How the Ex-Goldman CEO actually invests his own money

the difference between somebody who's really really good and somebody who can't make it is not that great goldman sachs senior chairman former ceo lloyd blank 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 i would say that ninety eight sent are equities what of your biggest holdings this is gonna be controversial and i don't know who i'm gonna upset but you know it's like are you trading every day yes that's crazy no it's not it's like taking a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while i'm talking right now it's like that so you're bullish on big tech anything on it's been good to be bullish on big tech and i'll stop being bullish on it when it stops going up what did the people who couldn't outperform what did the bottom half have in common the bigger takeaway is that i feel like got rude where to know why i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on a goal less travel never look the reason why it's interesting to talk to you is because i'm pretty good at building companies you know i built a company that was doing million in revenue by the time was thirty one but i'm like i don't know anything when it comes to investing my portfolio is basically nobody knows anything well that's what i've learned but it seems like you know a lot plus i'm so on the inside unlike a lot of people i know nobody knows anything whereas pure everybody else just wonders well that's cool and so the so i'm gonna to ask you a a ton of questions and it's come and it's gonna come from a perspective of like i actually don't know what i'm doing and the majority of my my portfolio is which i actually think is smart is just ninety percent index ten percent ponds well that's sensible but you day trade which i thought was hilarious two things one i'm a pro at it i mean there's what i did my you know only for the last four or five decades and the other thing is that nothing hugely positive or hugely negative is intersect my life yeah so to me it's like a hobby what age were you when you felt that you're out grew up in the project so i 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 that our rich can't be hard for me to even to say it but you know by any metric i have been that way for a you know for a long time but i never feel that way i mean i'm still trapped in that mindset you know the kid from the projects so your your father was a a postal worker i think you said you are an urban hi which i like grew up in east new york brooklyn you know you know at the end of two you know you know you know two subway lines and a bus in the eastern part of brooklyn you know growing up i think i went to i think i went to manhattan three times i never left the country didn't didn't fly on airplane till after i left you know less school and stuff you know yeah i was pretty provincial it turns out that if you look at the lists of most successful people or wealthiest people in the us you're not seeing a lot of morgan's rockefeller or any of these classical family names on that list you're seeing basically people not necessarily growing up in poverty but they were kind of middle class people who did you know who did well these are not you know generational wealthy people coming along a lot of people were socially mobile in their lives and that you know created well for others and you know and a piece of it stuck to them 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 i i think what's shocking that shocking but i think what would be good if everybody understood is that you know look they're very very few geniuses in the world i don't know if i've ever met one you don't think that you've met which you meet jeff bezos you're not like this guy just has more horsepower yeah or most of the people i meet i can't i i i'm not saying i can do what they do but i could see how they can do what they do very few people my if 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 maybe a guy like that where i don't know how have you met him oh yeah a lot don't you forget we under road his you know a lot of his stuff when you met him did you didn't think when you when you you know you know him i guess you didn't think this guy's is different oh no no i'm saying he's very different i'm 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 hi there and guess what after they finished speaking they said how they say how did i do like 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 and people are a lot more insecure and a lot more and sometimes the most successful people that you know are driven by insecurity and their flaws or things like that so you also have to be lucky that 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're peak in the wrong year you'll never med in the olympics even though you were a fat you know so 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 you know 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 skill set required or the degree of work required is beyond the grasp of many of your listeners it's not so you've had teams of traders so you you you you were like a a commodity salesman but you came 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 the difference between somebody who's really really good and somebody who can't make it is not that great you know when you you know you think of a golf tournament and somebody wins a golf tournament by one stroke and there's six people tied for second one stroke behind the winner that's a very low margin of victory and a lot of life is like that and sometimes it's winner take all where somebody is just ever so slightly better but that thing stands out by the way a lot of life is like that the difference between a great actor will get any part he or she wants in hollywood and the second best one you know may have to like wait tables at night you know i wasn't i wasn't cursed by being a great athlete and so i didn't have i wasn't tortured into thinking should i go you know should i dedicate myself to sports and athletes or should i try you know strive to do well in classes in school and get another i i didn't have that but imagine the unfortunate person who's the best athlete his high school ever produced gets a a minor league baseball contract and from the minor week something like two percent eventually make a living out of being you know enough money you know jig get become professional you know you get into very rare fight area when you're talking about the people who are the best at what they do with a market only rewards and can only give a full time job opportunity to people who are in you know who point o zero one percent of that field you had this funny bit where you i think something had happened where goldman you guys were like really nervous of making mistakes when you know we had you know the big financial crisis the one that was like in o seven zero eight when the regulators wanted to make sure that this kind of thing never happened again well the only way can make things sure that you know once you're in the risk taking world anything can happen you know it risk is risk and you don't you know always know the consequences of it and if you try to leg risk you know you may think you're protecting the world from the hundred year storm but you're also gonna fore the ninety nine years of in between when there was growth but you said even inside of goldman you were like we were meeting with the twenty partners or something and people were throwing around ideas and some of the ideas were pretty good and you're were like what the hell guys we're talking ourselves out of everything on this show we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive well lucky for you the team at hubspot they have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple easy to read wealth guide it's thirty five principles from the top investors we're talking guys who have been on the pod like howard marx man par bra morgan h cathy 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 everyone's sewing around the ideas and everyone around here is saying like oh we can't do this because like what the hell aren't we 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 you know the firm at that point had just gone through a period where it had you know big losses and people were gun shy and i you know you'd think a risk manager always trying to impress people from taking risk sometimes a good risk matter 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 you don't move forward there's no growth you can't be an entrepreneur you've been an entrepreneur you can't be 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 back 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 yeah and as you get more successfully you i at least i have and i think you said goldman dead you take less risk well i think that that's what makes people more conservative think of the word conservative you can serve you become interested and what and not losing what you have as opposed to making more now when i say making more people gonna be rep pulse by the idea of making more raking more is another way of saying advancing creating wealth can you tell that story about warren buffett in the book that was amazing where you he loaned you a bunch of money basically over a handshake and a phone call and i was like alright i'm gonna go take my grand at dairy green 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 at a very important moment invest money in goldman sachs do you remember how much i think it was five billion dollars or ten million billion what you do you i called we had talked before that and you know you know with him he decides to do something he does so gonna be with him i didn't have to ask him it would it would serve no purpose to ask him two or three times so you said you said hey warren we're going to this thing we might meet need a little i no and i've done that before he would he be willing you know 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 thought is a good investment to make he wasn't doing it because he was trying to you know help us although it had the effect of helping us but he was trying to help his own shareholders and you know you know he he saw us what i saw on us which was a good investment that was being beaten down by you know circumstances that it would reverse and i think he wanted to make an investment before it got better well i think in the story was cool because you were like on the phone with them you're like hey warren you wanna do this thing or or i think maybe he called you it and he's like hey let's you know i'm to do five billion dollar investment or a alone i'm not sure if he's a loan or investment preferred stock it's something between a loan yeah and a and a stock and you are like yeah cool that sounds great we would love to work with you do you wanna do some due diligence or do you wanna like signs some paperwork and he's like no no no i'll just send the money and you know i gotta go i'm gonna take my kid to take my grand kid at dairy queen just just figure it out and let me know where you want me to send them money the fact that yes that was actually the flow of the conversation but he's a pretty rigorous guy he knows that we're a pretty rigorous people and and at one point he said you know and i said you know i would feel better telling you all the thing you know before you make this investment i would feel better telling you all the things i'm worried about and he said you know lloyd i know you're well enough to know that you worry enough for the both of us and then i i i pushed a little bit and he said look berkshire five billion dollars it's not even it's you know again berkshire is a an insurance company and so in their real in their real business berkshire insurers among other things property he said look five billion dollars 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 five billion dollars wasn't a big number to him that was a joke and i took it that way nobody wants to lose five billion dollars not even him but you know he was very good and it was a very important it wasn't just the money in fact frankly the money was irrelevant to us because we had the money what we didn't have was we didn't have the confidence of the world because at that point people you know some institutions that were similar to ours were kind of failing 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 scares people even more because i think he sets up in like oh and hey by the way do me a favor don't sell any of your shares until i sell mine or something like that like let's be locks up no it wasn't even a favor was a it was he asked for that he asked for our commitment for that yeah didn't ask for it and writing and and you were like yeah i'll put that in the contract that sounds was good was no no no need it's cool just tell me you commit and that was it and that's pretty amazing 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 is not a is not a written contract people buy and sell bonds and things and they they don't get delivered for two days suppose somebody could lie and say i really didn't do that or i didn't intend it or i'm con you know or something but you'll never eat lunch in this town again and if people rely on their reputation for prob 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 have you did you see the text between i think it was like ellis and elon elon was like hey i'm gonna buy twitter for you know whatever i think thirty billion are you in and he was like yeah i'm in for five or like you know it was like a a fairly casual conversation for like a pretty huge thing no but that sounds right just because something is big doesn't mean it's tricky or complicated some you know there are big things that are simple and little things that are complicated i think all things considered it's always good to document stuff but in a trading room you know you don't document stuff when people buy and sell stuff also sometimes the execution of what you've agreed to is so near in time that it's pointless to document it because in two days you're gonna perform and so there's nothing there's no 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 you know all things equal it's good to have a document but it's marginally not necessary and most of the transactional world works without documentation so you're no longer the ceo but at 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 i invest in risky assets that's what's fun for me and that was what i did my whole career money percent isn't in just end index funds or boring stuff well index funds are risky they're just they're are diversified across different things but if you're in a diversified equity etf you're in equities yeah and equities will is 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 it it's still risky i'm i would say that i am ninety eight percent in in risky assets of which you know ninety five or the ninety eight are equities probably a third a quarter is in etfs and seventy five percent is in single stock and if i'm wrong it's ten percent or in etfs and ninety percent in single stock because that's what i like to do well okay of that i'm so curious about this of the so i'm in ninety ninety percent just a vanguard fun and then ten that's sensible because this is what you're you're you're not doing this you're not doing investing for a living of course and i'm not i'm probably not gonna change that but i'm always interested in seeing how other people like to invest so of the seventy five percent what are some your biggest holdings things well i'm i would say that right now i'm very heavily focused in tech and have been for a long time for good reason companies all the big you know all the big hyper scaler and second tier ones what's the second tier one what's an example of the second tier one i mean if they're if they're yeah i'm a big hyper scaler like you know like the google's of the world and the microsoft of the world and nvidia of the world maybe a second tier version down the slightly down the food with no insult and intended to larry ellis maybe oracle but i don't have to have i changed my things all the time so it doesn't matter you know specific names i'm just giving you i'm speaking in terms of category that's how i think of it as you know not necessarily the blue of the blue chip yeah one's one that are a little bit risk and by the way the companies that are probably gonna be gigantic companies that some people know about today and are investing in and i never heard of them because i'm just not always you know i'm not walking around the carter's the silicon valley shops and i don't know the new new thing and it might be commonplace knowledge over there but it's not with you know everybody knows the world's a big place and everybody always knows their corner of it so you're bullish on big tech anything else i'm generally bullish and and by the way it's been good to be bullish on both a 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 yeah my foreseeable future is when i finish this conversation with you and then i'll check it again are you trading every day yes that's crazy no it's not it's not okay i don't think it's really crazy it's just crazy for me to you oh no no i multiple times it's taking a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while i'm talking to you right now it's like back it's background noise it's like you know some people like to listen to music you'd say how much time do you spend listening to music well they're not sitting at a desk slump hunch 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 yeah it's out there it's going on what trades did you make today i think today i may have you know i i i'm not sure what i did because i put in orders because knowing that you're gonna time me up and i wasn't gonna be able to look at stuff i told people what to do i'm so curious to sell you know maybe to sell some you know energy is rising you know i've been i buy and sell a lot of stuff i don't wanna talk about specific things because right people listen to these things on different days and they'll start you know sounds smart as stupid depending on do you have a team oh just me just you yeah and so you're at your computer doing it on your own no no i'm not out of computer i don't have a computer i have an ipad so you're on your ipad doing and a phone are you and your most what what's your source of information to make decisions i chat with people what you're texting them 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 and you're doing that all day some people follow i follow the news but i also follow business news and i like you know companies are like little stories and it's like gossip what do you what do you read i read you know all the newspapers of course i start with the new york post paper of record yeah and you know when i read papers like you know like journal the times the f feet you know bloomberg i look at you know very financial financially or you know finance all of them yeah no i don't steal them yeah well you know how many pay do hit and you're like oh shit i'm not gonna read i do find a different article that happens every once in a while there's something esoteric where you know i click on something in it turn know it turns me down so i don't read it there's a million other thing but i i do this and i have to think gee why am i qui 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 yes i have for a while and i'm not and that's not because of it it's because of where i focused so i started to say i'm i'm mostly and have been in tech energy don't forget have background in trading energy yeah 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 i'm sure you still own a bunch of goldman i do i i tend to have of some affection for the organization that i spend almost forty years and so yeah i kinda like those that that company hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog post emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses so like i said i'm boring and it's ninety ten it's the most simple stuff oh it's the advice i would give to people i think at your age it pays to be in risk assets like equities as opposed to you know fixed income but if i were in equities and by way this is same advice that a warren buffett would give i would be in a diversified portfolio of equities like this s sm p five hundreds which is spies or v and i'm i do v i would also be because of the importance of tech and the you being on the threshold of great changes in technology i might be mostly in those generic diversified things but i might also have etfs that we're focused on you know on more tech oriented ones that you know so that would give me disproportionate although the general ones the ones that are the broadest index are very heavily intact because just tech us such a the market cap of tech companies are so heavily weighted in those that you do get a fair share of tech even in a very broad index and you know frankly that has gone well for a long time and every once in a while something doesn't work it goes down a lot and you have to be able to do that that's why i say at your age the older you get the more conservative the older you get the more concerned you should be about not losing money as opposed to maximizing the money you make but as a young person you have time to you have time you know you'll out live your mistakes what's your opinion on what's going on with like the robinhood of the world and all these like like the cal and things that promote like day trading but also bedding and things like that i think those things that kinda democrat investing and make it very very accessible to people is in its own terms a very good things so people should be aware of assets that they could buy and make it easier to do some and maybe you know receive advertising promotion so that they focus on it more than they would maybe they would never focus on it but for those companies you know at the same time if you make it too much like a video game you could 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 mh so that's the risky thing so you know when you have some of these sites and they show confetti dropping because you did a trade and you know have a boy and high five and you know you should gamble and make that look too attractive you know for some people that's a disservice and for other people it's exactly what they need they won't go overboard but they but it needed 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 and it was because you had poor input like you or you had a you just let a motion control you know a million things i didn't an interesting one yeah oh well i i i thought you know spacex was overpriced at a hundred billion dollar market cap what's it gonna go for now like generally it's in the market people are discussing that now i think they were proposing something that would make it worth you know a trillion and three quarters i'm not involved obviously i'm not involved in any and what did you say what you thought was expensive of a hundred million yeah so one instead of you know you know a hundred and seventy five wow i mean i could pick any number i mean i missed a lot of things i remember a million years ago when they were auction off bandwidth or something for cell phones and i'm thinking why would anybody wanna carry a cell phone with you when there's you know twenty million or two hundred you know thirty million i'm not sure the exact number of telephone booths around why would you wanna carry at that time cell phones were bulky and the batteries lasted fifteen minutes or something like that why would anybody want that so i showed them how smart i was and so i didn't make early investments in sell your opportunities of things i let me tell you i missed a lot more stuff than i got yeah and you know go doesn't miss as much as i this but that's because go has a lot of people in it not just me but if it was just up to me i would have missed it you know nobody's great about you know predicting the future i tried to like talk to like some of the younger people who listened to the show where i'm like man having a supportive partner is like without a doubt more game changing probably than any yeah any i and let's take the opposite side of it and you know statistically this is gonna happen to a lot of people and happens to good people and it doesn't make you a bad person but people have bad marriages and they have breakups and they have children and they fight over custody and visitation and all those kinds of things life's a lot better if you can avoid those problems and by the way being lonely is not the worst thing in the world a bad marriage is you know that you have to work out of and deal with you know kids and property settlements that's worse i'm a very emotional person i think a lot of people who are entrepreneurial tend to be quite high up and downs and i think people like you who are a good ceos tend to be a little bit more steady and optimistic and i think that having like a great wife it's really been like a one plus one equals five type situation and by the way i'm not and that i'm not just saying this for completeness but it's worth saying it's about and wives to have great husbands and that's a tough you know there's a lot of people i know partners of mine and things where the husband in the relationship takes a less stressful job because needs to support his wife wife and her stressful job and sometimes that's even harder because no as much as we wanna think things are calibrated and equal dies don't have babies yeah yeah yeah you also like hanging out with you now you seem super happy and optimistic but in the book you were like i'm prone to anxiety and that was like i think a polite way of saying it but like there you seem like a pretty anxious person occasionally no i well i'm wired that way a little bit you know inherited from my dad was an anxious person you know i made my kids anxious you know unfortunately i yeah that there's benefits and burns to every situation and being anxious and looking you know around corners for problems and seeing things that could go wrong i think that suited me my job i mean not all of life is about your job you could be happy in another thing you should be happy in other ways and other parts of life besides just your job but just looking at that narrow point i was in a you know i was in a risky business with a firm with a big balance sheet that had a lot of investments and that bought and sold and price risk and took on other risks and other people didn't wanna have for a price and you know something if you're gonna do that job and provide over other people doing that job it helps to be somewhat focused on things that could go wrong and in my life i generally upbeat that i think things will tend to work out but i know that before they work out they go wrong a lot of things go wrong did you have any it didn't seem like it when i was reading about it your travel schedule was crazy did you have any work like balance when you were doing it well when you asked me any of course i still say yes but not not not not enough that would be reasonable to most people yeah no i traveled a lot and they and they hair's again where are you're having a supportive spouse you know it's very helpful and look my wife laura i was a laura worked in big law firms and you know now she's you know the chair of barn college and other things she would you know helped helps to oversee a charter school you know she's you know very involved you know in the world but tell you one thing she did was very part of my career when i needed to move overseas she took care of everything and let me tell you when we moved overseas she's the one who got the car got the house you know made sure the kids got to school i took victory laps because i was doing a good job at work but she was doing all the you know all the work that made possible so yeah i think i'm about my wife now she's a stay home mom right now and it's awesome man having someone like who has your back it's pretty great like i don't even how we pay a lot of our bills we were talking the other day we were talking last night and i was like look i'm trying be morbid but like if you died i wouldn't know how certain things happen at all like how does our rank get paid or like dude do we pay utility i i know anything i think we i i hope we're exceptional but i will tell you that i haven't paid a bill in well over forty years really she she does it all laura or does it all yeah we have a bill paying service that she manages and she does it and i you know what the hell how much could she steal it's all hers anyway that's can i ask you about that that's actually interesting do you guys meet to discuss finances at all 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 forty or maybe you're late thirties and you're like we bought a vacation home and it was like maybe three hundred grand i think and you're like that was all of our money we're like it was more than all of our money yeah you were like i'm supposed to be this big shot i don't remember if you're a partner or not i think you were but you were were you're like i was probably a new part in the early days of the away i mean too much it would take too much time for your 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 are like you know i i had a paper i don't have a lot of like cash i had no like no money and and i you know we borrow and so we were driving through the closing and now i'm a different kind of guy can buy things i don't even go to the closing warriors do but in those days you know we were an about everything and we bought you know you know we had a very small apartment in the city and we were having kids and at point we had just had our second kid and there was no place for them to you know breathe or run around in our little apartment so instead of getting a bigger apartment in the city we bought a relatively small place and out in the you know at the beach and we were going through the math or my wife was really my wife was doing this and she was going through in her mind where the money for the closing and she had to come up to a certain amount and she said we borrowed this much and you know i had this much in this account and that much in that account and she couldn't make it work out to the total we needed to close and she was freaked out and so he drove like you know thirty 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 ten percent so she kept coming short so you guys were like really on the edge yeah we'll yeah we weren't i mean we were able to buy dinner that night not we not you know not you know it wasn't a question of sur i just don't think that i we we exhausted more than all of our savings we do a monthly meeting i learned this from my friend ram remit he's a a personal finance author where and we've been doing this since you know i started dating my wife when we were twenty five probably at twenty six we we've moved in together and we would do like a look back we're like here's what we spent this month is that in line or not in line with our expectations at our budget and are we happy with it do we wanna spend do we wanna spend less are we happy with what we spent doing and that discipline has been nice and we've never ever ever worried look i grew up in a household when my dad worked nights at the post office but before he got that job he had worked on a you know he'd worked in private thing i think he drove a truck for a while and he worked in a dry good stores clerk and he actually lost his job was unemployed for a while so i i grew up in a household where you know we had the rank was you know scares you know very scarce and stuff so i'm used to that kind of fret and being you know and being nervous about like really nervous about money what age should that stuff you know probably in my you know in my thirties and so that's a privileged position yeah you know i'm lucky that way but i grew up but you know listen i was pretty scarred growing up in a household their money with scarce and so i'm familiar with what people think you know it's very funny because people you know i'm you know ceo of goldman sachs blah blah obama a real fat cat kind of guy that says x but you know a lot of times people will assert that i mean be being with some politicians where they saying what do you know about this or that what do you you know and i'm going listen i you know i did some research on you before this conversation but your dad went to yale and my dad went to the post office so why are you telling me what you know that doesn't go away either like the way that like the first twenty years that you experienced i it's like a lower teen trauma a little bit not to be too a voodoo woo but like i i felt the same way my mom and dad told me they're were like when i think they said like when i graduated high school they're were like we had like eight thousand dollars that was our our situation and i was like weren't you nervous and they were really like yeah we were nervous all the time i when i got to college after i bought books and did this and i i remember bought a sweater which was a very big deal for me because when i got to college i wasn't dressed the way everybody else was dressed and you know i you know i just didn't know i came from brooklyn and i never you i never saw and so you know went out and i bought a you know sweat it to put over a tennis shirt because that's how everybody dressed in those days and then after i bought at and and and at one point i had i remember this i had eleven dollars left over what year freshman year this would have been like nineteen seventy one or two yeah so it's still only worth they left the bucks and i was on financial aid like full financial aid but full financial aid doesn't cover you know going to movies or things like that you know this you know buying a beer and then so somebody said just go to the financial office and tell them that you know in this situation can they help you out and i went to the financial aid office and they said here fill out this form and on once i put what you have on the other put what you need and see whether there's a difference between madden and i did them i turned it in and i remember making it so that there was a difference of five hundred dollars like think my life cost five hundred dollars more than what i had and so a clerk looked at it and said oh okay and they and right there while i waited she made out a check for five hundred dollars and gave it to me and i said whoa to what more is no no you was i i was about i heard the joke reaction is i should have asked for a that no but that with the point was it was the first time my life that i wasn't really nickel and dying it was like you know it was like unbelievable and by the way that that had a big influence on me because i later went to harvard is looking enough to get in there that's another whole set of stories but as a result of that you know my my commitment to my again university is i you know i c chair the campaign for financial aid and i did you know that was a big deal because it was not only that i got it but i got it in a way that had a generosity of spirit to it and so i didn't feel bad i wasn't made to feel bad about it and that was so i i think you know everyone you know my category thinks about giving but i also think about how feels to receive yeah and i and and so i came away with a feeling that you know it's not just enough to give people what they need but you have to give them you ever get to it in a way where it's a positive experience also yeah well it doesn't it feels a lot dignified it's dignified and again that five hundred dollars i hope i've repaid a lot lot a lot a lot a lot of times over but that was still something look i'm telling you the story today how about that that was that was well over fifty years ago and it's still something that you know that i think about that you know moment when i got because i was relieved i got the money but i was also i i i i i didn't feel bad about it this is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least three million dollars a year in revenue because around this point that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company and you realize two things one you've done something great but just do a long way from your final destination and two you look around and you realize i am all alone i out run my peers which means you're now making ten million dollar decisions alone by yourself and that is when mediocrity can creep in my company hampton we solve this problem by giving a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs who are gonna hold you accountable call you out on your nonsense and help show you the way because the fact is is that there's only tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there and they're hard to find and if you can find them it's hard to have this explicit time this explicit place where you sit down where the rules are clear that we are here to help each other and to be one another's board of directors the biggest risk is not failing you have a company and it's working you're gonna be fine but the biggest risk is waking up ten years from now and saying shit i barely grew and business and in life and for people like you who ambitious wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid we have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members and i know this stuff actually works whether you work with hampton or you get your own group on your own but having a group like this a group of people who meet with in real life once a month it can change your life it change mind and i know it will change yours so check it out join hampton dot com there's this book called die zero have you ever seen a book no but it the title tells me everything yeah and 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's a he he seems like a great guy but it this the the premise is like spend while you're alive because when you're dead like who cares and so the the premise is if you're gonna give if you can pull it off give now at least experience was a choice expressed 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 it's cool and that was a very good visual for me you know to feel give with you warm hand not your cold is that what you're gonna is how what you intend to do yeah i have to work things through and i i joked in the book and it's i'm kind of only a half a joke so putting those aside and stuff and just thinking of your kids i sometimes i wanna i give things you know like take you know i give i give stuff to them and then i feel then i feel am ambivalent that you know that they that they have what i gave them what do you mean ambivalent like you don't feel good that you know i sort of you know i'll give stuff to my kids because i can afford to doing it and they're great kids and they work really hard they're super there's nothing you know nothing wrong with them and you know it has not room 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 i've 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 else because i gave it to them dude i had the exact same conversation conversation my wife yesterday if i gave it to them why am i then acting you know regret that they have it i had the same talk with my wife yesterday i remember saying telling her we had just hung out with someone who was born into a wealthy family and i and i was en i was like that asshole hasn't worked hard for this and mad and it was really a little bit jealousy of like you know i'm better than them because i worked for and i wasn't give nothing and then like i was like well but i intend to give them to my kid it's like i'm gonna create my children are gonna be the people that i dislike and i thought that was really strange you think turn out kids turn out the way they turn out for a variety of reasons one of which could be you know their neediness this or the surplus they have but that could be a small part of and there are other things that make your kids my i have no issues my kids you know you know it's terrific they worked hard they went to good schools they apply work goldman no at each worked you know go kind of firm that doesn't discourage people from from bringing their kids into the business i you know it was an old partnership yeah family firm you know was a good thing to be big so all of my kids worked at least briefly at the firm but it was too complicated it was complicated for them to work there you know my name was smith they could have hidden out but if your name is blind fine you know it was just too and and by the way the burdens of being that were very heavy you know i can't tell you i'm not in my kid's heads totally so i can't tell you what they feel so i'll just say generically do to a son of a very senior or the daughter very senior person organization you have to worry that people think you didn't get your job by merit and they'll think you know you don't work hard and we'll think this so there's a lot of pressure on kids to come in earlier stay later show show their mock there's some baggage there's baggage that they have to overcome so it was it was it was it would have been too oppressive for them to i saw someone i think it was like i researching and it was like an old little darker article yeah and you seem pretty tough skin i would have been very upset about that about people writing that stuff that would've have been that would've have very it turns out i had a thick skin look if i it didn't have a thick skin i wouldn't have survived there and there i wouldn't be i wouldn't have the i wouldn't have the joy of sitting opposite you now there'd be somebody else in this chair talking you instead of it still hard i mean like oh i didn't like it but it turns out i could be i could i could take that i take a punch look to be the ceo of a firm as high profile as goldman going through the stressful times that we went through if you know one you know to survive that you needed to sit a thick skin and i had one was there a point where you thought this isn't gonna work no you felt good the whole or if i no i didn't feel good 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 wanna test it i don't wanna get i don't get challenged more to get to the point where i can take it but certainly everything that i've endured so far obviously i could take because i took it in life there people could take a punch and people can take a punch and so it turns out i didn't know that until i got punched but it turns out that i could take a punch not everybody can by the way it doesn't make them a bit people have different wiring some people are athletic some people aren't do you think you're born a great investor i don't know i certainly wasn't so i can't tell you you don't think you were no i i i ran affirmed that contained a lot of great investors i'm not a bad investor i can read balance sheet and plans and you know 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 salesman in great traders and great bankers in this and you know fortunately i had i didn't have to be the greatest at hitting 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 just look maybe once upon a time the captain a ship got to be captain because he could do every job on the boat i'm not sure that's true in a nuclear navy and so i will tell you maybe there was a time that the person who ran a financial firm could do was best at every job in that firm but i didn't i couldn't have been no one could be at a firm is complicated as big and diverse as goldman and so i didn't have to be 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 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 had a conversation with you know senior partner there who was sort of assigned to a culture new people to the firm and he gave you some rules of the road you know things like make sure you don't get anywhere in near anything that would today would be called me too kind of activity you know the warnings so that kind of stuff then a warning to you know make sure you're very rigorous and conservative on your taxes yeah and then there were two other things that they advise 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 so it's good for you good for the firm do this so that was another topic that was bro 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 sort 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 or about your wife at goldman that's and now that's you know that may be the best but it's not gonna be the case for me because i was i stayed too long that's what i gonna ask you what you gonna you have to do something now what do you gonna what do you maybe maybe i'll join the foreign legion or go up in a space 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 the queen you know the other the other guy the worker bees and the others they can or they go off and the you know the queen's state i was caught of you know as the ceo in long time i stayed a long time and you do other things but i don't think i'm ever gonna be too separated from my experience at goldman and look i wrote a book called street wise getting to through goldman sachs so when i wrote a memoir even has goldman sachs in the in the subtitles so i'm never gonna i'm not gonna comply with that piece of advice but i knew where the advice was coming from the important thing is and i do i serve on boards and i do other activities and i'm interested in other stuff i i retired early enough with enough gas in the tank that i could go out and learn you know pete i tried teaching a little bit and i said you know something better than teaching i wanna learn and so i you know take some courses online and do some you know things and 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 linguistics and ant anthropology and i read a lot of history i think you said you you're were like if a trader asked me what to study i tom him to study history i do what do you what do you read you know a while ago some reason i i shoot medieval evil history because it's hard 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 in the church and and i i i got sort of got interested in reading it and sometimes you pick up good authors that you really like the way they write and so you less interested in the topic they picked to write about then the fact that they're writing it i tend to also to i i like reading a lot of biographies which one move the needle for you most for me it was titan and i know you did a thing with ron turner actually i read titan i didn't love it that as much as that i mean you know the rock obviously about rockefeller and i've read a lot of his read like you know and when i read like an author i tend to read all of his stuff there's a book i write as an author i always like she's been dead a number of good number of years and i named barbara tu who wrote she wanted 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 of whirlwind went a great book out biology but a fantastic book and by the way very influential book world war one it's about yes but very and very influential because it shows how you can get caught up in a vortex you forces started to mobilize it it almost couldn't be stopped that 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 fourteenth century and the guy was a very influential person not a king but kind of an ari democrat and he moved back and forth between france and the fourteenth century reason i was called it just in mirror she wrote this book like in middle of the cold war when everybody was worried that the world was gonna be blown apart in a nuclear war and stuff and actually in the fourteenth century it was a time when they had the black plague and the people sc and the hundred years war was a very stressful time in europe and the world in general but certainly in europe and people were very very fatal in their attitude and that's why it was called a distant mirrors was like sort of like a mirror on the twentieth century and she the jumping off point for telling the story was this particular guy a baron k was a french democrat but he fought in the hundred years where he ended up marrying an english woman and so he appeared it was like z he popped up in a lot of places and so he gave me the opportunity to write a history of a lot of different of what was going that era i 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 like reading the power broker about robert moses by carol robert robert carroll he just had a thing at the american issue museum yes it was awesome and i'll tell you the interesting thing is i read reason why i reread that i read that book once when i was start and eerie lawrence one this there's no reason why they should know him but it was a guy you know basically built new york and yeah well the power broker because asserted power that on paper he shouldn't have had but by din of his personality in different offices he held and clever things he really was a power broker and to the point of dominating even the elected officials who nominally his boss and there were aspects of he did great things you know he built know from the long island expressway to all sorts of things and you know but he also you know had personality flaws that today looked worse than they did in that era yeah i mean he's accused of being in like a a pretty big racist yeah 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 it 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 get slavery and so how do you evaluate that and so people have different you know how do you look at that does that just disqualify the good things that they did or you know it gets very confusing and hard to fathom and different people have different views about these things and he was kind of a personality like that in a different way but you know when i first read the book as a young guy i was focused on the floor part yeah and i said oh god this is a you know you know this was a tough human being and instinct terrible but tough and but you know this and then after forty 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 wanna do it and the sacrifice how to make and evaluating what i got done in the effort it took i reread that robert moses book and all of a sudden his achievements started to go up yeah and the other floors kinda stayed the same they didn't get better but i became i 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 and it made me appreciate the degree of difficulty of his achievements more than i had i feel that way about the founding fathers i i'm angry at them for a bunch of stuff and then i i'm like man thomas jefferson he was like twenty eight or thirty years old when you wrote three or thirty when when you wrote this document and how much wisdom and there was no template for really and you know the idea of something that you know we can get you know because democracy was a pro jar of demo it was anarchy yeah and i think about that revolution because i've been because ken burns has this american revolution documentary and it's just you 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 we can you can fix that and that just like that was if you read a book and i just read a book on the constitution that was even debated there's a cool one by the guy who did the brooklyn on bridge one where it talks about how it was the most important words of the constitution was we believe these truths to be self evident and it just like goes yet despite the self evidence of the rules they still had us you know they debate its slate and by the way not that they didn't know it was wrong at the time and missed it and we're probably they knew but by the way another good book to read is it's part of it will ultimately be a three vial seen by by rick atkinson on the 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 but americans don't learn enough about the american revolution and why it was fought and of course people debated it because then you have views you know people you know revised history and say you know these people were evil they were you know they were you know it's like columbus you know they don't want it they renamed columbus day because he was you know bad to the indigenous people which i'm sure he was but in a ship that was not as long as your backyard swimming pool you know in in the fifteenth century steer that ship to a continent that he wasn't sure was there for crying out loud give a guy you know give let's have some credit on this stuff you know in other words you can't you know nobody's gonna be perfect but you know we have those you know all these revision histories that stop admired characteristics and achievements that are worth admired just because there were other flaws in the person that delivered the achievement it's it's crazy yeah i've i've ignored the american revolution for long time but i've now i've gone down this path because of that can 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 a immigrant family and they are small business owners and now that i'm in new york i walked by all these bode that are owned by like you know vietnamese families are like oh spectacular and it 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 potatoes 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 i know this is gonna be controversy i don't know who i'm gonna upset but you know it's like i would say that most of the people who are prominent social democrats grew up in prosperous families here of course and let me tell you the people 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 that but i love like this i i i'm like particularly like the immigrant journey you know i think i'm i i freaking love that and know i think like the american dream shouldn't be to move here and buy a home it should be moved here and start a small business and and i think it's really cool but not everybody's comp capable but the fact that people can do look i you know i agree with you and you know we're going through a moment where people you i guess people always question again i've grew up i was a young guy during the vietnam era so i grew up when everybody was disgusted with the country and stuff and you listen here's another good thing about the country you can live here quite happily you know quite comfortably why you express your contempt for the country of course where else can you the way that i described do is i'm like it's mostly good and you can 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 get would be oh god i i am but i know but look everybody has to red these things and maybe it's you know maybe it's a function of age you know i could talk to you about history all day i'm so happy that that you're into that no no but i think that's why i like the upper one i the history part and i'll tell you why it relates to the commercial rights is that you can is that history again doesn't repeat but to para and a remark attributed to you know twain mark twain is it doesn't repeat but it rhymes and and so patterns happen again so we're going through these tough times and oh it's unlike anything but it's you know it's not that different from the late sixties when the country was very polarized or the mccarthy era where we sort of went off the rails and then got back on the rest so people say oh my god i don't like you know the norms of you know the norms of political proper political behavior or gone forever well you know we did have a civil war we did have a mccarthy era we did put you know japanese american citizens who were japanese descent and camps yeah because we were freaked out by world you know by pearl harbor and then we we overcame those things and regretted them afterwards so even at the worst there's hope there's always hope for america and and and america has always fulfilled those hopes eventually yeah i think warren buffett or you i think quoted warren buffett in the books saying like you know i i wouldn't bet against america or i think a lot of people have said that i bet be i wouldn't get against america and though you know so if you watch the evening news you read the newspaper you'd walk away with one set of views well i think there's a lot of lazy phrases for example i see people online it'll make comments you're like well in this economy blanket 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 for like it's hard to feel 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 it's like well that's pretty defeat us 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 occur i mean will always be hard now i'm thinking today you know when i was when i was achieved you know i was crossing into adulthood they were drafting people via vietnam war the literally the body count coming out of you know they would read every friday evening they you know they would read you know it's scroll down the tv you know three hundred and fifty four hundred and fifty six hundred died and then of course compare that to world war two when you know when thousand yeah 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 it's 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 i do that all the time like i remember i was reading about sake 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 or that's a good book too doesn't don't to occur even ambrose the best and people this is way under discuss sac for the listener basically losing clark wet west from s saint louis and they know that coming from saint louis of course it's it's and i and i'll tell you if started from but they started in saint louis from from and they basically said just go west and figure out if there's was like a passage and they didn't know what the hell they were they go to portland and then they find you know progressive mayor yeah it's a lot different now do you think lewis and clark would have been impressed by the progressive as well what's crazy as they wet thirty people and like nun died and so they go there but sat and and they find this woman named sac who spoke a variety of languages and they're like hey come with us well lot of people don't talk about this she had a three month old kid and if you actually there's a sake a gold dollar have you seen one of those yes her kid is strapped to her don't i'm like if she could do that don't 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 sac a kid and i don't how the kid turned out i hope very well he turned out great joe there was joseph he went to my high school by the way he in the first graduating class my high school tell you the infant mortality rate was a lot higher than so keep keep don't let facts get in the way of a good story keep the thermometer give don't let the facts get away him do them vaccines according through the schedule and take good care of them because you don't want your there has been progress on infant mortality so just because her kid made it through i ended up dying of illness at like in or early for so my story doesn't exactly hold true but i appreciate you so much this awesome yeah no my pleasure alright that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule where to know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break just talk about a podcast because if you're listening to this you like podcast and what's better than one podcast another podcast and let me tell you another podcast you should check out it's called success story if you like hearing about different success stories and hearing q and a sessions with successful business leaders or hearing keto presentations or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics this is a great podcast for you so check it out wherever you get your podcast