CEOInterviews.AIFrom $11 in His Pocket to CEO of Goldman Sachs

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David0:00

Harvard is the Goldman Sachs of educational institutions.

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Lloyd Blankfein0:03

Yes.

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David0:04

Or Goldman Sachs is the Harvard of financial companies.

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Lloyd Blankfein0:07

There's a lot of similarities, and I think the way people would gun for Goldman if you wanted to get a good headline and get attention, people will gun for Harvard the same way.

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David0:21

Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Context Window. Today's guest is Lloyd Blankfein. Lloyd was the CEO of Goldman Sachs for 13 years and twice named one of Time Magazine's most influential people. He was CEO during the 2008 financial crisis, which Goldman survived mostly intact, while other big banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapsed. As we discuss, he successfully managed the firm through one of the biggest crises in modern history. We talk about what Lloyd's worried about now and the current risks in today's financial system. In many ways, Goldman's success and Lloyd's success made them the face of Wall Street to an angry public, so his job quickly changed from financial management to crisis management. So much so that he began communicating with the firm through daily mass voicemails, which he thinks is an underrated approach even today. Lloyd is also a Harvard graduate and author of a new memoir called Streetwise. We talk about how his rough upbringing prepared him for Harvard, why he is a champion of the liberal arts education, and the importance of taking on difficult problems that other people refuse to tackle. I also ask him for advice about how to communicate through the crises facing Harvard right now. This was a fun and spirited conversation. To send me feedback, please email [email protected], and enjoy the show.

Lloyd, thank you for being here.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:29

David, thanks for having me.

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David1:31

I read Streetwise, your new memoir, and I really enjoyed it. Sincerely enjoyed it, not just saying it for the cameras.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:35

Oh, no, no, please stop. No, yeah, right. The interview's over, right? Please stop.

D

David1:39

No, but I'll tell you why I enjoyed it. So I've read a lot of memoirs, and a lot of them, I feel like when people are writing about their past, like when you were talking about how you grew up in East New York, in public housing, and you rode the bus to school, and you got held up at knifepoint, and all these things, I felt like you were narrating it, not interpreting it. And what I mean by that is you were just, like if you were watching the video of your life, you were just saying this happened and this happened, and you were just letting people know how you felt at the time, not how you interpret it after the fact. And so that for me was very refreshing. Did you do that on purpose?

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Lloyd Blankfein2:09

You know, look, it's an out-of-body experience. I was talking about a different person. I was talking about, you know, Lloyd at 15 or Lloyd at 17 years old. So I wasn't talking about me. I was talking about that person. So yeah, I could be a little bit dispassionate and clinical, but, you know, it's all part of the thing. And, you know, it contributes, it's sort of an explanation of all the unfortunate steps that got them to me to be the way I am today.

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David2:34

Well, but I mean, I think you're being a little modest in a sense that many people write a memoir to try to cast a particular light on their life, and it seemed like your goal was to just tell the true story in some sense.

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Lloyd Blankfein2:45

Well, in a way, you know, one of the things I wanted to accomplish, you know, when I walk into a room, I meet somebody, I have to say, you know, I may think of myself one way, but I have to remind myself, 'Oh my God, they're thinking of me as the guy who runs this,' and yet all of which is true, but that's not how I think of myself. And as between that person's very high view of me and my own view, I'm right, 'cause I've been with myself longer. And so part of what I wanted to do in setting things out the way they are is to really make it accessible. Look, I worked hard. I had a good, you know, good EQ, good enough IQ. Things that you, but, you know, but I wanted to make it kind of accessible. Like, I wasn't one in a zillion people who did it. You know, it was fortune in a way, and I wanted to make it so that, oh my goodness, look, in my life where I've met a lot of extraordinary people, I've met very few people who I couldn't figure out how do they do it.

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David3:36

So you wanted people to get it.

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Lloyd Blankfein3:37

That was your, I wanted people to get it, you know, your goal, and also realize that it's accessible. A young kid reading this, it's not gonna be for everybody. Not everyone's gonna have to have the same breaks, not everyone will work as hard, and not everybody will be as fortunate in this or that, but it's accessible. It's not impossible.

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David3:56

One thing that seemed to really animate you through your childhood, really comes out on the page, was your desire to escape. You wanted to get out of your neighborhood and get somewhere else. You didn't know yet that it was gonna be Harvard, although it was eventually Harvard, and that was a driving force behind a lot of your motivation to escape. And yet I was struck by a part of your book when you talked about, you know, you got your letter to Harvard. You were thrilled. Your sister, your older sister, Jackie, went with you to visit, and you saw Harvard, and then you describe on the ride home feeling melancholy. Why did you feel melancholy?

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Lloyd Blankfein4:30

Well, you know, look, I was with my sister who I, you know, who I adore. She was like my parent. She was nine, more than nine years older than me, and, you know, she didn't have the break. She didn't go to college, never would have contemplated that she would go to college, and here I was, you know, I was, like, breaking through, and she was very attentive. And by the way, she didn't have a jealous bone in her body, and she was supportive. But I felt that, you know, it was a, you know, my enthusiasm was tempered that, you know, it was all about me, and I was aware of that. And I felt, you know, that she had, you know, my sister was older. You know, we grew up in public housing. You know, we were too crowded, too small a space, you know, too little money and too little of this and too little of that. You know, I was getting out. And I was sort of, like, leaving, you know, somebody behind on the dock. I felt somebody. And so, yes, my enthusiasm was a little bit tempered by that.

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David5:18

Yeah, it was just striking 'cause it was almost like you were the dog that caught the school bus in one sense. Like, I'm gonna get out, and then you realize you were gonna be the only one.

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Lloyd Blankfein5:25

Well, the dog that caught the school, you know, that metaphor is, you know, gee, you wanted it, now you don't know what to do with it. That wasn't what was really dominating. It was just a little bit tempered by the fact that it occurred to me to be a little bit more empathetic to how she might have been feeling, and it wasn't necessarily that. That's not what animated her.

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David5:42

That probably made it worse, by the way, right? The fact that she was so happy for you.

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Lloyd Blankfein5:44

No, no, I just, you know, it was just, look, you know, I always saw, like, a lot of different sides to things. But I was happy. By the way, I was in part also the dog that caught the bus because I didn't know, I didn't necessarily know. But that wasn't really, I knew I was going on a different kind of adventure, and I was, you know, I was braced to be discombobulated.

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David6:06

You described yourself in your book as the class clown many times. And that you, well, in, no, I mean, some people have said that. I don't know that I would've described myself, but I, but I, well, you did describe yourself, but I absorbed it. Yes, I said that other people referred to it, and I guess, I guess, it shouldn't be a shock that anybody who took the time to write a memoir wanted attention from time to time. Right. You know? Right. Fair enough. What I found interesting about that is also there were several anecdotes in the book where it was clear that you had used humor, or at points in your life humor has been an asset to you. And so I wondered if you think that's true, and also, if it's true, do you think that young people should try to build their sense of humor in the same way they build other skills?

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Lloyd Blankfein6:46

Well, I think humor, in a lot of the ways I have it, is perspective. I always saw things a little bit, and by the way, I know this, and people have said it. And I was in a market. You know, I was involved in taking risk and being a risk manager and trying to anticipate things that would go wrong. That was my core competence, and I think humor is a different kind of perspective. You know, stepping out of your side, seeing the funny side of things, the lighter side of things, a different perspective, recognizing that in the historical sweep of things, you're, you know, you, it, and everybody, everybody's really, really down. Don't you, you know? And they, but they, but you know because you see to have perspective that there's a cycle to things. At the bottom, things look like they're getting worse, but they don't. They could. And at the top, you think things are gonna grow to the sky, but they don't. And so having that perspective and standing a little bit away from it and commenting from time to time. But in terms of using humor and being vocal about it and demonstrative, really that was kinda defensive on my part. You know, I was always, I was always very kind of intense and kind of focused, and that could be, you know, people didn't always enjoy being on the other side of it. And I learned over time that, you know, I'd walk into a room, and people would put the women and children down in the storm cellar and circle the wagons and be braced for it. And I learned over time that I was never going to shed that kind of intensity, but what I could do is I could sort of redirect it a bit and be more self-deprecating. And take the edge off. And that's really the purpose that that served for me, but, you know, but it, you know, not to quote that great philosopher Popeye, 'I am what I am, what I am,' boo-boo. So I'm not gonna step away from that. I'm always gonna have that personality.

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David8:30

So do you think that was always there? I mean, did you cultivate it? I guess my question is, you know, young people are very career-driven. They want advice from people like you. Sense of humor was useful. Could you actually advise people to try to cultivate that, or is it just something that, I am what I am, what I am, you can't do it, you know?

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Lloyd Blankfein8:43

Look, it's somewhere in between. You know, I was, only at home in East New York, Brooklyn before I left to the great world of Harvard and beyond. It was a quarter of my life, yet that quarter is 99%. You know, you're imprinted. I think you're formed. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't lean against your tendency. You're never gonna be a completely different person. But you could be made aware of what your tendencies are, lean against them, stop yourself in moments, take the edge off sometimes. And so the answer is, is someone who's not funny gonna be funny? No. Can you see things a little bit differently? Can you learn to have some perspective? Could you accept that? Yes, you can be a, you can make yourself a little bit different. But you go with what you are. Look, I'm not suggesting any resignation where you accept your status or accept your personality or accept this or that. You should always do it, but you should always learn to appreciate yourself because you're gonna be stuck largely with your foundation.

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David9:40

Yeah, that's a fair point. Speaking of that, you mentioned that you went to Harvard when you were 16. So you skipped a grade, at least one grade.

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Lloyd Blankfein9:45

I skipped a grade early, but I also went to a failed, and then failing, subsequently failed New York City high school.

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David9:52

Thomas Jefferson High School? Is that right?

L

Lloyd Blankfein9:53

Yeah. Yes. It was on triple session, which means that they cleared the room out, the whole school out twice. So you went in the morning, there was an afternoon session, and there's a late afternoon session of the school building because it was, and in those days, you know, you took your majors, and I'd done all that thing at a very young age, not out of sheer brilliance, but because there were no electives or special courses or advanced placement.

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David10:16

Well, it's sort of interesting, Lloyd, because, you know, you did that. You're being a little bit modest. I mean, you were precocious enough to get through high school at 16.

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Lloyd Blankfein10:21

Oh, no, no. I was, you know, I was good in my high school where, you know, where only a reasonable but minority of the kids in the school spoke English. So I rose to the top of the heap in the school. So I'm not, I'm being factual.

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David10:35

What's interesting about it to me is that, you know, lots of people a generation ago skipped grades. Not lots, but a lot more than now. Basically nobody skips grades now. So do you think that would've benefited you? Like, what if you'd come to Harvard when you were 18 or 19 instead of 16?

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Lloyd Blankfein10:46

I think I would've done better in hindsight. I was geared to do everything as soon as you can. It was early, and I thought it was, I thought it was almost status-y that I was younger. But of course, a year here and there at my stage of life, and even at your stage of life, is no big deal. Very small percentage of who you are substantially fully formed. But at 15 or 16, you're still a work in progress, and those years are very important. And had I been a year older, a year more mature, a year more experienced, a year more comfortable with myself, I would've gotten more out of college instead of, you know, in addition to all the intimidation that Harvard would impose on people, even from the best prep school, let alone, you know, a very urban high school, you had to, I had to add to it the fact that I was younger and even for where I came from, less sophisticated.

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David11:40

You said something striking about you, when you first came to Harvard. You said that was the first time in your life that you hadn't felt nickeled and dimed. Can you explain that?

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Lloyd Blankfein11:47

Yeah. I grew up in a place, you know, my father worked nights at the post office, civil service, but prior to that, he had lost his job, and he was unemployed for a while. And, you know, and I grew up with, you know, things were tight. By the way, I didn't think we were poor. Like everybody else, you know, 85% of the country, we thought we were middle class. I just didn't know better. And so I was used to, like, living things tightly and closely and, you know, everything was on a budget, and if you spent money, I remember breaking my glasses once, and that was, like, a big deal 'cause they had to be replaced. And so everything was kinda tight. You get to Harvard, and oh, my God, you know, I lived in a room that had a fireplace, and, you know, you can go into the, you know, the food hall and just take the food and as much as you wanted. And stuff like that. I had not, like, I had not lived like that before. And I remember this one thing that really, it was nothing, but it just stuck with me, that I went, when I went and tried out for crew, and kids were, like, kids, you know, in the observation of the coaches there, were taking towels and ripping the towels to make headbands for themselves so they could work out. And I'm saying, 'You're destroying a towel.' I mean, in my household, I think I was using towels that were new, you know, my great-grandfather brought them over from Eastern Europe, and 45 years later was still using the same towel. I mean, I couldn't imagine that there's a culture somewhere that people just could be that so reckless.

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David13:16

Well, you also said that, right, because of the financial aid at Harvard, and didn't you also request some additional financial aid when you were there, and you got it or, I remember.

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Lloyd Blankfein13:23

Yeah, that was another thing that was very important. So when I'd gotten there, you know, I had my full tuition and room and board covered, which is an embarrassingly slight number compared to what it costs today. But of course, there are books and the other expenses that you have, you know, living. And for that, the way the financial aid worked then, and I knew something about the financial aid 'cause subsequently I worked on financial aid for Harvard. You know, by the way, I went to a different school than my roommates went to because I worked 15 to 20 hours a week. And that meant I didn't do the, you know, extra-curricular activities. And so some of that may have been character-building, but, you know, I'm not sure dorm crew at the end of the day or serving the poor, maybe a little bit, but not really. But I, at one point, I, you know, ran out of money. I had literally, I remember I had $11, and so I went to the financial aid office to say it, and somebody just very matter-of-factly at the financial aid office said, 'What do you need?' I said, 'Well, like, I don't know what I need. I just know that I know what I'm missing.' Something. But, I need something. So he goes, says, 'Hand me a piece of paper,' which had, you know, looked like an income statement. 'You know, we'll write, you know, the expenses are on this side. Write down your, you know, what you have, and, you know, see what the difference is.' And so I did it, and I made it come out to a round number of $500. Okay. This is, you know, for me circa, you know, what was it? 1971. Yeah. And, you know, way back when $500 was more, you know, a lot more than it is today, and I put that in, said my offer. She looked at it and, you know, gave me a check for $500 right then and there. And that's, you were not nickeled and dimed. She said, 'This is what you need, this is what you got.' And it was, like, easy. I didn't have to testify. I didn't have to write an essay. I didn't have to get audited or somebody go over. They didn't say, 'Here's $450.' They just, yeah. They negotiate exactly like that. And so that really stuck with me as, you know, kind of like a way to do things, which had vast more impact on me than the dollars.

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David15:22

I always thought to myself, you know, when people say, 'Gosh, how can you give, you know, money to Harvard or that when, you know, people, you know, in Appalachia are not sustained, and how could you do this when that, and doesn't Harvard have wealth?' And I said, 'You know, for a lot of reasons, not just that reason. But for a lot of reasons, I think, you know, there is poverty. We have to solve these problems, but there's room on the balance sheet of the country to have a space program to explore.' Even though people are hungry, we're still exploring space. Yes, yes. And there's room and actually a need for great institutions. Yes. And also, you were giving out of a sense of affiliation. I mean, it wasn't, this was something that helped you, and you wanted to give back.

L

Lloyd Blankfein16:06

But again, that's my personal belief. But when I'm talking to other people, why should they give? And other people say, why should they do that when not everybody in the world is sustained or has enough calories, or look at the people in war-torn regions, don't they need it more? The answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. You know, the human race should be strivers, so we should still explore and launch rockets to the moon at great expense. And I think there's a need and a utility for great institutions that should be somewhat oblivious to the very tightest, tightest cost controls because we recognize what we're trying to accomplish here.

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David16:45

I would say also that the promise of what a Harvard or schools like it, what that education's supposed to do, is to provide benefits not just to the person who receives them, but to society. So people who go off to, oh, no, no, obviously. You know, as far as I'm concerned, the Ivy, these great institutions with their need-blind admissions is one of the great instrumentalities of accelerating people into the middle and more productive classes of the country. And I say more productive even in the commercial sense, if you wanna go there. It makes people more enriched citizens, and maybe add to the, but if you're that kind of person that only cares about dollars and cents, it does that, too.

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Lloyd Blankfein17:23

Yes. Yes.

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David17:24

Yeah. So speaking of that, so I can tell from reading your memoir and from this conversation that money was very salient to you when you were in college. And so I'm wondering, you know, there's this thing called the Thiel, Peter Thiel's fellowship now that offers at least $100,000 to young, talented people who are willing to drop out and start a company instead. Do you think if the Thiel fellowship had been offered to you, you would've taken it?

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Lloyd Blankfein17:43

No, I wouldn't have 'cause even though money was tight, but I wasn't that wired to go for money. I see. Yeah. In other words, money was tight because money was tight. And when I was a kid in high school, I worked and contributed money into the household. And so I was always aware what things cost, and that you had to have it. But I don't think at any point in my life I was trying to maximize my income or the stage. It's one of the ironies, I think that at a time when young kids today have a life expectancy at close to or in excess of 100, you know, as life expectancy has grown on, all of a sudden they have to, at a younger and younger and younger age launch their professional career, even though they have a much longer runway in front of them, and a chance to become a complete person and a better developed person. I think what the concept of that, and I'm, you know, he's not here, and I'm, you know, he's a complicated, you know, Peter Thiel is a complicated guy who I've met from time to time. So not to address him personally, but the idea of kids not getting a general education and just focusing at the earliest they possibly can on to be commercially successful, I think it's subversive. I think for a million reasons, for people's own personal education to become a more complete person, become a better person. But if you only were concerned about commercial advancement and didn't care about being a better well-rounded person and an enriched person, and you only cared about the commercial outcome, let me tell you, in the commercial world, you still have to get along and deal with people. And people wanna deal with interesting people and not the narrowest person. And so I don't doubt that there's, and of course, legend, success stories of people who dropped out of school and done these fabulous things, but, and so it's good for them. They'd never trade that in, never go backwards, and I'm really happy for them. But I think generally, in the greater world, I think undergraduate years are for liberal arts, becoming, you know, expansive and becoming the more interesting person that will be as a result of those greater interests, and being more interesting to other people will lead to more, even more commercial success.

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David19:53

So it sounds like you would advise, let's say, Lloyd Blankfein today, coming from public housing in New York, coming to a place like Harvard, gets offered a fellowship like that. You would tell them not to do it.

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Lloyd Blankfein20:06

Of course.

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David20:07

You would tell them to graduate and wait.

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Lloyd Blankfein20:08

Yeah. To graduate, to learn as much as you can, to learn, to read, if you wanna be a physicist, read history. You don't know the way the world's going to evolve anyway. Yes. You know, 15 minutes ago, everyone would've wanted to be a software engineer. And that doesn't look so good. Coding boot camps. Coding boot camps. Right? They were all the rage a few years ago, and now look. And now you might as well have butter churning boot camps, or have a whole course on how to use your slide rule. And what, and my kid, if I said that, my kids would go, 'What's a slide rule?' And so you don't know the way the world's going to evolve. And I'll tell you something else you don't know. You don't know the way you're going to evolve. Undergraduate years is not just to wait to see how the world evolves. It's to learn things so you could see how you evolve and how your interests develop.

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David20:53

I'm really glad to hear this, Lloyd. It's an endorsement, a credible endorsement of the value of a liberal arts and sciences education in a time when things are changing rapidly. That's what you want. Your education needs to prepare you not just for today's technological disruption, but the one after that, and the one after that, and the one.

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Lloyd Blankfein21:06

Well, not to prepare you for them 'cause you don't know the one after that. How about just to prepare you to have an open mind and a curiosity about things?

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David21:13

Yes. That too. That's the most important thing. Yes, I agree. Going back a little bit, 'cause again we mentioned that money was very salient in your life, I have another counterfactual for you.

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Lloyd Blankfein21:21

Okay.

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David21:21

Okay. So how much of your net worth would you give up today to give $100,000 to your 17-year-old self in cash? You don't have to give it to financial aid. It's just in your bank account.

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Lloyd Blankfein21:29

Would I give, you know, you know, paths diverge in Yellow Woods. Who knows? I, you know, I was what I was. I developed in that way. I don't know. Look, hey, let me say it, I evolved the way I did.

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David21:44

You wouldn't give yourself any, you wouldn't give yourself a break?

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Lloyd Blankfein21:46

Look, look, I compare myself, I love my kids. They grew up differently than I did. I had some, I call my first chapter advantages. You know? If you look at it, because I had, there were burdens I had that other people didn't have, and there were benefits I had that other people didn't have. I'll give you one important one that people like my kids didn't suffer from. I never had to source my motivation. If I had a job and somebody offered me 50 cents an hour more for a different job, I would've taken that one because I needed it. And I didn't have to source. It wasn't like, 'Is this gonna fulfill me? To be or not to be?' You know? It was, like, I didn't have to source my motivation, so life was easier in that way.

D

David22:29

I see. Okay. Now, if you are very well off and you could do anything.

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Lloyd Blankfein22:34

Yeah. The problem, it's like now, I'm retired. So every day I get up, I don't set my alarm clock. I could decide what I wanna do. Sometimes it takes me till about 5:00 in the afternoon to figure out what I wanna do that day, by which time I'm already starting to, by all the, the day is over, and I'm starting to think about where I'm gonna have dinner. You know, I get kind of, you know, I get kind of tied up. I can't get tied up in stuff. But when I was younger, I didn't get tied up in anything. I knew what I had to do. Simple. And life was simpler. So if I went back in time and made myself wealthier at a younger age, would that have helped me or not? I don't know. I am what I am.

D

David23:07

I see. Okay. So you went to Harvard Law School straight out of undergraduate?

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Lloyd Blankfein23:10

Yep. Yep.

D

David23:11

And then you worked for three years at a law firm?

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Lloyd Blankfein23:14

Let me tell you, to take a gap year would, for the way I grew up, would have looked so frivolous.

D

David23:19

I'm sure. Yeah, right. Right. Although you did have to take on loans to go to Harvard Law School, yeah?

L

Lloyd Blankfein23:24

I did. Yeah. But everybody, yeah, but people took on loans. I mean, I didn't feel like, oh my God, I'm so, you know, look how I'm suffering 'cause I'm taking on loans.

D

David23:34

So you went to Harvard Law School straight through, and then you worked in law. You practiced law.

L

Lloyd Blankfein23:38

Yep.

D

David23:39

Tax law, corporate law, for three, four years.

L

Lloyd Blankfein23:41

For about four and a half years.

D

David23:42

Four and a half years, okay. And then you went to go work in commodities trading, which is pretty far in career space from one to the other. So tell me a little bit about that decision. How did it land with your wife, your friends? Why'd you do it? Did you think it was the right decision?

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Lloyd Blankfein23:57

Well, yeah, it was kind of defaulted into it because like a lot of people, you know, in a big law firm in those years, it's probably a lot different today, but in those years, you worked at a law firm for about eight or nine years. You were up for partner. You made it or you didn't. Then in between, people would peel off and do other things. Become a general counsel, go out, you know, become, you know, go to a commune and live. Something, they'd do something different along the way. And that usually happened around the time that you were kind of, you'd, like Groundhog's Day. Halfway through, you'd pick up your head, see if you saw your shadow or not, and I picked up my head, didn't see my shadow.

D

David24:30

So you didn't think you would make partner?

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Lloyd Blankfein24:32

No, no. I was doing actually well, but I decided I, based upon the way the lifestyle that the partners were having, and what they were working on, and to me was like, I was a tax lawyer, and there were people in the next office. You know, you'd get these things called advance sheets when new cases would come down. Now it would all be online. There, it would come in the mail, and guys would be waiting to get the advance sheets of the new cases that were decided and read them so they could see how they impacted the state of the tax law. And it was like the Wells Fargo wagon was coming, and they couldn't wait to get it. And I would dread getting them 'cause then I'd have to read those things, and it was so boring. And I'm saying to myself, you know, I was doing well in the law firm, but I said, 'But I'm never gonna, you know, if I have to compete against those people that love this stuff, and I don't, and to me it's really a job. And they love it.' I said, 'I better find something that I like better than this to do.'

D

David25:21

So you looked down the road and you said, 'I don't like what this future is.'

L

Lloyd Blankfein25:24

So I'm in New York, and so what do you do? If you start looking for another job, it's finance, 'cause we're a finance town. And so I applied to all banks and investment banks and maybe a consulting firm or something like that, you know, New York kinds of things. And it, I kinda got rejected at all the important ones. By the way, including Goldman Sachs. I went and got an interview. Didn't do well. And by the way, I never did any work. I didn't even know what investment banks did. I remember going up in the elevator at one of these things, and on the elevator they had, on the top of the elevator lit up. You know, it said, you know, private finance, fixed income trading, municipal bonds. And I realized, I started writing it down, 'cause up until that point I didn't know what, I didn't know what they did in these firms. And that, you know, instead of saying sportswear, lingerie, probably a bad sign in retrospect. Yes. Yeah. A bad sign of what I did. And so I got turned down, and then I got, through a headhunter, called me up and introduced me to this commodity trading firm, J. Aron & Company. J. Aron, yeah. And I got a job there, and Goldman Sachs acquired them right about the time I was interviewing there.

D

David26:29

So you got into Goldman through the back door.

L

Lloyd Blankfein26:31

So I got in through the back door at Goldman, and that's how I got into the firm.

D

David26:34

You know, you describe in your memoir, you went from working in tax law to going to J. Aron, and you were on the trading floor, which is basically just pandemonium, people yelling at each other, calling out numbers, names on the phone.

L

Lloyd Blankfein26:45

You know, so I go from a set, by the way, I liked my law firm, I mean, I liked the job. I just didn't, the content of it, over time, I wasn't gonna, I didn't think I'd be that great at it. But it's a place where it was, Donovan Leisure, it was a great firm. It's no longer there, but it was one of the big firms at the time.

But a lot of firms have been, you know, through merger, it doesn't exist. And you could hear a pin drop in the firm. I had my, you know, I had an office. I had a secretary. At 4:00, they came out, around with a tea cart. Like, it was like, you know, like we were, you know, like it was like old- Do you drink tea? Well, I did when I was there. And they came with cookies and stuff, and it was just so, you know, it was just so fuddy-duddy and lovely.

D

David27:21

And then, you know, I go to this- Not for you though, right?

L

Lloyd Blankfein27:23

Yeah, commodity trading firm where, yeah, the big trading floor, and people were screaming at each other, and that, and I, you know, it was a, it was a little bit of a shell shock.

D

David27:29

You thought, 'Now I'm home.'

L

Lloyd Blankfein27:30

But I got a job. Those guys said, 'Can you, can you...' You know, in fact, the guy who interviewed me literally was calling me college boy. I mean, calling me college boy, which tells you something about the rest of the people that worked there.

D

David27:44

Different time, yeah.

L

Lloyd Blankfein27:44

And so, I ended up... He said, 'Can you think you can work in that?' And I said, you know, 'Work in it? I go home to it every day.' Kind of thing, 'cause I was used to... And so I did, and it suited me. It suited my short attention span. And I kind of, I liked it. You know, I like processing information. I like the impact of events on markets. You know, you had to know everything that was going on all the time.

D

David28:09

Yeah, being in the middle of everything.

L

Lloyd Blankfein28:10

Being in the middle, and you know, a little pandemonium, but everybody knew what was going on. And, you know, people would be fighting with their spouses. In those cases, fighting with your spouse has meant fighting with your wife, around the thing, and shouting at each other and shrieking, and it was just a cacophony of noise. But if somebody said something wrong, the whole room would stop, and everybody would look at that place because people were able to select anything. So, you know, I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot, and I learned that it suited me.

D

David28:38

So trading floor today is not like that.

L

Lloyd Blankfein28:39

No, not at all. It's silent. People have headphones on. They're on their screens. People will email to the person sitting next to them rather than lean over and whisper to them.

D

David28:49

So do you think you would've gone into the same profession now, given that's what it was like?

L

Lloyd Blankfein28:53

You know, I don't know. It's times. It's like could Michael Jordan beat so-and-so in basketball? They're different games, different times. I'd say people who are good and motivated and disciplined will be good in whatever environment you throw them into. They'll just develop different skills.

D

David29:07

Well, I'm sure you would've been good. The question is would you have wanted to do it? Because you were leaving an environment that was more sedate.

L

Lloyd Blankfein29:13

But, you know, so look, I think things are more the same than they are dissimilar. So it's less, you know, different technology, different noise level, different, you know, of 50 different things. But at the end of the day, it's still what's going on, people trying to guess the future, people still trying to be disciplined about their mistakes. People taking a warehouse full of information trying to figure out what's important, what's not important. And those basic fundamental things have probably been going on for all recorded history. You know, when people were tapping things onto rocks and tablets, they would, you know, there were still people transacting and trading and trying to figure out whether this would be more valuable later or in a different place than here.

D

David30:00

Yeah, that's right. You joined J. Aron, which was acquired by Goldman, and you rose very quickly. You became a partner in 1988. Right? And that was very rapid, and that was a big moment for you. So tell me when you got that call that you were becoming a partner, and also explain, like, what does it mean to be partner at Goldman Sachs?

L

Lloyd Blankfein30:17

Well, Goldman Sachs historically was a literal and a legal partnership, but by the way, it still operates as a kind of partner like today. What it means is that the owners of the firm are a whole echelon, a whole layer of the senior people of the firm, and everyone behaves like owners. And so it tends to be a little bit flatter organization, less stratified. The people who nominally are employees and subordinates on an organizational chart are your co-owners. And as owners, they feel entitled to information, and they act and behave like owners who care about the success of the whole enterprise, not just their narrow job. And when you run a place like that, you feel somewhat that your legitimacy is based upon the consent of your fellow owners, who in a corporation would be your subordinates, and you would owe them very little, but when they're your co-owners, you owe them a lot. And so the whole style and way of running things and thinking about things and the relationship between yourself and the person above you or the person below you is different in terms of how you carry yourself in terms of consequence. So that in a partnership generally, and in ownership culture, there generally is more loyalty to the institution because you're a co-owner of it and not just a temporary renter of it.

D

David31:42

Right. You're a partner in the firm literally.

L

Lloyd Blankfein31:43

Partner. And so that's kind of what it means.

D

David31:45

And so then that was very different than the culture at J. Aron, right? And so part of this was you were being made partner from J. Aron, which was only one part of what Goldman Sachs was.

L

Lloyd Blankfein31:53

But that stayed as one part and was operated separately for a long time, and even though I joined Goldman Sachs, in my book, the subtitle of my book has the word Goldman Sachs in it, I was still a little bit aloof from core Goldman because J. Aron, the company that I joined, was in a separate building for a long time. Even though it was acquired, it wasn't integrated in. And that took years and for a long time. So even when I became a partner of Goldman Sachs, I would say things like, 'I'm going to visit Goldman Sachs.' And, you know, I talked about Goldman Sachs in the third person. It took over time, it got integrated. It's kind of lost to memory now these many years, many, many years later.

D

David32:33

So early on in your tenure as a partner, you got into a little bit of hot water with a guy named Robert Maxwell.

L

Lloyd Blankfein32:39

Oh, yes.

D

David32:40

Right. A little bit, who later... Now, you were advising him, and he later was accused of fraud, and you had a line in the book which I thought was great, which was, 'I realized I was now a person that was worth manipulating.' So tell me about that.

L

Lloyd Blankfein32:49

In the annals of Goldman or world or the history of fraud, it's not even a detail, not even a parenthetical. But it's a lesson. I was relatively still a junior guy, but maybe on the cusp of breaking through. And I was running a foreign exchange desk in business, and long story short, he was a guy that was committing... he was a very substantial, important figure in the UK firmament. And it turns out he was committing fraud by moving funds from his public company and the pensioners of his public company to a private company that was his property, and manipulating it. And one of the devices he used to manipulate this was doing foreign exchange transactions, which he was totally authorized to do, blah, blah, blah. But guess what? The way he was doing it and executing it was calling the foreign exchange desk at Goldman Sachs, me as the principal, and I was so enamored of the idea that I was talking to the great man myself that I didn't exercise a lot of critical faculty. Now, was there critical faculty? I don't know. There was just... he was doing foreign exchange, having them delivered. Did I, would I have checked on it, inspected? Would I, should I have been suspicious? No. But the point was that when it was all sorted out, I felt so guilty of my very minor administrative involvement in it that I turned it in my own head to a big thing. And I remember lawyers talking to me and briefing me. I thought they thought I might be called to testify. What was I gonna testify to? That I was in his... You know. But it wasn't a big deal, but I thought, 'God, can I get fired? Can I get this? Did I do something wrong?' And so the natural guilt, being a guilt-ridden person to begin with, it fed on me. But I also learned that, as you said, that I was worth being a... that I was now in a position of influence. And you know what I've noticed? I'll say something more generically. The kinds of people who had the job I had aren't out and about and mingling and using their... you know, you develop, when you have to be at a job where you're one of the big equity providers or capital providers or lenders and you have to exercise judgment on behalf of your balance sheet and your shareholders and the firm, 'I'll do this, I won't do that, I'll invest in this, I won't do that,' everybody's coming to you, and you have a lot of friends. But you're in a position to do very important and make or break certain opportunities for other people. And I think over time it makes you a little bit more careful and disciplined and maybe even a little bit more remote.

D

David35:30

Wary.

L

Lloyd Blankfein35:31

And wary. Best word, about stuff, and maybe that transit. So, you know, and I noticed that among people who had that job when I had that job and people afterwards, you don't see those people as much out and about.

D

David35:46

And 'cause everybody wants something from them, you know, and participating in the favor bank.

L

Lloyd Blankfein35:50

Yes. You know, making deposits and withdrawals in the favor bank.

D

David35:52

Well, because you... That's what struck me about it, was that you had an early negative experience with that that affected you a lot, but that really helped you because you were wary of the favor bank early on. And it was minor, like you said, and that was probably useful for you.

L

Lloyd Blankfein36:02

It's very funny. It's like I have a lot of friends and people I vastly, you know, greatly admire from my career who I engage with in business, and I have social friends and, you know, not zero, but I tended not to... my best social friends were the ones that I wasn't doing business with. And the reverse. It's a simpler relationship. It's just a simpler relationship. And I just could be more open and less wary.

D

David36:30

So you, again, you rose very quickly through the firm. Um, you were named CEO...

L

Lloyd Blankfein36:34

Didn't feel quick to me.

D

David36:36

Well, as it... Relatively speaking, it was quick. And you, you know, you became... So you succeeded Hank Paulson as CEO in 2006. So he was the CEO and you were working with him, and in 2002 he asked you to kind of rescue the equities division. And the sense I got from your accounting of this was that this was a problem that nobody wanted to tackle, including the two co-COOs.

L

Lloyd Blankfein36:58

Yeah. I think rescue is a little... There was... Address it. Yeah. Address... Make it better, address... Um, yes, it was a focus because at that point I had been in the commodities division and then we merged the fixed income and the commodity, the much larger fixed income division with commodities and I ran that. And then the equity division was run pretty, what I thought, pretty inefficiently because at that point the trading division was viewed as a facilitation division. 'Cause the way the firm made more money and the bigger part of what it did, even in people's consciousness, was it did IPOs and brought companies to market. And raised capital. And in order to raise capital, you have to be able to trade the securities. Once the securities get created by a company, goes public, you had to be able to trade it. And that trading was viewed as a facilitation in order to get the IPO, the capital raising. And it wasn't viewed as a profit center in and of itself. In fact, it lost money continuously, but it lost less money than was being made in fees for doing the capital markets, the fundraising.

D

David38:11

And you had the mindset of a trader, so you saw this.

L

Lloyd Blankfein38:13

Had the mindset, and there's no reason why the traders shouldn't be charged with making money. And very often, if you tell people they don't have to make money, they don't make money. If you tell them they have to make money, they make money. You know, it just rewires them. And so we went over there and rewired, and I had a lot of help in that. There were other people who came. You know, I was then running those divisions. And I moved people over who were very good and had gone through that same kind of evolution in fixed income and in other places, and they did it. But in those days, it was very inefficient in terms of population, the way it was organized. We, you know, I think we had 82 people covering Fidelity. And I said, 'You know something? Why don't we have somebody talk to them about all this stuff?'

D

David38:56

But this seemed like an important episode for you because the way I read it in your book, this was a problem that just, it was a really thorny, complicated problem, and everyone knew it was, but nobody really wanted to dig in and solve it, including, again, these folks who were nominally doing it, and also potentially the future successors to Hank Paulson. And so when he asked you to do that, which was in 2002, I think, in retrospect, do you think that was the moment when you started to be considered his successor? 'Cause you were willing to take on something that other people wouldn't take on.

L

Lloyd Blankfein39:27

You know, I don't know. At that point, there were other people in the firm who'd been there a little bit longer, and they were elevated way higher and before me that were still there. I just thought it was something that I wanted to do.

D

David39:37

Right. I mean, I wasn't... From your perspective, I'm just saying, do you think the fact that you were willing to tackle a really tough problem that other people weren't kind of put you in that position later on?

L

Lloyd Blankfein39:47

Maybe. I, even now, I don't know the people. There were other people who were named. I thought it was just weakness on the part of those other people that they didn't take it on and do it. And they didn't wanna take risk and do something that would work. I had nothing. I didn't mind. I was just focused on getting it done. It sort of annoyed me that it was run poorly and inefficiently, and that was my principal motivation, the annoyance.

D

David40:11

You wanted to fix it.

L

Lloyd Blankfein40:12

I wanted to, yeah. And I did it, and I knew the people there knew how to do it. They just had to be... By the way, that's in everything. You know, very often, look, I don't know anything, but anything that's organized circa 20 years ago needs something different today. Things evolve and move on. I'm sure half of the good things at Harvard are between the units that you have and the different departments, and they fall in between, and then other departments are growing into each other. I'm sure there are people who are doing, you know, there's a research project or a course that could be in the School of Public Health, the medical school, the bio department, or some other place, and yet you have all these divisions and everyone has their thing. And if someone came in today, they would probably reorganize it differently. But that's a high bar to get over because everybody who runs each of those places doesn't wanna give up his branch. And the question is, who has the energy to just go in and fix it once and for all?

D

David41:08

It's gotta be a guy like you.

L

Lloyd Blankfein41:09

Or you.

D

David41:10

You, it was you.

L

Lloyd Blankfein41:10

Well, it was me there, but you there in the new place. But I'm saying, but that's what has to be done. And then the second you expose yourself and lift your head above the parapet, everyone in all those groups who are fighting away from you will then agree on one thing: you're a bad guy.

D

David41:27

So you're telling my future is what you're saying?

L

Lloyd Blankfein41:30

Yes. I'm foretelling. No, but it's just the nature of things.

D

David41:31

But that's not what happened to you because four years later, you were named a CEO. You were... It was Memorial Day weekend, you're on the golf course, you get a call from Hank Paulson. What was that like?

L

Lloyd Blankfein41:41

Well, Hank and I, my predecessor, who subsequently became Secretary of Treasury. We had this course of dealing. Like, a fabulous guy, very smart. We couldn't be more different. He's a Christian Scientist from the Midwest, and I'm a Brooklyn Jew. And but we got along great, but one of the things in our course of dealing with each other is we kind of... Even though everybody works around the clock seven days a week, we never called each other at night or on weekends, even though I called everybody else at that time, and so did he. But we never called each other. And then one day over the weekend, I'm out of the house, and I get a call from Laura on Memorial Day weekend, on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, and she says, 'Hank's called the house. He's looking for you.' And I go, he didn't even have my cell phone number. This is my boss, and does it show you how rare it was. And I go, 'Hank? Calling me? At home?' And he was calling, and I knew what was going on because for a few weeks before that, he was approached by the president, who's Bush, who's, by the way, whose chief of staff was ex-Goldman. So, you know, like a lot of people in the administration, and every administration is ex-Goldman. And I know that Hank was being offered being Secretary of Treasury, but it was the second term of Bush, so it was the second half of the second term of a by then unpopular president who wasn't gonna get anything done.

D

David43:13

So you weren't sure he was gonna take it?

L

Lloyd Blankfein43:15

He wasn't sure he was gonna take it. I was pretty sure he was gonna take it. Because you're secretary, you know, it's a very hard... You can act reticent, but it's very hard to turn that down. And also, which I said to him at the time when he said, 'I'm not gonna...' I said, 'I think you're gonna take it.' Why? I said to Hank at the time, 'Hank, what was your first job out of college?' Which I knew, and he knows. It was, oh, White House fellow. I said, 'You know, the die is cast. Your first job was Washington. You're not gonna turn down, you gonna wait till there's a better president or a different time?' You know, there's a once in... And so he ended up taking it and he said, so he was calling to tell me that he was gonna take the job, and that we should fly down together, that he was going down to the Rose Garden on Tuesday, this was a Sunday, on Tuesday to fly down with him, and we'll discuss transition.

D

David44:11

Okay. And then you knew.

L

Lloyd Blankfein44:13

Yeah, then I knew. And so I was thinking, 'Oh my God, this is the hit.' And he said, 'I'd like you to be my successor. Of course the board has to do that,' blah, blah, blah. And so my knees are knocking. I was scared. But, and, you know, gave me a couple days to stew about it. But when he said we'll fly down together, it was a short flight from New York to Washington. So at least I'll have 15 minutes, because once he got the nomination, he couldn't, you know, he had to be away from the firm. So it's like the hit by a bus scenario in which case he's not gonna engage with the firm anymore. 'Cause he'd have to have a wall then, 'cause he had to first, you know, get confirmed by the Senate and be remote from the firm. And I remember thinking, 'Well, at least I'll be able to discuss the transition.' And then we get on the plane and we start talking about what he should ask, you know, read his acceptance speech, read Bush's speech. And I realized, whose transition are we talking about? I thought it was my transition, but it was his, obviously. You know, my mind, I think his job was important, so we talked about his transition. And then it was an interesting thing because didn't have the normal, you know, where the senior guy is retiring and here's the successor and we're gonna overlap for six months. And I'm gonna show him where the keys are and where the bathroom is and all these other kinds of things and what's on the shelf. And he just sort of disappeared and off and running. Which has advantages too.

D

David45:33

It does. Although it turns out, you know, this was 2006, so times were good financially. You have about 15 minutes.

L

Lloyd Blankfein45:38

For about 15 minutes. Yeah, it turns out that that prep wouldn't have really maybe prepared you for what was to come. No, no. Well, it would've been... Look, it would've been, if nothing else, it would've allowed me to get my kinda sea legs. I remember that week we had a global, you know, like our partners meeting that was in Chicago where, you know, a young first term Senator Barack Obama was speaking to our partners, and Warren Buffett. And the very next week after that we had our board meeting in Beijing. Which, and the board meeting when you have these remote board meetings is just an excuse to turn them into very big client events. So we had, you know, we were hosting all these parties, one in the Forbidden City, one literally on the Great Wall. Invited, you know, half the people from the standing committee were at the party, and all the CEOs of state-owned enterprises, which are also ministerial positions, were there. And I'm like... Actually, I was CEO designate because Hank didn't wanna, as he shouldn't have, give up his title until he was confirmed, which took a couple of months 'cause they... And who knows anymore? Today would take years. Today it only took a couple of months. And so, but he couldn't obviously come to any, so I was the de facto CEO of the company. And I'm walking along, and I had to learn to get, you know, acclimated isn't right... Statesmanlike. You had to be statesmanlike right away. Statesmanlike, which was not necessarily how I was honed and picked for the job. And I remember one of my board members, one of my most important board members at that time, 'cause when I say my board members, they were Hank's board members, but now they became my board members. I'm walking along to a dinner in China, and, you know, the Chinese. Nominally we're the host, but really the hosts are the Chinese 'cause we're having it in their Forbidden City on their Great Wall. Are in front of us, I'm hanging, you know, with some of the executives of the firm and board members, and I literally feel a kick in my butt. And I turn around, and who kicked me? And it was Ruth Simmons.

D

David47:37

Oh, yeah.

L

Lloyd Blankfein47:37

Yeah. Ruth Simmons, who was then the president of Brown, who had a distinguished career before that, and a distinguished post-Brown career. Very important, good board member and a good friend and a mentor, and tormentor at times. Kicked me, and I turn around, I was, like, startled. She said, 'You get up there with those guys.' Get up there. You know, it was great.

D

David48:00

Be the statesman.

L

Lloyd Blankfein48:01

Well, it was right. I mean, here I was, I hadn't gotten accommodated to who or what my job was, who I was at that point. I didn't feel like it, but whether I felt like it or not...

D

David48:10

You were gonna have to get up there.

L

Lloyd Blankfein48:12

Exactly. Get up there with those guys.

D

David48:13

Yeah, you better be ready.

L

Lloyd Blankfein48:13

And that was another lesson and a data point for me.

D

David48:16

When you think about how you and Goldman managed to weather the financial crisis, you talked a lot about the firm's internal mark-to-market culture. And as a matter of fact, how that internal culture helped you get neutral with respect to the mortgage market as early as January in 2007, when actually the crisis didn't start to hit till several months later. So tell me, what is mark-to-market culture, and why is it so important?

L

Lloyd Blankfein48:37

Well, and by the way, it speaks to things that are going on in the current market, in the current environment. But, you know, things accumulate on people's balance sheet, and you can look at them, and what does that mean, balance sheet? You know, if you're a big bank, you have a lot of assets and liabilities. You own stuff. Assets is another word for stuff. And a lot of the stuff you own you've had for a long time, and you have an idea of what they're worth. And really, the fluctuations of value in what you have should flow through your income. If it's worth less, it's a loss. If it's worth more... But generally, if you're not selling them every day, you don't know that the value of them has changed. And you just take it for granted that the value is the same unless you hear otherwise generally. And sometimes they sit there forever and you don't change the price of them. And then suddenly, at some point, you find out, 'Oh my God, they're not worth what I thought they were. We're really a lot less wealthy. We really had losses that we haven't accumulated or acknowledged in the world.' So what we always had was a culture where we marked things to market every day. We'd look at the value of things. Did the value change? And we'd run that through the P&L.

D

David49:41

How did you assess the value?

L

Lloyd Blankfein49:42

We had a separate part of the firm. In other words, we had traders who buy and sell things and who can live in a fantasy world if they want to, that this is worth more than I paid for it. But we had another part of the firm who didn't enjoy that fantasy world, who would go out... The risk management side. The risk management side. And controllers, we call them. And they would go out, and they would assess the value of it, and they would look for parallel instruments, and they would look for analogous things, and they would look for things that sold in the market that were like it. And you know something? If they couldn't find anything, they would lower the value, and if they got challenged in that by a trader, the controller would say, 'Okay. Go out and sell a couple of them and see what price you get.' So it's adversarial by design. And by the way, those people got... They were partners, too. And they got paid well for doing that job, and they were parallel, and they could have done each other's jobs, and so they were high status in the firm. And so we got a sense, apparently earlier than other people, that a lot of the triple A securities, the mortgages, that existed on people's balance sheets, that other people thought were money good, that were as good as Treasuries, as US Treasuries, were not.

D

David50:52

And you got that sense because you tried to sell them, or you marked them...

L

Lloyd Blankfein50:53

Because people had to sell them and go to market. They were continually being marked down. By the way, the other thing about marking them down in value is it makes it easier for the traders to sell them. Because if you have something that's marked at 100, and the best you can get for them in the world is 72, you don't wanna take the 28 loss. But if it's already marked down to 72, you've already had the loss. So you might as well sell them. So for a variety of reasons, marking it to market and making you take the medicine early was a risk management tool and a good accounting tool, and it made people do that. And as a result of that, our balance sheet and our awareness of what was going on was better.

D

David51:38

So you were...

L

Lloyd Blankfein51:38

By the way, we didn't know that we were gonna be right in the long run. Things that the market was paying 72 for could've been really five minutes from now worth 100. You know, it could've been a... in other words, we didn't necessarily know it was right, just that was what the market was saying.

D

David51:55

You're saying it, you weren't... You didn't do better because you had a premonition that things were gonna be worse. It's because you had an adversarial culture of pricing these trades and saying, 'Look, I...' A forced imposition of reality.

L

Lloyd Blankfein52:09

Yeah. Of current reality. So as soon as something happened in the world that sends you a signal back, you noticed it, and you had to account for it. And so it makes you much more attuned to the signal, and it makes what you have conform to the current reality. And other people were living in a relative fantasy place where all of a sudden when the crisis started to unfold, they had literally, some of them hundreds of billions of dollars of losses that were not taken, which eroded all their capital. And so firms went under.

D

David52:38

And that explains why you were in a better position. I mean, nobody's in a good position when you have a historic crisis, but you were in a better position than the other firms.

L

Lloyd Blankfein52:44

Right. Our big achievement during those years of the global financial crisis was we didn't lose money. We didn't make money, but we didn't lose money, and we were a firm that was known for taking a high-risk profile. And we fulfilled our functions in the market because while this is going on, we're buying from people who wanna sell, selling to people who wanna buy, performing our normal market-making functions and taking on risks, and so fulfilling those obligations. It was not fun. It wasn't pleasant. It was a lot of work to break even. And by the way, there were huge swings while we're trying to break even because you can't always sell what you have. You have to sell things that are like it, but they're not exactly like it. And there are different timings and different things, and so you have to have computers and algorithms and smart people to figure out how to get yourself close to even. But we managed to get close to even.

D

David53:37

Which is better than going out of business.

L

Lloyd Blankfein53:38

We...

D

David53:38

Which is better than dying.

L

Lloyd Blankfein53:40

Dying, yeah.

D

David53:41

So there were a bunch of you, bunch of banks in different, or bunch of firms in different situations during the crisis, and one thing that's striking to me as I read both your book and then other accounts of this was the level of cooperation between both the government and CEOs of banks, and then actually between rival banks that are trying to kill each other in normal times. You all were all brought together, put in a room essentially, and said, 'Work it out.' And you did.

L

Lloyd Blankfein54:05

Oh, yeah. Well, all the institutions are always frenemies. They have to be because even when you do an M&A, there's more than one advisor, and there's people on the other side, and you have to be able to have good working relationships, and so sometimes you're adversarial, the next time you're co. You're bringing a huge company public, there are four underwriters, and the underwriters have to...

D

David54:27

Work together, and you make markets here, I'll make markets. So you're always coordinating, and then you're always competing against each other. In that particular case, it was the government that brought everybody together.

L

Lloyd Blankfein54:40

Yeah. And the government, of course, is adversarial to you all the time and structured that way, except at times they need cooperation that goes beyond their ability to command you.

D

David54:50

Yes.

L

Lloyd Blankfein54:51

And so but everybody has the same interest because you don't want the world to-

D

David54:55

Yeah. Well, so here's my question, Lloyd. That was striking that that happened during the crisis, which is now almost 20 years ago. If we had another crisis, do you think that level of trust between government and banks would exist today? Would you be able to get into a room and work it out today?

L

Lloyd Blankfein55:08

Well, you would. Again, it wasn't necessarily a level of trust, it was a level of self-interest, and that was commanded. People would still have that self-interest. Everything is always different.

D

David55:20

What are the differences today?

L

Lloyd Blankfein55:21

In those days, the central bank could convene a meeting. The New York Fed in the conference room of the New York Fed convene a meeting, and you get the heads of 12 institutions, let's say a dozen institutions, and that would be 90% of the exposures that they were worried about. And maybe the Big Five were 84% of the exposures that they were worried about. It was very concentrated.

D

David55:47

Today, with private equity and private credit and all these different organizations, and in a way, some of the reforms that were done after the global financial crisis made the big banks much more regulated, required so much more capital that a lot of the activity-

L

Lloyd Blankfein56:04

The capital left to the unregulated entities. And now so much of it is done outside the ability of the regulators to observe that they wouldn't know necessarily who to call up. And if they knew who to call up, they'd have to hold it at Yankee Stadium because there are just so many more entities to bring together. So I think it would be more difficult today.

D

David56:30

So it's interesting because there's many more people. That could be a strength because it diversifies risk across the system, or it could be a weakness because it's hard to coordinate. What's your instinct on that?

L

Lloyd Blankfein56:39

I would say it this way. There's a law of conservation of risk. Risk exists in the world. It's sometimes a question of how you distribute it. And so what I think is a lot of the reforms that were done, like making things much more diversified and spread out, makes the 20-year storm safer, but the 80-year storm more dangerous.

D

David57:04

Hmm.

L

Lloyd Blankfein57:05

Because in other words, it's less likely to have a problem because it's more distributed, so what would've been the 20-year storm, the bad hurricane that comes once every 20 years, we'll get through that because the risk isn't so concentrated. But if we ever have the 80-year storm where the risk is overwhelming, how do we get everybody in the room? How do we do this? How do we organize it?

D

David57:27

So you think longer booms but then deeper busts? Is that kind of-

L

Lloyd Blankfein57:30

It's very possible that it is. And by the way, since it's the 80-year storm, the people who put the rules in place only have to worry about whether their grandchildren are gonna be up to snuff. Because they're not gonna have to face it.

D

David57:41

But there's a lot in life where we do things that make-

L

Lloyd Blankfein57:50

Look, the technology today, things are done more easily, but we've lost the ability. They've done their algorithms and their fast models. And there's artificial intelligence, and these things are being done, and they can be checked, and they can be checked against each other. But if it ever got to be something overwhelming and even something that was beyond the scope of anybody's ability to predict, you've now lost the intuition about it.

D

David58:13

So how do you fix it?

L

Lloyd Blankfein58:14

So again, there are a lot of things in life that make things safer for the 20-year storm, but more dangerous for the 100-year storm or the 80-year storm. And I think that that's an example, and people don't always think that way, but it occurs to me to get out of town before the big one.

D

David58:29

Ah. Good, good advice. So, when the crisis was roiling, you took on an investment from Warren Buffett. When the terms of that deal were announced, you had several investors call you and essentially say, 'I would've given you a better deal. Why didn't you call me?' And you said basically, 'No offense, but you're just money.' What did you mean by that?

L

Lloyd Blankfein58:47

Well, Warren, and this was before TARP or anything. We always, Goldman never really lost access to the independent markets who could raise money and borrow money and stuff. And Warren, and the best money to have is money from Warren Buffett, and he brought-

D

David59:04

Why?

L

Lloyd Blankfein59:05

He's a validator. You know, he's sharp. He's reputationally good. He doesn't have to do anything he doesn't wanna do. His thing was, 'I'm like a baseball player standing at the plate where they don't call strikes. I could stand there and wait forever. I don't have to do anything.' He always had a very good relationship with our firm, to our credit and to our pride. And going back generations, you know, I think he tells a story when he, 1939, when he was nine years old, his father, who was a small-town broker in Nebraska, brought him in to meet the head of then Goldman Sachs, Sidney Weinberg. And so anyway, he had a lot of stories.

D

David59:40

He didn't like investment banks, but he made an exception for you.

L

Lloyd Blankfein59:42

He didn't like investment banks. But he seemed to like us. And at that time that we were gonna go to market and do deals, he set his terms. They were, and as everything from him, they were fair. Some people said that's expensive, but it was fair given what we got from him. And the day after we did that, we did a capital raise. His was, it wasn't even what the regulators would have thought of as good capital. It was a preferred, which is more like a loan than like an equity, even though it's preferred stock. It's really more like a debt instrument. And it was very, terms that other people thought were favorable, but I thought it was favorable to him, but it was really also favorable to us. And the next day we raised capital at a much more favorable rate because of him.

D

David1:00:30

Because you had that.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:00:31

Exactly. And so in a way, the fact that we paid him a lot for the capital we got from him, it didn't cost us anything. It paid it back by being able to get capital from the general market. Because once they had his validation, they were willing to do it at a rate more favorable to us. And so that Warren Buffett, and we've done subsequent things with him, and he's one of those people in the world who, he sees the world differently, and I'm not always sure how he gets to where he gets, but I pay close attention.

D

David1:01:04

Can't argue with the track record.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:01:04

But I play close attention. And not only his making money, but his, you know, people's intelligence runs in different ways. He is a great reductionist. You give him a warehouse full of information and a ton of impressions, and he'll focus on the one thing and say it succinctly. And after it's over, you say, 'Well, why did I think this was so complicated?'

D

David1:01:25

That's a gift.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:01:26

It is.

D

David1:01:26

So you did successfully navigate Goldman Sachs through the crisis, but eventually, at least in the public eye, the worm turned on Goldman Sachs. It went from, 'How did you do it?' to, 'How did you do it?'

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:01:39

Right. And we were a target, and there's a lot of reasons for that unrelated to us.

D

David1:01:44

And I wanna get into that. So, in a very memorable article in Rolling Stone, they called Goldman Sachs, I think I'm gonna get this right, a giant vampire squid attached to the face of humanity. Did that hurt your feelings?

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:01:55

I think the word sucking. Sucking on the face of humanity. Sucking was in there somewhere. And actually, I was gonna say, squids are like, they're very little.

D

David1:02:01

But so did being called a giant vampire squid hurt your feelings?

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:02:06

Actually, I thought it was pretty funny. I saw the humor in it. And by the way, it didn't really hurt us anywhere. But, you know, I would say any press is good press. No, that was so over the top that it was kind of funny. It was the stuff that wasn't over the top that wasn't funny. Because what happened was it was after the global financial crisis. Look, it's so hard to say this in a humble way, but if the banks had managed themselves the way we did, there wouldn't have been a banking crisis. We might have had a recession. But it would've been pointless if you weren't gonna have retribution and things, and how did this happen, and who's, you know, the politicians. Look, there was a real estate bubble, people were doing crazy things. Secretaries were buying four houses on credit. They extended. Ironically, of course, Goldman Sachs is a wholesale firm. We don't do mortgages with individuals. You can't have a checking account at Goldman. There's no branches of Goldman. We were unknown to the general public because we didn't have a consumer business. And then, of course, Goldman always had people that were in government because people, not because we hired from government, government hired from us. And so it was Government Sachs, and who are those people? And I don't see them in my ordinary life. So we came, and we didn't lose money.

D

David1:03:26

How come you didn't lose money?

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:03:29

All these others did. So they weren't gonna go after Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns or all these, Merrill Lynch, all these companies that disappeared, and they weren't gonna go after the companies that lost $50 or $60 billion because they couldn't look like malefactors. They looked like victims. They were victims in their cells. So let's go after, you know, poor Goldman Sachs. And so I played my role in that.

D

David1:03:51

You did. You spent many a day under the hot lights of Congress.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:03:55

Yeah, it's House Klieg lights asking me, 'What do you do?' And of course, it was never any, you know. But, you know. It wasn't as much fun as it looked.

D

David1:04:02

So you did, Goldman did end up paying a $550 million fine to the SEC. And-

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:04:09

Well, everybody.

D

David1:04:10

Yeah. No. So now I wanna. So you pay the fine to the SEC, and in the book you say, I'm gonna, maybe you're gonna get this quote right. You say, 'We ended up settling with the government, which you always end up doing even if you think you're right.' So were you right?

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:04:24

Yes, we hadn't done a, I think we had done everything correctly, but a settlement was gonna be achieved, and I think you can't, you know, I'm sure we agreed to a set of facts that you can't dispute because they're an agreed set of facts. So I, to this day, I agree to whatever set of facts. But everybody, it was like a, frankly, it came across like a tax. So ours was, it was all done in proportion to the amount of mortgages you had on your balance sheet. And so ours was a relatively low number because we were relatively small in the mortgage business compared to firms that were originating mortgages. And so everybody did that and did it, and I said, 'Of course you have to settle because the government is not just your adversary in a court case. They're also your regulator. And they also have to approve everything you do or disapprove everything you do. So you can't do anything.' So I said, 'It's like one of those episodes of Star Trek where some alien takes over the life support systems of the ship. And Kirk tries to negotiate with, how do you negotiate with somebody who could turn off all the oxygen?' And so, so guess what? You settle. You do that. And I'm smiling now and I'm making it sound cavalier, but it was a very big deal at the time, and I'm sure there were things that we could have done better. But had we behaved egregiously or badly or sold some things that we knew were bad or things like that? I don't think so. But whatever facts one agrees to and one settles are things that are still undisputed to this day.

D

David1:05:57

Okay. So we went, we just kinda went from the beginning to the end of the financial crisis, but I wanna step back into it for a second and just ask you about your leadership style during it. So one thing that struck me in the book was that you communicated with the firm by mass voicemail, like almost every day or multiple times a week. So tell me about why you did that, and also how do you think you would have done that today given the technology we have?

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:06:19

I don't think I would've done it today, too, because there was emails. The thing about voicemail is it communicates more. It communicates feeling and whether you're scared or whether you're not scared, or whether it's good. You know, I think it, and I think they all aged well. But at the time, it was very important to do. And I'm smiling now and going over this like everything was so easy and cavalier. It was very difficult. And also it's resolved, so you know it didn't get worse. But at the worst day, everyone thinks it's gonna get even worse from there, so everyone's very nervous and anxious. And at times we had, a lot of people in the firm are, CNBC was helpful in that they were putting, like, our stock price in the corner of the screen, watching it go down every day. And every conversation on TV is, 'Will these survive? Will that guy's?' You know? And doing their part to be as provocative as possible to get more viewership, and it was terrible. And so everyone in the firm was getting paralyzed, staring at the TV, watching it. I need to get people back to work. So, basically my line to the firm was, 'I only need 2% of the people to focus on Goldman Sachs' issue, the crises that we have on our own balance sheet,' to the extent we had any, or dealing with the general public, or dealing with Congress, or dealing with the press. I need some people in the firm to work on that, but I didn't need everybody watching TV or wondering what happened. So I said, 'Look, if you wanna help the firm and its reputation, do your jobs.' You know, we're like a little bit, when they tell you on an airplane that when the oxygen comes down, put it on yourself first and then put it on your kids. I need them to get themselves settled and then help their clients. Put the oxygen, because the clients were distressed, and they had problems with their balance sheet, and they were undercapitalized for the moment. And we're in the business of raising it and doing those things. So I said, 'If you wanna help the firm and its long-term reputation and business, do your jobs. And if you focus on your jobs, I'll tell you what's going on openly and honestly.' And so I got used to, at the end of it, most, a lot of days, sending a voicemail out, 'This is what we did.' And the other thing I was doing was I was doing my normal job. So if I had, you know, and my job, when you're CEO of a firm like that, you spend a good chunk of your time on airplanes. You're just as in business and just as in charge in Japan, Paris, New York, and Beijing. You know, so you're traveling among all these places, pitching business, helping clients, and so I was doing all my job and not sitting behind wringing my hands. And so, you know, I'd get in and I'd say, 'Look, I just landed in Paris. You know, we did this and that. I had 12 good meetings, and we had this event, and our reputation's good. We did this and that.' And my tone was to be reassuring and to show that I was engaged in business as usual. And of course, while I'm on the plane and doing other things, in between things, we're doing this and dealing with articles in the press that they give you 20 minutes to respond or five minutes to respond to the article to correct their facts and things like that. So we, and respond to regulators who are asking you questions and so all that is going on simultaneously. But it's very important there, and the best advice I give to leaders, is communicate.

D

David1:09:52

Yeah, so I wanna ask you about that. First, one thing you said struck me. So what you describe is a very scary time, and you spent a lot of time reassuring people. And as I read Streetwise, you expressed a lot of negative emotions in there, anger, envy, regret, but there wasn't a hint of fear. Now, maybe you have fear, but you didn't seem to show it then. And actually, even when you describe it, in a way, you almost seem to enjoy the process of it. So why were you, is that true? What are you afraid of, Lloyd? And do you think your lack of fear, if you agree with this, helped you manage during this time?

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:10:21

I think my resting state is a constant state of anxiety and looking at the thing. I look at, and I mean, not a joke. I mean, I was a good risk manager. I was good at looking at things that could go wrong. I was always trying a contingency plan for what could go wrong, and to mitigate the consequences of things that might go wrong but probably wouldn't, but they might. And so that's my natural orientation. That's how I gravitated to the job I had. I think that's my wiring. But I never, I don't, you know, touch wood. I, you know, look, I haven't been shot at or things like that, so I don't know how, you know, you don't know how you'll respond to stuff if you haven't had to respond to stuff. But I've been through enough of those kinds of crises where everybody's being chaotic to know that generally in times like that, things kinda slow down for me. And I'm sure that I can get scared, but I never got really panicky and out of control. I just never have.

D

David1:11:12

Seemed to focus you more.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:11:13

Yeah, I've always kind of been like that. I'm not trying to, I'm not dying to keep getting tested and find out that there is some limit that I get to where I completely wanna throw myself out the window. But I haven't gotten to it yet and I don't wanna get it. I would like to be retired and be out of the woods and not challenge it again. But I went through the crisis of the century at the firm I was in, you know, roughly every four or five years. You know, the Asian financial crisis, and the dot-com bubble, and the Mexican peso problem, and long-term capital, and the global financial crisis. You know, they seem to happen regularly. And, you know, there's only so many times you could stand at the end, look down, and think that it's a bottomless abyss. Because by this time I know it's not bottomless. We're gonna get through this. And the other thing I knew, and I tell this to people all the time, is you're gonna get judged, and your reputation is gonna get foundered by how you do in those times. And it's gonna stick with you. So I say perform well. Because we will get through this. We will get to better times. How do you wanna be thought of? People are keeping the receipts. So I say, 'If you wanna be scared, that's fine, but don't act that way.'

D

David1:12:30

So you learned a lot about crisis communication. And I'll be honest, as I read how you navigated into this new world of communications, you were focused on managing Goldman through the crisis economically, and then you had this communications PR crisis you were dealing with, and that required a different strategy and skill set.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:12:48

Yeah, we had the reputational crisis.

D

David1:12:48

How did you, did you know these securities were bad?

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:12:52

So, so I couldn't help but notice the parallel to Harvard University.

D

David1:12:57

So what do you think you, what would you tell Harvard University or leaders of Harvard about how to communicate through a crisis?

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:13:06

Well, oh my God, it's so complex, and I know so little. Who am I to, you know, who, I mean, seriously, who am I to. I'd say, you know, I don't know. I wouldn't even know who to tell. I don't even know the governance. It's such a, you know, so mysterious to me. And, you know, I don't, I don't even know. I have a lot of, you know, I don't need a lot of information to have opinions.

D

David1:13:29

Yes, that's true.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:13:29

I do qualify my opinions when I don't have a lot of information.

D

David1:13:33

Yeah. Let's focus your advice on the future. So let's not talk about something that's happened, but, like, if you are an organization, let's think. There's some similarities here. Very strong brand, has historically not felt the need to be responsive to the outside world. And also, if you wanted to go out, if you wanted to, look, if you wanted to go into a Western town and establish your reputation as a gunfighter, who do you challenge?

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:13:53

Yeah. You challenge the guy who's the best reputation.

D

David1:13:56

Yes.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:13:56

And so, you know, Harvard is the Goldman Sachs of educational institutions. Or Goldman Sachs is the Harvard of financial companies. It's always big reputation, gets good people. You know, very decorative on a resume.

D

David1:14:07

Yeah.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:14:07

Both of them are. So there's a lot of similarities, and I think the way people would gun for Goldman if you wanted to get a good headline and get attention, people will gun for Harvard the same way.

D

David1:14:18

So what should Harvard and institutions like it, like let's say Ivy League colleges or places that are seen as bastions of elite privilege, how should they be communicating differently in this new world?

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:14:27

Look, I think it's fundamental. I think these, you know, if Harvard were a public company, they would be forced to open the window and let breeze flow through it and deal with, you know, if you run a public company, there's always a threat, shareholders will threaten to throw you out if you don't do X, Y, and Z. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. Maybe they'll get the support of other shareholders, maybe they won't. But there's that pressure, that external pressure on you all the time. Of course, there's government pressure and regulator pressure and the press. But, you know, functionally you can be, you know, your job, you have people you work for, the public, and the public has a way of manifesting its displeasure with you. At Harvard now, I think the biggest problem it has is that, who owns it? Who's the owner? Who are the shareholders? Who does it? Is it the faculty? I always, you know, the alumni, the faculty, everybody. Well, everyone says that, you know, the kids are there for four years. Then the faculty says, 'What are you talking about? You're there for a short term, but I'm the faculty, I'm gonna be there for 25 years.' And then I'm going, 'You faculty, who the heck are you? I'm an alum. I'm gonna be an alum for 60 years.' And so you get, you know, who is the one one has to be responsive for? I think most people now, in my observation, not knowing anything, is I think the leadership of the school is much, much more attentive and defensive, vis-a-vis the faculty, than any other. And I think, you know, in the past period, I think the most important constituency is one I didn't mention, didn't even mention, the general public that basically funds a lot of the university. So it's either through tax deductibility or grants. It's the thing, and so all of a sudden, out of nowhere, another constituency emerges, the government comes along and says, 'Guess what? I don't like what you're doing here.' And they go, 'Oh my God, who the heck are you to say this?' And so all of a sudden, that's another constituency that I think the university was slow and possibly even in shock knew existed, and after it found out about its existence, didn't think it had any legitimacy to express a point of view.

D

David1:16:56

What do you think a university like Harvard owes the public specifically? So obviously Harvard is accountable to the public, but what do you think, what, yeah, what-

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:17:07

Well, when you say obviously, you could just stop right there. What do you mean when you say it's accountable to the public?

D

David1:17:11

What I mean is concretely. So what should Harvard be doing more for the public that it's not doing now?

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:17:13

Well, for one thing, I think Harvard does, let me just say as a predicate, and we've had this conversation, I think Harvard has done a lot for the public. And I don't mean in terms of the great citizens it's turned out. I mean, just the research that's been, what's been invented there, discovered. I mean, it does a lot for the public, and I think it does a poor job communicating that. So one thing I think Harvard deserves to start in a better place than it finds itself with the general public. Maybe it didn't care enough of what the general public thought, just the same way Goldman didn't. Because you're not a retail university. And just like we weren't a retail firm. You're a wholesale, and you care about a certain community, and then suddenly you discover a broader community is more relevant to your health than you thought it was. And so now you discover that you need to do more with the general public, and I think it has to go out there, tell more what it does, but it also owes something really. Because for all the things that I just mentioned, the fiscal side of things, the grants and the research, what you get paid to do, but also the tax deductibility. And don't forget, part of the strut of Harvard is that you're doing the best job, you're training the elite for the country, and don't you think the country has a stake in how its elite is being? And for a long time, Harvard had looped into thinking that it was a global institution. But it really isn't. It's an American institution that admits people from overseas.

D

David1:18:41

And to your point about communications, I mean, many people don't know that other than West Point and the Naval Academy, no university has given more lives in the service of the country than Harvard. No college has graduated more people to serve in public office than Harvard. So Harvard is a patriotic institution, and its history is intertwined with the history of the country.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:18:57

100%, and that's why I started out and spent some time saying it punches below its weight in terms of its consciousness for what it has done and is doing for the country. But that said, there's a little bit of arrogance within the institution. There's a reason why the country doesn't know it. Harvard didn't feel the need to say it, because it's self-contained within Harvard, and I think Harvard very much cares about what other people at Harvard think about Harvard. But I think there's more room to admit some breezes from the outside world on it. And I think there is some debt, too. Western civilization that's responsible for the openness and the scientific method and all sorts of things, and you can go back and forth. And this is all my point of view. Throw it out. It's just my thing. But I think, you know, I'm not indifferent. I believe in other civilizations. Everybody has a right to do what they want, but I'm taking a position that Western civilization and the openness and freedom of speech and all those things that we practice, and freedom of religion and thought is virtuous. And I would, I think Harvard should think it's virtuous.

D

David1:20:04

So I'm, I'll tell you why I'm asking, too, Lloyd, because, you know, you have been a loyal supporter of the university, and you wrote in your book a line that struck me, as somebody who works at Harvard. You said, 'I love the place. I don't know if it always reciprocates.' Why did you say that?

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:20:17

Well, I'm always, well, you know, when I was a student there, again, for reasons that we'd gone into, I didn't necessarily felt of it. I felt a little bit, you know, that I was trying to catch up to it, that I didn't quite get it, and I never quite got it. You know, I kind of, look, I got in, I do a lot for Harvard. Harvard has done a lot for me, and in gratitude, but I never quite felt, you know, I have opinions about things. I don't think, you know, people, because I have been a donor, I get a lot, you know, I can get attention for that. And then I've been involved in, not just with Chuck, you know, for in the prior campaign, I could share the fundraising financial aid and express views. And on a person-by-person basis, I have no grievance at all, but I've never been particularly solicited in any way for, on certain kinds of governance issues. And but I haven't tried to elbow my way in either. Every once in a while I try to chip in something and it goes in and never knows what happens to it. But when you look at the sons and daughters of Harvard and who they are in the world, I look at that thing and say, 'You know something? Why should they listen to me more than they listen to this one, this one, this one, all the great people that are there?' So I'm not aggrieved by it. But at the same time, I don't feel that the university is hanging on my every word or my thoughts. And why should they? So I can have opinions, and it's sometimes it's easiest to have opinions when you know no one cares. Because if somebody's gonna listen to your opinion and change their behavior, you better be more careful in your opinions. But right now I don't have to be so careful because no one cares anyway.

D

David1:21:57

I don't think that's true. But let me ask you one more question.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:21:59

Sure.

D

David1:21:59

It's about Harvard. So, you know, as I mentioned, Harvard's history is deeply intertwined with the history of the country, and we're about to celebrate the 250th birthday of the country. Harvard's been around nearly 400 years. So here's my question for you. Do you think, on net, Harvard is a force for good in the world? And if it is, or if it's not, how could it be better?

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:22:18

Oh, my gosh, of course it's, I mean, how could, I mean, God, could I have given a suggestion that I don't think it was a force for good in the world? Of course it is. It's a great institution. It has the ability to attract and retain great people and make them better because of the platform and because of the fact that they, you know, collectively it's a polymath. There's brilliant people in every department. You know, you walk into a room at Harvard and, you know, sometimes the arrogance bothers you because you walk into a room and they think they're the smartest people in the world at what they do, and very often they're right. Which makes it even more difficult. So of course it's a force for good. I think it could be, how could it be better? I think the perpetuation of the prejudices and the opinions of members of the faculty at various time, which is backward-looking and isn't necessarily responsive, could be corrected. I think some of the willingness to tolerate, the tolerance and the wokeness, which is a form of tolerance, in excess makes you kind of loathe to appreciate things that of course you should appreciate, like our civilization and our value and liberal values. And you have to be in a position to promote what, regard things that are antithetical to those values. So, you know, come out and say something. And I would like to know, in the 19th century or the things that got Harvard to where it is, didn't we have, didn't we like certain things and not like other things and not tolerate everything? And so anyway, I don't wanna come across as anti-free speech or anti-this, but some of the things have gotten completely crazy to me, and we're going in a loopy direction. Here's another thing I'd say. I think that I don't think the government should take over the school, and I think Harvard should make its own decisions with what it promotes and its pedagogy and how it's teaching. But I think the light that was shone upon the direction that Harvard was going in, and the fact that Harvard has made certain course corrections, I don't think that would've happened but for the intervention of the government. And so in that, is the government going too far? Are they asking to do things they shouldn't? Probably. I mean, I haven't studied it closely, but it doesn't strike me that the government is going too far. But what some people would think was the assault on the university presidents that drew out that bad reaction, I think that was an important moment and a valuable moment because I think we would still be hurtling in a direction that produced those responses.

D

David1:25:14

Lloyd Blankfein, thanks so much for taking the time to be with me today.

L

Lloyd Blankfein1:25:17

Good. Thank you.

From $11 in His Pocket to CEO of Goldman Sachs | Lloyd Blankfein

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