E231: Lloyd Blankfein: Keynote at AlphaSummit

David Weisburd had a chance to witness live the conversation between Jack Kokko, Founder & CEO of AlphaSense, and Lloyd Blankfein, former Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, during AlphaSummit 2025 in New York City. In this wide-ranging discussion, Jack draws out Lloyd’s reflections on his early years in Brooklyn, his path to leading Goldman Sachs, and the lessons learned from steering the firm through periods of volatility and transformation. Together they explore how leadership, risk, and technology continue to shape Wall Street—and what it takes to stay adaptable in an ever-changing world.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Weisburd?

  I recently attended Alpha Summit 2025 in New York City, AlphaSense inaugural user conference, dedicated exploring the future of market intelligence and decision making. This event featured a very insightful keynote conversation between Jack Kokko, founder and CEO of AlphaSense, and Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of Goldman Sachs. We recorded live on October 7th. The discussion was inspiring exchange on leadership, markets, and innovation in the age of AI. I'm thrilled to share the special Alpha Summit keynote with you here. To learn more about AlphaSense, visit alphasense.com. That's alphasense.com. Enjoy.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Really incredible to have you here. Thank you again for joining us.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  It's my pleasure. If I'd known it was like this, I'd have gone to Brooklyn more.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  It's beautiful. It is beautiful.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think I've mentioned to you that I started my career in investment banking, actually, I applied to Goldman Sachs, didn't get the job, so I ended up working at another firm.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  You know, I applied to Goldman Sachs and didn't get, and never got a job there either. They turned me down. And the only job I got was at a small commodity trading firm called J. Aaron & Company, and Goldman bought them. That's how I got into Goldman, after being rejected by them. I spent two years trying to avoid all the people that turned me down. And then they spent the next 20 years trying to avoid me.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  So you didn't do a victory speech and coming back?

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Say again?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  You didn't do a victory speech coming back?

• 1:38Speaker 02

  No, but anyway, go on. So you started Morgan Stanley?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was just gonna say that-

• 1:45Speaker 02

  And then you went astray.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  I'm even more humbled, given that, to be on stage with you. So again, thank you. You've got an incredible personal story, and I thought it'd be really great for the audience to hear kind of your story arc from your earlier years through that period when you joined Goldman and ultimately led the firm from the top. Be, you know, just, I would love to hear kind of what shaped your approach at the top from those earlier experiences.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there are, there are people who started out in life in kindergarten, being voted the most likely to succeed. That wasn't me.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  I started when I, I'm joking about Brooklyn because I grew up in Brooklyn. And actually, I grew up in public housing in East New York, Brooklyn. None of you will ever have been there.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  And, and I spent a lot of time trying to leave Brooklyn. So it's always, I always get PTSD when I have to cross the river and come back. But here I am, nonetheless. But, you know, it was, it's kind of unlikely. I worked my way through it. My dad was a clerk in the post office and we lived in the projects. And I always wanted to get out and go, you know, my ambition was to go to an out of town school. And, you know, I achieved that, worked my way up. And I'm not, and, you know, it kind of worked out for me. If it hadn't, somebody else would be sitting here and you'd be talking to that person. But it, I would say it was a low probability that it would be me and a high probability

• 3:26Speaker 02

  that somebody would be here.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  I would say that in terms of, I don't want to sound like I worked, walked uphill both directions to and from school. You know, I, you know, my parents, you know, I had an intact family and they valued education. They were happy for me when I got into schools. You know, I didn't, I didn't have to walk across a desert to get out of a war torn country or anything like that. But I got in, I, I, I went through essentially seven years of liberal arts. I went to college and law school. And I went to law school because it was kind of at that time was a continuation of liberal arts because I didn't know what I wanted to do. And of course I graduated with loans and had to pay them back. So I ended up in a law firm. And that was when I decided, after five years of that drudgery,

• 4:12Speaker 02

  I decided that, you know, to apply to Wall Street. And that's where we pick up the story of getting turned down by everyone, as I should have been, and getting a small job and working my way up through, starting out as a gold trader at J. Aaron and Company and eventually, you know, running fixed income trading and equities, accreting all the trading parts of the firm. So for the, for 20 years, I ran the kind of the risk side of the firm, trading and eventually became Chief Operating Officer and succeeded my boss, my then boss, Hank Paulson, when he became Secretary of Treasury. Goldman had a tradition, you know, Bob Rubin, Steve Mnuchin, Hank Paulson, of going into the cabinet and, and other government offices,

• 4:56Speaker 02

  which I kind of, which kind of ended with me because here I am with you and not in, not in Washington.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Well, we've got a room here full of decision makers and influencers. And we've been talking a lot about data-driven decision-making, how to be smarter about all this.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  I think it's terrific.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  I'm curious about, you know, from your, you know, history at the top of Goldman Sachs, what are some of the big decisions that, that you're most proud about? Maybe there's one or two. And maybe there's something that you'd go back and change and do differently.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Well, I think, and this is a generic thought, the things that you end up being proudest of were always, you know, having gotten through your worst moments. And, you know, I sometimes try to comfort people that, you know, the most prized thing in the American culture is resilience of all the things you could be, is, you know, the person who gets knocked down and gets up. And every time one of my friends or somebody I know gets killed on something, I say, well, congratulations. Now you have the predicate for a comeback, you know? But it, but it's true. I would say that in a million years, I would never pulled a lever to be part of the financial crisis. Although, you know, some of you are too young, but of a certain age, you know, spending like, you know,

• 6:16Speaker 02

  100 hours testifying and getting killed in front of, you know, being part of, on the wrong end of a show trial in Washington and all that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, taking an organization through that. Is the, you know, is something that's distinctive. I mean, anybody could, anybody can run something when things are going well. You can get swept in a vortex along. You know, AI is a thing and you're in the right company at the right time and you do it. What happens when the cycle shifts? Or more importantly, what happens when you have to decide whether something is cyclical and will shift or secular and won't ever come back? And you have to convince some people that it's secular or cyclical if the rest of the world is thinking otherwise.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  And those, those kind of fork in the road moments and those times when you're under the most pressure, the things that, you know, you feel proudest about, you know, at the end of things, because that's the only time you could think of, gee, if someone else was there, it might not have worked out as well.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  How did you go about it? You know, you had your executive team, you had clients, other advisors, I'm sure, around you. Were you leaning any, any particular directions or were you just like, you know, doing this alone in a room, sort of thinking hard and coming up with those tough choices?

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Well, I'm sure, you know, your Morgan Stanley culture is not going to be that different from Goldman and I would say, I don't think, I don't think there were six people in all of Goldman Sachs who didn't think that I should be working for them and not the other way around. You know, and maybe, you know, maybe 10% of them were even right, but there I was. So I would say in, you know, leadership, if you're, if you're running the post office or something like that, or something where you have thousands of people who are happy to have a job and they get paid by the hour and it's a union. You know, that's different than when you're running an organization where everybody came out of great schools, as ambitious as you are, can maybe, or as smart as you, but maybe they're just younger and you got there first.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  And, you know, it's a different, you know, it's a different thing to manage people who are super smart and super effective and as ambitious as you are and, and have a legitimate claim to that ambition. And I would say, and, and you must have this in your organizations, most important thing you can do is in building teamwork and partnership.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Is communication. And whether or not you're a real partnership technically, you can have the culture of a partnership. And I think startups and people in these industries do a very good job because they do share ownership. And so people can real feel skin in the game kind of partnership. But partnership also implies certain things. The rights of a partner is to know what's going on. So communication excessively, sort of suborning the organizational chart, knowing people three layers down is an element of making people feel partner-like. Taking more time to socialize the things you want to do.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  In a normal corporate hierarchy, lightning bolts come from the fingers of CEOs. We're going to do this and everything is yes, sir. Taking more time to socialize the things you want to do. It's cumbersome. By the way, occasionally changing your mind in the face of like actually listening and paying attention. That's what makes an organization feel partner-like. And the best organizations are partner-like. It's like the difference between the Soviet Army and the US Army, at least theoretically. We have people in the field who make decisions like they own the consequences of what they're doing instead of rote obedience.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  And in order to achieve that, the leader has to kind of bend and invest time and energy in acknowledging the equivalence of some people who are subordinate to you in the organization. And at the end of the day, you're responsible and the buck stops with you. But you let things go on maybe a little longer, tolerate a little less speed in order to bring everybody up to speed at the same time.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Thank you. I hope somebody's taking notes. I wish I was. I'd love to talk a bit about kind of taking a step back through years and how you've seen Wall Street change over the past decades since you first joined Goldman and perhaps even more so in recent years. Is it really the financial crisis and regulation that drove most change? Was it technology? Is it the rise of private markets or something totally different?

• 10:54Speaker 02

  No, I would say Wall Street has, again, what did I say?

• 11:01Speaker 02

  You know, it doesn't repeat, but history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, or, you know, I'm thinking that, you know, you know, the DNA of a pig and the DNA of a, of a, of a human are about 97% the same, but the 3% makes a big difference. I would say it's different now, but 97%, you know, you have ambitious people making their way in the world, taking risk. The tools are different and you're contributing yet another set and layer of very important tools that'll make things more efficient. But at the end of the day, it comes down to the judgment that gets applied to the, to the information and the data. You know, you want to have the best data because you're competing with other people who are trying to get better data than you have it, but at the end of the day, you're

• 11:45Speaker 02

  at the fulcrum, you humans are at the fulcrum of a bigger lever. Having said that, the leverage is much greater. And so the people who are very good and very important to their organization are worth more, and maybe the people who are less important are worth less. And so if I had to say one thing that's different, I think, is that the person who is making the decision has much more leverage today, because everything has an extra two zeros at the end of it. And, um, so I would say the winners are going to be bigger winners.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  And the, and the people who are just, you know, filling out the ranks are going to have, you know, are going to have, uh, are going to have less fulfillment, probably, in, in, in the world that we're in today. But it's gone through those things before. You know, once, when I started at Goldman in trading, there was a trading room of hundreds of people, you know, big buildings, which we don't need as many big buildings as before, and to get prices and to get liquidity, you'd have 10 people pick up a phone and call out and get 10 things, and somebody would scoop them all up. Now someone's just tapping on a machine.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  And they're still functioning. It's all, you know, it's better. When I started out, I spent three hours a day proofreading telexes. Nobody's proofreading. What's a telex? You know, that ticker tape that used to fall out of building windows when somebody would, you know, when, you know, when somebody, you know, when the soldiers came back from World War I, those are telling that people were doing that. Nobody's doing that now. I'm sure it was character building in some way, but not so much that it was worth so much time. There's just much more leverage in the system where the person who's, you know, it's if it's not win or take all, it's win or take most. And therefore, the people who help with that, who are special, are worth more.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  And, you know, so, you know, you know, I'm sure that 90% of the people here are in the top 10% of their organization. So, you know, you have nothing to worry about.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Actually, that's a debate that we we end up having a lot. There is, you know, I guess you can think about AI as a technology elevating everybody. But then your point is more about maybe it's the superstard that it elevates the most.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  And It's all leverage. The world is, and I think of it as a lever in a fulcrum. The people, you know, at the fulcrum are going to lift more than they ever could have before, and it behooves you to do it. You know, people are wringing their hands about spec. What choice do you have? You know, you can't, in in trade, you know, you know, trading evolved differently. Now it's, you know, you're entering things and if you want to get a price and, you know, we're not focused on this business principally, but if you want to take an offer or hit a bid in a market, you're going to, the person who is one millisecond faster, who lives,

• 14:56Speaker 02

  whose machines are a half a block closer to the exchange's machines, wins 100% of the time. So how could you not invest in the technology to get closer? And the same thing applies to the people who are exercising judgment over, you know, investment decisions. It may not be, you know, as obvious, but you know, you want to have the best tools and resources or at least have an arms race, you know, have a, you know, you know, a nuclear settlement where if you don't use it, I won't use it. But guess what? They're using it, so you better, you better, you better catch up and try to stay ahead. And if you're not trying to be ahead, you're going to fall behind.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  You know, everyone's going and anguishing over whether you should have the spend or not. I said, who can afford, how could you not do it? And if later you overspent or you invested in the, you know, too bad, sorry, you know, let's fix it quickly. But what choice do you have? You can't walk off the field.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  I love that analogy of, you know, being one millisecond closer to the exchange. It sort of really crystallizes how, you know, edge really matters, even if it seems very minute. It can mean everything, depending on what you're trying to do. So that makes a lot of sense. How do you think, you know, that's an example of sort of, this automated trading and financial market players giving some control to machines, letting them make decisions in that millisecond scale where people can't compete. So the world has, financial world has already given some autonomy to machines. At what point do they really get uncomfortable with that?

• 16:41Speaker 01

  With AI agents and like trying to automate?

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Well, I'll tell you, one thing that I think is, that is worrisome is in the olden days, like 20 years ago, you could have a room, and by the way, I'm using analogies from trading, but it applies universally, where if something, where you'd have the intuition of knowing whether something was right or wrong, you could have a cacophony of noise all around. Every, you know, the person next to you is fighting with his wife. Someone's, you know, arguing with our husband and blah, blah, blah. A million things, but if somebody said something wrong, a wrong price, or somebody was buying and should have been selling, or someone was saying the wrong thing about a company, the room would stop and everybody would focus because there was an intuition about things.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Now everything is in a glop, in a box, and the things are going so fast and analyzing so much information.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  That you can't intuit anymore. It spits out an answer. What are you supposed to do with it? You can't criticize it. You have to accept it. And that's where there's an opportunity. You know, leverage goes both ways. The age of this kind of thing. You can have, you couldn't have a mistake that would cost $10 million. You know, you could do things backwards or, you know, how could it cost you that much money? Today, you can have an errant piece of software that in one minute exercises 100,000 transactions. And you could lose billions of dollars. In other words, the world, leverage has made things better, but it also makes things more concentrated and dangerous

• 18:21Speaker 02

  and take away the intuition element. One of the things I like about your product is, you know, let me go with things I'm more familiar with. The thing about Google was always it's a bibliography. You get the sources and you have to investigate it. Then you come up with AI and it gives you the answers. But that's not totally satisfying because how do I know to trust it? What I want is I want the answer with a bibliography. I want to trust but verify. I want to get the thoughtful, you know, intelligent response to my question and maybe an elaboration of it. But I want to go back and look at the sources or at least verify that there were sources. And I think that that's, that's an important element

• 19:06Speaker 02

  going forward of all these different devices. Mirror bibliographies aren't going to work and the answer is not going to work because who could trust? You can't trust it. And you don't want to trust it. And you don't want a world where everyone's going to just trust it because then why do they need anybody?

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• 20:07Speaker 01

  No, that's fascinating. And I think from your investment banking lens, banks are kind of all about risk control. It's sort of letting ambitious people go and take risks, but also building the right controls to prevent that. And now if we're, you know, there's a lot of ambition from, you know, technology players to go and build agentic, automatic things. I think that risk control lens is really important.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Look, there's nothing that can go wrong. When you have balance sheets that are in the trillions and you're advising at the, you know, at the sort of the cold front of all these changes and technology shifts and other things and politics, there's nothing that could go wrong anywhere in the world that doesn't affect you adversely. And if you're Goldman, there's nothing that could go wrong where they don't accuse you of having caused it. So, you know, so it really behooved us to pay a lot of attention to what was going on. And by the way, there's two things at work here. You want to know what's going on so that you don't have problems. And you want to put the effort in to know what's going on.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  So when inevitably something slips through, at least the world knew you used your best efforts to try to stop things from going wrong. Because eventually, inevitably, something screws up. And then the, you know, and then what happens is, what did you do? How hard did you work? Were you negligent or worse? Or did you, you know, was it something that was totally unavoidable, given all the diligence that you put in? So for a variety of reasons, well, those two reasons. One, you'd like to not have a problem. And two, when a problem does happen, you'd like to have the record show that you did everything you could.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  That makes sense. And again, it becomes a lot more, a lot harder when you're trying to control machines at the speed of machines. So that's fascinating. I wonder, like, just taking that in another direction, with a thought experiment. If you think about, you know, the evolution of investment banking and where things are heading and take that even further. If you were starting Goldman Sachs today or an investment bank, how would you decide what would be the edge today for that sort of? Built from scratch, new winning bank.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  You know, there's different directions you can go in like, you know, the difference in a Goldman Sachs and what a lot of people here are doing. You know, Goldman Sachs is a big company. The burden is, it's very hard to move it, very hard to affect it. And in a startup like you're, well, I mean, not a startup at this point, but a young company and other young companies, big impact, you don't have to have a burden that anything you do could blow up the planet because you're still small enough that you can't even if you wanted to. And if you're Goldman, you don't want to, but anything you do can. So how do you, the idea of starting up a Goldman is very far, is very hard to even imagine because what makes Goldman a Goldman

• 23:12Speaker 02

  is the influence it has, the reputation it has with the people who have capital and want to invest it and the people who need capital and can, you know, and our role is kind of intermediating between those very, very large and kind of very capable and effective groups. You know, the people who are the most entrepreneurial and the biggest, who have the most demand for something and the people who have the biggest supply of it, there's no, almost there's no way of incrementing your way to it. And, you know, a lot in my life, I, you know, most, a lot of people, like you worked in an investment bank for a while and then when, you know, you wanted to be an entrepreneur and you wanted to, uh,

• 23:54Speaker 02

  and so there are some, you know, you know who you are and there's some people who value that kind of big ship, big thing, influential thing with the burden of not being, you know, knowing that you have to have a lot of partners and it's not you alone and you're wielding, you know, you're, you're driving a battleship. It could sometimes take 75 miles before you could turn it around and all the consequences of that. And there are some people who are wired to be more entrepreneurial, do things quicker and you forego possibly the influence and, you know, unless you become one of like, uh, you know, one of the big, uh, hyperscalers who were both in this new world and you can aspire to that,

• 24:36Speaker 02

  but that's rarefied atmosphere. So what would I do, uh, today? You know, I now know what the, what the other, I didn't do both. I was a big firm kind of a person, but I got to a level where you could kind of wield it. And so, you know, that was, you know, that was fun for a while and very much not fun for other, at other times.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  You know, it's a thought experiment I've been having, so that's very...

• 25:04Speaker 01

  I love having this conversation. But let's shift a little bit and just talk about how how you see the equity market evolving. You know, when you talk about, you know, all the entrepreneurs no longer necessarily aspiring to go public. It's not a given that a company has to go public as they grow. You see private market allowing startups to raise billions of dollars and not have to go public. So how do you think about, is that a good or bad thing?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  You know, where are we heading with that?

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Well, it's caught... Look, let me just say my credentials for answering the question. I was at...

• 25:44Speaker 02

  I spent almost exactly half... I was at Goldman, you know, 38 years. It's hard to imagine. If you'd imagine me, I can imagine it. But exactly half my time is a private company and half my time is a public company.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  And it's a lot easier to function in a private company. You don't have, you know, have, you know, obviously you don't work for yourself. You have investors instead of shareholders, but the rules are different. And, you know, the stuff you have to do, the burdens you take on as a public company and the regulators you take on as a public company are very difficult. But if you want to achieve mass and scale and size, eventually you have to do it. And so people will put it off. But eventually, the people who, you know, as you get lots of people who've invested lots of their time and lives in your company, they may want to stop sleeping on their mother's couches and maybe want to be able to sell stuff.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  You can do that somewhat now and very highly publicize that people are, you know, like OpenAI managed to get liquidity and give liquidity to some of its people, but it's still not liquid. You know, you can't buy and sell shares in the company very easily if you're an insider. Other people can invest. And it becomes, you turn yourself into a bit of a pretzel to try to make the things you can do easily as a public company doable in a private company. And you can go for a very long time, but you can't, it's very hard to go forever. I think the world externally has made...

• 27:23Speaker 02

  It's much more onerous to be a public company, which is why people stay private for longer. And you're going to find out that they're going to be... The next set of problems and blowups could very well happen in private companies. And people are going to go, "Tis, tis. You know, these are unregulated. We have to draw them into the regulatory regulated world." And in order to do that, you might have to make it less onerous. So people want to go public sooner. I would say right now, the gap between the degree of difficulty in private and public is too great. I think, um, I think there has to be more oversight of private companies. If they're going to be, if you're going to have, you know, 500, which you already have, half a trillion dollar private companies, the world has to pay more attention to them. And it has to make it less burdensome to be a public company.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  And so that has to be some convergence. But right now, it takes it where people will stay private longer. But inevitably, it's very, very tricky and hard to do. And it's very hard to satisfy all your constituencies if you don't have the access to liquidity, um, that a public and, you know, the ability, a lot of capabilities that you only get from being public. But I would stay private long, you know, if I were today, I enjoyed life much better. It makes decision making different. When I was in a private company, which by the way, was one company, but the private Goldman didn't have, you're, you only cared about how much money you made in your, in your capital account.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  If you made all your money in year one, lost money in year two, and made a fortune in year three, you add it all up and the bottom line was good and you split and it all went into cap and that was fine. In a public company, the value that you make is not, it's your earnings, but it's your earnings times a market multiple. And the market multiple may be affected by how smooth your earnings are. In a private company, I never cared about how smooth my earnings were or your growth is 30% this year, 32% next year. It doesn't become ever, doesn't ever go down. You never have a down round. Did I care in a private company whether I had the equivalent of a down round or a bad year? But in a public company,

• 29:36Speaker 02

  you find yourself sacrificing earnings in exchange for having a smoother earning platform. So businesses that were more volatile, but maybe in the long run, higher performing and higher income generating, you just chew because you cared about your stock price. And you might have, you know, and your stock price was your earnings E times a PE. And if you had higher earnings one year, it might lower your PE that the market gives you, your price, you know, the multiple, to a point where you wish you didn't have those earnings. Crazy. And so I thought I could behave more rationally, in my point of view, in a private company. But in a public company,

• 30:21Speaker 02

  and maybe that's right. I shouldn't say that it's not rational because people will pay more for smoother earnings than volatile earnings because volatility may suggest to people that it may not be there next year. And it was smooth for the last 10 years. It's more likely to be there in the 11th year. So it not only affects your mood or your state of mind, it affects really your decision making. And in my mind, not necessarily for the better, but other people would dispute that and say you should, as a company, aspire to have, you know, kind of, you know, smoother growth pattern and not a volatility that suggests that you might not be, it might not produce in the next period.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it sounds like it's, you know, a lot of arguments in both sides and maybe it really depends on who you are as a company.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  You know, as a public company, when you have to go through and talk to the public and communicate with sell-side analysts, they're gonna, you know, all of a sudden the volatility. By the way, it's not necessarily volatility in your earnings. It might be volatility in the way you deal with your people. You may want to replace people. And you might say, if you're a public company, gee, is this going to make us look bad to the investor? You have to explain yourself to the investor community. You may not think those people are so smart, but you know, they have, you know, we know what they say. They buy, this is a bad metaphor these days, but they buy ink by the barrel. And you don't. And so they publish and, you know, you have to please people who, you know, you may not hire, you may not think they're good enough to be hired in your own business, but they may have a lot of influence.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Well.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Not the Goldman analyst, but.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Of course. Let's talk about, again, your perspective on just big picture markets and business. What has changed over the past decades? And then, and what's different about the market today? And how then do you look at the next 12 to 18 months? What is going to be the primary driver of what really changes the markets?

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Here is nothing ever, I mean, history, you know, this is where it rhymes, but really rhymes. We're going through cycles now and you can't turn on, you can't watch pundits on TV without somebody saying, is this 1999 or 1996? You know, we've seen through these cycles, you know. One of the advantages of, not many advantages of being older, but one of the advantages you have actually lived through these things. Now, you can read about it in history books, but it's not quite as vivid. And when you live through these, you know, elevations and crashes and stuff, it's like the difference between living in a war or reading about the war.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  I'd say it's cyclical with, and it's changes. And why is it different this time? And, you know, it's very funny, and you turned on, you listened to the punditry, and nobody's talking about this other than to describe the differences between the spend today versus the dot com era. People were making money, they weren't making money then, you know, and making those analogies. And, you know, I find myself thinking about that, too. Not to overcomplicate things, but if you ask me about the market for the next period, there's a lot of exogenous events. The market, nobody really knows things. You have to, you know, that's why they call it speculating. I don't know what's going to happen next, but with what I know, we're in a growthy market.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Things are going relatively well on the cusp of great technological innovation that's going to make things more efficient. It may take time, it may be spending too much, or maybe not spending too much. But in this moment, when things are going pretty well, and I know if you're talking to a big group, you have to say there are a lot of people who are suffering, but in a macro sense, the economy is going pretty well, there's essentially full employment. And into this market, we're about to go, we're about to go through tremendous monetary market stimulation because we're going to take interest rates down, and whether we take them down in the next three cycles or we skip one, rates are coming down. And we're about to go through a fiscal stimulus because all the, all the stuff that's coming in

• 34:30Speaker 02

  with the last bill hasn't hit yet but has gone, and that spending is going to hit. So I would say your starting position is that the next period going forward is going to be very friendly to risk assets. Having said that, they don't give, you know, they don't blow a horn when sentiment shifts. So you'd have to be cagey, but I would say your baseline position is that things are, that we're, that things are going well, what could go wrong? Not like, you know, and that's how you have to start out, that's how you have to look at it. I would say you start from a position of optimism and then worry about what could go wrong.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Well, I'm getting some hints that we are running out of time. I'd love to continue to hear all your fascinating insights. Maybe one quick one at the end. What advice, based on kind of what all of what you described on what's happening in the market, what's shifting, what advice do you have for what people should do differently now? Whether it's whether you're investing in a market or, or a company playing in that, that new landscape?

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Look, what's new? Stay front of foot on all the things that are evolving and developing. You know, you don't want to be, you know, you don't want to be working on the Burroughs community, uh, computer when everybody has, you know, a desktop. And you don't want to be, you know, you don't want to be, um, you know, you know, there's a lot of stuff that has to be done. But if I were, you know, you're younger, starting out, I'd want to be on the forefront of the technological changes and the opportunity set that's, that's happening. And try to stay on that train as long as you possibly can. I know people who are 80, I know people... You know, I'm not going to name the names, but I could and you'd know them,

• 36:20Speaker 02

  who are in their 70s and 80s are on the cutting edge and running companies that are in the cutting edge and they're on the cutting edge within their own company. I know people who are 35 years old and are just doing their jobs every day and hope that nobody asks them a question about what's new and different. And so just stay, you know, stay front and foot and try to stay on that, you know, try to stay on that new, that train of innovation for as long as you can. And, you know, don't, and if you don't ever get off, you'll be, you'll be at the top of the heap.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Lloyd, thank you so much. It's been an incredible conversation.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 36:55David Weisburd?

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