How the Ex-Goldman CEO actually invests his own money

**Lloyd Blanfein** (0:00)
The difference between somebody who's really, really good and somebody who can't make it is not that great.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
Goldman Sachs Senior Chairman and former CEO Lloyd Blanfein.

**Sam Parr** (0:08)
Your portfolio as a pie chart, what does it look like right now?

**Lloyd Blanfein** (0:11)
I invest in risky assets. That's what's fun for me. I would say that 98% are equities.

**Sam Parr** (0:17)
What are some of your biggest holdings?

**Lloyd Blanfein** (0:18)
This is going to be controversial. I don't know who I'm going to upset, but you know, it's like.

**Sam Parr** (0:22)
Are you trading every day?

**Lloyd Blanfein** (0:23)
Yes.

**Sam Parr** (0:23)
That's crazy.

**Lloyd Blanfein** (0:24)
No, it's not. It's like taking a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while I'm talking.

**Sam Parr** (0:28)
Right now. So you're bullish on Big Tech. Anything else?

**Lloyd Blanfein** (0:32)
It's been good to be bullish on Big Tech, and I'll stop being bullish on it when it stops going up.

**Sam Parr** (0:37)
What did the people who couldn't outperform, what did the bottom half have in common?

**Lloyd Blanfein** (0:41)
The bigger takeaway is that.

**Sam Parr** (0:53)
The reason why it's interesting to talk to you is because I'm pretty good at building companies. I built a company that was doing almost 20 million revenue by the time I was 31 But I'm like, I don't know anything when it comes to investing. My portfolio is basically 80

**Lloyd Blanfein** (1:04)
Nobody knows anything.

**Sam Parr** (1:05)
Well, that's what I've learned. But it seems like you know a lot.

**Lloyd Blanfein** (1:08)
Because I'm so on the inside, unlike a lot of people, I know nobody knows anything, whereas everybody else just wonders.

**Sam Parr** (1:16)
Well, that's cool.
I'm going to ask you a ton of questions, and it's going to come from a perspective of like, I actually don't know what I'm doing. The majority of my portfolios, which I actually think is smart, is just 90 percent index, 10 percent bonds.

**Lloyd Blanfein** (1:27)
Well, that's sensible.

**Sam Parr** (1:28)
But you day trade, which I thought was hilarious.

**Lloyd Blanfein** (1:30)
Two things. One, I'm a pro at it. I mean, this is what I did only for the last four or five decades. The other thing is that nothing hugely positive or usually negative is going to affect my life.

**Sam Parr** (1:41)
Yeah.

**Lloyd Blanfein** (1:42)
So to me, it's like a hobby.

**Sam Parr** (1:43)
What age were you when you felt that?

**Lloyd Blanfein** (1:45)
I grew up in the project, so I wouldn't say that I felt poor, but I certainly was incapable of feeling well to do. I can't even say the R word, rich.
I can't, it's hard for me even to say it. But by any metric, I have been that way for a long time, but I never feel that way. I mean, I'm still trapped in that mindset of the kid from the projects.

**Sam Parr** (2:09)
So your father was a postal worker. I think you said you were an urban hick, which I liked.

**Lloyd Blanfein** (2:14)
I grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, at the end of two subway lines and a bus in the eastern part of Brooklyn. Growing up, I think I went to Manhattan three times. I never left the country, didn't fly on an airplane till after I left school and stuff.
Yeah, I was pretty provincial. It turns out that if you look at the lists of most successful people or wealthiest people in the US, you're not seeing a lot of Morgans or Rockefellers, or any of these classical family names on that list. You're seeing basically people not necessarily growing up in poverty, but they were middle-class people who did well. These are not generational wealthy people coming along. A lot of people were socially mobile in their lives, and created wealth for others, and a piece of it stuck to them.

**Sam Parr** (3:09)
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?

**Lloyd Blanfein** (3:20)
I think what's shocking, that's shocking, but I think what would be good if everybody understood is that, look, there are very, very few geniuses in the world. I don't know if I've ever met one.

**Sam Parr** (3:30)
You don't think that you've met, when you meet Jeff Bezos, you're not like, this guy just has more horsepower?

**Lloyd Blanfein** (3:35)
Yeah, or most of the people I meet, I'm not saying I can do what they do, but I could see how they can do what they do.