Lloyd Blankfein on His Memoir Streetwise, Risk Management and Leadership

I'm Allison Nathan, and today we have something a bit different for you. You're about to hear an episode of our sister podcast, Talks at GS. In each episode of this show, you'll hear a conversation about leadership and industry transformation recorded in front of a live audience at Goldman Sachs. This particular episode features our former chairman and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, in conversation with our current Chairman and CEO, David Solomon. They discuss Lloyd's career, his leadership through the financial crisis, and his new memoir, Streetwise. It's a really interesting and fun conversation, and

So we're thrilled to be joined today by Lloyd Blankfein. Lloyd served as our Chairman and CEO from 2006 to 2018 after serving as President and Chief Operating Officer under Hank. Lloyd played a big role in building a lot of our sales and trading businesses earlier in his career, played a huge role in shaping the firm's approach to risk management, but he's probably best known for his humor and for leading the firm through the financial crisis and its aftermath. His leadership at that extraordinary time made him one of the most respected corporate leaders not just on Wall Street but around the

And David, listen, thanks so much, Quixus. You've terrific through this whole process. So thanks for the support and helping to promote it.

Absolutely. Well, the book really starts your childhood in Brooklyn to your journey to your time at the firm and all the lessons you learned along the way. And so I want to kind of walk through And some of I know a lot of people in this room don't know that the former CEO of Goldman Sachs used to sell peanuts at Yankee Stadium.

I did.

Yeah, you did. Not beer because you weren't old enough to sell beer.

No, but I used to walk up This is in the old Yankee Stadium, steep steps. You have to go and some guy made a commission of 7¢ on a $25 item and some guy way up there would call you and actually it was Frankfurt where you had to carry like them in water and stuff, they weighed about 400 pounds and you'd make a total of like, I think, 2 and a quarter cents if you walked up there and you made the sale, I used to do that stuff.

So you write in the book that at one point escaping your childhood neighborhood was your primary ambition in life. Tell us a little bit about kind of your childhood and the journey that kind of led you not too far from the neighborhood You to Goldman

know, had two parents, a relatively crazy but stable background, but I did grow up in public housing in Brooklyn, and it was kind of a new struggle. Was always, you know, my father was unemployed for a while. One thing I didn't have to do and one of the advantages, and the first chapter of the book I call Advantages, which is I never had to source my motivation. I knew that I really wanted to get out, to get away. You know, we lived very tight quarters in the projects, public housing, and always shared a room alternately with my sister who was a little older than me, she had a kid, very young.