The American Dream and Future Outlook

The difference between somebody who's really, really good and somebody who can't make it is not that great. Goldman Sach, senior chairman and former CEO Lloyd Blankfine. Your portfolio as a pie chart, what does it look like right now? I invest in risky assets. That's what's fun for me. I would say that ninety eight percent are equities. What are some of your biggest holdings? This is gonna be controversial. I don't know who I'm gonna upset, but you know, it's like are you trading every day? Yes. That's crazy. No it's not. It's taking a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while I'm talking right now. It's like back to you're bullish on big tech. Anything else? It's been good to be bullish on big tech and I'll stop being bullish on it when it stops going up. What did the people who couldn't outperform? What did the bottom half have in common? The bigger takeaway is that I feel like I can rule the world and know I could be what I want to . I put my all in it like a day's off on the road let's travel, never looking. 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 twenty million revenue by time I was thirty one, but I'm like, I don't know anything when it comes to investing. My portfolio is basically a no body nobody knows anything. Well, that's what I've learned . But it seems like you know a lot. Close I'm so on the inside , unlike a lot of people, I know nobody knows anything, whereas everybody else just wonders. Well, that's cool. And so I'm going to ask you a ton of questions and it's come and it's gonna come from a perspective of like I actually don't know what I'm doing. The majority of my portfolio, which I actually think is smart is just ninety percent index, ten percent bonds. Well, that's sensible. But you day trade, which I thought was hilarious. Two things I.' Omne, a pro at it. I mean, there's what I did, 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. Yeah. So to me, it's like a hobby. What age were you when you felt that? I grew up in the project, so I always wouldn't say that I felt poor , but I certainly was incapable of feeling well to do. I can't even say the R word rich. I can't, it's hard for me to even to say it. But 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.on So your father was a postal worker. I think you said you were an urban hick , which I liked. I grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, you know, you know, at the end of two, you know, 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 didn't fly on an airplane till after I left, you know, to left school and stuff, you know, yeah, I was provincial. It turns out that if you look at the lists of most successful people or wealthiest people in the U. S. , you're not seeing a lot of Morgan's 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, you know, who did well. These are not, you know, generational wealthy people coming along a lot of people were socially mobile in their lives and created wealth for others and you know, and a piece of it stuck to them. What I'm curious about is because you have this perspective of knowing world leaders , potentially the most powerful people on earth . Is there anything that would shock them about what it's like to be around some of these ? I think what's shocking, that's shocking, but I think what would be good if everybody understood is that you know,, look, very there are very, few geniuses in the world. I don't know if I've ever met one. You don't think that you've met Bezos, you're not like this guy just has more horsepower. Yeah, or most of the people I meet , I can't I'm not saying I can do what they do, but I can see how they can do what they do. Very few people have met in my life where I can't even see the world through their eyes or I can't even see how they do what they do. Elon Musk may be a guy like that where I don't know how have you met him? Yeah, a lot. Don't forget we underwrote his, you know, a lot of his stuff. When you met him, did you didn't think when you when you, you know, you know him, I guess. You didn't think this guy's different? Oh, no, no, I'm saying he's very different. I'm giving you an extreme case where a guy but when people toss around the word genius, there's a lot of words that get tossed around superstar that get diluted. The bigger takeaway is that I've known people who've done very, very well and in high office and high there. And guess what? After they finish speaking, they said how they say, how did I do? Like they want affirmation and they're insecure and their kids don't always like them. People are a lot more normal than you think they are. And people are a lot more insecure and a lot more and sometimes the most successful people that you know are driven by insecurity and their flaws or things like that. So you also have to be lucky the ball has to bounce. You could be the fastest runner in the world , but the Olympics are once every four years and if you pake in the wrong year, you'll never meddle 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 too old for it at that point or something. So there's a lot of fortune, there's a lot of luck, but I wouldn't exaggerate the skill set required or the degree of work required is beyond the grasp of many of your listeners. It's not. So you've had teams of traders. You were like a commodity salesmen, but you came you became to eventually lead traders. What did the people who couldn't outperform or who were not the best, what did they have in common? The difference between somebody who's really, really good and somebody who can't make it is not that great When 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 winter take all where somebody is just ever so slightly better , but that thing stands out. By the way, a lot of life is like that. The difference between a great actor will get any part he or she wants in Hollywood and the second best one, you know, may have to like wait tables at night. You know, I wasn't I wasn't cursed by being a great athlete . And so I didn't have to I wasn't tortured into thinking , should I go 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 two percent eventually make a living out of enough money 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 one percent of that field . You had this funny bit where you, I think had happened where Goldman , you guys were like really nervous of making mistakes When you know we had, you know, the big financial crisis, the one that was like in zero seven zero eight, when the regulators wanted to make sure that this kind of thing never happened again. Well, the only way we can make things sure that , you know, once you're in the risk taking world , anything can happen. You know, risk is risk and you don't always know the consequences of it. And if you try to legislate risk, you know, you may think you're protecting the world from the hundred year storm , but you're also going to forego the ninety nine years of in between when there was growth. You said even inside of Goldman, you were like, we were meeting with the twenty partners or something and people throwing were around ideas and some of the ideas were pretty good and you were like, What the hell guys? We're talking ourselves out of everything . On this show, we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive. Well, luckily 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 thirty five principles from the top investors. We're talking guys who have been on the pod like Howard Marks, Manich e Perbay, Morgan Housel, Kathy Wood, and a ton 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 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 resiliency, they bounce back and they look at the new information that they have, not the past, and they adapt quickly. You know, the firm at that point had just gone through a period where it had, you know, big losses and people were gunshy . And you know, you'd think a risk manager's always trying to rep ress 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 move forward. There's no growth. You can't be an entrepreneur, you'd be an entrepreneur, you can't be entreprene ur unless you take risk. If you take risk, there's a not insignificant chance that you'll fail and you'll lose money for all the people that backed you. That's a terrible situation . But the alternative to never taking any risk will give you the comfort of not losing money for yourself or anybody else, but you also won't make progress. Yeah, and as you get more successful, at least I have, and I think you said Goldman did, you take less risk. Well, I think that's what makes people more conservative. Think of the word conservative. You conserve. You become interested and not losing what you have as opposed to making more. Now, when I say making more are people going to be repulsed by the idea of making more. Making more is another way of saying advancing, creating wealth. 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 Dary Green. 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 . So you remember how much? I think it was five billion dollars or ten billion dollars. What did you do? You call it a billion you talk before that and you know, 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. So what you said you said, Hey, Born, we're going to this thing. We might need a little and I've 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 thought it was 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 saw in us what I saw in us, which was a good investment that was being beaten down by, you know, circumstances that would it reverse. And I think you wanted to make an investment before it got better. Well, I think 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, yeah, let's you know, I'm willing to do a five billion dollars investment or a loan. I'm not sure if it's a loan or investment. It was preferred stock. It's something between a loan and a stock. And you were like, yeah, cool. That sounds great. We would love to work with you. Do you want to do some due diligence? Or do you want to like science andw porkaper and he's like, No, no, no, I'll just send the money and you know, I got to go. I'm gonna take my kid to take my grandkid a Dairy Queen. Just figure it out and let me know where you want me to send the money. 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 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 before you make this investment, I would feel better telling you all the things I'm worried about . And he said, you know, Lloyd, I know you well enough to know that you worry enough for the both of us . And then I pushed a little bit and he said, look, Berkshire, five billion dollars, it's not even it's, you know, again Berkshire is an insurance company . And so in their in their real business Berkshire insures , among other things, property and he said, look, five billion dollars, if it all goes bad, that's not even a bad hurrican e on the east coast. So put me in my place. So in other words, five billion dollars wasn't a big number to him. That was a joke and I took it that way. Nobody wants to lose five billion dollars, not even him, but you know, he was very good and it was a very important. It wasn't just the money. In fact, frankly, the money was irrelevant to us because we had the money. What we didn't have was we didn't have the confidence of the world because at that point people, you know, some institutions that were similar to ours were kind of failing, others were in distress . We weren't failing and we weren't in that much distress, but people didn't know that. And if you just assert that , it scares people even more because 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 lockstone. No, it wasn't even a favor. He asked for our commitment for that. Yeah. Didn't ask for it in writing. And you were like, yeah, I'll put that in the contract. That's all 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. You know, in our world, in my world of buying and selling stuff . Most of the stuff we do is not written down. It's not a written contract. People buy and sell bonds and things and they don't get delivered for two days. I suppose somebody could lie and say I really didn't do that or I didn't intend it or I'm confused or something, but you'll never eat lunch in this town again. You know, people rely on their reputations for probate. 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. 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 whatever I think thirty billion are you in? And he was like, yeah, I'm in for five or you know, it was like a fairly casual conversation for like a pretty huge thing. No, but that sounds right. Just because something is big doesn't mean it's tricky or complicated. 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 document stuff when people buy and sell stuff. Also, sometimes the execution of what you've agreed to is so near in time that it's pointless to document it because in two days you're going to perform and so there's nothing 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 all things equal. It's good to have a document, but it's largely not necessary in most of the transactional world works without documentation. So you're no longer the CEO, but in the book, you're like, I now like to trade on my own. If your portfolio has a pie chart, what does it look like right now? I invest in risky assets. That's what's fun for me. And that was what I did my whole career in my life. ten percent is in just index funds or boring stuff. Well, index funds are risky. They're just they're diversified across different things, but if you're in a diversified equity ETF, you're in equities. Yeah. And equities will is a lot different than being in debt and it's a lot different than being in short term money markets, which is more safe. And so it's still risk y. I would say that I am ninety eight percent in risky assets of which ninety five or the ninety eight are equities , probably a quarter is in ETFs and seventy five percent is in single stock. And if I'm wrong, it's ten percent are in ETFs and ninety percent or sing inle stocks because that's what I like to do. Okay, of that, I'm so curious about this. Of the, so I'm in ninety, ninety percent just a vanguard fund and then ten percent. That's sensible because this is what you're doing. You're not doing investing for a living. Of course. And I'm not I'm probably not going to change that, but I'm always interested in seeing how other people like to invest. So of the seventy five percent, what are some of your biggest holdings? Well, I would say that right now I'm very heavily focused in tech and have been for a long time for good reasons. Which companies? All the big, you know, all the big hyperscalers and second tier ones. What's the second tier one? What's an example of a second tier one maybe? No if they're yeah, the big hyperscaler like , you know, like the Googles of the World and the Microsofts of the World and NVIDI's of the world , maybe a second tier version down the slightly down the food no, no insult intended to Larry Ellison, maybe Oracle. I don't have to have 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 as, you know , not the necessarily the bluest of the blue chip ones, one that are a little bit riskier. And by the way, the companies that are probably going to be gigantic companies that some people know about today and are investing in. I never heard of them because I'm just not always, you know, I'm not walking around the corridors or Silicon Valley shops and I don't know the new thing. And it might be commonplace knowledge over there, but it's not with everybody knows the world's a big place and everybody always knows their corner of it. So you're bullish on big tech, anything else? Generally bullish. And by the way, it's been good to be bullish on big tech and I'll stop being bullish on it when it stops going up. For the foreseeable future, that's what you're thinking. Yeah, my foreseeable future is when I finish this conversation with you and then I'll check it again. Are you trading every day? Yes. That's crazy . No, it's not. I don't think it's really crazy. It's just crazy for me to Oh, no, no, I multiple times, it's taking a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while I'm talking to you. Right now 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 slump hunched over, just listening to music and doing nothing else. Maybe if you're a record producer, you do that. But normal people are listening to music while they're doing other stuff. To me, the market is like music. It's out there. It's going on. What trades did you make today? I think today I may have , you know, I'm not sure what I did because I put in orders 'cause knowing that you're gonna tie me up and I wasn't gonna be able to look at stuff. I told people what to do. I'm so curious to sell, you know, maybe sell some, you know, energy is rising. You know, I've been I buy and sell a lot of stuff. I don't want to talk about specific things because people listen to these things on different days and they'll start they'll sound smart or stupid depending on what they say. Do you have a team? Oh, just me. Just you. Yeah. And so you're at your computer doing it on your own. No, no, I'm not at a computer. I don't have a computer. I have an iPad. So you're on your iPad doing it. And a phone. Are you in your most what's your source of information to make decisions? I chat with people. Texting. What? You're texting them? Yeah, usually I call. Somebody will text me, I'll text them, then I'll get tired of tapping things out and I'll be tired of fixing their typos because of my fat fingers. So I just call people up. And you're doing that all day. Some people follow I follow the news, but I also follow business news. And I like, you know, companies are like little stories. And it's like gossip. What do you read ? I read, you know, all the newspapers. Of course, I start with the New York Post, the paper of record. Yeah . And, you know, when I read papers , like, you know, like the Journal of the Times, the FT , you know, Bloomberg, I look at, you know, very financially or you know, financial pins all of them? Yeah, no, I don't steal them. Yeah. Well, you know, how many paywalls do you hit? And you're like, oh, shit, I'm not going to read that. I got to find an article. Well, that happens every once in a while, there's something esoteric where I, you know, I click on something and it turns, you know, and it turns me down. So I don't read it. There's a million other things .. But I do this And then I have to think of, Gee, why am I quibbling about this? I will tell you, I am still watching commercials on Netflix. Are you really? Yes, that's hilarious. Have you outperformed the market significantly? Yes, I have for a while and I'm not that's not because it's because of where I focus. So I started to say I'm mostly and have been in tech energy . Don't forget I have a background in trading energy . Yeah . 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. Well, I'm sure you still own a bunch of goldman. I do. I tend to have some the affection for organization that I spent almost forty years in. So yeah, I kind of like those that company. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content, that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze Assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data, so you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out hubspot. com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. So like I said, I'm boring and it's ninety ten, it's the most simple stuff. It's the advice I would give to people. I think at your age, it pays to be in riskier assets like equities as opposed to 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 five hundreds, which is spies or VO s. And I do VOJ. 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 more tech oriented ones that you know, so that would give me disproportionate . Although the general ones, the ones that are the broadest index are very heavily in tech because just tech are such the market cap of tech companies are so heavily weighted in 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 get, the more concerned you should be about not losing money as opposed to maximizing the money you make, but as a young person, you have time to you have time you'll outlive your mistakes. What's your opinion on what's going on with like the Robinhoods of the world and all these like the cowshees and things that promote like day trading but also betting and things like that? I think those things that kind of democratize investing and make it very, very accessible to people is in its own terms a very good thing. So people should be aware of assets they could buy and make it easier to do some and maybe receive advertis ing promotions so that they focus on it more than they would. Maybe they would never focus on it but for those companies. You know, at the same time, if you make it too much like a video game , you can mask the fact that there's danger associated with it and you can lose and that people who don't have a lot of money can lose more than they can afford to lose. So that's the risky thing. So when you have some of these sites and they show confetti dropping because you did a trade and you know, half a boy and high five and you know, you should gamble and make that look too attractive . You know, for some people that's a disservice and for other people, it's exactly what they need. They won't go overboard, but they but it needed to be more attractive for them to develop an interest in it. Are there any interesting things that you didn't invest in that ended up turning out right? And it was because you had poor input like or you just let emotion control you or a million things. That's an interesting one yeah. Well, well, I thought, you know, SpaceX was overpriced at one hundred billion dollars market cap. What's it going to go for now? No, it's in the market. People are discussing that now. I think they're 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 that. And what did you say, what you thought was expensive? one hundred billion? Yeah . So one instead of , you know, one hundred seventy five. Wow. I mean, I could pick any number. I mean, I missed a lot of things. I remember a million years ago when they were auctioning off bandwidth or something for cell phones. And I'm thinking, why would anybody want to carry a cell phone with you when there's 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 in sellular opportunities or things. Let me tell you, I missed a lot more stuff than I got . Yeah . And you know, Goldman doesn't miss as much as I miss, but that's because Goldman has a lot of people in it, not just me. But if it were just up to me, I would have missed, you know, nobody's great about predicting the future . I try to 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 . 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 will 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 that you have to work out of and deal with, you know, kids and property settlements. That's worse. I'm a very emotional person. I think a lot of people who are entrepreneurial tend to be quite high up and downs, and I think people like you who are good CEOs tend to be a little bit more steady and optimistic. And I think that having like a great wife, it's really been like a one plus one equals five type situation. 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 stress ful job because needs to support his wife in her stressful job. And sometimes that's even harder because as much as we want to think things are calibrated and equal, guys don't have babies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You also like hanging out with you now, you seem super happy and optimistic. But in the book, you were like, I'm prone to anxiety. And that was like, I think, a polite way of saying it. But like , you seem like a pretty anxious person occasionally. No, I, well'm wired that way a little bit. You know, I inherited from my dad was an anxious person and you know, I made my kids anxious. You know, unfortunately that there's benefits and burns 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 I was in a risky business with a firm with a big balance sheet that had a lot of investments and that bought and sold and price risk and took on other risks that other people didn't want to have for a price. And you know, something if you're gonna do that job and preside over other people doing that job, it helps to be somewhat focused on things that could go wrong. And in my life, I generally upbeat that I think things will tend to work out , but I know that before they work out, they go wrong. A lot of things go wrong. Did you have any it didn't seem like it when I was reading about it? Your travel schedule was crazy. Did you have any work life balance when you were doing it? Well, when you ask me any of, course I, still say yes, but not enough that would be reasonable to most people. Yeah . No, I traveled a lot and then hairs again where having a supportive spouse was very helpful. My wife Laura was a lawyer, worked in big law f irms and, you know, now she's, you know, the chair of Barnett College and other things. She, you know, helped helps to oversee a charter school. You know, she's very, 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 Ied was doing a good job at work , but she was doing all the, you know, all the work that made it possible. Yeah, I think about my wife now. She's a stay at home mom right now and it's awesome, man. Having someone like who has your back, it's pretty great. Like I don't even know how we pay a lot of our bills . We were talking the other day, we were talking last night and I was like, Look, I'm not trying to be morbid, but like, if you died, I wouldn't know how certain things happen at all. Like how does our rent get paid or like do we pay utility ? I didn't do anything. I think we I hope we're exceptional, but I will tell you that I haven't paid a bill in well over forty years. Really? She does it all. Laura does it all. Yeah, we have a bill paying service that she manages and she does it. And you know, what the hell? How much could she steal? It's all hers anyway. That's it. Can I ask you about that? That's actually interesting. Do you guys meet to discuss finances at all? I'm in charge of generating the money and she's really in charge of distributing it. You told the story. I think you were close to forty or maybe your late thirties and you were like, we bought a vacation home and it was like maybe three hundred grand, I think. And you're like, that was all of our money. No, it was more than all of our money. Yeah, you were like, I'm supposed to be this big shot. I don't remember if you were a partner or not. I think you were, but you were that was probably a new partner, but in the early days of 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. Yeah, you were like, you know, I had a paper wealth. I don't have a lot of like cash. I had no like no money and you know we borrowed and so we were driving to the clos ing. And now I'm a different kind of guy. I can buy things. I don't even go to the closing. Waiters do it. But in those days, you know, we were angsting about everything . And we bought , you know, 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 out in the , you know, beach at the , and we were going through the math or my wife was really my wife was doing this and she was going through in her mind where the money for the closing and she had to come up to a certain amount and 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, thirty 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 ten percent . So she kept coming short. So you guys were like really on the edge. Yeah . Well , yeah, we were . I mean, we were able to buy dinner that night. You know, not, you know, it wasn't a question of survivability. I just don't think that we exhausted more than all of our savings. We do a monthly meeting. I learned this from my friend Rami. He's a personal finance author where and we've been doing this since you know, I started dating my wife when we were twenty five, probably at twenty six, 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 we've never ever worried . Look, I grew up in a household where my dad worked nights at the post office, but before he got that job he had 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 as unemployed for a while. So I grew up in a household where , you know, where the rent was, you know, scarce very scarce and stuff. So I'm used to that kind of fretting and being, you know, and being nervous about like really nervous about money. What age should that stop? You know, probably in my, you know, in my thirties, you know. So that's a privileged position. You know, I'm lucky that way . But I grew up, you know, listen, I was pretty scarred growing up in a household 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 CEO of Bomban S, Bachslob blah,, blah, real bl fah,at cat kind of guy that says evil. 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 or what do you know? And I'm going, listen, you know, I did some research on you before this conversation but your dad went to Yale and my dad went to the post office. So why are you telling me what you know that doesn't go away either. Like the way that the first twenty years that you experience 'm like a lowered teeth trauma a little bit , not to be too woo woo, but like I felt the same way. My mom and dad told me they were like when I think they said like when I graduated high school, they were like, We had like eight thousand dollars. That was our situation. And I was like, Wnere't you nervous? And they were like, Yeah, we were nervous all the time. 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 in you, know, you know, I just didn't know I came from Brooklyn, I never went, you know, I never saw it. And so, you know, I went out and I bought a sweater or 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. e Ile hadven dollars left over . What year? The freshman year, this would have been like nineteen seventy one or two. Yeah, so it's still only worth fifty bucks. And I was on financial aid, like full financial aid, but full financial aid doesn't cover , you know, going to movies or things like that. And you know, with 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, Hey, 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 I did that. I turned it in and I remember making it so that there was a difference of five hundred dollars . Like my life cost five hundred dollars more than what I had. And so a clerk looked at it and said, Oh, okay. And right there, while I waited , she made out a check for five hundred dollars and gave it to me. And I said, Whoa . What more of that? No , I used for five thousand dollars. The joke reaction is I should have asked for a thousand. No, but the point was it was the first time in my life that I wasn't really nickeled and dying. 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 horror, I was lucky enough to get in there. That's another whole set of stories. But as a result of that, you know, my commitment to my 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 think , you know, everyone, you know, in my category thinks about giving, but I also think about how it feels to receive . Yeah . And so I came away with a feeling that, you know , it's not just enough to give people what they need, but you have to give them you have to get to it in a way where it's a positive experience also. Yeah. It feels a little dignified. It's dignified and again, that five hundred dollars. I hope I've repaid a lot, a lot, lot, 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 fifty years ago and it's still something that I think about that moment I got because I was relieved I got the money but I was also I didn't feel bad about it . This is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least three million dollars 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 ten million dollars 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 that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there and they're hard to find. And if you can find them, it's hard to have this explicit time, this explicit place where you sit down where the rules are clear that we are here to help each other and to be one another's board of directors. The biggest risk is not failing. You have a company and it's working. You're going to be fine. But the biggest risk is waking up ten 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 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 dot com . There's this book called Die With Zero. Have you ever seen a book? No, but the title tells me everything. 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 seems like a great guy, but the premise is like, spend while you're alive because when you're dead , like who cares? And so the premises is if you're going to give, if you can pull it off, give now. It's a joke way of expressing it that I didn't originate, that somebody said it to me, but it resonated with me. He said he wanted to give with his warm hand, not his cold hand. That's cool. That was a very good visual for me, you know, to feel. Give with your warm hand, not your cold hand. Is that what you're going is what you intend to do? Yeah, I have to work things through. And I joked in the book and it's kind of only a half a joke. So putting those side philanthropy and stuff and just thinking your kids, sometimes I give things like , 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. What do you mean ambivalent? Like you don't feel good ? That you know, I sort of, you know, I'll give stuff to my kids because I can afford to do it and they're great kids and they work really hard. They're super , there's nothing nothing wrong with them. You know it has not ruined my kids that they get stuff far from it. But you know, I'll give them stuff, then I'll say, You have no idea of God , you know, I didn't have what you have. And I live like this and you're living like that and I'm saying, well, the reason why they're not living they're living so well is because I gave it to them. Dude, I had the exact same conversation with my wife yes. So if I gave it to them, why am I then acting acting , you know , regretful that they have it. I had the same talk with my wife yesterday. I remember saying telling her we had just hung out with someone who was born into a wealthy family and I was envious. I was like, that asshole hasn't worked hard for this and that. And it was rooted a little bit in jealousy of like, you know, I'm better than them 'cause 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 going to be the people that I dislike . And I thought that was really strange. 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, you know, terrific. They worked hard, they went to good schools. They applied. They worked at Goldman. No, each worked. You know, Goldman's a kind of firm that doesn't discourage people from bringing their kids into the business. It was an old partnership , 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. 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 don't work hard and they'll think there so there's a lot of pressure on kids to come in ear ly, stay later, show their mockup. Yeah, there's some baggage. There's baggage that they have to overcome. And so it would have been too oppressive for them to do. Yeah. I saw someone, I think it was like, I was researching and it was like an old gaulker article. Yeah. And you seem pretty tough skinned. I would have been very upset about that about people writing that stuff. That would have been I was very, 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 I wouldn't be 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 still hard. I mean, like, oh, I didn't like it, but it turns out I could be, um , 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 want, you know, to survive that, you'd needed a thick skin and I had one. Was there a point where you thought this isn't gonna work? No. It felt good the whole or if it didn't feel good , but 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 people 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 'em a bit. People have different wirings. Some people are athletic, some people aren't. Do you think you're born a great investor? I don't know. I certainly wasn't, so I can't tell you. You don't think you were? No, I ran a firm that contained a lot of great investors. I'm not a bad investor. I can read balance sheet and plans and proposals and I have opinions on the future. A lot of times I'm right, but I didn't again, I didn't climb the ranks because specifically I was an investor. Goldman Sachs has great investors and great salesmen and great traders and great bankers and this . And you know, fortunately I didn't have to be the greatest at any one of those things. I was a pretty good manager and I was a pretty good strateg ist for the business and I was a good partner to other people . And that was what was required of my job. Just look , maybe once upon a time the captain of the ship got to be captain because he could do every job on the boat. I'm not sure that's true in a nuclear navy. And so I will tell you maybe there was a time that the person who ran a financial firm could do was best at every job in that firm . But I didn't't I couldn have been. No one could be at a firm as complicated and as big and diverse as Goldman and so I didn't have to be. My last question, you had this really cool thought. It was awesome, actually. And I wrote it down and I've been thinking about it a lot. This idea that someone said it to you when you became a partner , you were like or they were like, you know, our goal here is that you become successful enough that when you die, there will be a really long multi paragraph obituary about you. And we hope that your time at Goldman is only a sentence or two. Yes, that was when I got when you make partner you had a conversation with senior partner there who was sort of assigned to acculturate new people to the firm and he gave you some rules about the ro ad, you know, things like make sure you don't get anywhere near anything that would today would be called met two kind of activity. You know, the warnings of that kind of stuff, then a warning to make sure you're very rigorous and conservative on your taxes. Yeah . And then there were two other things that they advised, one of which is they set up a charitable foundation for you and they said, We expect you to do this, to use it. And to give money away and it's good for your personal life , and it's also good for your professional life to be thought of as somebody who gives back to the community. And as a result of being on philanthropic boards and other things, you 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 your balance in your life , you know, think of it this way. If you live the kind of life that there's an obituary written about you, and it's nine paragraphs long , make it so that you do enough so that there's no more than three of those nine paragraphs or about your life at Goldman. And now that may be the best, but it's not going to be the case for me because I was I stayed too long. That's what I was going to ask you. What are you going? You have to do something now. What are you going to do? Maybe I'll join the foreign legion or go up in a space . What do you hope the rest of the paragraphs will be? Do you have a do you have like a goal? 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, you know, the queen stay I was caught, you know, as a CEO in a long time. I stayed a long time. And you do other things, but I don't think I'm ever going to be too separated from my experience at Goldman. And look, I wrote a book called Streetwise Getting Two and Through Goldman Sachs. So when I wrote a memoir, it even has Goldman Sachs in the subtitles. So I'm never going to I'm not going to comply with that piece of advice, but I knew where the advice was coming from. The important thing is and I do, I serve on boards and I do other activities and I'm interested in other stuff . I retired early enough with enough gas in the tank that I could go out and learn, you know, I tried teaching a little bit and I said, you know, something better than teaching. I want to learn . And so I, you know, take some courses online and do some, you know, things . And that's the luxury of my position now. So 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, there's background noise . I read a lot of financial stuff, but I also read about cosmology and the physics of small stuff, and I'm interested in linguistics and anthropology and I read a lot of history. I think you said you were like, if a traitor asked me what to study, I still want to study history. I do. What do you what do you read? You know, a while ago, for some reason, I chewed medieval history because it's hard to follow. Yeah, it is. It's very hard to follow, but then I sort of got caught up in it because of, you know, the way people fought in those days, relationship with religion in the church . And I sort of got interested in reading it. And sometimes you pick up good authors that you really like the way they write and so are you less interested in the topic they pick to write about than the fact that they're writing it. I tend to I like reading a lot of biographies. Which one moved the needle for you most? For me it was Titan and I know you did a thing with Ron Churnow. Actually, I read Titan. I didn't love it as much as that. I mean, you know, the rock obviously about Rockefeller . And I've read a lot of his I've read a lot when I read 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 pure to 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, a great book, not a biography, but a fantastic book. And by the way, very influential book. World War I, it's about. Yes. But very influential because it shows how you can get caught up in a vortex Forces started to mobilize it alm.ost It 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 fourteenth 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 fourteenth century Reason was called a distant mirror. She wrote this book like in the middle of the Cold War when everybody was worried that the world was going to be blown apart in a nuclear war and stuff. And actually, in the fourteenth century was a time when they had the black plague and the papal schism, and the Hundred Years War was a very stressful time in Europe and the world in general , but certainly in Europe and people were very, very fatalistic in their attitude. And that's why it was called a distant mirror. It was like sort of like a mirror on the twentieth century. And the jumping off point for telling the story was this particular guy, Baron Cousi was a French aristocrat, but he fought in the Hundred Years War. He ended up marrying an English woman. And so he appeared, it was like Zelek, he popped up in a lot of places. And so it gave me the opportunity to write a history of a lot of different of what was going on in that era. And that I enjoyed reading that book. That was one of the few books I've read twice. That's awesome. I also liked totally different. I liked reading The Power Broker about Robert Moses Carroll. Robert Carroll. He just had a thing at the American History Museum. Yes. It was awesome. And I'll tell you the interesting thing is the reason why I reread that. I read that book once when I was and reaudience won't necessarily there's no reason why they shouldn't know him, but it was a guy who basically built New York and well the power broker because he asserted power that on paper he shouldn't have had, but by dint of his personality and different offices he held and clever things he really was a power broker to the point of domin ating even the elected officials who were nominally his boss . And there were aspects that he did great things, you know, he built , you know, from the Long Island Expressway to all sorts of things , you know, but he also , you know, had personality flaws that today look worse than they did in that era. Yeah, I mean, he's accused of being like a pretty big racist . He's 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. And you know, so think of, you know, think of the founding fathers who, you know, created a 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 how do you look at that? Does that disqualify the good things that they did? Or it gets very confusing and hard to fathom and different people have different views about these things. And he was kind of a personality like that in a different way. But you know, when I first read the book as a young guy , I was focused on the flaw part . Yeah . And I said, Oh God, this is a, you know, you know, this was a tough human being. An instinct terrible, but tough and bad, you know, this. And then after forty 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 and they didn't want to do it and the sacrifice had to make and evaluating what I got done and the effort it took. I reread that Robert Moses book and all of a sudden his achievements started to go up Yeah . And the other flaws kind of stayed the same. They didn't get better, but I became I kind of valued him more. What it showed was, again , it was less about Robert Moses at this point than it was about me because I had changed because as a result of trying to get things done, and it made me appreciate the degree of difficulty of his achievements more than I had. I feel that way about the founding fathers. I'm angry at them for a bunch of stuff and then I 'm like, man, Thomas Jefferson , he was like twenty eight or thirty years old when he wrote thirty three or thirty when he wrote this document and how much wisdom. And there was no template for, really . And you know, the idea of something that, you know, we can get , you know, because democracy was a prejorative demos. It was anarchy. Yeah, and I think about that revolution because Ken Burns has this American Revolution documentary, and it's just I didn't realize how consequential the American Revolution was and how like for the most part there had never been democracy at such a large scale. And they made this document that was self amending. Like this idea that you can like, we are flawed and you can fix it and that 's just like that was if you read a book I just read a book on the Constitution, that was even debated. There's a cool one by the guy who did the Brooklyn Bridge one where it talks about how it was the most important words of the Constitution was we believe these truths to be self evident. And it just goes and yet despite the self evidence of the rules, they still had us, you know, they debated slavery. And by the way, it's not that they didn't know it was wrong at the time and missed it. They knew they knew. But by the way, another good book to read is it's part of it will ultimately be a three volume scene by Rick Atkinson on the American Revolution. But the first one is called The British Are Coming and he has a second volume is out . 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 debate it because then you have views, you know, people 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 it. They renamed Columbus Day because he was, you know , bad to the indigenous people, which I'm sure he was , but a ship that was not as long as your backyard swimming pool , you know , in the fifteenth century steered 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 character istics and achievements that are worth admiring just because there were other flaws in the person that delivered the achievement. It's it's crazy. Yeah, I've I've ignored the American Revolution for a long time and I've now gone down this path because that of Ken Kensburn 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 bedegas that are owned by Vietnamese families or like oh spectacular and I'm like, this is the greatest place on earth where someone can come with nothing and like my favorite part is walking around here. You see these bedegas and they're called American cowboy or like American Inc. And like someone was so proud but they didn't speak English enough to know but they just knew that like cowboy in America was like cool . I know this is going to be controversial. I don't know who I'm going to upset but you know it's like I, would say that most of the people who are prominent social democrats grew up in prosperous families here. Of course. And let me tell you, the people who grew up under communism don't wish the country was socialist. Of course. I mean, it's crazy, it's crazy, but you know, but I love like this immigrant like particularly like the immigrant journey, you know, I think I freakin' 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 think it's really cool. But not everybody's competent. Everyone's capable, but the fact that people can do it, look, you know, I agree with you. And 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. Of course. Where else can you? The way that I described America is I'm like, it's mostly good and you can and we can improve. And you could talk about all the bad stuff and you generally won't be arrested for it. Yeah. It's mostly great and we can improve it. would be. No, God, I am, but look, everybody has to rediscover these things. And maybe it's, you know, maybe it's a function of age. You know, I could talk to you about history all day. I'm so happy that you're into that. No, no, I think that's why I like the upper one. No, no, I like the history part and I'll tell you why it relates to the commercial life is that you can is that history again doesn't repeat, but to paraphrase a remark attributed to, you know, Twain, Mark Twain, is it doesn't repeat, but it rhymes . And so patterns happen again. So we're going through these tough times. And oh, it's none like anything, but it's not that different from the late sixties 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 the norms of society, you know, the norms of 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 know, Japanese American citizens who were Japanese descent in camps because we were freaked out by world, you know, by Pearl Harbor. And then we overcame those things and regretted them afterwards. So even at the worst, there's hope there's always hope for America and America has always fulfilled those hopes eventually. Yeah, I think Warren Buffet or you I think, quot,ed Warren Buffett in the book saying like, you know, I wouldn't bet against America or I think a lot of people have said that. I wouldn't bet I wouldn't get against America. And though, you know, so if you watch the evening news, you read the newspaper, you'd walk away with one set of views. Well, I think there's a lot of lazy phrases. For example, I see people online and they'll make comments 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 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 . Now I'm thinking today, you know, when I was when I was a cheat, you know, I was crossing into adulthood , they were drafting people Vietnam war, the 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, three hundred and fifty, four hundred and fifty, six hundred died. And then, of course , compare that to World War two . When, you know, when thousands Yeah, died for years. And so, you know, every generation has its challenges. Every generation minimizes the challenges of the past because they're resolved and can't get worse and maxim izes the challenges that people face today because they're still scared of them because they're not resolved . And so that's why it's good to read that's why I think it's beneficial to read history because if they can go through that period , then we can get through ours. Yeah, I do that all the time. Like I remember I was reading about Sakajewia when she was with Lewis and Clark, and I purposely read that book before I had my kid because a lot of people don't remember that's a good book too. Courage. Stephan ambrose the best. And people, this is way under discussed. Sacka Jewellia, for the listener, basically Luc and Clark West from St. Louis, and they know that coming from St. Louis. Of course , I'll tell you what started from, but they started Saint Louis 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. Now they go to Portland and then they find progressive mayor. Yeah, it's a lot different now. Do you think Lewis and Clark would have been impressed by the progressivism of it? Well, what's crazy is they went with thirty people and like none died . And so they go there. And they find this woman named Sakajoea who spoke a variety of languages, and they're like, Hey, come with us. A lot of people don't talk about this. She had a three month old kid. And if you actually, there's a Sakahoyoaia gold dollar. Have you ever seen one of those? Yes. Her kid is strapped to her. And I'm like, if she could do that, don't 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 Sakahoya can carry a kid and I don't have a kid. turned out. I hope very well He turned out great. His name was Joseph. He went to my high school by the way. He was in the first graduating class in my high school. I tell you the infant mortality rate was a lot higher than. So keep ing Don't let Fax get in the way of a good story. Keep the thermometer giving. Don't let the facts get away. Give them vaccines according to the schedule and take good care of them because you don't want there has been progress on infant mortality. So just because her kid made it through, I ended up dying of illness at or early fortunes. So my story doesn't exactly hold true, but I appreciate you so much. This is awesome. Yeah , my pleasure. All right, that's it. That's a pod. I feel like I can rule the world and know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like a day's all the road let's travel never looking back . All right, let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast. Because if you're listening to this, you like podcasts. And what's better than one podcast? Another podcast. 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 podc ast for you. So check it out wherever you get your podcast