Lloyd Blankfein

But...

The business of Jay Aaron and Company was kind of a sleepy business, except it erupted in a positive way at the end of, you know, before Volcker came in and clamped down on inflation, a highly inflationary period.

And, of course, the savvy, streety guys at Jay Aaron

extrapolated the value of the firm at the peaky-peaky part of its thing and sold itself to Goldman.

At the same time, DLJ, which was an investment bank at that time, bought Ackley, and Salomon Brothers and Fibro got together.

So it was in the air that the Wall Street firms needed a commodity arm, and Goldman Sachs got J. Aaron.

Now, J. Aaron...

had a, you know, kind of a different culture.

It was, you know, to the extent that this is kind of all lost now because all these firms have kind of blended and you wouldn't know the difference.

But at the time, Goldman was kind of an our crowd kind of a firm.

It was a Jewish-y kind of firm.

So was J. Aaron, but very different.

Goldman was kind of like...

you know, it was kind of a, you know, the upper echelon, upper echelon crowd and Jay Aaron was more of a kind of a streety guy.

Yep.

Goldman recruited from the Ivy League.

Yep.

And, you know, people with MBAs and Jay Aaron just recruited people and the first, the entry-level job for most of the life of Jay Aaron was, the best job to get was the driver for one of the, for one of the traders and literally, and it was kind of almost like mafia-like in a way and that's how you rose in the organization by that and,

And I had gone through college, went to law school, took myself and my loans into a law firm and worked there for about four or five years and like a lot of other people at that time.

I was doing well at the law firm, but it wasn't necessarily for me in the long term like a lot of people.