the sensible thing to do would just be go off and have a good time. But unfortunately, I'm not wired to go off and have a good time, so I would have to find something to be stressed about. If you're asking me an investment question, I would say with $500 million, you're pretty insulated from the ups and downs of the short-term markets. And so I would probably be plowing myself into the new economy and technology and stuff like that. If the $500 million, if the question is meant to be, if you were liberated from the need to support yourself by $500 million, I would say I'd go into the library and satisfy all the things about which I've been curious over the years and have the luxury of learning. One of the things, and I know this is, your husband and I had this, because I know Hubert teaches at school now after his successful career as a CEO and is teaching. I tried that for five minutes and I said to myself, gee, why am I teaching? What I really want to do is learn. And so that's how I spend a lot of my time.

H

Hortense le Gentil45:49

I hope you're satisfied. So you know what you do now. So, another one.

L

Lloyd Blankfein45:55

I would focus on getting the $500 million as a priority. Yeah.

H

Hortense le Gentil45:58

And have some good time too, you know.

L

Lloyd Blankfein46:01

Yes. And for those of you who are richer than that, I'm sorry that you lost the balance.

H

Hortense le Gentil46:06

You don't want to go to the moon.

L

Lloyd Blankfein46:10

I don't want to go to New Jersey.

H

Hortense le Gentil46:12

Okay. You stay here.

L

Lloyd Blankfein46:15

Yes.

H

Hortense le Gentil46:16

Okay, good to know. You know where to find him, so. Okay, so another one. Did you have a special teacher who influenced you?

L

Lloyd Blankfein46:29

I remember some teachers, yes, along the way, and not profound, but I also had people who took an interest in me, the most important of which were people who had no, to my mind, had no benefit in taking an interest in me, and that made it all the more sincere, and it established my appreciation. I remember when I got to my law firm and I still was a kid from Brooklyn, I went straight through, I never took any time off. I went through my first job in law school and I never, when you go to college and law school and law school itself, you don't, you didn't wear clothes, you don't wear suits, you don't have. I remember going in and somebody taking me aside and say, you know, instead of those five polyester ties you're wearing, why don't you buy one nice one? And why don't you wear white shirts instead of those, you know, noisy colors that don't go with the stupid tie you wear. And, you know, people, it's funny that the things that people taught me, you know, wasn't the key that I remember that did the most for me was, or I should put it this way, the things I were most grateful for was the thing that they don't have courses for. Was just the fact that people took an interest and took the personal risk and risked offending me by telling me something that if my father had gone to work in a suit, in a profession, he might've taught me, but he didn't. And I didn't know, and so somebody watched me and took me aside and tried to straighten me out. And so those are important lessons also. But other than that, I don't know, one of my regrets was that I went to these great schools where professors had office hours and invited students to come in, and I was so focused on just getting through it that I really didn't, I really wasted a lot of that time. I didn't form very close relationships. And that's a big, and my advice to someone else would be to do that.

H

Hortense le Gentil48:27

To do that.

L

Lloyd Blankfein48:28

And I didn't take advantage. But the lessons, most of the investment that people made in me and the lessons I had were, you know, once I had crossed over and became a professional. And I was lucky in that way because not everybody takes interest in other people.

H

Hortense le Gentil48:45

Nice. I wanted to make a joke. So what are the most important qualities of a CEO?

L

Lloyd Blankfein48:55

I would say the most, I'd say the qualities that I would look for in anything, moving up ahead, you're going to be a CEO, going ahead is I like people who are curious, who want to know, and somebody comes in and tells me that they're Googling something 40 times a day, I like that person. I mean, life is an open book test now. So anytime you don't know, I mean, personally, I walk along, somebody gives me an address, the street is called Blippity Blip Avenue, and I want to know who is Blippity Blip and why'd they name a street for them? And I look, and I just like, if you're curious about, you know, when you're, the world's always changing. Careers are evolving. The skills that you need to know to be a CEO or to be any advanced thing aren't related to the specifics of your industry or what you have to do that year or what is compelled. It's curiosity and the ability to learn things, the ability to recruit people to your banner, to get them to want to work with you, to make those implied contracts that aren't in writing, but where the person that's working for you knows you'll be good for them, and so they're going to work hard to be good for you. Again, curiosity, good people, skills. You have to be smart enough, but you know, most of the rooms I walk into, everybody's smart enough. The hardest, the EQ sometimes is harder to get to than IQ. And again, I come back again, so-and-so, the biggest, the person to, now you don't want to be asked dopey questions, and a dopey question is the same question you've asked six times you want. But I would rather have somebody who wants to know, look, you know, I don't know, somebody, I don't know, people make the observation, somebody is running, you know, one day is running, an auto company, and next he gets hired in a job to run an aeronautics company. Or is running a service company, and then he runs, how could people do that? Because the answer is the skill set you need isn't the narrowness of the product or the service. The skill set that you need is how quickly could you learn stuff? How good are you to strategize to get from where you are to a better place, or to get from the present to the future? And how well can you mobilize the people who do know the real stuff to want to support you and who want to make you succeed because they see in it their own interests will be benefited by your success. And those are the things. And if you have those down, then it doesn't, then you can go and be the CEO of anything.

H

Hortense le Gentil51:36

Yeah. And maybe, maybe be a coach or so, you know.

L

Lloyd Blankfein51:40

Well, the coach, as you must realize, is the highest, most exalted thing you can be.

H

Hortense le Gentil51:44

No, no. Of course, of course.

L

Lloyd Blankfein51:47

Yes, of course.

H

Hortense le Gentil51:48

No, of course not.

L

Lloyd Blankfein51:49

Not that I pander to my audience, but don't.

H

Hortense le Gentil51:53

So we're talking about curiosity. What types of books do you read? Examples.

L

Lloyd Blankfein52:00

Oh, I read a lot of history books. I like history. And I think history is a good field for people to go into. I said liberal arts, but one of the things I think people should always do if you want it. Liberal arts is good to be a well-rounded person, good for your own sake. But most people in the world want to deal with other people who are interesting. It's good for your commercial life to be a well-rounded person. And if you're going to be in, and I think knowing history is a good thing. And as you know, as attributed to Mark Twain, but he probably never said it, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Knowing history, knowing cycles, and knowing that people have gone through, it's like what I said, 1968 was worse than 2026 by most metrics in terms of anxiety and the risk in the world. Knowing that and things like that, that we've gone through cycles before, makes, prevents you from being too elated and extrapolating from the best of moments, and it keeps you from being too miserable and depressed at the worst of times. Because you know on both things, there are cycles to things. And I think knowing that there are cycles, and by the way, there are cycles in business, and there are cycles in history. You know, everyone, people tell me, oh my God, the politics are so bitter and bad. This is the end of the American experiment, blah, blah. I said, you know, we've been through these before. We went through a McCarthy era. We went through our fear and anxiety over communism. Now maybe our fear and anxiety is over militant Islam. But we've gone through cycles like these before, and if we've gotten through them before, we'll get through them again. And I always was more serene than other people based on the fact that I understood that we'd done, we've gone through worse times than these, so guess what? We have the capacity to get through these. So I read a lot of history, and I'll tell you what else I listened to a lot of. I discovered great courses, courses on tape, and I'm filling in holes of my liberal education that I missed, and I listened to a lot of, I went through a period where I, for some reason, I liked anthropology and linguistics, and now I'm doing a lot. I'm listening to a lot of courses on physics of big things and physics of small things like, you know, relativity and cosmology. And also, I'm listening to a lot of lectures on quantum mechanics.

H

Hortense le Gentil54:30

Oh, yeah.

L

Lloyd Blankfein54:30

And the thing I like best about that is knowing that no one in the world understands it. So I'm relieved. I'm relieved of the obligation of having to understand what I'm listening to. So it makes it more enjoyable as opposed to thinking that it's possible to understand it and punishing myself for not understanding it.

H

Hortense le Gentil54:52

I like that too. One in particular you would recommend to listen or to read.

L

Lloyd Blankfein54:58

Oh yes, like go on the great courses and it's on Audible, I'm not a commercial, I don't have stock in the company. But if you go in, there's a thousand things and there's some great, at every level, there's like 1,200 courses on the thing ranging from, you know, you know, physics for idiots and poets and physics for, you know, advanced graduate degrees. And you could work your way up in any topic. And what a luxury it is to have the time and not have to scrape and make a living. And I can do this stuff. What a wonderful thing.

H

Hortense le Gentil55:27

I think it's amazing.

L

Lloyd Blankfein55:28

That goes back to, I'm still focused on that $500 million question.

H

Hortense le Gentil55:32

Yeah, exactly. But whatever comes first and you --

L

Lloyd Blankfein55:36

First thing you do is open up a private account at Goldman Sachs.

H

Hortense le Gentil55:41

So now we know.

L

Lloyd Blankfein55:42

Old habits die slowly, sorry.

H

Hortense le Gentil55:45

Okay. So considering the business and political climate, climate --

L

Lloyd Blankfein55:53

Climate, it's okay.

H

Hortense le Gentil55:55

Thank you.

L

Lloyd Blankfein55:56

I understand broken French.

H

Hortense le Gentil55:57

I know you understand French, so you saved me. So in New York City, if you were a young finance professional, would you stay in New York City or move to Miami?

L

Lloyd Blankfein56:11

Well, I think to this, look, you can get lucky and you can find anything. The probabilities are more in your favor if you start your career at Goldman Sachs, but move to Miami before your kids start school and your wife makes friends and makes it impossible for you to move to a more favorable tax location. So here I am --

H

Hortense le Gentil56:34

Yes, talking New York.

L

Lloyd Blankfein56:35

-- retired and still a New York taxpayer.

H

Hortense le Gentil56:38

Poor you.

L

Lloyd Blankfein56:39

And let me tell you, I'm still waiting for my thank you.

H

Hortense le Gentil56:43

Okay, so you know what you do, firmly.

L

Lloyd Blankfein56:45

Yes.

H

Hortense le Gentil56:47

So, okay, what else do we have? How much did luck factor into your career?

L

Lloyd Blankfein56:56

Look, everybody's the beneficiary of luck, but if you live long enough and have enough impressions, again, it's like that person who plays poker. And yet, the best poker player wins every tournament. Now, how can that be? Isn't it luck involved? If you get enough hands, statistically, everybody gets the same set of opportunities, people play them better than others. Now, some people, I don't know that you get, I don't know that all the opportunity set that comes in your life, is enough of a population so that you could say that I think there are some people who get disproportionately good luck or disproportionately bad luck. But I don't think people should be wringing their hands, worrying about whether they're lucky or unlucky. I think you should wring your hands and focus on playing the cards you get as well as you can play them.

H

Hortense le Gentil57:46

Yeah, and knowing how to --

L

Lloyd Blankfein57:48

And also people don't understand, there are benefits and burdens to every situation. When I was growing up, I thought, gee, how lucky would I have been if I'd been born into a more prosperous family, or this, or I had benefits of that, or I didn't have to work on this job, or didn't have to work in the dorm crew, or this. Instead, I had a convertible in college, or something like that. And then I realized I know people like that, and then those same people that I thought were so lucky, turns out that they were victims of high expectations that they couldn't meet, or they were oppressed by it. I'm telling you, in every situation, there are benefits and burdens. I think just play the cards you have and don't worry about whether you got your share of good luck or bad luck.

H

Hortense le Gentil58:28

Yeah, and I think luck is always coming, but you have to see it.

L

Lloyd Blankfein58:33

And I don't know what, the point I'm making is you don't know what good fortune is or not. You know, I will tell you one of the lucky things that turns out for me is I needed to make money when I was getting out of school. If I had gotten a job for $100, you know, when I graduated from college, if it paid $50 more an hour or $50 more a week, I took that job. I did not have to source my motivation. I know kids who are well-to-do before they start their first job and they spend all day wondering what they should do and by the time they figure out what to do that day, it's time for dinner.

H

Hortense le Gentil59:09

Okay, so It's time to dinner soon here, too, so. Your story is inspiring and worth telling. What do you want your kids to trace away, to take away, sorry, to take away from the book? Is there anything you couldn't say in person to your kids?

L

Lloyd Blankfein59:30

You know, I would like to be a benefit to my kids and not a burden. I worry sometimes that the arc of my career, which affords benefits to my kids because, you know, they went, you know, they didn't have to work and they didn't have to do dorm crew or work in, you know, work in, you know, that job. That's an obvious benefit. But also I've created the burden of higher expectations on their part. And there's benefits to them because there's no mythology. They've met smart people and people who run companies and people hide people in government just by tracking with me. And so the mythology that otherwise is intimidating to people and the mysterious nature of the world is not mysterious to them. That's a benefit. But people thinking that maybe they had advantages and that maybe they shouldn't get credit for the good things they've accomplished is a burden on them. So I, you know, with respect to my kids, I hope that the benefits outweigh the burden just like every parent would.

H

Hortense le Gentil1:00:31

Yeah. That's a good, I think that's a good way to stop. So it's right, 8 p.m. So thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, Lloyd Blankfein. Thank you, Lloyd.

Lloyd Blankfein with Hortense le Gentil: Streetwise, From Brooklyn to Boardroom | LIVE from NYPL

About Lloyd Blankfein