SPEAKER_01
The difference between somebody who's really, really good and somebody who can't make it is not that great. Goldman Sachs, senior chairman and former CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Your portfolio as a pie chart, what does it look like right now? I invest in risky assets. That's what's fun for me. [SPEAKER_00] I would say that 98% are equities. What are some of your biggest holdings? This is going to be controversial. I don't know who I'm going to upset, but are you trading every day? Yes. That's crazy.
SPEAKER_00
No, it's not. It takes a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while I'm talking right now. So you're bullish on big tech. Anything else? [SPEAKER_01] It's been good to be bullish on big tech, and I'll stop being bullish on it when it stops going up.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] What did the people who couldn't outperform, what did the bottom half have in common? The bigger takeaway is that the reason why it's interesting to talk to you is because I'm pretty good at building companies. I built a company that was doing almost 20 million in revenue by the time I was 31. [SPEAKER_00] But I'm like, I don't know anything when it comes to investing. My portfolio is basically nobody knows anything.
SPEAKER_00
Well, that's what I've learned. But it seems like you know a lot.
SPEAKER_01
Because I'm so on the inside, unlike a lot of people, I know nobody knows anything, whereas everybody else just wonders.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Well, that's cool. And so I'm going to ask you a ton of questions, and it's going to come from a perspective of, I actually don't know what I'm doing. And the majority of my portfolio is, which I actually think is smart, is just 90% index, 10% bonds. [SPEAKER_00] Well, that's sensible.
SPEAKER_00
But you day trade, which I thought was hilarious. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, but two things. One, I'm a pro at it. This is what I did for the last four or five decades. And the other thing is that nothing hugely positive or hugely negative is going to affect my life. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] So to me, it's a hobby. [SPEAKER_00] What age were you when you felt that? [SPEAKER_00] I grew up in the projects. So I always, I wouldn't say that I felt poor, but I certainly was incapable of feeling well-to-do. I can't even say the R word. Rich. I can't, it's hard for me to even just say it. But by any metric, I have been that way for a long time, but I never feel that way. I'm still trapped in that mindset of the kid from the projects.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] So your father was a postal worker. I think you said you were an urban hick, which I liked.
SPEAKER_00
Grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, at the end of two subway lines and a bus in the Eastern part of Brooklyn. Growing up, I think I went to Manhattan three times. I never left the country. Didn't fly on an airplane until after I left school. Yeah, I was pretty provincial. It turns out that if you look at the lists of most successful people or wealthiest people in the U.S., you're not seeing a lot of Morgans or Rockefellers or any of these classical family names on that list. You're seeing basically people not necessarily growing up in poverty, but they were middle class people who did well. These are not generational wealthy people coming along. A lot of people were socially mobile in their lives and created wealth for others and a piece of it stuck to them.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] What I'm curious about is because you have this perspective of knowing world leaders, potentially the most powerful people on earth, is there anything that would shock them about what it's like to be around some of these?
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] I think what's shocking, not shocking, but I think what would be good if everybody understood is that there are very, very few geniuses in the world. I don't know if I've ever met one.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] You don't think that when you meet Jeff Bezos, you're not like, this guy just has more horsepower?
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Yeah, or most of the people I meet, I can't, I'm not saying I can do what they do, but I can see how they can do what they do. Very few people have I met in my life where I can't even see the world through their eyes or I can't even see how they do what they do. Elon Musk may be a guy like that where I don't know how. Have you met him?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Oh yeah, a lot. Don't forget, we underwrote his stuff. When you met him, didn't you think this guy's different?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Oh no, I'm saying he's very different. I'm giving you an extreme case where a guy, but when people toss around the word genius, there's a lot of words that get tossed around, superstar that get diluted. The bigger takeaway is that I've known people who've done very, very well and in high office and high positions and guess what? After they finished speaking, they say, how did I do? They want affirmation and they're insecure and the kids don't always like them. People are a lot more normal than you think they are. People are a lot more insecure and sometimes the most successful people that you know are driven by insecurity and their flaws. So you also have to be lucky. The ball has to bounce. You could be the fastest runner in the world, but the Olympics are once every four years. And if you peak in the wrong year, you'll never medal in the Olympics, even though you were the fastest. I got to be CEO of Goldman Sachs because my predecessor got nominated to be treasury secretary. Had he not been that, maybe he would have lasted five more years in the job and maybe I would have been too old for it at that point or something. So there's a lot of fortune. There's a lot of luck, but I wouldn't exaggerate the skillset required or the degree of work required is beyond the grasp of many of your listeners. It's not.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] So you've had teams of traders. You were a commodity salesman, but you became to eventually lead traders. What did the people who couldn't outperform or who were not the best, what did they have in common? [SPEAKER_01] The difference between somebody who's really, really good and somebody who can't make it is not that great. When you think of a golf tournament and somebody wins a golf tournament
SPEAKER_01
There's a lot of luck, but I wouldn't exaggerate the skillset required or the degree of work required is beyond the grasp of many of your listeners. It's not.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] So you've had teams of traders. You were a commodity salesman, but you came to eventually lead traders. What did the people who couldn't outperform or who were not the best, what did they have in common? [SPEAKER_01] The difference between somebody who's really good and somebody who can't make it is not that great. When you think of a golf tournament and somebody wins by one stroke and there's six people tied for second, one stroke behind the winner. That's a very low margin of victory. A lot of life is like that. Sometimes it's winner take all where somebody is just ever so slightly better, but that thing stands out. A lot of life is like that.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] The difference between a great actor will get any part he or she wants in Hollywood. And the second best one may have to wait tables at night. I wasn't cursed by being a great athlete. So I didn't have to, I wasn't tortured into thinking, should I dedicate myself to sports and athletes or should I strive to do well in classes and school and get another guy? I didn't have that. But imagine the unfortunate person who's the best athlete his high school ever produced gets a minor league baseball contract. And from the minor league, something like 2% eventually make a living out of enough money, become professional. You get into a very rarefied area when you're talking about the people who are the best at what they do, where the market only rewards and can only give a full-time job opportunity to people who are in 0.001% of that field.
SPEAKER_01
You had this funny bit where Goldman, you guys were really nervous of making mistakes. When we had the big financial crisis, the one in 07, 08, when the regulators wanted to make sure that this kind of thing never happened again. Well, the only way you can make sure that, once you're in the risk-taking world, anything can happen. Risk is risk and you don't always know the consequences of it. And if you try to legislate risk, you may think you're protecting the world from the hundred year storm, but you're also going to forego the 99 years in-between when there was growth. But you said even inside of Goldman, you were meeting with the 20 partners or something and people were throwing around ideas and some of the ideas were pretty good. And you were, what the hell guys, we're talking ourselves out of everything.
SPEAKER_00
On this show, we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive. [SPEAKER_01] Well, lucky for you, the team at HubSpot has pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple, easy to read wealth guide. It's 35 principles from the top investors. We're talking guys who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Manish Pabrai, Morgan Housel, Cathie Wood, and a ton others. So these are all their frameworks, their mental models, their rules, basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin. You can get it in the link below.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Everyone's throwing around ideas and everyone around here is saying, oh, we can't do this because what the hell? Why aren't we trying some stuff? Let's get after it. And I think you said the best traders are the ones who have resiliency. They bounce back and they look at the new information that they have, not the past, and they adapt quickly. The firm at that point had just gone through a period where it had big losses and people were gun shy. A risk manager is always trying to repress people from taking risk. Sometimes a good risk manager has to promote the idea that people take risk because that's what you're there for. And if you don't take risk, you don't move forward. There's no growth. You can't be an entrepreneur. You can't be an entrepreneur unless you take risk. If you take risk, there's a not insignificant chance that you'll fail and you'll lose money for all the people that backed you. That's a terrible situation. But the alternative to never taking any risk will give you the comfort of not losing money for yourself or anybody else, but you also won't make progress.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And as you get more successful, at least I have, and I think you said Goldman did, you take less risk. [SPEAKER_01] Well, I think that's what makes people more conservative. You think of the word conservative, you conserve, you become interested in not losing what you have as opposed to making more. Now, when I say making more, are people going to be repulsed by the idea of making more? Making more is another way of saying advancing, creating wealth.
SPEAKER_01
Can you tell that story about Warren Buffett in the book? That was amazing, where he loaned you a bunch of money basically over a handshake and a phone call and was, all right, I'm going to go take my grandkid at Dairy Queen.
SPEAKER_00
You know, Warren is one of those great men, which he's brilliant in a way that I can't put myself in his shoes and see the world through his eyes. And during the financial crisis, he offered to, at a very important moment, invest money in Goldman Sachs.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Do you remember how much? I think it was $5 billion or $10 billion. And what did you do? You just called him? I think it was $5 billion. We had talked before that and, with him, he decides to do something. It's all going to be with him. I didn't have to ask him. It would serve no purpose to ask him two or three times. So what you said, you said, hey, Warren, we're going to this thing. We might need a little liquidity.
SPEAKER_01
No, and I'd done that before. Would he be willing to do this? And at the time, he wasn't grabbing. And then eventually he called in and was willing to do it for his own reasons. And he saw it as a good investment to make. He wasn't doing it because he was trying to help us, although it had the effect of helping us, but he was trying to help his own shareholders. And he saw in us what I saw in us, which was a good investment that was being beaten down by circumstances that it would reverse. And I think he wanted to make an investment before it got better.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] liquidity.
SPEAKER_01
No, and I'd done that before. Would he be willing to do this? And at the time, he wasn't grabbing. And then eventually he called in and was willing to do it for his own reasons. And he saw it as a good investment to make. He wasn't doing it because he was trying to help us, although it had the effect of helping us, but he was trying to help his own shareholders. And he saw in us what I saw in us, which was a good investment that was being beaten down by circumstances that it would reverse. And I think he wanted to make an investment before it got better.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Well, I think that, and the story was cool because you were like on the phone with him. You're like, hey, Warren, you want to do this thing? Or maybe he called you and he's like, hey, I'm willing to do a $5 billion investment or a loan. I'm not sure if it was a loan or investment.
SPEAKER_01
It was preferred stock. It's something between a loan and a stock.
SPEAKER_01
And you were like, yeah, cool. That sounds great. We would love to work with you. Do you want to do some due diligence or do you want to sign some paperwork? And he's like, no, no, no. I'll just send the money. And I got to go. I'm going to take my kid to, I'm taking my grandkid to Dairy Queen. Just figure it out and let me know where you want me to send the money to talk later. Well, it helped the fact that, yes, that was actually the flow of the conversation, but he's a pretty rigorous guy and he knows that we're pretty rigorous people. And at one point he said, and I said, I would feel better telling you all the things before you make this investment, I would feel better telling you all the things I'm worried about. And he said, Lloyd, I know you well enough to know that you're worried enough for the both of us. And then I pushed a little bit and he said, look, Berkshire, $5 billion. It's not even, it's, Berkshire is an insurance company. And so in their real business, Berkshire insures, among other things, property. He said, look, $5 billion, if it all goes bad, that's not even a bad hurricane on the East coast. So put me in my place. So in other words, $5 billion wasn't a big number to him. That was a joke. And I took it that way. Nobody wants to lose $5 billion, not even him. But he was very good. And it was a very important, it wasn't just the money. In fact, frankly, the money was irrelevant to us because we had the money. What we didn't have was we didn't have the confidence of the world because at that point, people, some institutions that were similar to ours were failing. Others were in distress. We weren't failing and we weren't in that much distress, but people didn't know that. And if you just assert that, it scares people even more.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. And I think he said something, oh, and hey, by the way, do me a favor, don't sell any of your shares until I sell mine or something like that. Like, let's be in lockstep. [SPEAKER_00] Oh, no, it wasn't even a favor. It was he asked for that. He asked for our commitment for that. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] Didn't ask for it in writing. [SPEAKER_00] And you were like, yeah, I'll put that in the contract. That sounds good. He goes, no, no, no, no need. It's cool. Just tell me you commit. And that was it. And that's pretty amazing.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] You know, in our world, in my world of buying and selling stuff, most of the stuff we do is not written down, is not a written contract. People buy and sell bonds and things and they don't get delivered for two days. I suppose somebody could lie and say, I really didn't do that or I didn't intend it or something, but you'll never eat lunch in this town again. And if people rely on their reputations for probity, it doesn't mean that things don't get documented so that each side really understands what the other person's perception is, making sure you're literally on the same page.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Did you see the text between, I think it was Ellison and Elon? Elon was like, hey, I'm going to buy Twitter for, I think 30 billion. Are you in? And he was like, yeah, I'm in for five. Or it was a fairly casual conversation for a pretty huge thing.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] No, but that sounds right. Just because something is big doesn't mean it's tricky or complicated. There are big things that are simple and little things that are complicated. I think all things considered, it's always good to document stuff. But in a trading room, you never document stuff when people buy and sell stuff. Also, sometimes the execution of what you've agreed to is so near in time that it's pointless to document it because in two days you're going to perform. And so there's nothing, there's no reason why you have to document something that will be accomplished before you could ever dot the I's and cross the T's in a document. But it's always, all things equal, it's good to have a document, but it's largely not necessary. And most of the transactional world works without documentation.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] So you're no longer the CEO, but in the book, you're like, I now like to trade on my own. If your portfolio as a pie chart, what does it look like right now? [SPEAKER_01] I invest in risky assets. That's what's fun for me. And that was what I did my whole career. 1% is in just index funds or boring stuff.
SPEAKER_01
Well, index funds are risky. They're just diversified across different things. But if you're in a diversified equity ETF, you're in equities. Yeah. And equities is a lot different than being in debt. And it's a lot different than being in short-term money markets, which is more safe. And so it's still risky. I would say that I am 98% in risky assets of which 95 or the 98 are equities. Probably a quarter is in ETFs and 75% is in single stock. And if I'm wrong, it's 10% are in ETFs and 90% are in single stocks because that's what I like to do. Well, okay. I'm so curious about this. So I'm in 90% just a Vanguard fund and then 10%-
SPEAKER_01
Well, that's sensible because this is what you're not doing. You're not doing investing for a living. short-term money markets, which is more safe. And so it's still risky. I would say that I am 98% in risky assets of which 95 or 98 are equities. Probably a quarter is in ETFs and 75% is in single stock. And if I'm wrong, it's 10% are in ETFs and 90% are in single stocks because that's what I like to do. Well, okay. I'm so curious about this. So I'm in 90% just a Vanguard fund and then 10%. Well, that's sensible because this is what you're not doing. You're not doing investing for a living.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Of course. And I'm not, I'm probably not going to change that, but I'm always interested in seeing how other people like to invest. So of the 75%, what are some of your biggest holdings?
SPEAKER_01
Well, I would say that right now I'm very heavily focused in tech and have been for a long time for good reason. Which companies? All the big, all the big hyperscalers and second tier ones. What's a second tier one? What's an example of a second tier one? I don't even know. If they have a big hyperscaler, the Googles of the world and the Microsofts of the world and NVIDIAs of the world, maybe a second tier version down, slightly down. No insult intended to Larry Ellison, maybe Oracle. I don't have to, I change my things all the time. So it doesn't matter, specific names. I'm just giving you, I'm speaking in terms of category. That's how I think of it, not necessarily the bluest of the blue chip ones, ones that are a little bit riskier. And by the way, they're companies that are probably going to be gigantic companies that some people know about today and are investing in. I never heard of them because I'm not always, I'm not walking around the corridors of Silicon Valley shops and I don't know the new thing. And it might be commonplace knowledge over there, but it's not with everybody. You know, everybody knows the world's a big place and everybody always knows their corner of it. So you're bullish on big tech. Anything else?
SPEAKER_01
I'm generally bullish. And by the way, it's been good to be bullish on big tech and I'll stop being bullish on it when it stops going up. For the foreseeable future, that's what you're thinking. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. My foreseeable future is when I finish this conversation with you and then I'll check it again. Are you trading every day? [SPEAKER_00] Yes. [SPEAKER_00] That's crazy. No, it's not. I don't think it's really crazy. It's just crazy for me. Multiple times, it's taking a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while I'm talking to you right now.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] It's like background noise. Some people like to listen to music. You'd say, how much time do you spend listening to music? Well, they're not sitting at a desk slumped, hunched over, just listening to music and doing nothing else. Maybe if you're a record producer, you'd do that. But normal people are listening to music while they're doing other stuff. To me, the market is like music. It's out there, it's going on. What trades did you make today? [SPEAKER_01] I think today I may have, I'm not sure what I did because I put in orders because knowing that you were going to tie me up and I wasn't going to be able to look at stuff. I told people what to do.
SPEAKER_01
I'm so curious. To sell, maybe sell some. Energy is rising. I've been, I buy and sell a lot of stuff. I don't want to talk about specific things because people listen to these things on different days and they'll start, sound smart or stupid depending on what day it is. Do you have a team? Oh, just me.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Just you. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
And so you're at your computer doing it on your own? [SPEAKER_00] No, no, I'm not at a computer. I don't have a computer. I have an iPad. [SPEAKER_00] So you're on your iPad doing it? [SPEAKER_00] And a phone. [SPEAKER_00] Are you, and you're mostly, what's your source of information to make decisions? [SPEAKER_00] I chat with people.
SPEAKER_00
Texting?
SPEAKER_01
You're texting them? [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, usually I call. Somebody will text me, I'll text them and then I'll get tired of tapping things out and I'll be tired of fixing the typos because of my fat fingers. So I just call people up. [SPEAKER_00] And you're doing that all day?
SPEAKER_00
Some people follow, I follow the news, but I also follow business news and I like, companies are like little stories and it's like gossip. What do you read?
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] I read all the newspapers. Of course, I start with the New York Post, the paper of record. And when I read papers, the Journal, the Times, the FT, Bloomberg, I look at very financially or finance oriented. You have subscriptions to all of them? Yeah. No, I don't steal them. Well, how many paywalls do you hit and you're like, oh, I'm not going to read that. I've got to go find a different article. Oh, that happens.
SPEAKER_01
Every once in a while, there's something esoteric where I click on something and it turns me down. So I don't read it. There's a million other things. But I do this and then I have to think, gee, why am I quibbling about this? You know, I will tell you, I am still watching commercials on Netflix. Are you really? Yes. That's hilarious. Have you outperformed the market significantly?
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I have for a while. And I'm not, that's not because of anything else. It's because of where I focus. So I started to say I'm mostly and have been in tech, energy. Don't forget, I have a background in trading energy. And I'm also in financial services because I know a lot about financial services, having I will tell you, I am still watching commercials on Netflix. Are you really? Yes. That's hilarious. Have you outperformed the market significantly? Yes, I have for a while. And I'm not, that's not because of, it's because of where I focus. So I started to say I'm mostly and have been in tech, energy. Don't forget, I have a background in trading energy. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
And I'm also in financial services because I know a lot about financial services, having been in the financial services. So those are the three areas that I've been focused on. I haven't.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Well, I'm sure you still own a bunch of Goldman. [SPEAKER_01] I do. [SPEAKER_01] I tend to have some affection for the organization that I spend almost 40 years in. [SPEAKER_01] So, yeah, I like that company. Do you, so I said, I'm boring and it's 90-10.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] It's the most simple stuff. [SPEAKER_00] That's the advice I would give to people. [SPEAKER_00] I think at your age, it pays to be in riskier assets like equities as opposed to fixed income. But if I were in equities, and by the way, this is the same advice that Warren Buffett would give. [SPEAKER_00] I would be in a diversified portfolio of equities like the S&P 500s, which is SPYs or VLOs. And I do VLO. [SPEAKER_00] And then I would also, because of the importance of tech and being on the threshold of great changes in technology, I might be mostly in those generic diversified things.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] But I might also have ETFs that were focused on more tech-oriented ones that would give me disproportionate exposure. [SPEAKER_00] Although the general ones, the ones that are the broadest index are very heavily in tech because tech companies have such a large market cap that they are so heavily weighted in those that you do get a fair share of tech, even in a very broad index. [SPEAKER_00] And frankly, that has gone well for a long time. And every once in a while, something doesn't work. It goes down a lot. And you have to be able to do that. That's why I say at your age, the older you get, the more conservative.
SPEAKER_01
The older you get, the more concerned you should be about not losing money as opposed to maximizing the money you make. But as a young person, you have time to, you have time, you'll outlive your mistakes. What's your opinion on what's going on with the Robin Hoods of the world and all these, the Cal Shees and things that promote day trading, but also betting and things like that? [SPEAKER_00] I think those things that democratize investing and make it very, very accessible to people is, in its own terms, a very good thing.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] So people should be aware of assets they could buy and make it easier to do some and maybe receive advertising promotion so that they focus on it more than they would. [SPEAKER_00] Maybe they would never focus on it, but for those companies. [SPEAKER_00] You know, at the same time, if you make it too much like a video game, you can mask the fact that there's danger associated with it and you can lose and that people who don't have a lot of money can lose more than they can afford to lose. So that's the risky thing.
SPEAKER_01
So when you have some of these sites and they show confetti dropping because you did a trade and you had a win and high five, you should not gamble and make that look too attractive. For some people, that's a disservice. And for other people, it's exactly what they need. They won't go overboard, but they needed it to be more attractive for them to develop an interest in it. Are there any interesting things that you didn't invest in that ended up turning out right?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And it was because you had poor input? [SPEAKER_01] Or you just let emotion control you?
SPEAKER_01
No, a million things. I didn't want to. What's an interesting one? Yeah. Oh, well, I thought SpaceX was overpriced at a hundred billion dollar market cap. What's it going to go for now? [SPEAKER_00] Like two trillion? [SPEAKER_00] I don't know. It's in the market. People are discussing that now.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I think they were proposing something that would make it worth a trillion and three quarters. [SPEAKER_01] I'm not involved. [SPEAKER_01] Obviously I'm not involved in any of this. [SPEAKER_01] And what did you say? What you thought was expensive?
SPEAKER_01
A hundred billion?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] So one instead of 175s. [SPEAKER_01] Wow. [SPEAKER_01] I mean, I could pick any number. [SPEAKER_01] I mean, I missed a lot of things. [SPEAKER_01] I remember a million years ago when they were auctioning off bandwidth or something for cell phones. [SPEAKER_01] And I'm thinking, why would anybody want to carry a cell phone with you when there's 20 million or 200, 30 million. I'm not sure the exact number of telephone booths around. Why would you want to carry at that time? Cell phones were bulky and the batteries lasted 15 minutes or something. [SPEAKER_01] Why would anybody want that? [SPEAKER_01] So I showed them how smart I was.
SPEAKER_00
And so I didn't make early investments in cellular opportunities or things. I missed a lot more stuff than I got. And Goldman doesn't miss as much as I miss, but that's because Goldman has a lot of people in it, not just me. [SPEAKER_01] But if it were just up to me, I would have missed a lot. [SPEAKER_01] Nobody's great about predicting the future.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] I try to talk to some of the younger people who listen to the show where I'm, man, having a supportive partner is, without a doubt, more game changing than anything. [SPEAKER_00] And let's take the opposite side of it. [SPEAKER_00] And statistically, this is going to happen to a lot of people and it'll happen to good people and it doesn't make you a bad person, but people have bad marriages and [SPEAKER_00] lot of people in it, not just me. But if it were just up to me, I would have missed. Nobody's great about predicting the future.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] I try to talk to some of the younger people who listen to the show where I'm like, man, having a supportive partner is without a doubt, more game changing probably than anything. [SPEAKER_00] And let's take the opposite side of it. And statistically, this is going to happen to a lot of people and it'll happen to good people and it doesn't make you a bad person, but people have bad marriages and they have breakups and they have children and they fight over custody and visitation and all those things.
SPEAKER_01
Life's a lot better if you can avoid those problems. And by the way, being lonely is not the worst thing in the world. A bad marriage is something you have to work out of and deal with, kids and property settlements. That's worse.
SPEAKER_01
I'm a very emotional person. I think a lot of people who are entrepreneurial tend to be quite high ups and downs. And I think people like you who are good CEOs tend to be a little bit more steady and optimistic. And I think that having a great wife, it's really been a one plus one equals five type of situation. And by the way, I'm not just saying this for completeness, but it's worth saying. Wives have great husbands. And that's a tough thing—there's a lot of people I know, partners of mine, where the husband in the relationship takes a less stressful job because he needs to support his wife in her stressful job.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] And sometimes that's even harder because, as much as we want to think things are calibrated and equal, guys don't have babies. Yeah. You also, hanging out with you now, you seem super happy and optimistic. But in the book, you were anxious. [SPEAKER_00] And that was a polite way of saying it. But you seem like a pretty anxious person occasionally.
SPEAKER_01
No, well, I'm wired that way a little bit. You know, I inherited from my dad—he was an anxious person. I made my kids anxious. You know, unfortunately, I had that. There's benefits and burdens to every situation. Being anxious and looking around corners for problems and seeing things that could go wrong, I think that suited me in my job. I mean, not all of life is about your job. You could be happy in other things. You should be happy in other ways and other parts of life besides just your job. But just looking at that narrow point, I was in a risky business with a firm with a big balance sheet that had a lot of investments and that bought and sold and priced risk and took on other risks that other people didn't want to have for a price. And something, if you're going to do that job and preside over other people doing that job, it helps to be somewhat focused on things that could go wrong. And in my life, I'm generally upbeat—I think things will tend to work out. But I know that before they work out, they go wrong. A lot of things go wrong.
SPEAKER_01
Did you have any work-life balance when you were doing it? It didn't seem like it when I was reading about it. Your travel schedule was crazy. [SPEAKER_00] Well, when you asked me if I had any, of course, I will say yes, but not enough that would be reasonable to most people. No, you traveled a lot.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] And then here's where having a supportive spouse was very helpful. And look, my wife, Laura, who's a lawyer, worked in big law firms. And now she's the chair of Barnard College and other things. She helps to oversee a charter school. She's very involved in the world. But I'll tell you one thing she did. She was very supportive of my career when I needed to move overseas. She took care of everything. And when we moved overseas, she's the one who got the car, got the house, made sure the kids got to school. I took victory laps because I was doing a good job at work, but she was doing all the work that made it possible.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. I think about my wife now. She's a stay-at-home mom right now. And it's awesome, man. Having someone who has your back, it's pretty great. Like, I don't even know how we pay a lot of our bills. We were talking the other day, and I was like, look, I'm not trying to be morbid, but if you died, I wouldn't know how certain things happen at all. How does our rent get paid? Do we pay utilities? I didn't know anything.
SPEAKER_00
I think we're exceptional, but I will tell you that I haven't paid a bill in well over 40 years. [SPEAKER_01] Really? She does it all. Laura does it all.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. We have a bill-paying service that she manages, and she does it. And I think, what the hell? How much could she steal? It's all hers anyway. Can I ask you about that? That's actually interesting. Do you guys meet to discuss finances at all? [SPEAKER_00] I'm in charge of generating the money, and she's really in charge of distributing it. You told the story, I think you were close to 40, or maybe late 30s, and you were like, we bought a vacation home, and it was maybe 300 grand, I think. And you're like, that was all of our money. [SPEAKER_00] No, it was more than all of our money.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you were like, I'm supposed to be this big shot. I don't remember if you were a partner or not. I think you were, but you were— [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, it was probably a new partner. But in the early days, the way—I mean, it would take too much time for your purpose here.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] You told the story, I think you were close to 40, or maybe you're late 30s, and you were like, we bought a vacation home, and it was maybe 300 grand, I think. And you're like, that was all of our money. [SPEAKER_01] No, it was more than all of our money. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, you were like, I'm supposed to be this big shot. I don't remember if you were a partner or not.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] I think you were, but you were like— [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, it was probably a new partner. But in the early days, the way, I mean, it would take too much time for your purpose here. But in a partnership, you don't take money out of the firm. So even when you own money, it stays in the firm. Yeah, you were like, I don't— I had paper wealth. I don't have a lot of cash. I had no money. And so we were driving to the closing. [SPEAKER_00] And now I'm a different kind of guy. I can buy things. I don't even go to the closing. Lawyers do it.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] But in those days, we were angsting about everything. And we bought— You know, we had a very small apartment in the city. And we were having kids. And at that point, we had just had our second kid. And there was no place for them to breathe or run around in our little apartment. So instead of getting a bigger apartment in the city, we bought a relatively small place out at the beach. And we were going through the math. Or my wife was really, my wife was doing this. [SPEAKER_01] And she was going through, in her mind, where the money for the closing. And she had to come up to a certain amount. And she said, we borrowed this much.
SPEAKER_00
And I had this much in this account and that much in that account. And she couldn't make it work out to the total we needed to close.
SPEAKER_01
And she was freaked out. And so we drove 30 miles where she's going over and over this stuff and doing it. And finally, we realized she forgot to count the down payment that we'd made on the house, which was 10%. So she kept coming short. So you guys were really on the edge. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Yeah, we were. I mean, we were able to buy dinner that night. Of course. You know, it wasn't a question of survivability. I just don't think that I— We exhausted more than all of our savings. We do a monthly meeting. I learned this from my friend Ramit. He's a personal finance author. And we've been doing this since I started dating my wife when we were 25, probably at 26 we moved in together. And we would do a look back where we're like, here's what we spent this month. Is that in line or not in line with our expectations and our budget? And are we happy with it? [SPEAKER_00] Do we want to spend more? Do we want to spend less? Are we happy with what we spent on?
SPEAKER_01
And that discipline has been nice. And we've never, ever, ever worried. Look, I grew up in a household where my dad worked nights at the post office. But before he got that job, he'd worked on a—you know, he'd worked in a private thing. I think he drove a truck for a while and he worked in a dry goods store as a clerk. And he actually lost his job, was unemployed for a while. So I grew up in a household where the rent was very scarce and stuff. So I'm used to that kind of fretting and being nervous about money—really nervous about money. What age did that stop?
SPEAKER_01
You know, probably in my 30s. You know, so that's a privileged position. You know, I'm lucky that way. But I grew up—but, you know, listen, I was pretty scarred growing up in a household where money was scarce. And so I'm familiar with what people think. You know, it's very funny because people, you know, I'm a CEO of Bowman Sachs, blah, blah, blah. I'm a real fat cat kind of guy that's a feeble. But, you know, a lot of times people will assert that.
SPEAKER_00
I remember being with some politicians where they were saying, what do you know about this or that? And what do you—and I'm going, listen, I did some research on you before this conversation. [SPEAKER_01] But your dad went to Yale and my dad went to the post office. So why are you telling me what I don't know? And that stuff doesn't go away either. The way that—the first 20 years that you experience, it's a lower T trauma a little bit.
SPEAKER_01
Not to be too woo-woo. But I felt the same way. [SPEAKER_00] My mom and dad told me they were—when—I think they said when I graduated high school, they were like, we had $8,000. That was our situation. And I was like, weren't you nervous? And they were like, yeah, we were nervous all the time. When I got to college, after I bought books and did this, and I remember bought a sweater, which was a very big deal for me because when I got to college, I wasn't dressed the way everybody else was dressed. And I just didn't know. [SPEAKER_00] I came from Brooklyn. I never saw it.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] And so I went out and I bought a sweater to put over a tennis shirt because that's how everybody dressed in those days. And then after I bought—and at one point, I had—I remember this, I had $11 left over. What year? Freshman year, this would have been 1971 or 72. Yeah, so that's still only worth, what, $50? And I was on financial aid, full financial aid. But full financial aid doesn't cover going to movies or things, you know, buying a beer. [SPEAKER_00] I never saw it. [SPEAKER_00] And so I went out and I bought a sweater to put over a tennis shirt
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] because that's how everybody dressed in those days. [SPEAKER_01] And then after I bought—and at one point, I had—I remember this, I had $11 left over. [SPEAKER_01] What year? [SPEAKER_01] Freshman year, this would have been 1971 or two. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, so that's still only worth what, $50? [SPEAKER_01] And I was on financial aid, full financial aid.
SPEAKER_01
But full financial aid doesn't cover going to movies or things like that, just buying a beer. And then somebody said you should go to the financial office and tell them that in this situation, can they help you out?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And I went to the financial aid office and they said, here, fill out this form. [SPEAKER_01] On one side, put what you have. [SPEAKER_01] On the other side, put what you need and see whether there's a difference between that. [SPEAKER_01] And I did that and I turned it in. [SPEAKER_01] And I remember making it so that there was a difference of $500. [SPEAKER_01] My life cost $500 more than what I had. [SPEAKER_01] And a clerk looked at it and said, oh, okay. [SPEAKER_01] And right there, while I waited, she made out a check for $500 and gave it to me. [SPEAKER_01] And I said, whoa. [SPEAKER_01] I want more of that. No, no, I didn't want more.
SPEAKER_00
You should have said $5,000.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] I know, the jokey reaction is I should have asked for a thank. No, but the point was, it was the first time in my life that I wasn't really nickeled and dimed. It was unbelievable. And by the way, that had a big influence on me because I later went to Harvard. I was lucky enough to get in there. That's another whole set of stories. But as a result of that, my commitment to my university is I co-chaired the campaign for financial aid and I did that was a big deal because it was not only that I got it, but I got it in a way that had a generosity of spirit to it. And so I didn't feel bad. I wasn't made to feel bad about it.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] And that was, so I think everyone in my category thinks about giving, but I also think about how it feels to receive. [SPEAKER_00] And I came away with a feeling that it's not just enough to give people what they need, but you have to give it in a way where it's a positive experience also. Yeah. Where it doesn't feel, it feels dignified. It's dignified. And again, that $500, I hope I've repaid a lot of times over, but that was still something, look, I'm telling you the story today. How about that? That was well over 50 years ago. And it's still something that I think about that moment when I
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] got it. I was relieved I got the money, but I was also, I didn't feel bad about it. [SPEAKER_00] There's this book called Die With Zero. [SPEAKER_00] Have you ever seen that book? [SPEAKER_00] No, but the title tells me everything. Yeah. And I, the truth is I haven't read it either. But the title does tell you everything. It's a great title. The guy, Bill Perkins, he seems a great guy, but the premise is spend while you're alive because when you're dead, who cares? And so the premise is if you're going to give, if you can pull it off, give now. Because at least you can experience it with joy.
SPEAKER_01
There's another way of expressing it that I didn't originate, that somebody said to me, but it resonated with me. He said he wanted to give with his warm hand, not his cold hand. That's cool.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] That was a very good visual for me, to feel. [SPEAKER_01] Give with your warm hand, not your cold hand. [SPEAKER_01] Is that what you're going to do? Is that what you intend to do? [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I have to work things through.
SPEAKER_01
And I joked in the book and it's only half a joke. So putting aside philanthropy and stuff and just thinking of kids, sometimes I want to, I give things, I give stuff to them and then I feel ambivalent that they have what I gave them. [SPEAKER_00] What do you mean ambivalent?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Like you don't feel good?
SPEAKER_01
That I will give stuff to my kids because I can afford to do it and they're great kids and they work really hard.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] They're super, there's nothing wrong with them. [SPEAKER_01] And I'll give them stuff. [SPEAKER_01] Then I'll say, you have no idea. [SPEAKER_01] I didn't have what you have and I live like this and you're living like that. [SPEAKER_01] And I'm saying, well, the reason why they're not living, they're living so well is because I gave it to them. [SPEAKER_01] Dude, I had the exact same conversation with my wife yesterday. [SPEAKER_01] So if I gave it to them, why am I then acting regretful that they have it? [SPEAKER_01] I had the same talk with my wife yesterday.
SPEAKER_01
I remember telling her, we had just hung out with someone who was born into a wealthy family and I was envious. I was like, that asshole hasn't worked hard for this and that. [SPEAKER_00] And it was rooted a bit in jealousy of I'm better than them because I worked for it and I wasn't given anything. [SPEAKER_00] And then I was like, well, but I intend to give to my kids. [SPEAKER_00] It's like, I'm going to create, my children are going to be the people that I dislike. [SPEAKER_00] And I thought that was really strange for me to think that way. [SPEAKER_00] Well, your kids will turn out, kids turn out the way they turn out for a variety of reasons.
SPEAKER_01
wealthy family and I, and I was envious. I was like, that asshole hasn't worked hard for this and that. [SPEAKER_00] And it was rooted a little bit in jealousy of like, I'm better than them because
SPEAKER_00
I worked for it and I wasn't given nothing. And then I was like, well, but I intend to give to my kids. It's like, I'm going to create, my children are going to be the people that I dislike. And I thought that was really strange for me to think that way. Well, your kids will turn out, kids turn out the way they turn out for a variety of reasons. One of which could be their neediness or the surpluses they have, but that could be a small part of it. And there are other things that make your kids.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] I have no issues. [SPEAKER_00] My kids, you know, terrific. [SPEAKER_00] They worked hard. They went to good schools. They applied. [SPEAKER_00] They worked at Goldman? [SPEAKER_00] No, at each worked, you know, Goldman's a firm that doesn't discourage people [SPEAKER_00] from bringing their kids into the business. It was an old partnership. Yeah. Family firm, you know, it was a good thing to big. So all my kids worked at least briefly at the firm, but it was too complicated. It was complicated for them to work there. [SPEAKER_00] You know, my name was Smith. [SPEAKER_00] They could have hidden out, but if your name is blind, fine.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] You know, it was just too. And by the way, the burdens of being that were very heavy. [SPEAKER_00] You know, I can't tell you, I'm not in my kids' heads totally, so I can't tell you what [SPEAKER_00] they feel.
SPEAKER_00
So I'll just say generically, if you're the son of a very senior or the daughter of a [SPEAKER_01] very senior person in the organization, you have to worry that people think you didn't
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] get your job by merit. [SPEAKER_00] And they'll think you don't work hard and you'll think this. [SPEAKER_00] So there's a lot of pressure on kids to come in earlier, stay later, show.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Show their moxie.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there's some baggage. There's baggage that they have to overcome. And so it would have been too oppressive for them to stay.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I saw someone, I think it was an old Gawker
SPEAKER_01
article. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. And you seem pretty tough-skinned. I would have been very upset about that, about people writing that stuff. That would have been really bothersome. No, I was very, it turns out I had a thick skin. Look, if I didn't have a thick skin, I wouldn't have survived there and there. I wouldn't have the joy of sitting opposite you now. There'd be somebody else in this chair talking to you instead of me. It's still hard.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Oh, I didn't like it, but it turns out I could take that. [SPEAKER_01] I could take a punch. [SPEAKER_01] Look, to be the CEO of a firm as high profile as Goldman, going through the stressful times
SPEAKER_01
that we went through, you know, to survive that, you needed a thick skin, and I had one.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Was there a point where you thought, this isn't going to work? [SPEAKER_01] No. [SPEAKER_01] It felt good the whole, or it felt— [SPEAKER_01] No, no, it didn't feel good.
SPEAKER_01
Not good, but— The things that would feel bad to anybody would feel bad to me.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I just could take it.
SPEAKER_01
Now I don't want to test it. I don't want to get challenged more to get to the point where I can't take
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] it, but certainly everything that I've endured so far, obviously I could take because I took [SPEAKER_01] it. [SPEAKER_01] In life, there are people who could take a punch and people who can't take a punch.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] And so it turns out, I didn't know that until I got punched, but it turns out that I could take a punch. Not everybody can. By the way, it doesn't make them a bad— People have different wirings. [SPEAKER_00] Some people are athletic, some people aren't. Do you think you're born a great investor? [SPEAKER_00] I don't know. I certainly wasn't, so I can't tell you. [SPEAKER_00] You don't think you were? [SPEAKER_00] No, I ran a firm that contained a lot of great investors. [SPEAKER_00] I'm not a bad investor. [SPEAKER_00] I can read balance sheet and plans and proposals and I have opinions on the future.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] A lot of times I'm right, but I didn't, again, I didn't climb the ranks because specifically [SPEAKER_00] I was an investor. [SPEAKER_00] Goldman Sachs has great investors and great salesmen and great traders and great bankers and this. [SPEAKER_00] And, you know, fortunately I had, I didn't have to be the greatest at having one of those [SPEAKER_00] things.
SPEAKER_00
I was a pretty good manager and I was a pretty good strategist for the business and I was a good partner to other people.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] And that was what was required of my job. [SPEAKER_00] Just look, maybe once upon a time, the captain of the ship got to be captain because he could do every job on the boat.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I'm not sure that's true in a nuclear Navy.
SPEAKER_01
And so I will tell you, maybe there was a time that the person who ran a financial firm could do, was best at every job in that firm.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] But I didn't, I couldn't have been, no one could be at a firm as complicated and as big
SPEAKER_01
and diverse as Goldman.
SPEAKER_00
And so I didn't have to be.
SPEAKER_01
My last question, you had this really cool thought. It was awesome actually.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And I wrote it down and I've been thinking about it a lot. [SPEAKER_01] This idea that someone said it to you when you became a partner, you were like, or they
SPEAKER_01
were like, you know, our goal here is that you become successful enough that when you die, there'll be a really long multi-paragraph obituary about you. And we hope that your time at Goldman is only a sentence or two. Yes. That was when I got, when you made partner, you had a conversation with, you know, senior partner there who was sort of assigned to acculturate new people to the firm. And he gave you some rules of the road, you know, things like make sure you don't get
SPEAKER_01
And I wrote it down and I've been thinking about it a lot. This idea that someone said it to you when you became a partner, you were like, or they were like, our goal here is that you become successful enough that when you die, there'll be a really long multi-paragraph obituary about you. And we hope that your time at Goldman is only a sentence or two.
SPEAKER_01
Yes. That was when I got, when you made partner, you had a conversation with senior partner there who was assigned to acculturate new people to the firm. And he gave you some rules of the road, things like make sure you don't get anywhere near anything that today would be called Me Too kind of activity. The warnings of that kind of stuff, then a warning to make sure you're very rigorous and conservative on your taxes.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Yeah. And then there were two other things that they advised, one of which is they set up a charitable foundation for you. And they said, we expect you to do this, to use it and to give money away. And it's good for your personal life. And it's also good for your professional life to be thought of as somebody who gives back to the community. And as a result of being on philanthropic boards and other things, you'll engage with a set of people that's broader than the people you might need in your business life.
SPEAKER_01
So it's good for you, good for the firm, do this. So that was another topic that was broached. And then the final thing they said was, as far as your balance in your life, think of it this way. If you live the kind of life that there's an obituary written about you and it's nine paragraphs long, make it so that you do enough so that there's no more than three of those nine paragraphs are about your life at Goldman. That's the best. [SPEAKER_00] You know, that may be the best, but it's not going to be the case for me because I stayed too long. That's what I was going to ask you. What are you going to, you have to do something now. Well, okay. What do you hope that.
SPEAKER_01
Maybe I'll join the foreign legion or go up in space. Well, what do you hope the rest of the paragraphs will be? Do you have a goal?
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I think at this point, every hive has a queen bee and the other guy, the worker bees and the others, they go off and the queen stays. I was, as a CEO and long time, I stayed a long time and you do other things, but I don't think I'm ever going to be too separated from my experience at Goldman. And look, I wrote a book called Street Wise Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs. So when I wrote a memoir, it even has Goldman Sachs in the subtitle. So I'm never going to comply with that piece of advice, but I knew where the advice was coming from.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] The important thing is, and I do, I serve on boards and I do other activities and I'm interested in other stuff.
SPEAKER_01
I retired early enough with enough gas in the tank that I could go out and learn. I tried teaching a little bit and I said, something better than teaching, I want to learn. And so I take some courses online and do some things and that's the luxury of my position now. So I'm feeding my curiosity about things away from business, but I also like business and I like markets. And so, as I said to you, I still trade. I watch markets as background noise. I read a lot of financial stuff, but I also read about cosmology and the physics of small stuff. And I'm interested in linguistics and anthropology. And I read a lot of history. I think you said you were, if a trader asked me what to study, I tell him to study history.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I do. What do you read? You know, a while ago, for some reason, I got into medieval history, because it's hard to follow.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it is. It's very hard to follow, but then I got caught up in it because of the way people fought in those days, relationship with religion and the church. And I got interested in reading it. And sometimes you pick up good authors that you really liked the way they write. And so you're less interested in the topic they picked to write about than the fact that they're writing it. [SPEAKER_00] I tend to also do, I like reading a lot of biographies. Which one moved the needle for you most? For me, it was Titan. And I know you did a thing with Ron Chernow.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Actually, I read Titan. I didn't love it as much as that. I mean, the book obviously about Rockefeller. And I've read a lot of his stuff. You know, when I read an author, I tend to read all of his stuff. There's an author I always like. She's been dead a good number of years now named Barbara Tuchman, who wrote, she won actually two Pulitzer Prizes. So I didn't actually discover her. She's been discovered away from me. But she wrote Guns of August about the origins of World War I. A great book, not a biography, but a fantastic book.
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, very influential book. [SPEAKER_01] World War I, it's about? Yes, and very influential because it shows how you can get caught up in a vortex. Forces started to mobilize. It almost couldn't be stopped. But she wrote a book that I found really fun that I'm not sure. It's not her most famous book, but it's called A Distant Mirror. And it's a history of a life that was led in the 14th century. And the guy was a very influential person, not a king, but an aristocrat. And he moved back and forth between England and France. And the 14th century, the reason why it was called A Distant Mirror,
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and very influential because it shows how you can get caught up in a vortex. Forces started to mobilize. It almost couldn't be stopped. But she wrote a book that I found really fun that I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_00
It's not her most famous book, but it's called A Distant Mirror. And it's a history of a life that was led in the 14th century.
SPEAKER_01
And the guy was a very influential person, not a king, but an aristocrat. And he moved back and forth between England and France. And the 14th century, the reason why it was called A Distant Mirror, she wrote this book in the middle of the Cold War, when everybody was worried that the world was going to be blown apart in a nuclear war. And actually, in the 14th century, it was a time when they had the Black Plague and the Papal Schism and the Hundred Years' War. It was a very stressful time in Europe and the world in general, but certainly in Europe.
SPEAKER_00
And people were very, very fatalistic in their attitude.
SPEAKER_01
And that's why it was called A Distant Mirror. [SPEAKER_00] It was a mirror on the 20th century. And the jumping off point for telling the story was this particular guy, Baron Cousy was a French aristocrat, but he fought in the Hundred Years' War. He ended up marrying an English woman. And so he appeared, it was like Zelig. He popped up in a lot of places. And so it gave you the opportunity to write a history of a lot of different aspects of what was going on in that era. And that was, I enjoyed reading that book. That was one of the few books I've read twice. That's awesome. I also liked, totally different, I liked reading The Power Broker about Robert Moses.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] By Robert Caro.
SPEAKER_01
Robert Caro. He just had a thing at the American History Museum.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Yes.
SPEAKER_01
It was awesome. And I'll tell you, the interesting thing is, the reason why I reread that, I read that book once when I was starting, and there's no reason why they should know him, but it was a guy who basically built New York.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And, well, The Power Broker, because he asserted power that on paper he shouldn't have had, but by dint of his personality and different offices he held and clever things, he really was a power broker to the point of dominating even the elected officials who were nominally his boss. And there were aspects of, he did great things, he built, from the Long Island Expressway to all sorts of things, but he also had personality flaws that today look worse than they did in that era. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] I mean, he's accused of being a pretty big racist.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he was accused of that, and he was accused of rolling over, building, cementing parks that were otherwise green that people today wouldn't do, but he did. And so think of the founding fathers who created the template for a democracy when none had existed for, and yet they had slavery. And so how do you evaluate that? [SPEAKER_00] And so people have different views on how do you look at that? Does that disqualify the good things that they did? Or it gets very confusing and hard to fathom, and different people have different views about these things. [SPEAKER_00] And he was a personality like that in a different way.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] But when I first read the book as a young guy, I was focused on the flaw part.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Yeah. [SPEAKER_00] And I said, oh, God, this was a tough human being.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] I didn't think terrible, but tough. And then after 40 years of trying to get stuff done and build in a business and try to influence people to do what I wanted them to do when they didn't want to do it and the sacrifice I had to make and evaluating what I got done and the effort it took, I reread that Robert Moses book. And all of a sudden, his achievements started to go up.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. And the other flaws kind of stayed the same. They didn't get better, but I became, I valued him more. What it showed was, again, it was less about Robert Moses at this point than it was about me because I had changed because as a result of trying to get things done, it made me appreciate the degree of difficulty of his achievements more than I had. I feel that way about the founding fathers. I'm angry at them for a bunch of stuff. And then I'm like, man, Thomas Jefferson, he was like 28 or 30 years old when he wrote this. No, 33 or 30, yes, I think.
[SPEAKER_01] When he wrote this document. And how much wisdom. And there was no template for it, really. And the idea of something that we can get, because democracy was pejorative. Demos. It was anarchy. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And I think about that revolution because Ken Burns has this American Revolution documentary. And it's just, I didn't realize how consequential the American Revolution was and how, for the most part, there had never been democracy at such a large scale. And they made this document that was self-amending. Like this idea that you can, we are flawed and you can fix it.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] And that's just crazy. And by the way, that was if you read a book, I just read a book on the Constitution. That was even debated. There's a cool one by the guy who did the Brooklyn Bridge one
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] where it talks about how the most important words of the Constitution was we believe these truths to be self-evident. And it just goes through. And yet, despite the self-evidence of the rules, they still had a, they debated slavery. And by the way, it's not that they didn't know it was wrong at the time and they missed it. No, they knew. They knew. But by the way, another good book to read is, it's part of,
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] That was even debated. [SPEAKER_00] There's a cool one by the guy who did the Brooklyn Bridge one where it talks about how the most important words of the Constitution were "we hold these truths to be self-evident."
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And it just goes through. [SPEAKER_01] And yet, despite the self-evidence of the rules, they still debated slavery. [SPEAKER_01] And by the way, it's not that they didn't know it was wrong at the time and they missed it.
SPEAKER_01
No, they knew. They knew. But another good book to read is part of what will ultimately be a three-volume series by Rick Atkinson on the American Revolution. The first one is called The British Are Coming and the second volume is out. People don't learn enough about history in general. But Americans don't learn enough about the American Revolution and why it was fought. And people debate it because then you have views, people revise history and say these people were all evil.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] They weren't. [SPEAKER_01] It's like Columbus. [SPEAKER_01] They renamed Columbus Day because he was bad to the indigenous people, which I'm sure he was. But in a ship that was not as long as your backyard swimming pool, in the 15th century, he steered that ship to a continent that he wasn't sure was there for crying out loud.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Give a guy some credit on this stuff. [SPEAKER_00] In other words, you can't say nobody's going to be perfect. [SPEAKER_00] But we have all these revisionary histories that stop admiring characteristics and achievements that are worth admiring just because there were other flaws in the person that delivered the achievement. It's crazy. Yeah. I've ignored the American Revolution for a long time, but now I've gone down this path because of that Ken Burns documentary. And I think it made me feel that capitalism in America is almost a spiritual thing. I married into an immigrant family, and they are small business owners.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And now that I'm in New York, I walk by all these bodegas that are owned by Vietnamese families. Oh, spectacular.
SPEAKER_01
And I'm thinking, this is the greatest place on earth where someone can come with nothing. My favorite part is walking around here, you see these bodegas, and they're called American Cowboy or American Inc. And someone was so proud, but they didn't speak English enough to know, but they just knew that Cowboy in America was cool.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] Look, I know this is going to be controversial. [SPEAKER_01] I don't know who I'm going to upset, but I would say that most of the people who are prominent social Democrats grew up in prosperous families here.
SPEAKER_01
Of course. And the people who grew up under communism don't wish the country was socialist. Of course. It's crazy. But I love the immigrant journey, I particularly love that. And I think the American dream shouldn't be to move here and buy a home.
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It should be move here and start a small business.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] And I just think it's really cool. [SPEAKER_00] But not everybody's competent. [SPEAKER_00] Everyone's capable. But the fact that people can do that. [SPEAKER_00] I agree with you. [SPEAKER_00] And we're going through a moment where people question things. I grew up as a young guy during the Vietnam era. So I grew up and everybody was disgusted with the country. And here's another good thing about the country. You can live here quite happily, quite comfortably while you express your contempt for the country. Of course. Where else can you do that? The way that I describe America is it's mostly good and we can improve.
SPEAKER_01
And you can talk about all the bad stuff and you generally won't be arrested for it. Yeah, it's mostly great and we can improve. But everybody has to rediscover these things.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] And maybe it's a function of age. [SPEAKER_01] I could talk to you about history all day. [SPEAKER_01] I'm so happy that you're into that.
SPEAKER_01
But I think that's why I like the Upper West Side. I like the history part. And I'll tell you why it relates to commercial life. History doesn't repeat. But to paraphrase a remark attributed to Mark Twain, it doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And so patterns happen again. We're going through these tough times and people say it's nothing like anything, but it's not that different from the late 60s when the country was very polarized. [SPEAKER_00] Or the McCarthy era, where we sort of went off the rails and then got back on the rails. [SPEAKER_00] So people say, oh my God, I don't like the norms of society, the norms of proper political behavior are gone forever.
SPEAKER_01
[SPEAKER_00] Well, we did have a civil war. We did have a McCarthy era. We did put Japanese American citizens of Japanese descent in camps because we were freaked out by Pearl Harbor. [SPEAKER_00] And then we overcame those things and regretted them afterwards. So even at the worst, there's hope. There's always hope for America. And America has always fulfilled those hopes eventually. Yeah, I think Warren Buffett, I think, quoted Warren Buffett in the book saying I wouldn't bet against America. Well, I think a lot of people have said that.
SPEAKER_00
I wouldn't bet against America. And if you watch the evening news, you read the newspaper, you'd walk away with one set of views. [SPEAKER_01] Well, I think there's a lot of lazy phrases.
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And then we overcame those things and regretted them afterwards.
SPEAKER_00
[SPEAKER_01] So even at the worst, there's hope. [SPEAKER_01] There's always hope for America. [SPEAKER_01] And America has always fulfilled those hopes eventually.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think Warren Buffett or you, I think, quoted Warren Buffett in the book saying, I wouldn't bet against America. Well, I think a lot of people have said that.
SPEAKER_00
I wouldn't bet against America. And so if you watch the evening news, you read the newspaper, you'd walk away with one set of views. [SPEAKER_01] Well, I think there's a lot of lazy phrases.
SPEAKER_01
For example, I see people online and they'll make comments. You're like, well, in this economy, blankety blank, or it's so crazy out there. And I hate those phrases because I think the words that you use shape how you think. It's hard to feel a certain emotion if you don't have a word to describe that emotion. And so I think that when people use phrases like, well, in this economy, it's hard to do blank, that's a pretty defeatist attitude. This economy is actually quite good. And it doesn't matter what the economy is, that shouldn't prevent you from exercising the action that you want to try to do. It will always be hard.
SPEAKER_00
Now, I'm thinking today, when I was a chief, I was crossing into adulthood. [SPEAKER_01] They were drafting people, Vietnam War, literally the body count coming out. They would read every Friday evening. They would scroll down the TV, you know, 350, 450, 600 died. [SPEAKER_01] And then of course, compare that to World War II when tens of thousands of people died over four years.
SPEAKER_01
And so every generation has its challenges. Every generation minimizes the challenges of the past because they're resolved and can't get worse and maximizes the challenges that people face today because they're still scared of them because they're not resolved. And so that's why it's good to read. That's why I think it's beneficial to read history because if they can go through that period, then we can get through ours. Yeah. Yeah. I do that all the time. I remember I was reading about Sacagawea when she was with Lewis and Clark. And I purposely read that book before I had my kid because a lot of people don't remember. That's a good book too, Undaunted Courage.
SPEAKER_01
Stephen Ambrose, the best. And people, this is way under discussed. Sacagawea, for the listener, Lewis and Clark went west from St. Louis. Sure, you know that coming from St. Louis. Of course, and I'll tell you a funny story. That's where they started from. But they started in St. Louis where I'm from, and they basically said, just go west and figure out if there's a passage. [SPEAKER_00] And they didn't know what the hell they were doing. Now they go to Portland and then they find a progressive mayor. [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, it's a lot different now.
SPEAKER_00
Do you think Lewis and Clark would have been impressed by the progressivism? Well, what's crazy is they went with 30 people and none died. [SPEAKER_01] And so they go there and they find this woman named Sacagawea who spoke a variety of languages and they're like, hey, come with us.
SPEAKER_01
Well, a lot of people don't talk about this. She had a three-month-old kid. And if you actually, there's a Sacagawea gold dollar. Have you ever seen one of those? Yes. Her kid is strapped to her. And I'm like, if she could do that, I don't need a baby thermometer for my bathtub. I don't need all these gadgets if Sacagawea could carry this kid. She had a kid and I don't know how the kid turned out. I hope very well.
SPEAKER_00
His name was Joseph. He went to my high school, by the way. [SPEAKER_01] He was in the first graduating class of my high school. [SPEAKER_01] But I will tell you, the infant mortality rate was a lot higher then. [SPEAKER_01] So keep...
SPEAKER_01
Don't let facts get in the way of a good story. Keep the thermometer. Don't let facts get away. Give them vaccines according to the schedule and take good care of them because you don't want there to be progress on infant mortality. So just because her kid made it through, I would... She ended up dying of illness at like her early 40s. So my story doesn't exactly hold true. But I appreciate you so much.
SPEAKER_00
This is awesome. [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. [SPEAKER_01] My pleasure. [SPEAKER_01] All right. [SPEAKER_01] That's it.
SPEAKER_01
That's the pot. I appreciate you so much. But the title does tell you everything. It's a great title. The guy, Bill Perkins, he's a, he seems like a great guy, but this, the premise is like spend while you're alive because when you're dead, like who cares? And so the, the premise is, is if you're going to give, if you can pull it off, give now. Because at least you can experience it with a joy. There's another way of express it that I didn't originate, that somebody said it to me, but it resonated with me. He said he wanted to give with his warm hand, not his cold hand. That's cool. That was a very good visual for me, you know, to feel.
SPEAKER_01
Give with your warm hand, not your cold hand. Is that what you're going to, is that what you intend to do? Yeah, I have to work things through. And I, I joked in the book and it's kind of only half a joke. So putting aside philanthropy and stuff and just thinking of kids, I, sometimes I want to,
SPEAKER_00
I give things, you know, like take, you know, I give, I give stuff to them and then I feel, then I feel ambivalent that I, you know, that they, that they have what I gave them. What do you mean ambivalent?
SPEAKER_01
Like you don't feel good? That, you know, I sort of, you know, I'll give stuff to my kids cause I can afford to do
SPEAKER_00
it and they're great kids and they work really hard.
SPEAKER_01
They're super, there's nothing, you know, nothing wrong with them. And, you know, it has not ruined my kids that they, they get stuff far from it. But, you know, I'll give them stuff. Then I'll say, you have no idea of God. I, you know, I didn't have what you have and I live like this and you're living like that. And I'm saying, well, the reason why they're not living, they're living so well is because I gave it to them. Dude, I had the exact same conversation with my wife yesterday. So if I gave it to them, why am I then acting, you know, regretful that they have it? I had the same talk with my wife yesterday.
SPEAKER_01
I remember saying, telling her, we had just hung out with someone who was born into a wealthy family and I, and I was envious. I was like, that asshole hasn't worked hard for this and that.
SPEAKER_00
And it was rooted a little bit in jealousy of like, you know, I'm better than them because I worked for it and I wasn't given nothing. And then like, I was like, well, but I intend to give to my kids. It's like, I'm going to create, my children are going to be the people that I dislike. And I thought that was really strange for me to think that way. Well, your kids will turn out, kids turn out the way they turn out for a variety of reasons. One of which could be, you know, their neediness or the surpluses they have, but that could be a small part of it. And there are other things that make your kids. I have no issues. My kids, you know, you know, terrific.
SPEAKER_00
They worked hard.
SPEAKER_01
They went to good schools. They applied.
SPEAKER_00
They worked at Goldman? No, at each worked, you know, Goldman's a kind of firm that doesn't discourage people from, from bringing their kids into the business.
SPEAKER_01
Like, you know, it was an old partnership. Yeah. Family firm, you know, it was a good thing to big. So all my kids worked at least briefly at the firm, but it was too complicated. It was complicated for them to work there.
SPEAKER_00
You know, my name was Smith. They could have hidden out, but if your name is blind, fine. You know, it was just too.
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, the burdens of being that were very heavy.
SPEAKER_00
You know, I can't tell you, I'm not in my kids' heads totally, so I can't tell you what they feel. So I'll just say generically, if you're the son of a very senior or the daughter of a
SPEAKER_01
very senior person in the organization, you have to worry that people think you didn't
SPEAKER_00
get your job by merit. And they'll think, you know, you don't work hard and you'll think this. So there's a lot of pressure on kids to come in earlier, stay later, show.
SPEAKER_01
Show their moxie. Yeah, there's some baggage. There's baggage that they have to overcome. And so it would have been too oppressive for them to stay.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I saw someone, I think it was like, I was researching, it was like an old Gawker
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article.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
And you seem pretty tough-skinned. I would have been very upset about that, about people writing that stuff. That would have been really bothersome. No, I was very, it turns out I had a thick skin. Look, if I didn't have a thick skin, I wouldn't have survived there and there. I wouldn't have the joy of sitting opposite you now. There'd be somebody else in this chair talking to you instead of me. It's still hard. I mean, like- Oh, I didn't like it, but it turns out I could be, I could take that. I could take a punch. Look, to be the CEO of a firm as high profile as Goldman, going through the stressful times
SPEAKER_01
that we went through, you know, one, you know, to survive that, you needed a thick skin, and I had one. Was there a point where you thought, this isn't going to work? No. You, it felt good the whole, or it felt- No, no, it didn't feel good. Not good, but- The things that would feel bad to anybody would feel bad to me. I just could take it. I mean, now I don't want to test it. I don't want to get, I don't want to get challenged more to get to the point where I can't take it, but certainly everything that I've endured so far, obviously I could take because I took it. In life, there are people who could take a punch and people who can't take a punch.
SPEAKER_00
And so it turns out, I didn't know that until I got punched, but it turns out that
SPEAKER_01
I could take a punch. Not everybody can. By the way, it doesn't make them a bad- People have different wirings.
SPEAKER_00
Some people are athletic, some people aren't.
SPEAKER_01
Do you think you're born a great investor?
SPEAKER_00
I don't know.
SPEAKER_01
I certainly wasn't, so I can't tell you.
SPEAKER_00
You don't think you were? No, I ran a firm that contained a lot of great investors. I'm not a bad investor. I can read balance sheet and plans and proposals and I have opinions on the future. A lot of times I'm right, but I didn't, again, I didn't climb the ranks because specifically I was an investor. Goldman Sachs has great investors and great salesmen and great traders and great bankers and this. And, you know, fortunately I had, I didn't have to be the greatest at having one of those things. I was a pretty good manager and I was a pretty good strategist for the business and I was a good partner to other people. And that was what was required of my job.
SPEAKER_00
Just look, maybe once upon a time, the captain of the ship got to be captain because he could
SPEAKER_01
do every job on the boat. I'm not sure that's true in a nuclear Navy. And so I will tell you, maybe there was a time that the person who ran a financial firm could do, was best at every job in that firm. But I didn't, I couldn't have been, no one could be at a firm as complicated and as big and diverse as Goldman.
SPEAKER_00
And so I didn't have to be.
SPEAKER_01
My last question, you had this really cool thought. It was awesome actually. And I wrote it down and I've been thinking about it a lot. This idea that someone said it to you when you became a partner, you were like, or they were like, you know, our goal here is that you become successful enough that when you die, there'll be a really long multi-paragraph obituary about you. And we hope that your time at Goldman is only a sentence or two. Yes. That was when I got, when you made partner, you had a conversation with, you know, senior partner there who was sort of assigned to acculturate new people to the firm.
SPEAKER_01
And he gave you some rules of the road, you know, things like make sure you don't get anywhere near anything that today would be called Me Too kind of activity. You know, the warnings of that kind of stuff, then a warning to, you know, make sure you're
SPEAKER_00
very rigorous and conservative on your taxes. Yeah. And then there were two other things that they advised, one of which is they set up a charitable foundation for you. And they said, we expect you to do this, to use it and to give money away. And it's good for your personal life. And it's also good for your professional life to be thought of as somebody who gives back to the community. And as a result of being on philanthropic boards and other things, you'll engage with
SPEAKER_01
a set of people that's broader than the people you might need in your business life. So it's good for you, good for the firm, do this. So that was another topic that was broached. And then the final thing they said was, and as far as, you know, your balance in your life, you know, think of it this way. If you live the kind of life that you, that there's an obituary written about you and it's nine paragraphs long, make it so that you do enough so that there's no more than three of those nine paragraphs are about your life at Goldman. That's the best.
SPEAKER_00
You know, that may be the best, but it's not going to be the case for me because I stayed
SPEAKER_01
too long.
SPEAKER_00
That's what I was going to ask you.
SPEAKER_01
What are you going to, you have to do something now. Well, okay. What do you hope that, uh. Maybe I'll join the foreign legion or go up in a space. Well, what do you hope the rest of the paragraphs will be? Do you have a, do you have like a goal? I think at this point, you know, every hive has a queen bee and the queen, you know, the other, the other guy, the worker bees and the others, they, you know, they go off and the, you know, the queen state, I was kind of, you know, as a CEO and long time, I stayed a long time and you do other things, but I don't think I'm ever going to be too separated from my experience at Goldman.
SPEAKER_01
And look, I wrote a book called street wise getting to and through Goldman Sachs. So when I wrote a memoir, it even has Goldman Sachs in the, uh, in the subtitle. So I'm never going to, I'm not going to comply with that piece of advice, but I knew where
SPEAKER_00
the advice was coming from. The important thing is, and I do, I serve on boards and I do other activities and I'm interested in other stuff.
SPEAKER_01
I, I retired early enough with enough gas in the tank that I could go out and learn, you know, I tried teaching a little bit and I said, you know, something better than teaching, I want to learn. And so I, you know, take some courses online and do some, you know, things and, and that's the luxury of my position now. So, you know, I'm feeding my curiosity about things away from business, but I also like business and I like markets. And so, as I said to you, I still trade. I watch markets as background noise. I read a lot of financial stuff, but I also read about cosmology and the physics of small stuff. And I'm interested in, um, linguistics and anthropology.
SPEAKER_01
And I read a lot of history. I think you said you, you were like, if a trader asked me what to study, I tell him to study history. I do.
SPEAKER_00
What do you, what do you read? You know, a while ago, for some reason, I, as true medieval history, cause it's hard
SPEAKER_01
to follow. Yeah, it is. It's very hard to follow, but then I sort of got caught up in it because of, you know, the way people fought in those days, relationship with religion and the church. And I got sort of got interested in reading it. And sometimes you pick up good authors that you really liked the way they write. And so you less interested in the topic they picked to write about than the fact that they're writing it.
SPEAKER_00
I tend to also do, I like reading a lot of biographies. Which one moved the needle for you most?
SPEAKER_01
For me, it was Titan.
SPEAKER_00
And I know you did a thing with Ron Chernow. Actually, I read Titan. I didn't love it as much as that. I mean, you know, the rock, obviously about Rockefeller. And I've read a lot of his, I've read a lot. You know, when I read like an author, I tend to read all of his stuff. There's a book I write. There's an author I always like.
SPEAKER_01
She's been dead a number, a good number of years now named Barbara Tuchman, who wrote, she won actually two Pulitzer Prizes. So I didn't actually discover her.
SPEAKER_00
She's been discovered away from me.
SPEAKER_01
But she wrote Guns of August about the origins of World War I. A great book, not a biography, but a fantastic book.
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, very influential book.
SPEAKER_01
World War I, it's about? Yes, and very influential because it shows how you can get caught up in a vortex. You know, forces started to mobilize. It almost couldn't be stopped. But she wrote a book that I found really fun that I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_00
It's not her most famous book, but it's called A Distant Mirror. And it's a history of a life that was led in the 14th century.
SPEAKER_01
And the guy was a very influential person, not a king, but kind of an aristocrat. And he moved back and forth between England and France. And the 14th century, the reason why it was called A Distant Mirror, she wrote this book like in the middle of the Cold War, when everybody was worried that the world was going to be blown apart in a nuclear war and stuff. And actually, in the 14th century, it was a time when they had the Black Plague and the Papal Schism and the Hundred Years' War. It was a very stressful time in Europe and the world in general, but certainly in Europe.
SPEAKER_00
And people were very, very fatalistic in their attitude.
SPEAKER_01
And that's why it was called A Distant Mirror.
SPEAKER_00
It was sort of like a mirror on the 20th century. And the jumping off point for telling the story was this particular guy, Baron Cousy was a French aristocrat, but he fought in the Hundred Years' War. He ended up marrying an English woman. And so he appeared, it was like Zelig. He popped up in a lot of places. And so it gave you the opportunity to write a history of a lot of different, of what was going on in that era. And that was, I enjoyed reading that book.
SPEAKER_01
That was one of the few books I've read twice. That's awesome. I also liked, totally different, I liked reading The Power Broker about Robert Moses. By Robert Caro. Robert Caro. He just had a thing at the American History Museum. Yes. It was awesome. And I'll tell you, the interesting thing is, the reason why I reread that,
SPEAKER_00
I read that book once when I was starting, and you know,
SPEAKER_01
there's no reason why they should know him, but it was a guy, you know, who basically built New York. And, well, The Power Broker, because he asserted power that on paper he shouldn't have had,
SPEAKER_00
but by dint of his personality and different offices he held and clever things,
SPEAKER_01
he really was a power broker to the point of dominating even the elected officials who were nominally his boss. And there were aspects of, he did great things, you know, he built, you know, from the Long Island Expressway to all sorts of things, you know, but he also, you know, had personality flaws that today look worse than they did in that era. Yeah. I mean, he's accused of being, like, a pretty big racist. Yeah, he was accused of that, and he was accused of rolling over, you know, building, you know, cementing parks that, you know, that were otherwise green that people today wouldn't do, but he did.
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, so think of, you know, think of the founding fathers who, you know, created the template for a democracy when none had existed for, you know, and yet they had slavery. And so how do you evaluate that?
SPEAKER_00
And so people have different, you know, how do you look at that?
SPEAKER_01
Does that disqualify the good things that they did? Or, you know, it gets very confusing and hard to fathom,
SPEAKER_00
and different people have different views about these things. And he was kind of a personality like that in a different way.
SPEAKER_01
But, you know, when I first read the book as a young guy,
SPEAKER_00
I was focused on the flaw part. Yeah. And I said, oh, God, this was a, you know, you know, this was a tough human being.
SPEAKER_01
I didn't think terrible, but tough and, you know, this. And then after 40 years of trying to get stuff done and build in a business and, you know, try to influence people to do what I wanted them to do when they didn't want to do it and the sacrifice I had to make and evaluating what I got done and the effort it took,
SPEAKER_00
I reread that Robert Moses book. And all of a sudden, his achievements started to go up.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. And the other flaws kind of stayed the same. They didn't get better, but I became, I kind of valued him more. What it showed was, again, it was less about Robert Moses at this point than it was about me because I had changed because as a result of trying to get things done,
SPEAKER_00
it made me appreciate the degree of difficulty of his achievements more than I had.
SPEAKER_01
I feel that way about the founding fathers.
SPEAKER_00
I'm angry at them for a bunch of stuff. And then I'm like, man, Thomas Jefferson, he was like 28 or 30 years old when he wrote this. No, 33 or 30, yes, I think.
SPEAKER_01
When he wrote this document. And how much wisdom. And there was no template for it, really. And, you know, the idea of something that, you know, we can get, you know, because democracy was pejorative. Demos. It was anarchy. Yeah. And I think about that revolution because Ken Burns has this American Revolution documentary. And it's just, I didn't realize how consequential the American Revolution was and how, like, for the most part, there had never been democracy at such a large scale. And they made this document that was self-amending. Like this idea that you can, like, we are flawed and you can fix it.
SPEAKER_00
And that's just, like, crazy. And by the way, that was if you read a book, I just read a book on the Constitution. That was even debated. There's a cool one by the guy who did the Brooklyn Bridge one
SPEAKER_01
where it talks about how it was the most important words of the Constitution was we believe these truths to be self-evident. And it just, like, goes through. And yet, despite the self-evidence of the rules, they still had a, you know, they debated slavery. And by the way, it's not that they didn't know it was wrong at the time and they missed it. No, they knew. They knew. But, by the way, another good book to read is, it's part of, it will ultimately be a three-volume scene by Rick Atkinson on the American Revolution. But the first one is called The British Are Coming and he has, the second volume is out about, people don't learn enough about history in general.
SPEAKER_01
But Americans don't learn enough about the American Revolution and why it was fought. And, of course, people debate it because then you have views, you know, people, you know, revise history and say, you know, these people were all evil. They weren't, you know, they weren't, you know. It's like Columbus, you know. They don't want it. They renamed Columbus Day because he was, you know, bad to the indigenous people, which I'm sure he was.
SPEAKER_00
But in a ship that was not as long as your backyard swimming pool, you know, in the 15th century, steered that ship to a continent that he wasn't sure was there for crying out loud. Give a guy, you know, let's have some credit on this stuff. You know, in other words, you can't, you know, nobody's going to be perfect. But, you know, we have those, you know, all these revisionary histories that stop admiring characteristics and achievements that are worth admiring just because there were other flaws in the person that delivered the achievement.
SPEAKER_01
It's crazy. Yeah. I've ignored the American Revolution for a long time, but now I've gone down this path because of that Ken's Burn documentary. And I think it made me feel like capitalism in America is almost a spiritual thing. You know, I married into an immigrant family, and they are small business owners. And now that I'm in New York, I walk by all these bodegas that are owned by, like, you know,
SPEAKER_00
Vietnamese families.
SPEAKER_01
Oh, spectacular. And I'm like, this is the greatest place on earth where someone can come with nothing. And, like, my favorite part is walking around here, you see these bodegas, and they're called, like, American Cowboy or, like, American Inc. And, like, someone was so proud, but they didn't speak English enough to know, but they just knew that, like, Cowboy in America was, like, cool. Look, I know this is going to be controversial. I don't know who I'm going to upset, but, you know, it's like, I would say that most of the people who are prominent social Democrats grew up in prosperous families here. Of course.
SPEAKER_01
And let me tell you, the people who grew up under communism don't wish the country was socialist. Of course. I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy, but, you know. But I love, like, this immigrant, I'm, like, particularly, like, the immigrant journey, you know, I think, I freaking love that. And, you know, I think, like, the American dream shouldn't be to move here and buy a home.
SPEAKER_00
It should be move here and start a small business. And I just think it's really cool. You know, but not everybody's competent. Everyone's capable.
SPEAKER_01
But the fact that people can do, look, you know, I agree with you.
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, we're going through a moment where people, I guess people always question. Again, I grew up, I was a young guy during the Vietnam era.
SPEAKER_01
So I grew up and everybody was disgusted with the country and stuff. And listen, here's another good thing about the country. You can live here quite happily, you know, quite comfortably while you express your contempt for the country. Of course. Where else can you do that? The way that I describe America is I'm like, it's mostly good and we can improve. And you could talk about all the bad stuff and you generally won't be arrested for it. Yeah, it's mostly great and we can improve. No, God, I am. But, you know, but look, everybody has to rediscover these things. And maybe it's, you know, maybe it's a function of age. I could talk to you about history all day.
SPEAKER_01
I'm so happy that you're into that. No, no, but I think. That's why I like the Upper West Side, by the way. No, but I like the history part. And I'll tell you why it relates to the commercial life, is that you can, is that history, again, doesn't repeat. But to paraphrase a remark attributed to, you know, Twain, Mark Twain, is it doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And so patterns happen again. So we're going through these tough times and, oh, it's none like anything, but it's, you know, it's not that different from the late 60s when the country was very polarized.
SPEAKER_00
Or the McCarthy era, where we sort of went off the rails and then got back on the rails. So people say, oh, my God, I don't like, you know, the norms of society, you know, the norms of political, proper political behavior are gone forever. Well, you know, we did have a civil war.
SPEAKER_01
We did have a McCarthy era. We did put, you know, Japanese American citizens who were Japanese descent in camps because we
SPEAKER_00
were freaked out by world, you know, by Pearl Harbor.
SPEAKER_01
And then we overcame those things and regretted them afterwards. So even at the worst, there's hope. There's always hope for America. And America has always fulfilled those hopes eventually. Yeah, I think Warren Buffett or you, I think, quoted Warren Buffett in the book saying, like, you know, I wouldn't bet against America. Well, I think a lot of people have said that.
SPEAKER_00
I wouldn't bet against America. And, you know, so if you watch the evening news, you read the newspaper, you'd walk away with one set of views.
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think there's a lot of lazy phrases. For example, I see people online and they'll make comments. You're like, well, in this economy, blankety blank, or it's so crazy out there. Like there's like these lazy phrases. And I hate those phrases because it's sort of, I think the way that the words that you use shape how you think. Like it's hard to feel a certain demotion if you don't have a word to describe that emotion. And so I think that when people use phrases like, well, in this economy, it's hard to do blank. It's like, well, that's pretty defeatist attitude. This economy is actually quite good.
SPEAKER_01
And it doesn't matter what the economy is, that shouldn't prevent you from exercising the action that you want to try to, I mean, it will always be hard.
SPEAKER_00
Now, I'm thinking today, you know, when I was, when I was a chief, you know, I was crossing
SPEAKER_01
into adulthood. They were drafting people, Vietnam War, literally the body count coming out of, you know, they would read every Friday evening. They, you know, they read, you know, scroll down the TV, you know, 350, 450, 600 died. And then of course, compare that to World War II when, you know, when tens of thousands of people over four years. And so, you know, every, every generation has its challenges. Every generation minimizes the challenges of the past because they're resolved and can't get worse and maximizes the challenges that people face today because they're still scared of them because they're not resolved. And so, you know, that's why it's good to read.
SPEAKER_01
That's why I think it's beneficial to read history because if they can go through that period, then we can get to ours. Yeah. Yeah. I do that all the time. Like, I remember I was reading about Sacagawea when she was with Lewis and Clark. And I purposely read that book before I had my kid because a lot of people don't remember. That's a good book too, Undaunted Courage. Stephen Ambrose, the best. And people, this is way under discussed. Sacagawea, for the listener, basically Lewis and Clark went west from St. Louis. Sure, you know that coming from St. Louis. Of course, and I'll tell you a funny story. That's where they started from.
SPEAKER_01
But they started in St. Louis where I'm from, and they basically said, just go west and figure out if there's like a passage.
SPEAKER_00
And they didn't know what the hell they were doing.
SPEAKER_01
Now they go to Portland and then they find, you know, progressive mayor.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it's a lot different now. Do you think Lewis and Clark would have been impressed by the progressivism? Well, what's crazy is they went with 30 people and like none died.
SPEAKER_01
And so they go there and they find this woman named Sacagawea who spoke a variety of languages
SPEAKER_00
and they're like, hey, come with us.
SPEAKER_01
Well, a lot of people don't talk about this. She had a three-month-old kid. And if you actually, there's a Sacagawea gold dollar. Have you ever seen one of those? Yes. Her kid is strapped to her. And I'm like, if she could do that, I don't need a baby thermometer for my bathtub. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't need all these gadgets if Sacagawea could carry this kid. She had a kid and I don't know how the kid turned out. I hope very well. He turned out great.
SPEAKER_00
His name was Joseph. He went to my high school, by the way.
SPEAKER_01
He was in the first graduating class of my high school. But I will tell you, the infant mortality rate was a lot higher then. So keep... Don't let facts get in the way of a good story. Keep the thermometer. Don't let facts get away. Give them vaccines according to the schedule and take good care of them because you don't want... There has been progress on infant mortality. So just because her kid made it through, I would... She ended up dying of illness at like... In her early 40s. So my story doesn't exactly hold true. But I appreciate you so much.
SPEAKER_00
This is awesome.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. My pleasure. All right. That's it. That's the pot. I appreciate you so much.