>> we're just starting? just like this? no foreplay? david: when you were growing up, you didn't have any money. was money something to thought about? >> people seem to blame goldman for the sins of wall street and they blamed anybody else. could this be life-threatening? lloyd: it's life-threatening, for sure. david: do you think, maybe i should step down as ceo and smell the flowers? >> would you fix your tie, please? david: people would not recognize me if i fixed my tie. let's do it this way. all right. ♪

david: i don't consider myself a journalist. and nobody else would consider myself a journalist. i began to take on the life of being an interviewer even though i have a day job of running a private equity firm. how do you define leadership? what is it that makes somebody tick? are you ready? are we ready? we are ready. we are here with lloyd blankfein who is been the chairman and ceo of goldman sachs for 10 years. i don't think any of your head predecessors in the last two decades stayed that long. lloyd: i'm sure it seems that long but they didn't say that long. david: let's talk about your early light if we could for a moment. you grew up in new york city. when you were growing up you didn't have a lot of money. was money anything you thought about when you were growing up? what were you interested in when

you were a young boy? lloyd: i didn't think about money because i went to school with kids like us. so i didn't know -- i don't know if it would have changed me, had i known, but i didn't know the range of possibilities. i grew up in brooklyn. david: your father worked in the post office. lloyd: they were colleagues. david: right. my work in baltimore and yours working new york but their job was to file the mail. sort the mail. so you weren't wealthy. you went through public schools. but you obviously did pretty well because were valedictorian in your class in high school. so you realize you probably were smarter than the average student. lloyd: i knew that ranking high in my school certainly meant i was good at school. but i didn't know how smart i was or how i compared. by the way, being good at school and being smart are two separate things. david: were you surprised when you got into harvard? did you think about not going because you couldn't afford it?

lloyd: my parents didn't go to college. it didn't occur to me to apply to that fancy of school. obviously i had heard of it. i knew i was going to go to college but i didn't assume -- i did not know what it would have been to go. i didn't know what a prep school was. i know what it is now but i did not know what they were. so it wasn't like i had expectations. i know that no other kid from thomas jefferson high school went into the ivy league that year but somehow there was some guy from harvard who spoke to me and encouraged me to apply. and the school waived the application fees and everything. and i wasn't that spectacular. it wasn't like i had perfect board scores. i don't know what made them want to invest. i got there and i was grateful. david: when the you got there, did you say these kids are smarter than me? or they are not as smart as me?

lloyd: i had to get over the idea we were from different planets. the first thing i did when i got accepted to college, my parents took me to something called the mail shop on ralph avenue in brooklyn where they bought me, for $40, three sports jackets, slacks, burnt orange pants -- the kind of things -- i wouldn't say i fit the demographic. when i get the harvard, circa 1971, i'm sure that my roommates from the new england prep school community looked at me like i was from some foreign planet. and i could tell that look. i was nuanced enough to tell the looking at me like i was a different species. david: were you an athlete or a scholar? lloyd: i was a swimmer in high school. i was never good enough for college. i went there and i wasn't going to be any good.

david: did you not try out for the summing team? -- swimming team? i've heard you say you were still swimming -- lloyd: i did. i was not built for speed. i was built for endurance. i had this longish waist, and you are swimming. and these kids would be showered and back in class by the time i was finished. so i went from there to the boathouse. david: when did you decide you wanted to be a lawyer? lloyd: when i started harvard, i was 16. i third 17 when i was there. i was young. by the time i had sorted things out, i was premed for a while. i took science courses. it wasn't sure what i wanted to do. i toyed with the idea of being connected to make. but i was not that good a student in it dawned on me that at some point, i need to pay off student loans and earn a living. so i thought i would be professional and i applied for law school. a lot of people just walked down

from school to law school. i didn't take time off in between. david: you went to the new york law firms right afterwards? lloyd: i got job offers at some. and i didn't get job offers at others. david: but you wound up at donovan leisure? lloyd: there was another firm hired me first. i got a call from them. after i had accepted the job and some months had gone by and they called me and said you know, we are going to move you -- we are -- we have over hired for the tax department. and i said well, i want to be a tax lawyer. corporate lawyer is fine. and they said they didn't have a spot for me. i said, tell me. how many slots do you have? said four. they i said how many people did you hire for tax? they said five. i said, i'm fifth on the list of four people? we don't look at it that way. and i said, i can't come to work for you.

there was another firm that i also liked. i originally did not sign up with them but i went there. david: you went there and did you practice tax law? lloyd: i did. i get thrown on the interesting cases involving the entertainment industry. i moved for two years out to california. i was in l.a. david: were you wearing leisure suits? lloyd: no, i was stepping over them on a saturday morning in a three-piece suit on the way to the office. i realized i was a little bit out of sync. the lifestyle in california as a corporate lawyer. david: i practice law as well. i wasn't a good lawyer. my clients made that clear. your clients presumably thought you were good at that. but you thought you wanted to leave? lloyd: i remember my friends are going to finance jobs. and at that point it wasn't the be-all or end-all. there was no thought of making more money. the job i took eventually paid

less money than what i was making at that point. i was a fifth year associate. i would be starting over at another firm. i apply to a few wall street firms. i didn't know a lot about them. i had a job interview at morgan stanley. dean witter at that time was a separate firm. goldman sachs was another. i got turned down by all of them probably for a good reason. i didn't know much about it. there is no reason to grab onto me. ultimately i joined jay aaron. it may have been acquired by goldman and it was a separate company and it was managed separately. and as a result, i was integrated into the goldman sachs firm. david: did you ever meet a person who turned you down at goldman? lloyd: i knew who it was. this is 36 years ago. so for many years after i got there there would be no one threatened by being at odds with me. it took me a while to work my way up the letterhead. david: did you feel like you are

ready to be the ceo of goldman sachs? lloyd: i never felt like i was ready to be the ceo. i've been the ceo for 10 years and i still don't feel like i'm ready to be the ceo of goldman sachs. ♪

♪ david: you wound up as the vice chairman of goldman sachs. it's ok number of years. lloyd: when i was living through it, it wasn't so quick. sales and trading and over time, i became a vice-chairman of the firm. one of several. but my particular coverage was over all the sales and trading businesses at that time. david: those are the ones when you could lose a lot of money so quickly. i'm assuming you were worried

about people under you making a a mistake -- a big mistake. lloyd: it was good training for the job i'm in now. i spend 99% of my time worrying about the 1% of things that could go wrong. it leveraged two things that are normally not virtues but in this context, it leveraged my add and my paranoia. david: when you became vice-chairman you were under hank paulson, the ceo. you seemed to like it. and then george w. bush eventually persuaded him, and he came back from the meeting with george bush saying he would take the job what did he say to , you? did you feel like you are ready to be the ceo of goldman sachs? lloyd: i never felt like i was ready. i've been the ceo for 10 years and i don't feel like i'm ready to be the ceo of goldman sachs. but there was a conversation. we kind of knew that he was being asked to do that job. he came back and he talked to me. i was not hyperventilating to be

ceo of goldman sachs. i was very comfortable and i like my place. for the previous 15 years, i was in the last job i could be in. other things opened up but i reported to people at the firm for a long time. i didn't think i would necessarily going to keep rising and have important things happen. he told me that he was offered this position and he planned to stay in the firm for a longer time and not take the job. there was still a possibility that by the time he was ready to leave at a certain age, i would still be young enough. and i said, that's fine. it's not like i'm waiting to take your seat. so it's fine. but notwithstanding him saying that, i guess he got another call to go in and he decided to take the job. no big surprise to me. david: so you became ceo? lloyd: i got the call from hank. hank is an intense guy who works seven days a week and 24 hours a day. i did two.

he said i'm going to onto washington because i decided to take it. there will be an announcement on tuesday, a day after memorial day in the rose garden and i , want you to fly down with me so we can discuss the transition. president bush i am pleased to : announce that i will nominate henry paulson to be treasury secretary. lloyd: i was thinking, do i need to discuss the transition to me. why do i need to discuss this with me? i kept waiting to hear from him. where are the keys very. -- buried. all he were talking about was his transition. david: so he took the job and you got the job and not too long after the u.s. economy went south. lloyd: i remember that. david: and we went into the great recession. so when did you realize the recession was heading further south than people thought it possibly could? lloyd: we were running a bank and worrying about the risk profile of the institution and what was going on.

in hindsight, everybody knows everything and everyone remembers having remembered everything. but they reality, every day that something happened, it was just an incremental thing happening. david: you went down to the secretary's office and he said we have a problem and i'm going to make you take $50 billion to shore up your balance sheet. was that something that you really wanted to do? lloyd: it is very hard to remember how you felt. i think a pretty good at it because a trading manager, you are always evaluating people's performances and trying to separate yourself from what you you know that the person who made the decision could not have known. otherwise you are a second guesser. and i remember when i was thinking. i remember thinking at the time, this would make things safer. and i had an element of relief about it. because it was going to stabilize things. was there a level of risk out there that i wouldn't have been comfortable? we can spend the money in our

personal lives to ensure ourselves against every remote risks. there was more than a remote risk at that point. not a certainty, but certainly a non-remote risk that there would be a domino effect that was -- things would cave in and spiral out of control. so did we know that we needed to have it done? not necessarily. but did we eliminate the risk that should not have been born? the answer is yes. the only thing we know is that the world didn't spin out of control. i would just say as a risk managing kind of person, i can't tell you that it needed to have been done. but people were going to sleep at night with much more risk than responsible people should have taken with the global economy. david: people seem to blame goldman for more than anyone else. why do you think that was? do you think it was fair? lloyd: i think there were a number of factors.

one, you can't escape the first factor which is that we were very involved in things. obviously, for all the advice we gave in a lot of areas no one was asking us for advice on how to manage public relations. we were flat-footed. we have been an institution for our whole lives. we didn't have a relationship with the american public. another name for the public's consumers and taxpayers. we do not have a consumer business. so we became the symbol of the mortgage business but we didn't originate mortgages. we bought mortgages from other firms, and if to an extent if you buy them from another firm you are giving cash to them to , do other mortgages which means we are an enabler of behavior. and the accusation was born out by the settlements where we agreed to a set of facts where we might not have done the due diligence on the mortgages we acquired so there is behavior in there. so that is one factor. we won't walk away from that.

there was also the issue that we managed our risk pretty well in the crisis. and there were a lot of firms out there that lost billion-$60 $60billion, $40 billion, -- as firms. billion we obviously didn't make money in the crisis but we didn't lose money in the crisis. so we came out relatively unscathed and looking like we needed to be punished in other ways. david: goldman now is much more involved in a philanthropic activities than it was before. 10,000 women 10,000 small , businesses. is this a response to some of the image issues? lloyd: historically, goldman sachs has been very philanthropic throughout our life. i was taken aside at goldman sachs and they said run your life and then someone writes an obituary about you, if there are nine paragraphs, no more than three should be about goldman sachs. you should have a more diverse

life. you should do things after goldman like public service. and i would say, in general, we never publicize what we did anywhere. we never saw goldman sachs commercials or advertisements or even a name on our building. after the crisis we realized we didn't communicate with the public and to let them know who we were and what our contribution was to society. there wasn't really an emphasis to say we are philanthropic. we have never not been. david: personal you have been involved in another -- and a number of philanthropic things. would you ever go into secretary of treasury or something like that? lloyd: without hesitation, i i said would like to be wanted to do that. i would have to think about it. in this environment, you won't argue with me on the point that it don't think an invitation is likely to come. but you never know. i am not soliciting it but it

would be crazy. people would say oh, i wouldn't want to do that. of course you want to make a contribution. david: how do you define leadership? what are the examples in your mind of what it takes to be a great leader? lloyd: different leaders and different cultures require different things. in the crisis you have to be optimistic but not so optimistic that you lose credibility. you have to be willing to take a punch. you have to have a compass. yet to be, if not charismatic, you have to be articulate because you have to bring people along. you have to get people to behave well. i said in the crisis to people that remember, act well now. because people are going to remember forever how you act in this critical time. so think about it. we are going to get through this. and your reputation that you form in this period of time will

stay with you forever. david: did you go for a second or third opinion just to be sure? lloyd: my whole life is about risk management and due diligence and worrying about details here it you really can't tell anybody until you tell everybody. ♪

♪ david: about a year or so ago, you are diagnosed with lymphoma. how did you deal with that when he first learned that treatment was necessary? did you think about stepping back from goldman? lloyd: i started having some symptoms at the time. they were just little problems that were easily explained in other ways. i had a cough. i had summer allergies, i thought. i had pains when i exercised. i have never been this age before. i started to lose weight. but i was always trying to lose weight. i just thought i was unusually disciplined this time around. when i collected that stuff i went in to see a doctor. first, saw nothing because they didn't even think to test me for what i had. prescribed allergy medicine and then a couple of weeks later, it didn't go away so i took a full cat scan. and that lit up like a christmas tree. he called me up and told me i had lymphoma. david: when a doctor tells you,

did they say you could treat it? or did he say this could be life-threatening? lloyd: it's life-threatening, for sure. there are over 70 different kinds of lymphoma. hodgkins, non-hodgkin's each one , carries its own risks. i had the more aggressive type which is dangerous. more dangerous, obviously. but it is curable. david: you are the hospital, sometimes three or four days for chemo? lloyd: the treatment that i had was six three-week cycles. so three weeks, six times on a cycle basis. the first 4.5 days of the cycle, about 98 hours or so, i would be getting chemo night and day continuously. david: did you go for a second and third opinion, just to be sure? or did you say uncomfortable with the initial prescription? lloyd: it's funny. you don't know how you will react to things until you live through them, but my whole life

is about risk management. due diligence and worrying about details. when this happened, it was so quick that when i have the cat scan, i knew i had lymphoma but i didn't know what type. i had to have a biopsy. which is general surgery. then it takes a week to figure out what you have. and the way these things work and the peculiarity of my being the ceo of a public company was you really can't tell anybody until you tell everybody. so my wife and i could tell nobody. so during this time, up until on the way to the hospital to get the biopsy, i had a schedule and a televised thing with a lot of reporters. we did that whole thing. went to the hospital. waited five days for the report. i went to get the results of the report and the thing was so kind of advanced and it was so

mandated what the treatment would be, i literally went upstairs and the doctor who delivered the results right upstairs to strap on the first of the chemo treatments. i did not get a second opinion. david: so the treatment is now been completed, is that right? now that you have had this, you are in remission? lloyd: right. david so that means you are : always subject to being hurt again in some way but generally you are in good health. lloyd: in fact, i should have been worried before i knew i had the problem at all. i should've been worried i would get it for the first time. now, i'm on edge because i'm worried about getting it for the second time. if i know better, i would be worried about getting it the first time. david: when you heard about the description of what you had and the necessary medication, do you think maybe life will be different for me and maybe i should step down as ceo and smell the flowers a little bit more? or you did not think about that? lloyd: i am very reality-based. maybe i'm not that spiritual, i don't know. but i was focused. again, the news of what is

happening, i knew it was lymphoma. i got on the telephone and people said, how jarring was that? it is a funny way to think about it but in some extent, i am a fatalist in some ways. i said every time i've ever gotten a physical and the doctor said there was nothing wrong with me, i was shocked. so finally somebody called me and said something was wrong with me. i sent par for the course. david: when i first met you, you did not have a beard. you have kept it. is that a permanent addition? lloyd: it shape itself and i have the chemo treatment. i love it. if it is in a victory it is a sign i'm gaining. so for my wife, i think it was very symbolic to allow the beard to be here. david: let me wrap up by asking you about your legacy.

well would you like ultimately when you do leave to be your legacy? lloyd: you are founder. i'm not a founder. golden sachs was a great firm when i got here. and hopefully it will be a great firm when i leave. so what i want to contribute is, i want to leave the firm at least as good. let me legal -- let me be more ambitious. stronger than it was when i found it. more influential. important, but given what we have had to work our way through, i would like to use the -- leave the firm also viewed as important to the american economy and culture. so we still have work left to do. ♪

trump, dold john solemnly swear that i will faithfully execute. >> that i will faithfully execute -- >> the office of president of the united states >> the office of president of the united states >> and will to the best of my ability-- >> and will to the best of my ability -- preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the united states. >> the constitution of the united states. >> so help me god. >> so help me god. >> congratulations, mr. president. ♪