Lloyd Blankfein

I give you two notes for the title.

I love the title.

Maybe wisdom is smart.

tempered by time and experience.

2008, huge crisis, the best part of my career in a lot of ways because it was the time when you could have risen to the occasion, you could rise to the occasion, or you could have not.

And I feel like I left it on the field.

I did the best I could.

If it had worked out badly, I wouldn't feel as sunny about it, even if I had tried my best.

But we got through it.

So that was the existential part of the crisis that we did.

better than anybody else.

And in fact, we did well.

And it was an inspiration to a lot of people in the firm for a long time that we managed that because we went into 2008 as the big risk takers that you know we are.

And yet we managed to get ourselves

You know, we didn't recognize what would happen, but we recognized that stuff was happening.

And so we did what a good risk taker will take when you don't really understand what's happening and you can't relate to it.

We got closer to home and brought our risk down very aggressively, almost like a plane that's flying at 30,000 feet.

develops a pressure issue and does a crash dive down to 10,000 feet.

That's kind of what we did.

And so, you know, I feel looking back at it, I felt that that's the time when I made the biggest difference.