YouSaid · the spoken record

Lloyd Blankfein

lines on the record: 113
first: 2026-05-12
most recent: 2026-05-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I would say that I grew up with Manhattan looming in the distance. I think I probably, when I was, before I went to college, I probably went into Manhattan three times or something like that. And I think twice was to the radio city music hall Christmas show. And I know once of them was an interview to go to Harvard. And that was a big deal. We might as well have been 5,000 miles away from it because I grew up in public housing. It was, this won't mean anything to you. It was a two-fare zone. You had to take a bus to the subway to get to the city. It probably took a long time to get there. I grew up in public housing, Nycha, where I think there's a gradation of incomes that you can have. There's different levels of public housing. And I think if you made more than $90 a week, you couldn't live in that particular building. So since then, I've met people who've walked across deserts, people who grew up in war zones. So I don't want to compare stories because a lot of people had tougher stories than that. But I didn't know a lot. And so.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Role did living near New York City or Manhattan, maybe more specifically play in sort of like Creating ambition Me, I didn't grow up in the projects, but I grew up very modestly as well. And In South San Diego, in Chuosa, like 10 minutes from Mexico, mom was a public school teacher, dad worked in retail in Mexico. Very far from Cambridge. And Harvard really changed my life, right?”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here I am trying to teach people how to me, trying to say we have to breathe. And then there were people who didn't look like they could walk up a whole flight of stairs. And they were really good. And so just people, you just don't know. And that's why, I mean, my advice, when you pick board members, this is a very, I'm turning to something that's generic into a very narrow thing. I think a good place to go is find people who've already gone through a crisis. Because to me, people who look like and sound like they'll get through it. I'm not sure how much of a correlation there is to the reality of it. But when somebody's gone through a crisis, I think that's your best bet.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And thinking one in page in particular who was a great athlete, terrific guy, real man's man, did rodeos on the weekend. He was terrible. Here I am”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I wouldn't have predicted that about myself, but I've now gone through. We had the crisis of a century roughly every four or five years. And it's always that way. But it doesn't mean I like crises and I wouldn't go out of my way to volunteer to be in one. It's just that when it happens, I generally have confidence. I'm not trying to tempt the fates. If I'm going to get discombobulated, everyone is going to get discombobulated before me. And so I've done that. And by the way, that taught me a lot about the people that you need to rely on because you can't really tell. I mean, not to coin a phrase, but you can't tell a book by its color. And I went through, and maybe this is out of sequence, but I went through the financial crisis and we had people”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, somebody said it, Goleman, you're very good in a crisis, and that's why you go out of your way to create them so you can give you an opportunity to be good in a crisis. And I would say that my normal resting state is to not be resting. So I tend to be a little bit wound all the time. I don't get especially wound as a crisis. In fact, things slow down for me. I'm used to seeing things like that. They're in slow motion. And I become very... Sensitive to what the people around me are thinking and trying to get them board, but most of the time, like at Goldman and most of life. In a crisis time, the really important thing is just to get people to do their jobs and just don't be frozen and don't submit to the chaos. Do you think”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that was real, but it wasn't like I was hungry. You know, I always used. Moments of crisis like that, I always tried to be disarming And by the way, it was very sensible to duck down under the desk. I mean, it was a line, realized we were pretty close up. And I was just, it wasn't that thoughtful on my part. It was just that it was like being in a movie and I was like enjoying watching it. And you had all these guys who wearing tuxedos, suddenly they had pistols in their hand and there were guys in full tactically and they all ran in and they all were on the stage with their guns facing outward, of course, because that's where the threat would have come from. Then I, you know, suddenly, you know, Guy tugs on my leg and he said, you really should get down. And I said, you're really right. I said, this is like when I get into an airplane, this is another time that I'm glad I'm short. But I was watching it and I saw what everybody was doing. And I didn't see a lot of panic. I didn't see any panic. The people under this, which was a sensible thing to do. But again, to break the moment, I looked down and they said,”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went to, I remember when I was doing his, what's his name from, you know, I said, when I retired, I am freed from the restraints that I had because, you know, I did this at Goldman. Yeah. And I realized that I was playing a dangerous game because I was being snarky with the president and I had all those back and forth with Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know. You know what? It's a funny thing. You would think that you see something and you're activated to tweet about it. Through me, I said, Oh, gee, I haven't tweeted for a long time. Let me find something to tweet about. And also being in the risk management business, I always know that everybody keeps doing that and eventually you get canceled because you do something, you step over some invisible line that nobody knew about. And so I realized that from a risk-reward point of view, it's all ego and no real value other than that. But that was saying when you retired, you grasp at straws.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does it take to lead through a crisis? Most organizations are built for normal conditions, but the real test comes when uncertainty is highest, when information is incomplete, and when decisions have to be made quickly, without knowing how things will play out. In those moments, success isn't about predicting the future. It's about preparation, judgment, and the ability to act while others hesitate. Few people have operated at that level as often as Lloyd Blankfein, leading Goldman Sachs through some of the most volatile periods in modern financial history. A16Z General Partner David Haber speaks with Lloyd Blankfein about risk, leadership, and building institutions that can endure through uncertainty.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before at this technological age, not just AI, but in general, could you have had a mistake that could cost billions of dollars? Not really. But now you can leave a piece of software, could go out and do 70,000 transactions to leverage in these things is themselves a big problem. Not because it's smarter than us and it's going to turn us into pets. But because we don't have the ability to test whether it's right or not.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once the present turns into the past, everybody's a genius. Most of what we do with respect to risk is not so much predicting it's a lot of contingency planning.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anybody who's investing, you know, you're doing two things, you're trying to make money for yourselves and your clients, and so you're trying to get out there and take risk. And you're also trying to be a risk manager. And you have to do both.”
2026-05-12 · a16z Podcast · Lloyd Blankfein on Risk, Crisis, and Leadership · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source