E231: Lloyd Blankfein: Keynote at AlphaSummit

Speaker 1 I recently attended Alpha Summit 2025 in New York City, AlphaSense inaugural user conference dedicated to exploring the future of market intelligence and decision making.

Speaker 1 This event featured a very insightful keynote conversation between Jack Coco, founder and CEO of AlphaSense, and Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of Goldman Sachs.

Speaker 1 Recorded live on October 7th, the discussion was inspiring exchange on leadership, markets, and innovation in the age of AI. I'm thrilled to share the special Alpha Summit keynote with you here.

Speaker 1 To learn more about AlphaSense, visit alpha-sense.com. That's alpha-sense.com.
Enjoy.

Speaker 2 Really incredible to have you here. Thank you again for joining us.
It's my pleasure.

Speaker 3 If I'd known it was like this, I'd have gone to Brooklyn more.

Speaker 2 It's beautiful.

Speaker 3 It is beautiful.

Speaker 3 Well.

Speaker 2 I think I mentioned to you that I started my career in investment banking, actually applied applied to Goldman Sachs, didn't get the job, so I ended up working at another firm.

Speaker 3 You know, I applied to Goldman Sachs and didn't get and never got a job there either.

Speaker 3 They turned me down, and I the only job I got was at a small commodity trading firm called Jay Aaron and Company, and Goldman bought them. That's how I got into Goldman, after being rejected by them.

Speaker 3 I spent two years trying to avoid all the people that turned me down,

Speaker 3 and this and then they spent the next twenty years trying to avoid me.

Speaker 2 me so so you didn't you didn't do a victory speech and you know coming back say again you didn't do a victory speech coming back no no

Speaker 2 but um anyway go on so so you went so you started morgan stamp yeah no i was just gonna say that and then you went astray i'm even more humbled um you know given that uh you know just to be on stage with you so again thank you You've got an incredible personal story, and I thought it would be really great for the audience to hear kind of your story arc, you know, from kind of your earlier years through that period when you joined Goldman and ultimately led the firm from the top.

Speaker 2 Would love to hear kind of what shaped your approach at the top from those earlier experiences.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well,

Speaker 3 there are...

Speaker 3 There are people who started out in life

Speaker 3 in kindergarten, being voted the most likely to succeed. That wasn't me.

Speaker 3 I started when I'm joking about Brooklyn, because I grew up in Brooklyn. And

Speaker 3 actually, I grew up in public housing in East New York, Brooklyn. None of you will ever have been there.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I spend a lot of time trying to leave Brooklyn. So it's always like I always get PTSD when I have to cross the river and come back, but here I am, nonetheless.

Speaker 3 You know, it was kind of unlikely. I worked my way through it.
My dad was a clerk in the post office and we lived in the projects. And I always wanted to get out and go.

Speaker 3 My ambition was to go to an out-of-town school. And, you know, I achieved that, worked my way up.

Speaker 3 And I'm not and

Speaker 3 it kind of worked out for me. If it hadn't, somebody else would be sitting here and you'd be talking to that person.
But

Speaker 3 I would say it was a low probability.

Speaker 3 that it would be me and a high probability that somebody would be here.

Speaker 3 I would would say that in terms of I don't want to sound like I worked walked uphill both directions to and from school.

Speaker 3 You know, I had, you know, my parents, you know, had an intact family and they valued education. They were happy for me when I got into schools.

Speaker 3 You know, I didn't have to walk across a desert to get out of a war-torn country or anything like that.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 I got in,

Speaker 3 I went through

Speaker 3 essentially seven years of liberal arts. I went to college and law school

Speaker 3 and I went to law school because it it was kind of at that time was a continuation of liberal arts because I didn't know what I wanted to do.

Speaker 3 And of course, I graduated with loans and had to pay them back, so I ended up in a law firm.

Speaker 3 And that was when I decided, after five years of that drudgery, I decided that, you know, to apply to Wall Street.

Speaker 3 And that's where we pick up the story of getting turned down by everyone, as I should have been, and getting a small job and working my way up through starting out as a gold trader at Jay Aaron and Company, and eventually, you know, running fixed income trading and equities, accreting all the trading parts of the firm.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 for 20 years, I ran kind of the risk side of the firm, trading, and eventually became chief operating officer and succeeded my boss, my then-boss, Hank Paulson, when he became Secretary of Treasury.

Speaker 3 Goldman had a tradition, you know, Bob Rubin, Steve Mnuchin, Hank Paulson, of going into the cabinet and

Speaker 3 other government offices,

Speaker 3 which kind of ended with me, because here I am with you and not in Washington.

Speaker 2 Well we've got a room here full of

Speaker 2 decision makers and influencers and we've been talking a lot about data-driven decision making, how to be smarter about

Speaker 3 from your

Speaker 2 history at the top of Goldman Sachs, what are some of the big decisions that that

Speaker 2 you're most proud about? Maybe there's one or two. And maybe there's something that you'd go back and and change and do differently.

Speaker 3 Well, I think, and this is a generic thought, the things that you end up being proudest of were always you, you know, having gotten through your worst moments.

Speaker 3 And, you know, I sometimes try to comfort people that, you know, the most prized thing in the American culture is resilience.

Speaker 3 Of all the things you could be, is, you know, the person who gets knocked down and gets up. And every time one of my friends or somebody I know gets killed on something, I say, well, congratulations.

Speaker 3 Now you have have the predicate for a comeback.

Speaker 3 You know, but it's true. I would say that in a million years, I would never pull the lever to be part of the financial crisis.

Speaker 3 To although, you know, some of you are too young, but of a certain age, you know, spending like 100 hours testifying and getting killed in front of, you know, being part of on the wrong end of a show trial in Washington and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 But at the end of the day, taking an organization through that is

Speaker 3 something that's distinctive. I mean,

Speaker 3 anybody can run something when things are going well. You can get swept in a vortex along.

Speaker 3 AI is a thing, and you're in the right company at a right time, and you do it. What happens when the cycle shifts?

Speaker 3 Or more importantly, what happens when you have to decide whether something is cyclical and will shift or secular and won't ever come back?

Speaker 3 And you have to convince some people that it's secular or cyclical if the rest of the world is thinking otherwise.

Speaker 3 And those kind of fork-in-the-road moments and those times when you're under the most pressure are the things that

Speaker 3 you feel proudest about

Speaker 3 at the end of things, because that's the only time you could think of, gee, if someone else was there, it might not have worked out as well.

Speaker 2 How did you go about it? You had your executive team,

Speaker 2 you had clients,

Speaker 2 other advisors, I'm sure, around you. Were you leaning in any particular directions, or were you just

Speaker 2 doing this alone in a room, instead of

Speaker 2 thinking hard and coming up with those tough choices.

Speaker 3 Well, I'm sure, you know, your Morgan Stanley culture is not going to be that different from Goldman. And I would say

Speaker 3 I don't think there were six people in all of Goldman Sachs who didn't think that I should be working for them and not the other way around.

Speaker 3 You know, and maybe

Speaker 3 10% of them were even right, but there I was. So I would say in leadership,

Speaker 3 if you're running the post office or something like that, or something where you have thousands of people who are happy to have a job and they get paid by the hour and it's a union,

Speaker 3 you know, that's different than when you're running an organization where everybody came out of great schools as ambitious as you are, can maybe are as smart as you, but maybe they're just younger and you got there first.

Speaker 3 And, you know, it's a different, you know, it's a different thing to manage people who are super smart and super effective and as ambitious as you are and have a legitimate claim to that ambition.

Speaker 3 And I would say, and you must have this in your organizations, the most important thing you can do is in building teamwork and partnership

Speaker 3 is communication.

Speaker 3 And whether or not you're a real partnership, technically, you can have the culture of a partnership.

Speaker 3 And I think, you know, startups and people in these industries do a very good job because they do share ownership. And so people can feel feel skin in the game kind of partnership.

Speaker 3 But partnership also implies certain things. You know, the rights of a partner is to know what's going on.
So communication

Speaker 3 excessively, sort of suborning the organizational chart, knowing people three layers down is an element of making people feel partner-like.

Speaker 3 Taking more time to socialize the things you want to do. You know, in a normal corporate

Speaker 3 hierarchy, lightning bolts come from the fingers of CEOs. We're going to do this and everything is yes, sir.

Speaker 3 You know, taking more time to socialize the things you want to do. It's cumbersome.

Speaker 3 By the way, occasionally changing your mind in the face of

Speaker 3 actually listening and paying attention. That's what makes an organization feel partner-like.

Speaker 3 And the best organizations are partner-like. It's like the difference between the Soviet Army and the U.S.

Speaker 3 Army, at least theoretically, where you have people in the field who make decisions like they own the consequences of what they're doing instead of rote obedience. And

Speaker 3 in order to achieve that, the leader has to kind of bend and invest time and energy in acknowledging the equivalence of some people who are subordinate to you in the organization.

Speaker 3 And at the end of the day, you're responsible and the buck stops with you.

Speaker 3 But you let things go on maybe a little longer, tolerate a little less speed in order to bring everybody up to speed at the same time.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you. I hope somebody's taking notes.
I wish I was.

Speaker 2 I'd love to talk a bit about kind of taking a step back three years and how you've seen Wall Street change over the past decades since you first joined Goldman and perhaps even more so in recent years.

Speaker 2 Is it really sort of the financial crisis and regulation that drove most chains? Was it technology? Is it kind of the rise of private markets or something totally different?

Speaker 3 I would say Wall Street has,

Speaker 3 again, what it's saying,

Speaker 3 it doesn't repeat, but history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

Speaker 3 I'm thinking that, you know,

Speaker 3 the DNA of a pig and the DNA of

Speaker 3 a human are about 97% the same, but the 3% makes a big difference. I would say it's different now, but 97%,

Speaker 3 you have ambitious people making their way in the world, taking risk.

Speaker 3 The tools are different, and you're contributing yet another set and layer of very important tools that'll make things more efficient. But at the end of the day, it comes down to

Speaker 3 the judgment that gets applied to

Speaker 3 the information and the data. You know, you want to have the best data because you're competing with other people who are trying to get better data than you have it.

Speaker 3 But at the end of the day, you're at the fulcrum, you humans are at the fulcrum of a bigger lever. Having said that, the leverage is much greater.

Speaker 3 And so the people who are very good and very important to the organization are worth more,

Speaker 3 and maybe the people who are less important are worth less. And so, if I had to say one thing that's different, I think, is that the person who is making the decision

Speaker 3 has much more leverage today because everything has an extra two zeros at the end of it.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 so I would say the winners are going to be bigger winners

Speaker 3 and the lo and the people who are just filling out the ranks are

Speaker 3 going to have

Speaker 3 are going to have are going to have less fulfillment, probably,

Speaker 3 in the world that we're in today. But it's gone through those things before.

Speaker 3 When I started at Goldman in trading, there was a trading room of hundreds of people, big buildings, which we don't need as many big buildings as before.

Speaker 3 And to get prices and to get liquidity, you'd have 10 people pick up a phone and call out and get 10 things and somebody would scoop them all up. Now someone's just tapping on a machine

Speaker 3 and they're still functioning. It's all, you know, it's better.
When I started out, I spent three hours a day proofreading telexes. Nobody's proofreading.
What's a telex?

Speaker 3 You know, that ticker tape that used to fall out of building windows when somebody would, you know, when.

Speaker 3 You know, when somebody, you know, when the soldiers came back from World War I, those are telling that people were doing that. Nobody's doing that now.

Speaker 3 I'm sure it was character building in some way, but not so much that it was worth so much time. There's just much more leverage in this system

Speaker 3 where the person who's, you know, if it's not winner-take-all, it's winner-take-most.

Speaker 3 And therefore, the people who help with that, who are special, are worth more.

Speaker 3 And, you know, so you know, you know, I'm sure that 90% of the people here are in the top 10% of their organization. So, you know, you have nothing to worry about.

Speaker 2 Actually, that's a debate that we end up having a lot. There is,

Speaker 2 I guess, you can think about AI as a technology elevating everybody,

Speaker 2 but then your point is more about maybe it's the superstars that it elevates the most.

Speaker 3 It's all leverage. The world is,

Speaker 3 I think of it as a lever in a fulcrum. The people at the fulcrum are going to lift more than they ever could have before, and it behooves you to do it.
People are wringing their hands about spending.

Speaker 3 What choice do you have? You know, you can't

Speaker 3 in trade, you know, you know, trading evolved differently.

Speaker 3 Now it's a, you know, you're entering things, and if you want to get a price, and you know, we're not focused on this business principally, but if you want to take an offer or hit a bid in a market,

Speaker 3 you're gonna, the person who is one millisecond faster, who lives, whose machines are a half a block closer to the exchange's machines, wins 100% of the time.

Speaker 3 So, how could you not invest in the technology to get closer? And the same thing applies to the people who are exercising judgment over

Speaker 3 investment decisions. It may not be

Speaker 3 as obvious, but you want to have the best tools and resources, or at least have an arms race, have a

Speaker 3 nuclear settlement where if you don't use it, I won't use it. But guess what? They're using it, so

Speaker 3 you better catch up and try to stay ahead. And if you're not trying to be ahead, you're going to fall behind.

Speaker 3 You know, everyone's going and anguishing over whether you should have the spend or not. I said, who can afford it? How could you not do it?

Speaker 3 And if later you overspent or you invested in the, you know, too bad, sorry, you know, let's fix it quickly. But what choice do you have? You can't walk off the field.

Speaker 2 I love that analogy of being one millisecond closer to the exchange. It sort of really crystallizes how

Speaker 2 edge really matters, even if it seems very minute. It can mean everything

Speaker 2 depending on what you're trying to do. So that makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2 How do you think that's an example of sort of

Speaker 2 this automated trading and

Speaker 2 financial market players giving some control to machines, letting them make decisions in that millisecond scale scale where people can't compete.

Speaker 2 So the world has, the financial world has already given some autonomy to machines. At what point do they really get uncomfortable with that, with AI agents and like trying to automate?

Speaker 3 Well, Taylor, one thing that I think is

Speaker 3 that is worrisome is in the olden days, like 20 years ago, you could have a room and by the way, I'm using analogies from trading, but it applies universally, where if something, where you'd have the intuition of knowing whether something was right or wrong, you could have a cacophony of noise all around.

Speaker 3 The person next to you is fighting with his wife. Someone's arguing with her husband and blah, blah, blah.
A million things.

Speaker 3 But if somebody said something wrong, a wrong price, or somebody was buying and should have been selling, or someone was saying the wrong thing about a company, the room would stop.

Speaker 3 And everybody would focus because it was an intuition about things.

Speaker 3 Now everything is in a glop, in a box, and the things are going so fast and analyzing so much information

Speaker 3 that you can't into it anymore. It spits out an answer, and what are you supposed to do with it? You can't criticize it.
You have to accept it. And that's where there's an opportunity.

Speaker 3 You know, leverage goes both ways. The age of this kind of thing.

Speaker 3 You couldn't have a mistake that would cost $10 million. You know, you could do things backwards.

Speaker 3 You know, how could it cost you that much money? Today, you can have an errant piece of software

Speaker 3 that in

Speaker 3 one minute exercises 100,000 transactions and you could lose billions of dollars. In other words, the world leverage has made things better,

Speaker 3 but it also makes things more concentrated and dangerous and take away the intuition element. One of the things I like about your product is,

Speaker 3 you know, let me go things I'm more familiar with. The thing about Google is always it's a bibliography.
You get the sources and you have to investigate it.

Speaker 3 Then you come up with AI and it gives you the answers. But that's not totally satisfying because how do I know to trust it? What I want is I want the answer with a bibliography.

Speaker 3 I want to trust but verify. I want to get the thoughtful,

Speaker 3 you know, intelligent response to my question and maybe an elaboration of it, but I want to go back and look at the sources

Speaker 3 or at least verify that there were sources.

Speaker 3 And I think that that's an important element going forward of all these different devices. Mere bibliographies aren't going to work and the answer is not going to work because who could trust?

Speaker 3 You can't trust it. And you don't want to trust it.
And you don't want a world where everyone's going to just trust it because then why do they need anybody?

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Speaker 2 No, that's fascinating. And

Speaker 2 I think from your investment banking lens, banks are kind of all about risk control. It's sort of letting ambitious people go and take risks, but also building the right controls to prevent that.

Speaker 2 And now if we're, you know, there's a lot of ambition from technology players to go and build agentic automatic things. I think that risk control lens is

Speaker 3 really important.

Speaker 3 Look, there's nothing that can go wrong when you have balance sheets that are in the trillions.

Speaker 3 And you're in, you know, you're advising at the, you know, at the sort of the cold front of all these changes and technology shifts and other things and politics.

Speaker 3 There's nothing that could go wrong anywhere in the world that doesn't affect you adversely. And if you're Goldman, there's nothing that could go wrong where they don't accuse you of having caused it.

Speaker 3 So, you know, so it really behooved us to

Speaker 3 pay a lot of attention to what was going on. And by the way, there's two things at work here.
You want to know what's going on

Speaker 3 so that you don't have problems.

Speaker 3 And you want to put the effort in to know what's going on. So when inevitably something slips through, at least the world knew you used your best efforts to try to stop things from going wrong.

Speaker 3 Because eventually, inevitably, something screws up.

Speaker 3 And then the, you know, and then what happens is,

Speaker 3 what did you do? How hard did you work?

Speaker 3 Were you negligent or worse?

Speaker 3 Or did you, you know, was it something that was totally unavoidable given all the diligence that you put in?

Speaker 3 so for a variety of reasons well there's two reasons one you'd like to not have a problem and two when a problem does happen you'd like to have the record show that you did everything you could that makes sense and again becomes a lot more a lot harder when you're trying to control machines at the speed of uh speed of machines

Speaker 2 so that's it's fascinating i wonder like just taking that in another direction with a thought experiment

Speaker 2 if you think about you know the evolution of of investment banking and where things are heading and take that even further, if you were starting Goldman Sachs today or an investment bank, how would you design it?

Speaker 2 What would be the edge today for that sort of built from scratch new

Speaker 2 winning bank?

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 there's different directions you can go. And the difference between a Goldman Sachs and what a lot of people here are doing, you know, Goldman Sachs is a big company.

Speaker 3 The burden is it's very hard to move it, very hard to affect it.

Speaker 3 And in a startup like yours, well, I mean, not a startup at this point, but a young company and other young companies, big impact, you don't have to have a burden that anything you do could blow up the planet because you're still small enough that you can't, even if you wanted to.

Speaker 3 And if you're a Goldman, you don't want to, but anything you do can. So, how do you the idea of starting up a Goldman is very far, is very hard to even imagine because what makes Goldman a Goldman

Speaker 3 is the influence it has, the reputation it has with the people who have capital and want to invest it, and the people who need capital, and can, you know, and our role is kind of intermediating between those very, very large and kind of very capable and effective groups.

Speaker 3 You know, the people who are the most entrepreneurial and the biggest, who have the most demand for something, and the people who have the biggest supply of it, is no,

Speaker 3 almost is no way of incrementing your way to it.

Speaker 3 And, you know, a lot in my life, I, you know, most, a lot of people, like you worked in an investment bank for a while and then went, you know, you wanted to be an entrepreneur and you wanted to.

Speaker 3 And so there are some people, you know, who you are, and there's some people who value that kind of big ship, big thing,

Speaker 3 influential thing with the burden of not being, you know, knowing that you have to have a lot of partners and it's not you alone and you're wielding, you know,

Speaker 3 you're driving a battleship. It could sometimes take 75 miles before you can turn it around and all the consequences of that.

Speaker 3 And there are some people who are wired to be more entrepreneurial and do things quicker, and you forego possibly the influence.

Speaker 3 And, you know, unless you become one of like, you know, one of the big hyperscalers who were both in this new world, and you can aspire to that, but that's a rarefied atmosphere. So, what would I do

Speaker 3 today? You know, I now know what the all what the other, I didn't do both. I was a big, firm kind of a person,

Speaker 3 but I got to a level where you could kind of wield it. And so, you know, that was, you know, that was fun for a while and very much not fun at other times.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's

Speaker 2 a thought experiment I've been having. So

Speaker 3 that's very,

Speaker 2 I love having this conversation. But let's shift a little bit and just talk about how

Speaker 2 you see the equity market evolving. You know, when you talk about all the entrepreneurs no longer necessarily aspiring to go public.
It's not a given that a company has to go public as they grow.

Speaker 2 You see private markets allowing startups to raise billions of dollars and not have to go public. So, how do you think about

Speaker 2 a good or bad thing?

Speaker 2 Where are we heading with that?

Speaker 3 Well, it's look, let me just say my credentials for answering the question.

Speaker 3 I spent almost exactly, I was at Goldman

Speaker 3 38 years,

Speaker 3 hard to imagine,

Speaker 3 if you'd imagine me, I can imagine it.

Speaker 3 But exactly half my time as a private company and half my time as a public company.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it's a lot easier to function in a private company. You don't have, you know, have, you know, obviously you don't work for yourself.

Speaker 3 You have investors instead of shareholders, but the rules are different. And

Speaker 3 the stuff you have to do, the burdens you take on as a public company,

Speaker 3 and the regulators you take on as a public company

Speaker 3 are very difficult. But if you want to achieve mass and scale and size, eventually you have to do it.
And so people will put it off.

Speaker 3 But eventually, the people who, you know, as you get lots of people who've invested lots of their time and lives in your company, they may want to stop sleeping on their mother's couches and maybe want to be able to sell stuff.

Speaker 3 You can do that somewhat now and very highly publicized. That people are, you know, like OpenAI managed to get liquidity and give liquidity to some of its people, but it's still not liquidity.

Speaker 3 You know, you can't buy and sell shares in the company very easily if you're an insider. Other people can invest.
And

Speaker 3 it becomes, you turn yourself into a bit of a pretzel to try to make the things you can do easily as a public company doable in a private company.

Speaker 3 You can go for a very long time, but you can't, it's very hard to to go forever.

Speaker 3 I think the world

Speaker 3 externally

Speaker 3 has made

Speaker 3 it much more onerous to be a public company, which is why people stay private for longer.

Speaker 3 And you're going to find out that there are going to be the next set of problems and blow-ups could very well happen in private companies, and people are going to go tis-tisk.

Speaker 3 You know, these are unregulated. We have to draw them into the

Speaker 3 regulated world. And in order to do that, you might have to make it less onerous.
So people want to go public sooner.

Speaker 3 I would say right now, the gap between the degree of difficulty in private and public is too great.

Speaker 3 I think there has to be more oversight of private companies if they're going to be, if you're going to have

Speaker 3 500, which you already have, half a trillion-dollar private companies, the world has to pay more attention to them. And it has to make it less burdensome to be a public company.

Speaker 3 And so there has to be some convergence. But right now it takes it where people will stay private longer, but inevitably it's very, very tricky and hard to do.

Speaker 3 And it's very hard to satisfy all your constituencies if you don't have the access to liquidity

Speaker 3 that a public, and

Speaker 3 the ability to

Speaker 3 a lot of capabilities that you only get from being public.

Speaker 3 But I would stay private long.

Speaker 3 If I were today,

Speaker 3 I enjoyed life much better.

Speaker 3 It makes decision-making different. When I was in a private company, which by the way, it was one company, but the private Goldman, didn't have,

Speaker 3 you only cared about how much money you made in your in your capital account.

Speaker 3 If you made all your money in year one, lost money in year two, and made a fortune in year three, you added it all up and the bottom line was good and you split and it all went into cap, and that was fine.

Speaker 3 In a public company, the value that you make is not, it's your earnings, but it's your earnings times a market multiple. And the market multiple may be affected by how smooth your earnings are.

Speaker 3 In a private company, I never cared about how smooth my earnings were, or your growth is 30% this year, 32% next year. It doesn't become ever, doesn't ever go down, you never have a down round.

Speaker 3 Did I care in a private company whether I had the equivalent of a down round or a bad year? But in a public company,

Speaker 3 you find yourself sacrificing earnings in exchange for having a smoother earning platform.

Speaker 3 So businesses that were more volatile, but maybe in the long run higher performing and higher income generating, you'd eschew because you cared about your stock price.

Speaker 3 And you might have, you know, and your stock price was your earnings E times a P E.

Speaker 3 And if you had higher earnings one year, it might lower your P E that the market gives you, your price, you know, the multiple, to a point where you wish you didn't have those earnings. Crazy.

Speaker 3 And so I thought I could behave more rationally, in my point of view, in a private company, but in a public company, and maybe that's right.

Speaker 3 I shouldn't say that it's not rational because people will pay more for smoother earnings than volatile earnings because volatility may suggest to people that it may not be there next year.

Speaker 3 And it was smooth for the last 10 years. It's more likely to be there in the 11th year.
So it not only affects your mood or your state of mind, it affects really your decision making.

Speaker 3 And in my mind, not necessarily for the better, but other people would dispute that and say you should as a company aspire to have

Speaker 3 kind of

Speaker 3 s smoother growth pattern and not a volatility that suggests that you might not be it might you might not produce in the next period.

Speaker 2 It sounds like it's yeah

Speaker 2 a lot

Speaker 2 a lot of arguments in both both sides and maybe it's really

Speaker 3 you know as a public company, when you have to go through and talk to the public and communicate with sell-side analysts, they're going to, you know, all of a sudden the volatility, and by the way, it's not necessarily volatility in your earnings.

Speaker 3 It might be volatility in the way you deal with your people. You may want to replace people.

Speaker 3 And you might say, if you're a public company, gee, is this going to make us look bad to the investor? You have to explain yourself to the investor community.

Speaker 3 And you may not think those people are so smart.

Speaker 3 But, you know, they have, you know, they, you know, you know what they say, they buy, this is a bad metaphor these days, but they buy ink by the barrel and you don't.

Speaker 3 And so they publish, and you have to please people who

Speaker 3 you may not think they're good enough to be hired in your own business, but they may have a lot of influence.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 not with moment analysts, but.

Speaker 3 Of course.

Speaker 2 Let's talk about,

Speaker 2 again, your perspective on just... big picture, markets and business.
What has changed over the past decades and then and what's different about the market today um and how then

Speaker 2 do you look at the next 12 to 18 months what is going to be the primary driver of what really uh changes the markets here is nothing ever changed i mean history you know this is where it rhymes but really rhymes

Speaker 3 We're going through cycles now and you can't turn on, you can't watch pundits on TV without somebody saying, is this 1999 or 1996? You know, we've seen through these cycles.

Speaker 3 You know, one of the advantages of, not many many advantages of being older, but one of the advantages is you have actually lived through these things.

Speaker 3 Now, you can read about it in history books, but it's not quite as vivid.

Speaker 3 And when you live to these, you know, elevations and crashes and stuff, it's like the difference between living in a war or reading about the war.

Speaker 3 I'd say it's cyclical.

Speaker 3 And it's changes. And why is it different this time? And, you know, it's very funny.

Speaker 3 And you turned on, you listen to the punditry, and nobody's talking about this other than to describe the differences between the spend today versus the dot-com era. People were making money.

Speaker 3 They weren't making money then,

Speaker 3 and making those analogies. And I find myself thinking about that too.
Not to overcomplicate things. But if you ask me about the market for the next period, there's a lot of exogenous events.

Speaker 3 The market, nobody really knows things. You have to, you know, that's why they call it speculating.
I don't know what's going to happen next. But with what I know,

Speaker 3 we're in a growthy market

Speaker 3 and things are going relatively well on the cusp of great technological innovation that's going to make things more efficient.

Speaker 3 It may take time, it may be spending too much, or maybe not spending too much, but in this moment, when things are going pretty well, and I know if you're talking to a big group, you have to say there are a lot of people who are suffering, but in a macro sense, the economy is going pretty well.

Speaker 3 There's essentially full employment. And into this market,

Speaker 3 we're about to go through tremendous monetary market stimulation because we're going to take interest rates down.

Speaker 3 And whether we take them down in the next three cycles or we skip one, rates are coming down.

Speaker 3 And we're about to go through a fiscal stimulus because all the stuff that's coming in with the last bill hasn't hit yet, but has gone. And that spending is going to hit.

Speaker 3 So I would say your starting position is that the next period going forward is going to be very friendly to risk assets. Having said that,

Speaker 3 they don't blow a horn when sentiment shifts. So you'd have to be cagey,

Speaker 3 but I would say your baseline position is that

Speaker 3 things are going well. What could go wrong? Not like, you know, and that's how you have to start out.
That's how you have to look at it.

Speaker 3 I would say you start from a position of optimism and then worry about what could go wrong.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 2 I'm getting some hints that we are running out of time. I'd love to continue to hear all your fascinating insights.
Maybe one quick one at the end.

Speaker 2 What advice, based on kind of what all of what you described on what's happening in the market, what's shifting, what advice do you have

Speaker 2 for what people should do differently now? Whether it's whether you're investing in a market or or a company playing in that

Speaker 2 new landscape?

Speaker 3 Look, what's the new?

Speaker 3 Stay front of foot on all the things that are evolving and developing.

Speaker 3 You know, you don't want to be you know, you don't want to be working on the Burroughs community computer when everybody has a desktop. And you don't want to be, you know, you don't want to be,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 there's a lot of stuff that has to be done.

Speaker 3 But if I were

Speaker 3 younger starting out, I'd want to be on the forefront of the technological changes and the opportunity set that's happening. And try to stay on that train as long as you possibly can.

Speaker 3 I know people who are 80, I know people,

Speaker 3 you know, I'm not going to name the names, but I couldn't, you'd know them, who are in their 70s and 80s are on the cutting edge and running companies

Speaker 3 that are on the cutting edge, and they're on the cutting edge within their own company.

Speaker 3 I know people who are 35 years old and are just doing their jobs every day and hope that somebody asks them a question about what's new and different.

Speaker 3 And so just stay, you know, stay front and foot and try to stay on that, you know, try to stay on that new, that train of innovation for as long as you can.

Speaker 3 And, you know, don't, and if you don't ever get off, you'll be, you'll be at the top of the heap.

Speaker 2 Well, Lloyd, thank you so much. It's been an incredible conversation.
Thank you.

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