My First Million - How the Ex-Goldman CEO actually invests his own money

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

Get our Investment Guide: https://clickhubspot.com/rgek Episode 834: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) sits down with former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blanfein ( https://x.com/lloydblankfein ) to talk about what he does with his money.  — Show Notes:  (0:00) Lloyd on Money, Day Trading, and Feeling “Rich” (3:52) Meeting Elon (5:23) What the worst traders have in common (9:54) Warren Buffett’s handshake deal (15:04) Lloyd breaks down his portfolio (20:41) Advice to young investors  (23:09) biggest mistakes (25:54) Anxiety as a superpower (27:54) Family finances (31:35) Scarcity (40:46) The Goldman Obituary Test (43:53) Lessons from history — Links: • Streetwise - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/780438/streetwise-by-lloyd-blankfein/  — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com  • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury for banking across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/  Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

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. 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, 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 here. Right now. It's like back. So you're bullish on big tech. Anything else? 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 I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back.

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 almost 20 million revenue by the time it was 31, 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.

Because I'm so on the inside, unlike a lot of people, I know nobody knows anything, whereas everybody else just wonders. 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, like, I actually don't know what I'm doing. And the majority, my portfolio, which I actually think is smart, is just 90% index, 10% bonds. Well, that's sensible. But you day trade, which I thought was hilarious. Two things. One, I'm a pro at it. I mean, this is what I did my, you know, only for the last four or five decades. And the other thing is that nothing hugely positive or usually negative is going to affect my life.

Yeah. So to me, it's like a hobby. What age were you when you felt that? You grew up in the project. 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 to say it. But, you know, by any metric, I have been that way for, 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 father was a postal worker. I think you said you're an urban hick, which I liked. Grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, you know, you know, at the end of two, 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 Manhattan three times. I never left the country, didn't fly on an airplane until after I left, you know, to 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 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're 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, you know, created wealth 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 think what's shocking, not shocking, but I think what would be good if everybody understood is that, you know, look, there are 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 what? When 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'm not saying I can do what they do, but I can see how they can do what they do. Very few people have met in my life where I can't even see the world through their eyes, or I can't. 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? Oh, yeah, a lot. Don't forget, we underwrote his, you know, a lot of his stuff. When you met him, you didn't think... When you, you know, you know him, I guess. You didn't think this guy's different? Oh, no, 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 hi there, and guess what, after they finish speaking, 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. 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 peaking the wrong year, you'll never meddle in the Olympics, even though you were the fat. 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. You were like 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 to, 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 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, you know, enough money, you know,

get become profession. You know, 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, you know, 0.001% of that field. You had this funny bit where you're, 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 07, 08, when the regulators wanted to make sure that this kind of thing never happened again. Well, the only way it can make things sure that, you know, once you're in the risk-taking world,

anything can happen. You know, 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 100-year storm, but you're also going to forego the 99 years of in-between when there was growth.

But you said even inside of Goldman, you were like, we 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 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.

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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 slowing around these ideas and everyone around here is saying like, oh, we can't do this because. It's like, 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. 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, you know, you'd think a risk manager is always trying to repress 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 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. Yeah, and as you get more successful, At least I have, and I think you said Goldman did, you take less risk.

Well, I think that 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, people are going to be repulsed by the idea of making more? Waking more is another way of saying advancing, creating wealth. 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 hand,

shake and a phone call and was like, all right, I'm going to go take my grandkid at Dairy Queen. 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. Do you remember how much? I think it was $5 billion or $10 billion. And what you do? You just called them. We talked before that, and, you know, you know, with him, he decides to do. do something who does and 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 he said, hey, Warren, we're going to this thing. We might need a little liquidity. No, and I've done that before. Would 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 it's 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, he saw on 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 that, and the story was cool because you were like on the phone with them. You're like, hey, Warren, you want to do this thing,

or maybe he called you and he's like, hey, let's, you know, I'm willing to do $5 billion investment or a loan. I'm not sure if it was a loan or investment. It was preferred stock. It's something between a loan and a stock. 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, you know, I got to go. I'm going to take my kid to 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 a pretty rigorous people. 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 well enough to know that you worry 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, you know, again, Berkshire is an insurance company. And so in their real, in their real business, Berkshire insurers, among other things, property. And 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, 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, it scares people even more.

Yeah, and I think he said something 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 in lockstep. Oh, no, it wasn't even a favor. It was he asked for that. He asked for our commitment for that. Yeah. Didn't ask for it in writing.

And you were like, yeah, I'll put that in the contract. That sounds good. He goes, no, no, no, no, no need. It's cool. Just tell me you commit. And that was it. And that's pretty amazing. You know, 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 I'm confused, you know, 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. Did you see the text between, I think it was like Ellison and Elon? Elon was like, hey, I'm going to buy Twitter for, you know, whatever, I think $30 billion. Are you in? And he was like, yeah, I'm in for five. Or, like, you know, it was like 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 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 going to perform. And so there's no reason why you have to document something that will be accomplished before you could ever dot the

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 largely not necessary in most of the transactional world works without documentation. 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? 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?

Well, index funds are risky. They're just, they're diversified across different things. But if you're in a diversified equity ETF, you're in equities. Yeah. And equities will, 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, in risky assets of which, you know, 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. 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

investing for a living. Of course. And 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? 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, you know, all the big hyperscalers and second tier ones. What's a second tier one? What's an example of a second tier one?

You know, if you have a big hyperscaler like, you know, like the Googles of the world and the Microsofts of the world and invidians of the world, maybe a second tier version down the, slightly down the funeral with 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, you know, specific names. I'm just giving you, I'm speaking in terms of category. That's how I think of it is, you know, not necessarily the bluest of the blue chip ones, one that are a little bit riskier. And by the way, the companies that are probably going to be gigantic companies that some people know about today and are investing, and I never heard of them. Because I'm just not always, you know, I'm not walking around the corridors of 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? 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. 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.

I don't think it's really crazy. It's just crazy for me. Oh, no, no, multiple times. It's taking a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while I'm talking to it. Right now. 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, 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 traits did you make today? I think today I may have, you know, 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. I'm so curious. You know, to sell, you know, maybe sell some, you know, energy is rising. You know, I've been, I buy and sell a lot of stuff. I don't want to talk about specific things because people who listen to these things on different days and they'll start, you know, sound smart or stupid depending on what day is.

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 it? And a phone. Are you, and you're mostly, what's your source of information to make decisions? I chat with people. Texting? 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, the paper of record. Yeah. And, you know, when I read papers, like, you know, like the journal, the Times, the FT, you know, Bloomberg, I look at, you know, very financially or, you know, finance oriented. Yeah. No, I don't steal them. Yeah.

Well, you know, how many paywalls do you hit? and you're like, oh, shit, I'm not going to read that. I've got to go find a different article. Oh, that happens. 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 of, 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? Yes, I have for a while.

And I'm not, that's not because it's because of where I focus. So I started to say I'm mostly and have done. 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 been in the financial services. So those are the three areas that I've been focused on. I haven't been... Well, I'm sure you still own a bunch of Goldman. I do. I tend to have some affection for the organization that I spend almost 40 years in. So, yeah, I kind of like those, that company. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned,

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Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. So like I said, I'm boring. And it's 90-10. It's the most simple stuff. It's the advice I would give to people. I think at your age, it pays to be in riskier assets like equities as opposed to, you know, fixed income. But if I were in equities, and by the way, this is the same advice that a Warren Buffett would give, I would be in a diversified portfolio of equities like the SMP 500s, which is spies or VLOs.

I do VLO. 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, but I might also have ETFs that were 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 in tech because just tech are 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. 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'll outlive your mistakes. What's your opinion on what's going on with, like, the Robin Hoods of the world and all these,

like, the Cal Shees and things that promote, like, day trading, but also betting and things like that. I think those things that kind of democratize investing and make it very, very accessible to people is in its own terms a very good thing. So people should be aware of assets they could buy and make it easier to do some and maybe receive advertising promotions 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 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. So, you know, when you have some of these sites and they show confetti dropping because you did a trade and, you know, had 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 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, or you just let a motion control you? No, a million things. I didn't want to... What's an interesting one, yeah. Well, I thought, you know, SpaceX was overpriced at $100 billion market cap. What's it going to go for now?

I don't know. It's in the market. People are discussing that now. I think they were proposing something that would make it were, you know, a trillion in three quarters. I'm not involved. Obviously, I'm not involved in any of this.

And what did you say, what you thought was expensive, $100 billion? Yeah. So, one, instead of, you know, you know, 175s. 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 auctioning off bandwidth or something for cell phones. And I'm thinking, why would anybody want to carry a cell phone with you when there's, you know, 20 million or 200, you know, 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 like that. Why would anybody want that? So I showed them how smart I was.

And so I didn't make early investments in cellular opportunities of things. Let me tell you, I missed a lot more stuff than I got. Yeah. And, you know, Goldman doesn't miss as much as I missed, but that's because Goldman has a lot of people in it, not just me. But if it were just up to me, I would have missed, you know, nobody's great about, you know, predicting the future. I try to, like, talk to, like, some of the younger people who listen to the show

where I'm like, man, having a supportive partner, is like, without a doubt, more game-changing, probably than anything. And let's take the opposite side of it. And, you know, 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 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 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 of situation.

And by the way, I'm not just saying this for completeness, but it's worth saying. And wives to have great husbands. And that's a tough, you know, there's a lot of people I know, partners are. mind and things where the husband in the relationship takes a less stressful job because needs to support his wife in her stressful job. And sometimes that's even harder because, you know, as much as we want to think things are calibrated and equal, guys 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, you seem like a pretty anxious person occasionally. No, well, I'm wired that way a little bit. You know, I inherited from my dad was an anxious person. You know, 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 and 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, 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 that other people didn't want to have for a price. And, you know,

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 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-life balance when you were doing it? Well, when you asked me any, of course, I will say yes, but not enough that would be reasonable to most people. No, I traveled a lot. And then there's again, we're having a supportive spouse, you know, was very helpful. And look, my wife, Laura, I was a lawyer, worked in big law firms. And, you know,

now she's, you know, the chair of Barnard College and other things. She helps to oversee a charter school. you know, she's very involved, you know, 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 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 it possible. Yeah, I think about my wife now. She's a stay-at-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 know 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 not trying to be morbid, but like, if you died, I wouldn't know how certain things

happened at all. Like, how does our rank get paid? Or, like, do we pay utility? Like, I didn't know anything. I think we, I hope we're exceptional, but I will tell you that I haven't paid a bill

in well over 40 years. Really? She does it all. Laura does it all. Yeah, we have a bill paying service that she manages, and she does it. And I think, you know,

what the hell? How much could she steal? It's all hers anyway. That's it. 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 40, or maybe you're late 30s, and you were like, we bought a vacation home, and it was like maybe 300 grand, I think. And you're like, that was all of our money. No, 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 were a partner or not. I think you were.

but you're like... Yeah, it was probably a new part, but in the early days, the way, I mean, too much, 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're like, you know, I had paper wealth. I don't have a lot of, like, cash. I had no, like, no money, and, you know, we bar,

and so we were driving to the closing, and now I'm a different kind of guy. I can buy things. I don't even go to the closing. Warriors do it, but in those days, you know, 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 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 so 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, 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 like really on the edge? Yeah. Yeah, we were. I mean,

we were able to buy dinner that night. Of course. You know, not, 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 Rameet. He's a personal finance author where, and we've been doing this since, you know,

I started dating my wife when we were 25, probably at 26, we moved in together. And we would do like a look back where 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? Do we want to spend more? Do we want to spend less? Are we happy with what we spent on? 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'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 as unemployed for a while. So I grew up in a household where, you know, where the rent was, you know,

very scarce and stuff. So I'm used to that kind of fretting and being, you know, and being nervous about, like really nervous about money. What age did that stuff? You know, probably in my, you know, in my 30s. And so that's a privileged position. Yeah. You know, I'm lucky that way.

But I grew up, you know, listen, I was pretty scarred growing up in a household. Totally. Their 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, you know, CEO of Bowman Sachs, blah, blah, blah. I'm a real fat cat kind of guy that's a fee. But, you know, a lot of times.

times people will assert that. I mean, being with some politicians where they were saying, what do you know about this or that? And I'm going, listen, I, you know, I did some research on you before this conversation. Your dad went to Yale and my dad went to the post office. So why are you telling me what you know that I don't know? And that stuff doesn't go away either. Like the way that, the first 20 years that you experience, it's like a lower T trauma a little bit, not to be too woo-woo, but like I felt the same way. My mom and dad told me they're like when I think they said like when I graduated high school, they were like, we had like $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, you know, I just didn't know. I came from Brooklyn. I never saw it.

And so, you know, 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 like 1971 or two. Yeah, so that's still only worth like, what, $50? 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. And, you know, just, you know, buying a beer. And then, so somebody said, you should 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 one side put what you have, on the other side put what you need and see where there's a difference between that.

And I did that and I turned it in. And I remember making it so that there was a difference of $500. Like my life cost $500 more than what I had. And so a clerk looked at it and said, oh, okay. And right there, while I waited, she made out a check for $500 and gave it to me. And I said, whoa. I want more of that.

No, no, I didn't want more. $5,000. You know, I heard the jokey reaction is I should have asked for a thing. No, but the point was it was the first time of my life that I wasn't really nickeled and dying. It was like, you know, it was like 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, you know, my commitment to my, again, university is I, you know, I co-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. 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 think, you know, everyone, you know, my category thinks about giving,

but I also think about how it feels to receive. Yeah. 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 have to get in a way where it's a positive experience also. Yeah. It feels a little dignified. It's dignified.

And again, that $500, I hope I've repaid a 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 well over 50 years ago. And it's still something that, you know, that I think about that moment when I got, because I was relieved I got the money. But I was also, I didn't feel bad about it. This is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least $3 million a year in revenue.

Because around this point, that's when you're able to live. look up after being heads down for years building your company, and you realize two things. One, you've done something great, but you're still a long way from your final destination. And two, you look around and you realize, I am all alone. I've outrun my peers, which means you're now making $10 million decisions alone by yourself. And that is when mediocrity can creep in. My company, Hampton, we solved this problem by giving a room of vetted peers, of other entrepreneurs who are going to hold you accountable, call you out on your nonsense, and help show you the way.

Because the fact is, is that there's only a 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 going to be fine. But the biggest risk is waking up 10 years from now and saying,

shit, I barely grew in business and in life. And for people like you who are 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 you meet with in real life once a month, it can change your life. It changed mine, and I know it will change yours. So check it out, joinhampton.com. There's this book called Die Wood Zero. Have you ever seen that book? No, but the title tells me,

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 seems like a great guy. But the premise is like, spend while you're alive because when you're dead, like, who cares? And so the premises is if you're going to give, if you can pull it off, give now. Because at least you can experience it with the 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. Give with your warm hand, not your cold hand. Is that what you intend to do? Yeah, I have to work things through. And I joked in the book, and it's kind of only a half a joke.

So putting aside philanthropy and stuff and just thinking of your kids, sometimes I want to, I give things, you know, like take, you know, I give stuff to them and then I feel, then I feel ambivalent 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 do it and they're great kids and they work really hard, they're super, there's nothing, you know, nothing wrong with them.

You know, it has not ruined my kids that 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, 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 was envious. I was like, that asshole hasn't worked hard for this and that.

It was rooted a little bit in jealousy of like, you know, I'm better than them because I worked for 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 with me to think that way. Well, your kids 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, terrific. They worked hard. They went to good schools. They applied. They worked at Goldman.

No. At each work, you know, Goldman's a kind of firm that doesn't discourage people from bringing their kids into the business. 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. Totally. My name was Smith. They could have hidden out. But if your name was blind, fine, it was just too. And by the way, the burdens of being that were very heavy. 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, a very senior person in the 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 you'll think this. So there's a lot of pressure on kids to come in earlier,

stay later, 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. Yeah, I think it was like, I was researching. It was like an old gawker article. 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 bothers. 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 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. It felt good, or it felt... No, no, it didn't feel good. 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 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 people who could take a punch and people can't 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 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 didn't have to be the greatest at any 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 of the 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 couldn't have been, no one could be, and a firm as complicated and as big and diverse as gold. 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, they were like, you know, our goal here is that you become successful enough that when you die, there will 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 you got, when you made partner, you had a conversation with, you know, senior partner there who was sort of assigned to a 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 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 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 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 your balance in your life,

you know, 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 or about your life at Goldman. That's the best. 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. You have to do something now. Well, what do you hope that? Maybe I'll join the Foreign Legion or go up in a space set. Well, what do you hope the rest of the paragraphs will be?

Do you have a goal? I think at this point, you know, every hive has a queen bee, you know, the other guy, the worker bees and the others, they go off and the queen's, I was kind of, you know, as a CEO in a 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 Streetwise, 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, I'm not going to 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 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 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 market 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 like, if a traitor asked me what to study, I tell him to study history. I do. What do you read? You know, a while ago,

some reason, as true medieval 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 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're less interested in the topic they picked to write about than the fact that they're writing it. I tend also to, 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 Cherno. 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. When I like an author, I tend to read all of his stuff. There's a book I write.

There's an author I always like. She's been dead a good number of years now named Barbara Tuckman 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 One, a great book, not a biography, but a fantastic book. And by the way, very influential book. 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 kind of an aristocrat, and he moved back and forth between England and France. In the 14th century, the reason of what 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 100 years war was a very stressful time in Europe and the world in general, but certainly in Europe. And people were very, very fatalistic in their attitude. And that's why it was called a distant mirror. It was sort of like a mirror on the 20th century.

And the jumping off point for telling the story was this particular guy, a Baron Cousie, was a French aristocrat, but he fought in the 100 years war. He ended up married. an English woman. And so he appeared, it was like Zellig. 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.

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 Carrow. Robert Carrow. 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. I read that book once when I was started, and you know, we were audience, There's no reason why they should know him, but it was a guy who basically built New York.

And, well, the power broker, because he asserted power that on paper he shouldn't have had, but by dint of his personality in 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. 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. 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? And so people have different, you know, how do you look at that? Does that 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 flaw part.

Yeah. And I said, oh, God, this is a, you know, this was a tough human being. And instinct 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 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. 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 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'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 was. When he wrote this. No, 33 or 30, yes, I think.

When he 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 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. And that's just like crazy. And by the way, 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 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. And yet despite the self-evidence of the rules, they still had us, you know, they debated slavery. And by the way, it's not that they didn't know

it was wrong at the time. I mean, 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, but Americans don't learn enough about the American Revolution and why it was fought. And, of course, people debated because then you have views, you know, people, you know, revise history, say, you know, these people were all 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 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. It's crazy. Yeah, I've ignored the American Revolution for a long time, and I've now have gone down this path because of that Kenzburn 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. 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, Vietnamese families.

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. 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. 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. 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.

But the fact that people can do it. Look, you know, I agree with you. And, you know, we're going through a moment where people, I guess people always question. And again, I grew up, I was a young guy during the Vietnam era. 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? The way that I describe America is I'm like, it's mostly good and we can improve. 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. 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.

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. Or the McCarthy era where we sort of went off the rails and then got back on the rail. So people say, oh, my God, I don't like, you know, the norms of society, you know, the norms of 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 in camps because we were freaked out by world, you know, by Pearl Harbor. 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, said that. I wouldn't better 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 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 phrase, you know, I think that when people use phrases like, well, in this economy, it's hard to do blank. It's like, well, 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. I mean, it will always be hard.

Now, I'm thinking today, you know, when I was achieving, you know, I was crossing into adulthood, they were drafting people, Vietnam War, literally the body count coming out of, you know, they would read every Friday evening. They read, you know, scroll down the TV, you know, 350, 450, 650, 600 died. And then, of course, compare that to World War II. When, you know, when tens of thousands, yeah, who died.

And so, you know, 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. 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, I do that all the time. Like, I remember I was reading about Saka Joia 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, on Dunted Courage.

Stephen Ambrose, the best. And people, this is way under-discussed. Saca Julia, 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 what they started from.

But they started in St. Louis from. I'm from. And they basically said, just go west and figure out if there was like a passage. And they didn't know what the hell they were doing. Now 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 progressivism of... Well, what's crazy is they went with 30 people and like none died. And so they go there. And they find this woman named Sakagia who spoke a variety of languages.

And they're like, hey, come with us. Well, a lot of people don't talk about this. She had a three-month-old kid. And if you actually, there's a Sacco-Jua 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 from my bathtub.

Like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't need all these gadgets. If Sack-I-Guardia 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. His name was Joseph. He went to my high school, by the way.

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 the- Don't let facts get in the way of a good story. Keep the thermometer. Don't let the 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... She ended up dying of illness at, like, in her early 40s. So my story doesn't technically hold true. But I appreciate you so much. This is awesome. Yeah, my pleasure. All right, that's it.

That's the pot. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road. Let's travel, never looking back. All right, let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast. Because if you're listening to this, you like podcasts.

And what's better than one podcast? Another podcast, another podcast you should check out. It's called Success Story. If you like hearing about different success stories and hearing Q&A sessions with successful business leaders or hearing keynote 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.