Raw Transcript
Let me start just by asking you
sort of what retirement has been like. You left the firm in 2018. What is your day to day like? I'll just say this I have
I still have the occupational hazard. I still have the background
noise of following markets. I still I still know
the price of everything all the time. I engage in some philanthropic activities
that I that I used to follow, that
I just do a little bit more of. I spend more time with my family,
although I haven't really clocked it. It may just be that my family
feels like it's more time, because. Because the weight of it
is more oppressive than it has been. But let me just say,
let me just sum it up. Yeah, I do what I want to do. I spent about 40 years
or more doing what I had to do, and now every day I get up and I kind of
do what I want to do that day. I swim every day. I watch, you know, I watch, I watch podcasts,
I walk around and I listen to things. And so, you know,
I like being up on things. And I can tell you what I don't do. I don't get calls
that require me to jump on a plane and fly to Riyadh on for, on four hours notice
so that I could, so they could raise
by a few percentage points the odds of getting a transaction
that we're competing for. But, you know, a lot of busybody,
and I'm nosy, and I look at what's going on, and if, And if I see a transaction,
if I read about a transaction and I wonder, gee, is, you know, who
who, who is doing this transaction? So I pick up, you know,
one of my grandkids toy telephones, and I bark into it and say,
are we in this? Why not? And there's nothing
that nobody at the other end. So I have all the satisfaction of reliving
my old life, of torturing people. But since no one's listening to it,
no one ever gets mad at me. You write in the book
about this transition that took place in the 90s, away
from kind of narrative driven investing or trading, into more algorithmic trading. It does strike me. We're in a moment
where there is a prevailing narrative. That's the AI narrative. How is it going to revolutionize
the world? Is it going to revolutionize the world? How long would that take? Are you an AI user, an AI skeptic? Look, I think it's a continuum. We always,
when you ask, say, algorithmic trading, they were always there were always people
who used analysis. Technical analysis,
as, you know, as technology advanced, you'd have machines looking for
the technical points and follow that. And the point of algorithmic traders
or technical trading is to take the human emotion out of it, because there's,
you know, there's a school that says, oh my God, you'll sit there and say, gee,
when X, Y, and Z happens, I'm going to do it. But when x, y, and z happens,
people don't do it. You know, let me make an analogy. In the real world, everyone says, you know, I just can't wait to buy
waterfront property when it gets cheaper. I'm going to buy it right after the next
hurricane, and of course the next. And then hurricane happens. Property values on the waterfront. Get lower. And guess what? When everybody else is scared
and wants to sell at a lower price, you don't want to buy at the lower price
because you're scared too. So this is something
that would take the emotion out of it and just force you into doing things
based on signals. And, it's it's,
you know, it was working then. It's working now. Just better technology
faster, and more, variables. You know, something that you're playing
around with mostly it's a parlor trick because I'm asking you for questions
that I could get the answer to, but not as quickly and not as delightfully when it gives me
something that's coherent. I would say when I use Google,
I get a bibliography. When I use, when I use chat or one or the other, I get an essay
that purports to be the answer. Sometimes I want a bibliography because
I want to do the background stuff myself and look through it. And sometimes I just want an answer. The the thing also about a bibliography
is you kind of kind of check sources when you just get an answer, you kind of
wonder whether it's right or not. I'm not running a company now,
so I can't tell you which parts of our operations
and technology and other things are being displaced
by AI, such that we can have a much smaller headcount in that
I do know, based upon other cycles, that in the short term,
you won't lose headcount. You'll have to add a headcount to use the new technology
while having the old, while having the old systems in place,
because you need a reliable system and you can't switch on a dime, so you'll have to run them
both parallel for a while. Are we over investing in it? Maybe even if it's perfect
and right in every way, not every company doing
it will will be a winner. Undoubtedly, in hindsight, will wish we
hadn't made some investments or we hadn't. We had invested in companies
that are involved in it, but we just don't know which. But you know, one other thing,
the hyperscale, I mean really companies invest in close to and in some cases over
$100 billion a year. How many countries could invest in R&D
for over $100 million a year? But I have to say, the people
who are doing it, these companies, most of them, are run by their founders who have most of their wealth
tied up in those companies. So they're playing with their own money
and they're risking their own wealth in this. And I would say, I don't know
if they're right, but they are. They are at least as likely to be right
as anybody else who's doing it. And they're and it's their money. They're putting their money
where their mouth is. Let me ask you about something
complementary to this. There is a growing chorus warning about what
AI is going to mean for private credit. So you had Jamie Dimon saying, I see
a couple of people doing some dumb things. Marathon's Bruce Richards
predicting the default rate in direct lending is going to rise
in the next few years because of software exposure to all of this. Are you worried about private credit,
you with your banking background, how much it's grown, and yeah, well,
I'm worried that one has to worry about opaque assets where there's with is illiquidity. So it's very hard to mark to market you
marking it by analogy to other companies. So it's not
there's no, there's no precision. They're very hard to test in the market whether your marks are correct,
because the only way to really test is to sell some. And it's very hard
to sell to a knowledgeable buyer because any knowledgeable buyer would have
to do the work and the credit analysis. And who's going to do the credit analysis
to buy a little smidgen,
little piece of something. And so and another phenomenon that's gone on
is we have and this is just taking it away from credit for a second and just talking
generically about opaque assets. The markets have been very good
for a very long time. The one thing that imposes
a lot of discipline on people are problems and losses and disasters. And something like that happens. And then everybody is,
you know, goes into shock and then all of a sudden
everyone gets very careful about how they allocate capital,
at least for a while. And like any other commodity, investing dollars is if it if you
if everything is always good and there's no cost, no adverse consequences,
you start to lose a discipline over time. And by the way,
this is why there's cycles to everything business
cycles, history cycles, market cycles. And so it's been a long time since we have had to,
you know, redress things. You know, how we I mean, I have this bad
habit of quoting movies sometimes. You remember in the movie,
you know, The Godfather, when they're going through the mattresses
and the guy says, you know, we have to have these things
every ten years to get rid of all the bad blood
that's built up over that ten years. And in a way, you have market problems
and crashes and problems simply because a lack of discipline
builds up over time. It's human nature.
There's an inevitability about it. We're kind of I don't know
if we're in the absolute end of the cycle, but we're getting close to the end of,
you know, late stages of cycles on this. And we do for a kind of a reckoning. So generally, I'd be very,
very I'm always very cautious. I'm in the risk management business,
but especially cautious at this time. You can point to several reasons, but if for no other reason,
just because we haven't had a problem for such a long time, undoubtedly we've put money in places where write offs
are going to need to happen. And when you're dealing with opaque,
illiquid assets like credit, that's a place that one would clearly
have to look. You've spoken out against people putting private equity
and, credit in retirement portfolios. This is something that the, an arm of Goldman Sachs
is, is doing, encouraging people to do. If you were still running the firm,
is that something you would be encouraging as well,
given the opacity of this asset class? Is it something that. Yeah,
I'm not talking about? Again, specific firms in firms
that are really good and care about. But this you know,
hundreds of firms doing this and not everybody has they you know, not
everybody's been around for 150 years or more and wants to be around
for another 150 years or more. So I would say just generically, putting the relative riskiness aside,
I would say the consequences of being wrong or having a problem in the account of retirees, i.e. real people, citizens, taxpayers, voters is much more highly consequential. The political sector, the government
sector really cares, but not that much. If institutional investors
lose money, they're smart. They can afford it even very, very,
very high net worth individuals. They must be smart
because they have money. And even if they don't, even
if they're not smart, they can afford it. But when you lose money for individuals, for consumers, I taxpayers and citizens, people in government get very, very upset. Regulators get very, very upset. So my point in that at any point in in
any moment you should approach when dealing with, you know, with that segment
with a lot more trepidation, not because the odds of this security will,
you know, will be worse in their account of someone else. Just the consequence of a bad outcome
is much more dramatic to the people who do that. Let me tell you,
I learned some of that heart. We're an institutional firm,
so we never really had that. But I understand the consequences
of that in the financial crisis. And so I just cautioned
now, I would say that as at all times, but here we are,
late cycle in these markets. This is the absolute end of the cycle.
I don't know. But after so many years of a bull market
and a bull run and all these assets, we're getting close. You know, you know, we're in the later
part of the cycle, I'm sure. So wouldn't you know it. So this is the time
when firms are lobbying to give individuals, you know, to bestow on them
the opportunity of investing in these assets, these relatively illiquid assets,
at this particular time of the cycle. I think the people who are doing this
should think about that very, very hard. And if they're going to do it, exercise
a much greater degree of caution and just be aware of the calculus. Is it worth it? In other words,
if your business is really terrific, if you're growing, you're doing very,
very well. Do you really need to extend
your franchise that much by going to this much more dangerous sector? You've called yourself
a warrior more than a warrior. Something
Jamie Dimon clearly is worried about is that we're back in a period
that's like 0506. So some run the run up to the crisis. How does that strike you
when you hear that? Do you see the historical analogy
that he does this moment to that? You know, no, I can't speak.
I mean, he's smart. He sees a lot of stuff. I don't
I can't comment on what he's saying, but I'd say the best analogy would be
to say, you know, kind of late cycle, you know, you know, the the crisis that
we have was, you know, in different forms. It was basically a real estate collapse. And it took the form of mortgages,
you know, loans on real estate,
real estate, on real estate. That was really what it was. And in one form or another. And that was kind of late stage
when individuals started to get involved in it. And of course, that was what,
you know, on the part, you know, enflamed the politics
at the time and really cause, you know, it was dramatic. And of course, banks were anyway
very complicated. We can talk about that. But what's an analogy? Maybe you could find an analogy
in that in companies that are historically
institutional companies transacting
institutional oriented products who are, you know,
trying to have very small size transactions put into mutual funds or for one case or, by the way,
into affiliated insurance companies, which is kind of one step away
for individuals, because remember, insurance companies
take your premium and will pay you back. They are the they're really it's really individuals
that are counting on, you know, in a lot of cases, individuals
that are counted on those companies having, you know, having a good portfolio
that solvent and so that they could pay back their debts,
you know, their obligations when their own there's when certain contingencies
happened years and years forward, kind of a can of kind of a consumer
oriented business also. So maybe that's an analogy because they both feel
kind of late stage with assets and opportunities that normally wouldn't,
you know, wouldn't go to individuals. That's what I see. But, you know, these crises don't have to,
you know, be the same. But, you know, in some way or another,
they rhyme, and they always come from,
you know, come from different things. Look, if we're sitting here,
one of the things I always thought, if we're sitting here fretting about
a specific thing, that's the thing that's less likely to happen
because they were fretting about it. That means we're all going
home, talking to our people, trying to moderate the risks
associated with it. And that's usually a good thing. It usually what you get
is usually when the, you know, when the world blows up, it's
something you thought was Triple-A. And the question is, you know, what is it. And who has, you know,
who has contingency planned well enough, who's looked around corners
and seen that possibility that they may have
thought was a very remote possibility. But it was a contingency that happened. And so they contingency planned
and did something, got closer to home at the right place
and reduced their risks. I'd like to talk about your appetite
for risk taking, how that's evolved. We could go back to the 1994,
which was a bad year for for Goldman. And you write in the book about how
there was this kind of pendulum shift. There was excessive risk taking. And then there's kind of excessive caution
that followed that. It's kind of found its feet. Again, talk,
if you would, just about finding that balance in 1994
was a really bad year for Goldman, because we were kind of there
by ourselves. You know,
if you're going to have a bad year, you'd like everybody around you
to have a bad year. You'd like it to be a generic problem. You like to be the best of a bad group, or even in the middle of a bad group. But, you know, we were miserable.
We didn't have a lot of company in 94. You know, we had very big positions
that were conditioned on rates not coming down, or at least not coming
up, especially European. This was a time of a crisis and
a lot of pressure on economies in Europe, and we thought they surely wouldn't
want to in this rate their people by taking interest rates
in a slow growth environment. Guess what? The misery of their people
in a slow rate environment. So, oh, we did poorly. We lost money. That was a moment in time
also, where the firm was a private partnership
and in a private partnership. And by the way, a private partnership
with unlimited liability for the partners. So you could not only lose
all the money you had in the firm, but they'll come around and take out,
take away your home and, you know, and so that really makes you really focused. And in our business,
if you're afraid to lose money, it's very hard to make money,
not because people are betting wildly, but we intermediate
the other side of what people want to do. People want to sell blocks of something. People want to hedge big positions where
there's no other side, where we would have to position that risk until we can cut it
into little pieces and sell it off. But that's a lot of risk. And so people were very, very loathe. So it's not just what you lose
in the moment. It's all the opportune innings
that you inevitably let go by that you
otherwise would have taken advantage on. And that could go for a long time. And what they're what you have to do
there is leadership has to be, you know, kind of, sober about the fact that you really don't
want to lose more money, but at the same time,
encourage people to go ahead and you have to have the discipline,
your own organization, to let people know by your behavior that you're not going to punish
or kill people for having legitimate losses
that were not nets, that were, you know, people
who you're not supposed to be stupid, but even smart people are wrong
a good percentage of the time. If you punish people for being wrong
as if they were stupid, you'll lose them. You'll even if they don't walk away,
you'll lose their mind and you lose their ambition. So that's a very,
very delicate management problem. After a crisis like that, to get people up
front and front of foot again. And by the way,
what they're feeling, you're feeling too, you know, you're a little bit about you're a little like the, flight attendant
going through turbulence, you know, and the engine may sound a little bit different, and you kind of wonder,
is it supposed to sound like that? And if you're the flight attendant,
you better have us. You better have a big,
fat smile pasted on your face. Because if you look like you're terrified,
guess what? The passengers guess how the passengers
are going to respond. So I would say, you know, in a crisis, put the oxygen mask on you first
before you put it on your kids because you're not doing your kids
any favors if you pass out. And the other thing is try to try to try
to look like you're not scared to death. Goldman special sauce, as you put it,
is that heritage you're talking about the fact that it was a partnership
for as long as it is, it was. How has it post IPO
been able to retain a lot of that? Maybe the special sauce isn't as strong as it was before,
but it does have a unique flavor to it. I think the most unbelievable thing
that we would have least predicted that we were the most nervous
about, the most, came up into the debates about whether we should go public or not, which, by the way,
I thought was inevitable given we needed a balance sheet
and stable capital. But the thing that was that I thought
would have been the biggest surprise if I, if I could look forward to
where we are today, is how well Goldman Sachs preserved
the partnership culture. 25 years, more than 25 years
after we've been a public company. Now, what does that mean, a partnership
culture? It's you know,
people don't necessarily understand it. You know, when I and by the way, I spent
half my tenure in the private firm, half of my tenure in the public company,
in a private company. The people that report to
you are your co-owners of the business. They have a set of expectations. They act like owners. They expect to know everything
that's going on. A Japanese bond
salesman wants to know what's going on in investment banking in London. If somebody screws up
somewhere in the world, it affects everybody around the firm. They're not just in their own cylinder. It's not considered rude to be a busybody and look around and
see what's going around the whole firm. It's their expectations,
their sense of entitlement to have that look spec to be consulted as owners. People think if they object,
you'll listen to them and you may be slow in implementing
a decision that you thought
was the right thing to do. But people are objecting
and say socialized things. More people in the firm get paid
based upon how the firm as a whole did not, their little cylinder
and not their little space. There's a lot of differences
between a partnership culture and a regular corporate,
and I think the firm did a good job in protecting that, even though, you know,
nobody's been a partner for a long time. But we call us that. They call themselves partners,
use the name and it's real. And, I'll tell you another thing. There's an economic difference. When I was in a private partnership,
you care about your capital account. You don't have stock at the end of your,
you know, and you leave your capital in the firm
because that's the, you know, your money is the
working capital of the firm. You care about how money accrete into your capital account,
but you don't care if it's if it's a smooth accretion
every year or if it rises 5% every year. You care what it looks like
after 20, 25, 30 years. And so if on a ten year cycle
you make money, four years lose money, and two years break even for other years,
that's perfectly fine. As long as it's enough in a corporation,
a public company, it's not just your earnings, it's
your earnings times a multiple. And the multiple is governed by people's
sense of the stability of your earnings
and the growth of your earnings. So all of a sudden you care about your
e your earnings, but you really care about your P
and maybe you should forego some of your earnings in order
to have more stability in those earnings. So you get a higher multiple. And so I think over time the real test was
how do you function. Recognize
that you had different ownership base i.e. public shareholders
versus the partnership. How do you satisfy your public owners
who care about a share price and still have all those partnership culture elements,
you know, the risk profile, everything? I'd say that process
started with my predecessor, Hank. Who? Hank Paulson, who was CEO
when the firm went public. It certainly continued
threading that needle with me. And I tell you, I think my successor,
David Solomon, has done a good time. And in some ways, he's completed
that transition to a great extent, because what I didn't do so much and what he did,
I kept a lot of our investing, investing opportunities on balance sheet, which was a very big source of E PNL. But it was a very
it was somewhat sometimes a burden on our p multiple
because it would be much more volatile. He's moved a lot of that off
balance sheet, which, frankly, was what our real owners at this point
really wouldn't want to have happen. You know, for a long time in Hank's
tenure, in my tenure, we were a public company, but most of the shares were owned
by insiders, by partners. Over time, partners retire,
they sell their stock. And so over time, it becomes more
and more like a traditional public company where the public owns the vast majority of shares
and the insiders own a small amount. Early in my tenure, the partners, you know, the traditional older partners,
still own most of the stock. And it was reflected in our board of directors, where we had
sometimes 4 or 5 Goldman people. Goldman
employees were on the board of directors. That wouldn't happen today. There is a, as I see it, a very vibrant alumni network, in part thanks to you and your work,
kicking that off and organizing it. How actively are you engaged
with what the firm is doing, you and you and other alumni of the firm watching
what's happening, what's all the time? I mean, it's a very important thing. It's very important
to the core of Goldman Sachs that we care about our alumni and in return,
the alumni care very much about the firm. If you went to somebody who'd been at Goldman Sachs
for five years, 25 years ago, had a great career, and you ask them to,
oh, tell me about yourself. First thing they'll say is, I'm x Goldman. A lot of people, Goldman Sachs,
go into public service after their tenure at the firm. And in fact, people refer to sometimes
revolving doors are was wasn't a revolving
door government took from Goldman. We didn't hire principally we didn't hire
people from government was the other way around. But we get people that were public service
minded. We care about our alumni. If somebody is going into government
15 years after, guess who they asked to help them with their process
of getting through the, getting through the Senate process
of confirmation or other things. But having been there is highly valuable. It's a very important recruiting tool,
and it's a very important morale lift. And part of the,
you know, part of the perks of being at the firm
is that you get to have been at the firm. There are always going to be people
who think they're going for 30 years to Goldman. They stay three, and there are people who only intend
to stay three and they stay 30. But whether it's 3 or 30,
it's a good place to get your training, start your career,
and to maintain the relationship with I suspect that you, as a Goldman
alum, have followed the scandal that erupted around Kathryn Ruemmler
the general counsel who came into that job after you. You'd left, a scandal
that was brought about by the fact that many emails between her
and Jeffrey Epstein were made public. She effectively became
a reputational risk herself. And I'm curious
how you think the firm, again as an alum,
how you think they've handled that. You know,
I tell you, I don't shy away from, you know, provocation,
but I just don't know. I hadn't met Kathy. She came in after I left. I don't know what the calculus was. I'd say in general, one of the ways
in which you're a good partnership is if you think, and again, this is a big if, I don't know,
I really don't know. I don't know what was exchanged. I don't know, Kathy,
I don't know the situation. But I'll say, Jim, as a generic matter, apply to other situations like the financial crisis
or a big loss. I'd prefer to talk about that. And you can draw your own analogy
where something goes wrong, or we're doing M&A and an M&A transaction. As people here, you know,
you have a TV station. People here well know sometimes your
opponents in an M&A will use the media against you and make accusations
and try to gin up support for themselves by slandering the opposition
in some way or another. Even if the pressure on you
in that kind of a context gets severe. If you cut and run on somebody
in your fund that you think whether you're right or wrong,
you think is unfair and you really think it and you really think they did
nothing wrong, you really think that somebody is just
picking on them and you really think it's caught, kind of get caught up
in some hostile M&A situation, not real. And if you add badly to your own people,
that's not just a specific, costly
thing to do with respect to that person, but that's a signaling that goes on
to the rest of the organization. And so one, you know, one doesn't do that. So you're asking me a specific question
about a specific person. I don't know enough to comment on that. But I will say what people are neglecting in looking at these situations is
I don't think that people who, you know,
I look in the mortgage crisis, nobody, you know,
there are a lot of people, you know, you have people that are the firms
that blew up certain things. They got fired. Did anybody ever hear
even know the name of somebody, the person who was running the mortgage business
at Goldman Sachs during that era? No, it's on me. I was the symbol. I was the guy in charge.
Everyone did this. I promise you,
I never sold a mortgage in the firm. First of all, you didn't do mortgages. It was secondary markets in that. But if they were doing their job
and did nothing wrong and hedged appropriately and didn't lose money
and did everything right, we didn't fire those people because there was a clamor
for that to happen. And if I had done it, we wouldn't
have been Goldman Sachs anymore. We wouldn't have the people we wouldn't be able to recruit,
we wouldn't be able to retain. The firm wouldn't
had its relationship with the people. So I am intentionally
not asking the specific question you're asking
because I don't know about it. It's not like I'm shying away from
it would be unfair. But I will say what doesn't get talked
about is the support that a firm should show to its people if they believe
that there's unfairness in the world. And by the way, we're seeing
some of this stuff where people get merely cited
at that saying in this situation where in a cancel culture world, again,
I'm talking more generically, people are cutting and running on people,
not just in this context, but, you know, every day you can read in the paper
somebody is getting fired for something that maybe three years from now they'll
look back and saying, was that really was that really a capital offense
and white people overreacting to it? So again, I shy away from the specifics
of this because I don't know enough. I'm not. And it wouldn't be right to comment. But I do say that
the world more generally is in a bad the polarized world we're in today
is in a bad place with respect to, penalties and accusations for questionable,
you know, for, you know, every, every crime is a felony. Every felony is a capital offense. And I'm not sure that that's warranted. One more question. On this note,
you wrote about a mantra that you used and read out to colleagues of yours
at Goldman, said there should be any tolerance for bad
behavior you observe at your company. Is that not applicable here? Mean,
I think, through sort of what's happened, which is the board clearly vetted her
and asked about her relationship. But you keep wanting to talk about this. I don't really have much to
I don't have much to say about it. I know in a trial, the prosecutor informs the jury about what? You know, how bad the victim suffered. But at the end of the day, you still that
the jury has to find out whether the person under trial was the perpetrator or did anything wrong. So at the end of the day, you can
you can appeal to people's emotion about how bad something the outcome
and the consequence of something was. But you still have to decide
whether the person, the person who's on the dock
did something wrong. And so, you know, if you want to talk about what happened in any given situation,
I probably agree with you. But at the end of the day,
the lawyer in me wants to focus. This is all I am with you on. The severity
and the difficult are the outcomes, and you want people who are responsible to suffer what they deserve to suffer. But at the end of the day,
you still have to decide if these are the right people and if what
they did was was what caused the problem. And so that's all, you know,
we can go around, go round about it,
but I don't know the situation. Let me pull back and ask
just about the by the way, go ahead. I was I got called by press people to comment
on my mentions in the Epstein file. There are five mentions of his office trying to get in touch with me,
to invite me to specific dinners, and I kept being out of town. And by the way,
I have no memory of it. But nice. You know, when people I didn't know
call my office inviting me to stuff I didn't know, I never said no, but
I didn't say yes if I didn't know them. And so the fifth time the memo went back internal
to Epstein's organization. Should I keep trying with Lloyd,
or should I give it up? And the answer came back,
I think at this point, give it up. And I didn't know that, because
if somebody asked me, did I ever meet him? No. Did I ever engage with him? No. But it was, you know, sidebar, third party
discussing how I was responding. And I frankly have no memory
of not being responsive. But that didn't stop reporters before I knew how I was mentioned, calling me up and asking me
if I wanted a comment on my mentions. Just saying, you characterize yourself
as a moderate globalist, and I wonder how you see the way
that corporate America is interacting with Washington today. You said we were talking about government
Sachs. Maybe there would have been a moment
for you to do some government service. Not in the second half of Trump's
first term. What do you think
as you watch your contemporaries, other CEOs, interact with this white House
in the way in which they are? Look, you have to do what you have to do. Somebody,
like I say, somewhere else, look, I don't want to do this,
I don't want to do that, blah, blah, blah. But if somebody puts a gun in your head, you're going to do stuff
you otherwise wouldn't like to do. I think I think we shouldn't have blue companies
and red companies. I mean, I don't,
and it feels that way to you. Yeah. Starting to flow. Yeah. It is starting to feel
that people are being asked and expected to take positions on the issue,
you know, controversial issues. I think that that, by the way,
are properly left to the political sector. I'm not saying that people shouldn't
have positions on them, but not in terms of your platform
because you're a, you know, because you're a, you know, consumer company,
you're selling toothpaste. I don't think you necessarily have. And somebody, you know, but
people are shoving microphones in people's faces and say,
you really should take a position here. I mean, so you could take a position
as an individual, but recognize the reason why they're shoving
the microphone in your face is because you have
the platform of your company. And since you are the interest in you
is coming from people's interest in the platform,
I think you have a duty to do
what's in the interest of the company. Now, I think there are times
when you not only can, but maybe you should take a position. And that is specifically where
the issue that's being debated is in the core of your expertise. So if the if, if there's a government
shutdown looming because they can't the government can't pass a budget. I think you can ask Goldman Sachs, what do you think
the consequences will be? And somebody at Goldman Sachs who knows about this stuff
should comment upon and take a view and explain it to the public
why they have the view that they have. I think there are cases where the issue affects your people in
a way that otherwise wouldn't allow them, may or may not allow them to do their jobs
like marriage equality. I took a very strong position
on marriage equality. I was the, chairman of the New York City
Partnership, which like the kind of the local chamber of commerce,
but only for very big but for very,
very big companies in New York. And we were very strong on that issue,
and we lobbied for it. But, you know, in that respect, I'm
the champion of the people who work at Goldman Sachs. As individuals. You can vote, you can make statements,
you can carry a placard and march. But I'm not sure it's right
to use the prestige of your corporation. And certainly I don't think
you should be required to do that. And there are people who would want
to require companies to do that. It makes no sense. Why should we divide countries
polarizing enough? Why should we divide our economy in half? On that issue of polarization, we've seen
companies have to go to the white House, the US government
taking stakes in companies. What do you make of that in the year 2026 to see a Republican president,
heading down that path? Look, I think, you know, one shouldn't
defend the extreme of anything. So I generally I think, the economy does
well without centralized control, centralized management of government
dictates. I'm glad that al Gore never built the information
superhighway and laid all that cable five minutes before the,
you know, before the clapping, the internet in the cloud took over
and made it vestigial. The strength of the US economy is that
we have millions of decision makers, and the real strength of the economy is
that when those decision makers are wrong, you know,
you build an airport in the wrong place. Planes don't land, their fees don't get
paid, the bank loans don't get paid off. They repossess, they plow it over and they build a Walmart quicker
than any other country would. That's the strength of our economy. Having government as a decider, or having government owning a stake
such that it slows down the processes that I just
described, is not a good thing. Is there room for government
sometimes, yes. Orphan drugs that otherwise wouldn't be made. Well, we have a social thing delivering rural mail when nobody would. The electrification of the Tennessee Valley in the 30s,
when nobody would have spent that money supply chain
where no individual company is, you know, has the wherewithal
or the incentive to play that money where they have to invest
some infrastructure as a matter of public policy or national security,
a lot of opportunities for government. Maybe they've hit all the right ones,
but I think, there are a lot of wrong ones
that are possibly to be hit. And if the government is involved in it,
it may get too much capital. I mean, it may have that capital
much longer than it needs to do. And the incentive structure is just,
you know, discombobulated. So there there's not no,
there's not no time for it, but it's not a lot. Lloyd Blankfein,
thank you very much. Thank you.