How the Ex-Goldman CEO actually invests his own money

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 /

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:08Sam Parr?

  Your portfolio as a pie chart, what does it look like right now?

• 0:11Speaker 00

  I invest in risky assets. That's what's fun for me. I would say that 98% are equities.

• 0:17Sam Parr?

  What are some of your biggest holdings?

• 0:18Speaker 00

  This is going to be controversial. I don't know who I'm going to upset, but you know, it's like.

• 0:22Sam Parr?

  Are you trading every day?

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 0:23Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  No, it's not. It's like taking a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while I'm talking.

• 0:28Sam Parr?

  Right now.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  It's like that.

• 0:30Sam Parr?

  So you're bullish on big tech. Anything else?

• 0:32Speaker 00

  It's been good to be bullish on big tech and I'll stop being bullish on it when it stops going up.

• 0:37Sam Parr?

  What did the people who couldn't outperform, what did the bottom half have in common?

• 0:41Speaker 00

  The bigger takeaway is that.

• 0:53Sam Parr?

  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 in revenue by the time I was 31, but I'm like, I don't know anything when it comes to investing. My portfolio is basically 80.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Nobody knows anything.

• 1:05Sam Parr?

  Well, that's what I've learned, but it seems like you know a lot.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Because I'm so on the inside, unlike a lot of people, I know nobody knows anything. Whereas everybody else just wonders.

• 1:16Sam Parr?

  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. The majority of my portfolios, which I actually think is smart, is just 90% index, 10% bonds.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Well, that's sensible.

• 1:28Sam Parr?

  But you day trade, which I thought was hilarious.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  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 hugely negative is going to affect my life.

• 1:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  So to me, it's like a hobby.

• 1:43Sam Parr?

  What age were you when you felt that?

• 1:45Speaker 00

  I grew up in the projects, so I always, I wouldn't say that I felt poor, but I certainly was incapable of feeling well to do. I can't even say the R word.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Rich. I can't, it's hard for me 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, of the kid from the projects.

• 2:09Sam Parr?

  So your father was a postal worker. I think you said you were an urban hick, which I liked.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  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, I think I went to Manhattan. Three times, I never left the country, didn't fly in an airplane till after I left school and stuff. Yeah, I was pretty provincial. It turns out that if you look at the lists of most successful people or wealthiest people in the US, you're not seeing a lot of Morgans or Rockefellers or any of these classical family names on that list. You're seeing basically people, not necessarily growing up in poverty, but they were kind of middle-class people who did well.

• 2:56Speaker 00

  These are not generational wealthy people coming along. A lot of people were socially mobile in their lives and created wealth for others and a piece of it stuck to them.

• 3:09Sam Parr?

  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?

• 3:20Speaker 00

  I think what's shocking, not shocking, but I think what would be good if everybody understood is that, look, there are very, very few geniuses in the world. I don't know if I've ever met one.

• 3:30Sam Parr?

  You don't think that you've met, like, when you meet Jeff Bezos, you're not like, this guy just has more horsepower?

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, or most of the people I meet, I can't, I'm not saying I can do what they do, but I can see how they can do what they do. Very few people have I met in my life where I can't even see the world through their eyes, or I can't even see how they do what they do. Elon Musk may be a guy like that, where I don't know how.

• 3:55Sam Parr?

  Have you met him?

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, a lot. Don't forget, we underwrote a lot of his stuff.

• 3:59Sam Parr?

  When you met him, you didn't think, when you know him, I guess, you didn't think this guy's different?

• 4:07Speaker 00

  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 high there and guess what? After they finished speaking, they said, how they say, how did I do? Like they want affirmation and they're insecure and the kids don't always like them. People are a lot more normal than you think they are. And people are a lot more insecure and a lot more. And sometimes the most successful people that you know are driven by insecurity and their flaws or things like that. So you also have to be lucky that the ball has to bounce.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  You could be the fastest runner in the world, but the Olympics are once every four years. And if you peak in the wrong year, you'll never medal in the Olympics, even though you were the fat, you know? So I got to be CEO of Goldman Sachs because my predecessor got nominated to be Treasury Secretary. Had he not been that, maybe he would have lasted five more years in the job and maybe I would have been, you know, too old for it at that point or something. So there's a lot of fortune, there's a lot of luck, but I wouldn't exaggerate the skill set required or the degree of work required is beyond the grasp of many of your listeners. It's not.

• 5:26Sam Parr?

  So you've had teams of traders. You, you, 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?

• 5:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  You know, I wasn't, I wasn't cursed by being a great athlete. And so I didn't have, I wasn't tortured into thinking, should I go, you know, should I dedicate myself to sports and athletes or should I try, you know, strive to do well in classes in school and get another 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%.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Eventually make a living out of being enough money, you know, get become professional. 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.

• 7:09Sam Parr?

  You had this funny bit where you're, I think, something had happened where Goldman, you guys were like really nervous of making mistakes.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  When, you know, we had, you know, the big financial crisis, the one that was like in oh seven, oh eight, when the regulators wanted to make sure that this kind of thing never happened again. Well, the only way to 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, you don't always know the consequences of it. And if you try to legislate risk, you know, you may think you're protecting the world from the hundred-year storm, but you're also going to forego the 99 years of in-between when there was growth.

• 7:53Sam Parr?

  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.

• 8:05Sam Parr?

  On this show, we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive. Well, lucky for you, the team at HubSpot, they have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple, easy-to-read wealth guide. It's 35 principles from the top investors. We're talking guys who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Manish Prabha, Morgan Housel, Kathy Wood, and a ton of others. So these are all their frameworks, their mental models, their rules, basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin. You can get it in the link below. Everyone's throwing around these ideas and everyone around here is saying like, oh, we can't do this because like, what the hell? Why aren't we, why aren't we trying some stuff? Let's get after it. And I think you said the best traders are the ones who have

• 8:47Sam Parr?

  resiliency, they bounce back and they look at the new information that they have, not the past, and they adapt quickly.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  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 manager has to promote the idea that people take risk because that's what you're there for. And if you don't take risk, you don't, you don't move forward. There's no growth. You can't be an entrepreneur. You've been an entrepreneur, you can't be entrepreneur unless you take risk. If you take risk, there's a not insignificant chance that you'll fail and you'll lose money for all the people that 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.

• 9:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and as you get more successful, at least I have, and I think you said Goldman did, you take less risk.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  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. Raking more is another way of saying advancing, creating wealth.

• 9:56Sam Parr?

  Can you tell that story about Warren Buffett in the book? That was amazing, where you, he loaned you a bunch of money, basically over a handshake and a phone call, and was like, all right, I'm going to go take my grandkid to Dairy Queen.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  You know, Warren is one of those great men, which he's brilliant in a way that I can't put myself in his shoes and see the world through his eyes. And during the financial crisis, he offered to, at a very important moment, invest money in Goldman Sachs.

• 10:23Sam Parr?

  Do you remember how much?

• 10:24Speaker 00

  I think it was $5 billion or $10 billion.

• 10:27Sam Parr?

  And what'd you do? You called him?

• 10:29Speaker 00

  We talked before that, and you know, with him, he decides to do something, he doesn't, 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.

• 10:40Sam Parr?

  So what you said, you said, hey, Warren, we're going to this thing, we might need a little liquidity?

• 10:44Speaker 00

  No, and I'd done that before. 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 saw it as a good investment to make. He wasn't doing it because he was trying to... You know, help us, although it had the effect of helping us, but he was trying to help his own shareholders. And, you know, you know, he, he saw in us what I saw in 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.

• 11:14Sam Parr?

  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 a $5 billion investment or a loan. I'm not sure if it's a loan or investment.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  It was preferred stock. It's something between a loan and a, and a, and a stock.

• 11:30Sam Parr?

  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 like sign some paperwork? And he's like, no, no, no, I'll just send the money. And, you know, I gotta go. I'm gonna take my kid to, I'm taking my grandkid to Dairy Queen. Just, just figure it out and let me know where you want me to send the money.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  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 things, 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, I pushed a little bit. And he said, look, Berkshire, $5 billion. It's not even, it's, you know, again, Berkshire's an insurance company. And so in their real, in their real business, Berkshire insures, among other things, property. He said, look, $5 billion, if it all goes bad, that's not

• 12:28Speaker 00

  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. Scares people even more.

• 13:06Sam Parr?

  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.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Oh, no, it wasn't even a favor. It was, it was, he asked for that, he asked for our commitment for that.

• 13:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  He didn't ask for it in writing.

• 13:21Sam Parr?

  And, and you were like, yeah, I'll put that in the contract. That sounds good. He goes, no, no, no, no need. It's cool. Just tell me you commit. And that was it. And that's pretty amazing.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  You know, in our world, in my world of buying and selling stuff, most of the stuff we do is not written down, is not, is not, 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 conce, 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.

• 14:03Sam Parr?

  Have you, did you see the text between, I think it was like Ellison and Elon? Elon was like, hey, I'm gonna 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.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  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 never, you don't document stuff when people buy and sell stuff. Also, sometimes the execution of what you've agreed to is so near in time that it's pointless to document it because in two days, you're gonna perform. And so there's nothing, there's no, there's no reason why you have to document something that will be accomplished before you could ever dot the i's and cross the t's in a document. But it's always, you know, all things equal, it's good to have a document, but it's largely not necessary.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  And most of the transactional world works without documentation.

• 15:07Sam Parr?

  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?

• 15:16Speaker 00

  I invest in risky assets. That's what's fun for me. And that was what I did my whole career.

• 15:21Sam Parr?

  1% is in just index funds or boring stuff?

• 15:25Speaker 00

  Well, index funds are risky. They're diversified across different things, but if you're in a diversified equity ETF, you're in equities.

• 15:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  And equities is a lot different than being in debt, and it's a lot different than being in short-term money markets, which is more safe. And so, it's still risky. I would say that I am 98% in risky assets, of which, you know, 95 of the 98 are equities. Probably a quarter is in ETFs, and 75% is in a 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.

• 16:08Sam Parr?

  Okay, I'm so curious about this. So I'm in 90% just a Vanguard fund and then 10%?

• 16:14Speaker 00

  Well, that's sensible, because you're not doing investing for a living.

• 16:18Sam Parr?

  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?

• 16:27Speaker 00

  Well, I would say that, right now, I'm very heavily focused in tech and have been for a long time, for good reason.

• 16:34Sam Parr?

  Which companies?

• 16:34Speaker 00

  All the big hyperscalers and second-tier ones.

• 16:39Sam Parr?

  What's a second-tier one? What's an example of a second-tier one?

• 16:41Speaker 00

  You know, if you have a big hyperscaler like the Googles of the world and the Microsofts of the world, and Nvidia's of the world, maybe a second-tier version slightly down the food. 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, ones that are a little bit riskier. And, by the way, they're companies that are probably going to be gigantic companies that some people know about today and are investing in. I never heard of them, because I'm 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

• 17:26Speaker 00

  it's not with, you know, everybody knows, the world's a big place, and everybody always knows their corner of it.

• 17:32Sam Parr?

  So you're bullish on big tech? Anything else?

• 17:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 17:42Sam Parr?

  For the foreseeable future, that's what you're thinking?

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, my foreseeable future is when I finish this conversation with you and then I'll check it again.

• 17:48Sam Parr?

  Are you trading every day?

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:50Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  No, it's not. It's like a...

• 17:52Sam Parr?

  I don't think it's really crazy. It's just crazy for me to...

• 17:55Speaker 00

  Oh, no, no. Multiple times. It's taking a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while I'm talking to you.

• 17:59Sam Parr?

  Right now?

• 18:00Speaker 00

  It's like back... It's background noise. It's like, you know, some people like to listen to music. You'd say, "How much time do you spend listening to music?" Well, they're not sitting at a desk 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.

• 18:23Sam Parr?

  What trades did you make today?

• 18:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 18:34Sam Parr?

  What orders?

• 18:35Speaker 00

  I told people what to do.

• 18:36Sam Parr?

  I'm so curious.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  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...

• 18:44Sam Parr?

  That's all right.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  People listen to these things on different days and they'll start, you know, sound smart or stupid depending on what day it is.

• 18:50Sam Parr?

  Do you have a team?

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Oh, just me.

• 18:52Sam Parr?

  Just you?

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:53Sam Parr?

  And so you're at your computer doing it on your own?

• 18:55Speaker 00

  No, no, I'm not at a computer. I don't have a computer. I have an iPad.

• 18:58Sam Parr?

  So you're on your iPad doing it?

• 18:59Speaker 00

  And a phone.

• 19:00Sam Parr?

  Are you... And you're mostly... What's your source of information to make decisions?

• 19:04Speaker 00

  I chat with people.

• 19:06Sam Parr?

  Texting?

• 19:06Speaker 00

  What?

• 19:07Sam Parr?

  You're texting them?

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, usually I call. Somebody will text me. I'll text them. 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.

• 19:17Sam Parr?

  And you're doing that all day?

• 19:19Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:26Sam Parr?

  What do you... What do you read?

• 19:28Speaker 00

  I read, you know, all the newspapers. Of course, I start with the New York Post, the paper of record.

• 19:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  Um, 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.

• 19:44Sam Parr?

  You have subscriptions to all of them?

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, I don't steal them. Yeah.

• 19:47Sam Parr?

  Well, you know, how many paywalls do you hit and you're like, oh shit, I'm not going to read that. I gotta go find a different article.

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Oh, that happens every once in a while. There's something esoteric where I, you know, I click on something and it turn, you know, and it turns me down. So I don't read it. There's a million other things. But I, I do this and 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.

• 20:06Sam Parr?

  Are you really?

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 20:07Sam Parr?

  That's hilarious. Have you outperformed the market significantly?

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Uh, yes, I have for a while. And I'm not, and that's not because of, it's because of where I focus. So I started to say, I'm mostly, and have been in tech, energy. Don't forget, I have a background in trading energy.

• 20:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:34Sam Parr?

  Well, I'm sure you still own a bunch of Goldman.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  I do. I, I tend to have some affection for the organization that I spent almost 40 years in. So, yeah, I kind of like those, that, that company.

• 20:45Shaan Puri?

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• 21:13Sam Parr?

  So like I said, I'm boring and it's 90/10. It's the most simple stuff.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  That'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 S and P 500s, which is SPYs or VLOs.

• 21:36Sam Parr?

  And I'm, I'm, I do VLO.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  And then I would also, because of. The importance of tech and being on the threshold of great changes in technology. I might be mostly in those generic diversified things, 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 have 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. 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

• 22:22Speaker 00

  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.

• 22:33Sam Parr?

  What's your opinion on what's going on with like the Robin Hoods of the world and all these like the Kalshis and things that promote like day trading, but also betting and things like that?

• 22:44Speaker 00

  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, you know, receive advertising promotion so that they focus on it more than they would. Maybe they would never focus on it, but for those companies. You know, at the same time, if you make it too much like a video game, you 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.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  You know, for some people, that's a disservice and for other people, it's exactly what they need. They won't go overboard, but they, but it needed to be more attractive for them to develop an interest in it.

• 23:39Sam Parr?

  Are there any interesting things that you didn't invest in that ended up turning out right? And it was because you had poor input, like you, or you had a, you just let emotion control you?

• 23:49Speaker 00

  No, a million things. I didn't want to.

• 23:51Sam Parr?

  What's an interesting one? Yeah.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  Well, I, I, I thought, you know, SpaceX was overpriced at $100 billion market cap.

• 23:57Sam Parr?

  What's it going to go for now? Like two trillion?

• 23:58Speaker 00

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

• 24:06Sam Parr?

  And what did you say? What you thought was expensive, 100 billion?

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. So one instead of, you know, you know, one hundred and seventy five.

• 24:14Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  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 cellphone with you when there's, you know, twenty million or two hundred, you know, thirty million, I'm not sure the exact number of telephone booths around, why would you want to carry, at that time, cell phones were bulky and the batteries lasted fifteen minutes or something like that. Why would anybody want that? So I showed them how smart I was. And so I didn't make early investments and sell your opportunities or things. I, let me tell you, I missed a lot more stuff than I got.

• 24:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  And, you know, Goman doesn't miss as much as I miss, but that's because Goman 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.

• 25:03Sam Parr?

  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 any, than anything.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 25:42Sam Parr?

  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.

• 25:59Speaker 00

  And by the way, I'm not, 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 of mine 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.

• 26:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You also, like, hanging out with you now, you seem super happy and optimistic. But in the book, you're 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.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  No, I, 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 in my job. I mean, not all of life is about your job. You could be happy in other things, you should be happy in other ways and other parts of life besides just your job. But just looking at that narrow point, I was in a, 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 priced risk and took on other risks that other people didn't want to have for a price. And you know something, if you're gonna do that job

• 27:20Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:34Sam Parr?

  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?

• 27:41Speaker 00

  Well, when you ask me any, of course, I will say yes, but not, not, not, not enough that would be reasonable to most people.

• 27:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  No, I traveled a lot and then here's again, where having a supportive spouse. You know, it was very helpful. And like 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, you know, helped, helps to oversee a charter school. You know, she's, you know, 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 I'm telling 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.

• 28:25Sam Parr?

  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 rent get paid? Or like, do we pay utility? Like, I didn't know anything.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  I think we, I, I hope we're exceptional, but I will tell you that I haven't paid a bill in well over 40 years.

• 28:56Sam Parr?

  Really? She, she does it all. Laura does it all.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 29:04Sam Parr?

  That's it. Can I ask you about that? That's actually interesting. Do you guys meet to discuss finances at all?

• 29:10Speaker 00

  I'm in charge of generating the money and she's really in charge of distributing it.

• 29:15Sam Parr?

  You told a 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.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  No, it was more than all of our money.

• 29:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you were like, I'm supposed to be this big shot. I don't remember if you were a partner or not. I think you were, but you were, you were, you were like-

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was probably a new partner, but in the early days, the way, I mean, too much, it would take too much time for your, your purpose here. But in a partnership, you don't take money out of the firm. So even when you own money, it stays in the firm.

• 29:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you were like, you know, I-

• 29:45Speaker 00

  I had paper wealth.

• 29:46Sam Parr?

  I don't have a lot of like cash.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  I had no, like, no money and, and, you know, we borrowed. 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. Lawyers do it. But in those days, you know, we were angsty about everything. And we bought, you know, uh, 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, you know, breathe or run around in our little apartment. So instead of getting a bigger apartment in the city, we bought a relatively small place and out in the, you know, at the beach. And we were going through the math, or my wife was really, my wife was doing this. And she was going through in her mind, where the money for the closing and she had to come up to a certain amount.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  And she said, we borrowed this much and, you know, I had this much in this account and that much in that account. And she couldn't make it work out to the total we needed to close. And she was freaked out. And so we 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.

• 30:55Sam Parr?

  So you guys were like really on the edge?

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, we were. I mean, we were able to buy dinner that night.

• 31:02Sam Parr?

  Of course.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  You know, not, you know, it wasn't a question of survivability.

• 31:06Sam Parr?

  I just don't think that I.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  We exhausted more than all of our savings.

• 31:10Sam Parr?

  We do a monthly meeting. I learned this from my friend Ramit. 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.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  Look, I grew up in a household where my dad worked nights at the post office. But before he got that job, he'd worked on a, you know, he'd worked in private thing. I think he drove a truck for a while and he worked in a dry goods store as a clerk. And he actually lost his job, was unemployed for a while. So I grew up in a household where, you know, where the rent was, you know,

• 31:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, scarcity.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:06Sam Parr?

  What age did that start?

• 32:07Speaker 00

  You know, probably in my, you know, in my 30s, you know? So that's a privileged position.

• 32:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  You know, I'm lucky that way, but I grew up, but you know, listen, I was pretty scarred growing up in a household.

• 32:18Sam Parr?

  Totally.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  Where money was scarce. And so I'm familiar with what people think. You know, it's very funny because people, you know, I'm a, you know, CEO of Bowman Sachs, blah, blah, blah. I'm a real fat cat kind of guy that's a zebra. But, you know, a lot of times people will assert that. I mean, being with some politicians where they were saying, what do you know about this or that? And what do you, you know? And I'm going, listen, I, you know, I did some research on you before this conversation. Your dad went to Yale, my dad went to the post office. So why are you telling me what, you know, that I don't know?

• 32:45Sam Parr?

  And that stuff doesn't go away either. Like the way that, like the first 20 years that you experienced, I, 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, um, when, I think they said like, when I graduated high school, they're like, we had like $8,000. That was our, our situation. And I was like, weren't you nervous? And they were like, yeah, we were nervous all the time.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  And 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, you know, I just didn't know I came from Brooklyn. I never, you know, 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.

• 33:32Sam Parr?

  What year?

• 33:33Speaker 00

  Freshman year, this would have been like 1971 or two.

• 33:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so it's still only worth like, what, 50 bucks?

• 33:40Speaker 00

  And I was on financial aid, like full financial aid. But full financial aid doesn't cover, you know, going to movies or things like that, you know, this, you know, buying a beer. And then, so somebody said, 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 whether there's a difference between that. And, 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 they, and right there, while I waited, she made out a check for $500 and gave it to me. And I said, whoa.

• 34:24Sam Parr?

  I want more of that.

• 34:25Speaker 00

  No, no, I didn't want more.

• 34:26Sam Parr?

  You said $5,000.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  The jokey reaction is I should have asked for a thing. No, but that was, the point was, it was the first time in my life that I wasn't really nickled and dined. It was like, you know, it was like unbelievable. And by the way, that, that had a big influence on me because I later went to Harvard, was lucky enough to get in there. That's another whole set of stories. But as a result of that, you know, my, my commitment to, 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, but I got it in a way that had a generosity of spirit to it. And so I didn't feel bad, I wasn't made to feel bad about it. And that was, so I, I think. You know, everyone, you know, in my category thinks about giving, but I also think about how it feels to receive.

• 35:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  And I, and, and so I came away with a feeling that, you know, it's not just enough to give people what they need, but you have to give them, you have to get it in a way where it's a positive experience also.

• 35:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, where it doesn't, it feels a little dignified.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  It's dignified. And again, that $500, I hope I've repaid a lot, 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, that was well over 50 years ago, and it's still something that, you know, that I think about that, you know, moment when I got, because I was relieved I got the money, but I was also, I, I, I didn't feel bad about it.

• 35:47Sam Parr?

  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 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

• 36:32Sam Parr?

  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.

• 37:19Sam Parr?

  There's this book called Die With Zero. Have you ever seen that book?

• 37:22Speaker 00

  No, but the title tells me everything.

• 37:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and the truth is, I haven't read it either. But the title does tell you everything. It's a great title. The guy, Bill Perkins, he's a, 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 premise is, is if you're gonna give, if you can pull it off, give now. Because at least you can experience the joy.

• 37:42Speaker 00

  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.

• 37:50Sam Parr?

  That's cool.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  That was a very good visual for me, you know, to feel. Give with your warm hand, not your cold hand.

• 37:56Sam Parr?

  Is that what you're gonna, is that what you intend to do?

• 37:59Speaker 00

  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, I, sometimes I wanna, I give things. Like, take, you know, I give, I give stuff to them, and then I feel, then I feel ambivalent that I, you know, that they, that they have what I gave them.

• 38:18Sam Parr?

  What do you mean ambivalent? Like, you don't feel good?

• 38:20Speaker 00

  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, they get stuff, far from it. But, you know, I'll give them stuff. Then I'll say, you have no idea of, 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.

• 38:45Sam Parr?

  Dude, I had the exact same conversation with my wife yesterday.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  So if I gave it to them, why am I then acting, you know, regretful that they have it?

• 38:55Sam Parr?

  I had the same talk with my wife yesterday. I remember saying, telling her, we had just hung out with someone who was born into a wealthy family, and I, and I was envious. I was like, that asshole hasn't worked hard for this and that. And it was rooted a little bit in jealousy of like, you know, I'm better than them, because I worked for it, and I wasn't given nothing. And then, like, I was like, well, but I intend to give to my kids. It's like, I'm gonna create, my children are gonna be the people that I dislike. And I thought that was really strange of me to think that way.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  Well, your kids will turn out, kids turn out the way they turn out for a variety of reasons. One of which could be, you know, their neediness, or the surpluses they have. But that could be a small part of it. And there are other things that make your kids. I have no issues, my kids, you know, terrific, they worked hard, they went to good schools, they applied.

• 39:38Sam Parr?

  They work at Goldman?

• 39:39Speaker 00

  No, each worked, you know, Goldman's a kind of firm. That doesn't discourage people from from bringing their kids into the business like, you know, it was an old partnership.

• 39:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  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.

• 39:56Sam Parr?

  Totally.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  My name was Smith. They could have hidden out, but if your name is blank, fine. You know, it was just too. And by the way, the burdens of being that were very heavy, you know, I can't tell you, I'm not in my kids' heads totally. So I can't tell you what they feel. So I'll just say generically, you're the son of a very senior or the daughter of 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 early or stay later, show, show their moxie.

• 40:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, there's some baggage.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  There's baggage that they have to overcome. And so it was, it was, it was, it would have been too oppressive for them to stay.

• 40:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I saw someone, I think it was like, I was researching you. It was like an old Gawker article.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:35Sam Parr?

  And you seem pretty tough skinned. I would have been very upset about that, about people writing that stuff. That would have been, that would have been really bothersome.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  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 be, I wouldn't have the, I wouldn't have the joy of sitting opposite you now. There'd be somebody else in this chair talking to you instead of me.

• 40:54Sam Parr?

  It's still hard. I mean, like.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Oh, I didn't like it, but it turns out I could be, I could, 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, if, you know, one, you know, to survive that you needed a thick skin and I had one.

• 41:11Sam Parr?

  Was there a point where you thought, this isn't gonna work?

• 41:14Speaker 00

  No.

• 41:14Sam Parr?

  You, it felt good the whole, or it felt.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  No, no, it didn't feel good.

• 41:17Sam Parr?

  Not good, but.

• 41:17Speaker 00

  The things that would feel bad to anybody would feel bad to me. I just could take it. I mean, now I don't want to test it. I don't want to get, I don't want to get challenged more to get to the point where I can't take it. But certainly everything that I've endured so far, obviously I could take because I took it. In life, there are people who could take a punch and people 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 bad, people have different wirings. Some people are athletic, some people aren't.

• 41:45Sam Parr?

  Do you think you're born a great investor?

• 41:47Speaker 00

  I don't know. I certainly wasn't. So I can't tell you.

• 41:49Sam Parr?

  You don't think you were?

• 41:50Speaker 00

  No, I, 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, you know, proposals and I have opinions on the future. A lot of times I'm right, but I didn't, again, I didn't climb the ranks because specifically I was an investor. Goldman Sachs has great investors and great salesmen and great traders and great bankers and this. And fortunately, I didn't have to be the greatest at having one of those things. I was a pretty good manager and I was a pretty good strategist for the business. And I was a good partner to other people. And that was what was required of my job. 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.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  And so I will tell you, maybe there was a time that the person who ran a financial firm could do was best at every job in that firm. But I didn't, I couldn't have been, no one could be at a firm as complicated, as big and diverse as Goldman, and so I didn't have to be.

• 42:49Sam Parr?

  My last question, you had this really cool thought. It was awesome, actually. And I wrote it down and I've been thinking about it a lot. This idea that someone said it to you when you became a partner, you were like, or they were like, you know, our goal here is that you become successful enough that when you die, there'll be a really long, multi-paragraph obituary about you. And we hope that your time at Goldman is only a sentence or two.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Yes, that was when I got, when you made partner, you had a conversation with, you know, senior partner there who was sort of assigned to acculturate new people to the firm and he gave you some rules of the road, you know, things like, make sure you don't get 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.

• 43:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  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 meet in your business life. So it's good for you, good for the firm, do this. So that was another topic that was broached. And then the final thing they said was, and as far as, you know, your balance in your life, you know, think of it this way, if you live the kind of life that you, that there's an obituary written about you and it's nine paragraphs long. Make it so that you do enough so that there's no more than three of those nine paragraphs are about your life at Goldman.

• 44:24Sam Parr?

  That's the best.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  You know, that may be the best, but it's not going to be the case for me because I was, I stayed too long.

• 44:29Sam Parr?

  That's what I was gonna ask you. What are you gonna, you have to do something now.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  Well, okay.

• 44:32Sam Parr?

  What are you gonna, what do you hope that, uh?

• 44:33Speaker 00

  Maybe I'll join the Foreign Legion or go up in a space.

• 44:35Sam Parr?

  Well, what do you hope the rest of the paragraphs will be? Do you have a, do you have like a goal?

• 44:39Speaker 00

  I think at this point, you know, every hive has a queen bee and the queen, you know, the other, the other guy, the worker bees and the others, they kind of, they go off and the, you know, the queens stay. I was kind of, you know, as a CEO, 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, in the subtitles. So I'm never gonna, I'm not gonna comply with that piece of advice, but I knew where the advice was coming from.

• 45:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  The important thing is, and I do, I serve on boards and I do other activities and I'm interested in other stuff. I, I retired early enough with enough gas in the tank that I could go out and learn, you know, people, I tried teaching a little bit and I said, you know, something better than teaching I want to learn. And so I, you know, take some courses online and do some, you know, things and, and that's the luxury of my position now. So, you know, I'm feeding my curiosity about things away from business, but I also like business. And I like markets. And so, as I said to you, I still trade, I watch markets as background noise. I read a lot of financial stuff, but I also read about cosmology and the physics of small

• 45:51Speaker 00

  stuff. And I'm interested in linguistics and anthropology and I read a lot of history.

• 45:57Sam Parr?

  I think you said you, you were like, if a trader asked me what to study, I'd tell him to study history.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  I do.

• 46:01Sam Parr?

  What do you, what do you read?

• 46:02Speaker 00

  You know, a while ago, for some reason, I, I was true medieval history because it's hard to follow.

• 46:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it is.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  It's very hard to follow, but then I sort of got caught up in it because of, you know, the way people fought in those days, relationship with religion and the church. And I, I, I got, sort of got interested in reading it. And sometimes you pick up good authors that you really like the way they write. And so you. Less interested in the topic they pick to write about than the fact that they're writing it. I tend also to, I like reading a lot of biographies.

• 46:32Sam Parr?

  Which one moved the needle for you most? For me, it was Titan, and I know you did a thing with Ron Chernow.

• 46:36Speaker 00

  Actually, I read Titan. I didn't love it as much as that. I mean, you know, the Rock, obviously about Rockefeller. And I've read a lot of his, I've read a lot, you know, when I 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 number, 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 War I, a great book, not a biography, but a fantastic book, and by the way, very influential book.

• 47:06Sam Parr?

  World War I, it's about?

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Yes. But, and very influential, because it shows how you can get caught up in a vortex. You know, forces started to mobilize, it almost couldn't be stopped. But she wrote a book that I found really fun, that I'm not sure, 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. And the 14th century, the reason why it was called A Distant Mirror, she wrote this book, like, in the middle of the Cold War, when everybody was worried that the world was going to be blown apart and a nuclear war and stuff. And actually, in the 14th century was a time when they had the Black Plague, and the Papal Schism, and the Hundred Years' War, it was a very stressful time

• 47:52Speaker 00

  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 like, sort of like a mirror on the 20th century. And she, the jumping off point for telling the story was this particular guy, Baron Cusi, was a French aristocrat, but he fought in the Hundred Years' War, he ended up marrying an English woman, and so he appeared, he was like Zelig, he popped up in a lot of places, and so it gave you the opportunity to write a history of a lot of different, of what was going on in that era. And that was, I enjoyed reading that book. That was one of the few books I've read twice.

• 48:26Sam Parr?

  That's awesome.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  I also liked, totally different, I liked reading The Power Broker, about Robert Moses.

• 48:31Sam Parr?

  By, uh,

• 48:32Speaker 00

  Caro.

• 48:32Sam Parr?

  Robert, Robert Caro. He just had a thing, uh, at the American History Museum.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:36Sam Parr?

  It was awesome.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  And I'll tell you, the interesting thing is, I read, the reason why I reread that, I read that book once when I was starting, and your audience will, there's no reason why they should know him, but he was a guy. You know, basically built New York.

• 48:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Well, the power broker, because he asserted power that on paper he shouldn't have had, but by dint of his personality and different offices he held and clever things, he really was a power broker to the point of dominating even the elected officials who were nominally his boss. And there were aspects of he did great things, 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.

• 49:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, he's accused of being like a pretty big racist.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  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 it, you know, so think of, you know, think of the founding fathers who, you know, created the template for a democracy when none had existed for, you know, and yet they 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.

• 50:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  And I said, oh, God, this is a, you know, you know, this is a tough human being. I didn't think terrible, but tough and, you know, this. And then after 40 years of trying to get stuff done and build in a business and, you know, try to influence people to do what I wanted them to do when they didn't want to do it and the sacrifice I had to make and evaluating what I got done and the effort it took. I reread that Robert Moses book and all of a sudden his achievements started to go up.

• 50:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 51:00Sam Parr?

  I feel that way about the founding fathers. I'm angry at them for a bunch of stuff. And then I'm like, man, Thomas Jefferson, he was like 28 or 30 years old when he wrote this.

• 51:10Speaker 00

  33 or 30, yes.

• 51:11Sam Parr?

  When he, when he wrote this document and. How much wisdom.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  And there was no template for it, really. And, you know, the idea of something that, you know, we can get, you know, because democracy was a pejorative, demos, it was anarchy.

• 51:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I think about that revolution because I've been, 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 we can, you can fix it.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that, by the way.

• 51:45Sam Parr?

  And that's just like crazy.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  That was, if you read a book, I just read a book on the Constitution, that was even debated.

• 51:50Sam Parr?

  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.

• 52:01Speaker 00

  And yet, despite the self evidence of the rules, they still had us, you know, they debated slave, and by the way, it's not that they didn't know it was wrong at the time and they missed it and were.

• 52:09Sam Parr?

  No, they knew.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  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, 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 and say, you know, these people were all evil, they weren't, you know, they weren't, you know. It's like Columbus, you know, they don't want, 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

• 52:51Speaker 00

  was not as long as your backyard swimming pool, you know, in, in the 15th century, steer that ship to a continent that he wasn't sure was there, for crying out loud, give a guy, you know, give, let's have some credit on this stuff, you know, in other words, you can't, you know, nobody's 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 cra, it's crazy.

• 53:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I've, I've ignored the American Revolution for a long time and I'm now, I've gone down this path because of that Ken, Ken's burn documentary. And I think it made me feel like. Capitalism in America is almost a spiritual thing. You know, I married into a immigrant family and they're 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 or like.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  Oh, spectacular.

• 53:45Sam Parr?

  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.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  I know this is gonna be controversial, I don't know who I'm gonna upset, but you know, it's like, I would say that most of the people who are prominent social democrats grew up in prosperous families here.

• 54:11Sam Parr?

  Of course.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  And let me tell you, the people who grew up under communism don't wish the country was socialist.

• 54:16Sam Parr?

  Of course.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  I mean, it's crazy, it's crazy, but you know.

• 54:19Sam Parr?

  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.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 54:58Sam Parr?

  Of course.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  Where else can you?

• 55:00Sam Parr?

  The way that I describe America is I'm like, it's mostly good and you can, and we can improve.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  And you could talk about all the bad stuff and you generally won't be arrested for it.

• 55:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's mostly great and we can improve.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  You would be, oh 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.

• 55:18Sam Parr?

  I could talk to you about history all day. I'm so happy that you're into that.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  No, no, but I think.

• 55:22Sam Parr?

  That's why I like the Upper West Side, by the way.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  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 rails. So, people say, "Oh, my God, I don't like, you know, the norms of society, you know, the norms of political, proper political behavior are gone forever." Well, you know, we did have a civil war, we did have a McCarthy era, we did put, you

• 56:08Speaker 00

  know, Japanese-American citizens who were Japanese descent in camps because we were freaked out 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's always fulfilled those hopes eventually.

• 56:26Sam Parr?

  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."

• 56:33Speaker 00

  Well, I think a lot of people have said that. "I wouldn't bet against, 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.

• 56:43Sam Parr?

  Well, I think there's a lot of lazy phrases. For example, I see people online and they'll make comments, they'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 emotion if you don't have a word to describe that emotion. And so, I think that when people use phrases like, "Well, in this economy, it's hard to do blank." It's like, "Well, that's 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.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  Now, I'm thinking today, you know, when I was, 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, you know, they would read, you know, scroll down the TV, you know, 350, 450, 600 died. And then, of course... Compare that to World War II. When, you know, when

• 57:46Sam Parr?

  Sixty million people over

• 57:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:48Sam Parr?

  Over four years.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  And so, you know, every, every generation has its challenges. Every generation minimizes the challenges of the past because they're resolved and can't get worse. And maximizes the challenges that people face today because they're still scared of them because they're not resolved. And so, you know, that's why it's good to read. It's, that's why I think it's beneficial to read history. Because if they can go through that period, then we can get through ours.

• 58:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I do that all the time. Like, I remember I was reading about Sacagawea when she was with Lewis and Clark. And I purposely read that book before I had my kid because a lot of people don't remember.

• 58:22Speaker 00

  That's a good book, too, Undaunted Courage.

• 58:24Sam Parr?

  Steve and Ambrose, the best. And people, this is way under discussed. Sacagawea, for the listener, basically Lewis and Clark went west from St. Louis.

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Sure, you know that coming from St. Louis.

• 58:33Sam Parr?

  Of course, it's, it's, and I'll tell you a funny story.

• 58:35Speaker 00

  That's where they started from.

• 58:36Sam Parr?

  But they started in St. Louis from from, and they basically said, just go west and figure out if there's like a passage. And they didn't know what the hell they were doing.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  Now they go to Portland and then they find, you know, progressive mayor.

• 58:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's a lot different now.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  Do you think Lewis and Clark would have been impressed by the progressivism of?

• 58:48Sam Parr?

  Well, what's crazy is they went with 30 people and like none died. And so they go there, but and they find this woman named Sacagawea 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 Sacagawea gold dollar. Have you ever seen one of those?

• 59:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 59:05Sam Parr?

  Um, her kid is strapped to her. And I'm like, if she could do that, I don't need a baby thermometer for my bathtub. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't need all these gadgets if Sacagawea could carry this kid.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  She had a kid and I don't know how the kid turned out. I hope very well.

• 59:17Sam Parr?

  He turned out great. Joe, his name was Joseph. He went to my high school, by the way. He was in the first graduating class of my high school.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  But I will tell you, the infant mortality rate was a lot higher then, so keep, keep.

• 59:25Sam Parr?

  Don't let facts get in the way of a good story.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  Keep the thermometer.

• 59:28Sam Parr?

  Don't let the facts get away.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  Give them vaccines according to the schedule and take good care of them because you don't want, uh, there has been progress on infant mortality. So just because her kid made it through, I would.

• 59:40Sam Parr?

  She ended up dying of illness at like in her early forties. So my story doesn't exactly hold true, but I appreciate you so much. This is awesome.

• 59:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 59:47Sam Parr?

  All right, that's it. That's the pod.

• 1:00:00Shaan Puri?

  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. And let me tell you, another podcast you should check out, it's called Success Story. If you like hearing about different success stories and hearing Q and A sessions with successful business leaders, or hearing 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 podcasts.