Podbit · My First Million
Young Blankfein read The Power Broker and fixated on Moses's flaws. After 40 years of trying to get things done and build institutions, he reread it and Moses's achievements shot up in his estimation. The flaws hadn't changed. He had.
Where this was said
At 49:20 · chapter starts 43:53
The episode's closing chapter is the most wide-ranging and in some ways the most revealing. Blankfein, who advises every young trader to study history rather than finance, guides Sam through his personal reading list with genuine enthusiasm. Barbara Tuchman gets extended praise for Guns of August and A Distant Mirror — the latter an account of 14th-century European life during the Black Plague, the Hundred Years' War, and the Papal Schism, which Tuchman framed as a mirror on Cold War anxieties about nuclear annihilation. Blankfein's point is explicitly practical: those people survived that era, and the patterns that produced their crises rhyme with ours [1] — Lloyd Blankfein "Blankfein's advice to young traders isn't to read balance sheets — it's to study history. Patterns recur. The current turbulence isn't unpr…" 58:00 . He describes rereading Robert Caro's The Power Broker 40 years after his first reading and finding that Robert Moses's achievements had grown in his estimation — not because the flaws diminished, but because after decades of trying to build things himself, he understood the degree of difficulty differently. The conversation spills into the American Revolution, founding fathers, Columbus, and Sacagawea — united by Blankfein's core thesis: context and historical perspective are the antidote to the kind of presentism that makes every generation believe its problems are uniquely dire.
Lloyd Blankfein argues that anxiety — looking around corners for problems — was a genuine asset in running a risk-taking financial firm, even if it burdened his personal life.
Blankfein inherited anxiety from his father, passed it to his kids, and spent decades looking around corners for problems. Running a firm with a massive balance sheet full of price risk, that anxiety was exactly the right wiring.
Lloyd Blankfein has not personally paid a single bill in over 40 years — his wife Laura manages all household finances through a bill-paying service.
When Lloyd Blankfein bought a small beach house early in his Goldman career, the closing cost exceeded the entirety of his and his wife's combined savings.
After buying books and a sweater freshman year at college circa 1971, Lloyd Blankfein had only $11 remaining to his name.
Lloyd Blankfein recommends studying history for investors because, as paraphrased from Mark Twain, 'history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes' — patterns always recur.
Kierkegaard lost five of six siblings and his mother before adulthood, grew up under a shame-ridden father, fell in love, proposed, then mailed back the ring and fled to Berlin. His inability to live up to his own most important commitment became the engine of his entire philosophical project.
Casanova escaped from Venice's inquisition prison, met Voltaire, Catherine the Great, Benjamin Franklin, and Mozart — then died completely alone in a Slovak castle, broke, telling stories to children who thought he was a crazy old man. His 2,000-page memoir sat unread for decades. A life full of fireworks that meant nothing.
Factories that replaced coal engines with electric ones in the early 1900s got only 6% efficiency gains. Those that redesigned their entire factory around electricity got a 3x productivity improvement. Swapping AI tools into your existing structure will give you 6%. Rebuilding around AI will give you 10x.
Lebanese terrorists backed by Iran were holding American hostages throughout the Reagan presidency. Reagan had loudly campaigned against negotiating with terrorists — putting him in an impossible position that his team quietly decided to ignore.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the US openly supplied Iraq with weapons, training, and intelligence. At the same time, Oliver North was secretly funneling missiles to Iran. The US was playing both sides of a shooting war.
Oliver North traveled to Iran under the alias 'William P. Goode' with a fake passport. CIA Director William Casey allegedly gave him cyanide pills so he could kill himself rather than be tortured if captured. He returned safely and the deal moved forward.
The Pentagon sold missiles to the CIA for $3,700 each. The CIA sold them to Richard Secord at cost. Secord sold them to Iranian middleman Ghorbanifar for $10,000 each. Ghorbanifar charged Iran even more. The profit — including $3 million in interest in one Swiss account — was diverted directly to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
America secretly transferred 2,000 missiles and missile parts to Iran in 8 shipments over more than a year. Only 3 of 7 hostages were released. Three more were taken. The net result was zero freed hostages and a full-blown constitutional scandal.
On October 5, 1986, a CIA Contra supply plane flew a weapons drop at 2,500 feet in broad daylight. A Sandinista soldier shot it down. The only survivor, Eugene Hasenfuss, had borrowed a parachute from his skydiving brother. He was captured, paraded in front of cameras, and told the Sandinistas everything he knew.
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