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This is Master's in Business with Barry rid Hoolts on Bloomberg Radio.
This week on the podcast My Conversation with David Rubinstein. He is co founder and co chair of private equity giant The Carlisle Group. They manage nearly half a trillion dollars in client assets. He is the host of Peer to Peer Conversations on Bloomberg TV, as well as PBS's History with David Rubinstein. He hosts the podcast for the Ages. He has written numerous best selling books, so many it's
hard to even keep up with them. The American Story, Interviews with Master Historians, How to Lead, the American Experiment, How to invest Interviews with masters on the Craft, The American Experiment, Dialogues on a Dream, and Now the Highest Calling. Conversations on the American Presidency. What can you say? A guy who grows up in a lower middle class family, gets through college and law school on scholarships and goes on to found one of the most successful buy out,
private equity and venture firms in history. Just an incredible success story and someone who is just rich with gratitude for where he is. Incredibly generous philanthropist across a variety of different areas, including what he calls patriotic philanthropy, which is helping to maintain and fix up some of the great monuments in American history that no one really has specific ownership. Everybody just assumes the federal government has taken care of it, and that turns out not to always
be the case. He is also the owner of the Baltimore Orioles. Just to fascin in conversation with someone who has just an amazing career, I found this to be really really interesting, and I think you will also, with no further ado, the Carlisle Groups David Rubinstein. Normally I would say welcome to Bloomberg here, David, but you're here all the time, so welcome to this little corner of the fifth floor of Bloomberg Radio.
Thank you very much for inviting me, and it's a pleasure to talk to somebody who's also a lawyer, who's also in the business world and also reads a lot.
We're going to get to your reading history, which is quite fascinating and I've been waiting for this conversation for a long time. Your prior book on leadership with CEOs was when we were first supposed to meet, but then that whole little pandemic thing happened and closed the world down, and so we had to postpone until now. But I'm thrilled to have you. Since you mentioned lawyers, let's talk a little bit about your educational background. Duke Undergraduate, Chicago
Law School. What was the original plan?
My career plan was to go into the federal government, be trained as a lawyer, so I could go back and make money. Eventually, when I wasn't in government, I was interested in being an advisor to a president. As a young boy, I was impressed with President Kennedy, and so I wanted to do what he said, come in and serve the government. And so eventually I thought if I went to law school, I'd have the skill set to maybe be hired in a government and maybe get a job in the White House. And my role model
was a man to whom I've dedicated this book. It was named Ted Sorenson.
Oh Sure.
Ted Sorenson was the person who helped to write John Kennedy's great Inaugural Address, helped to write Profiles and Courage. He was an incredibly brilliant young man at thirty thirty
one when he worked for President Kennedy. He was in his forties when I joined the law firm after law school that he was at Paul Weiscriftkin, Wharton and Garrison, and I hoped that some of his pixie thus would kind of fall out my way, and eventually I sort of did find that situation where I got a job working in the car campaign and worked in the car to White House.
I'm fascinated as a recovering attorney as people who have done these successful career transitions. What led you in nineteen eighty seven to say, Hey, you know there are some opportunities in private equity. Let's explore that well.
In nineteen eighty seven, the phrase private equity had not yet even been invented. It was then called buyouts. I was thrown out of the White House when we lost to Ronald Reagan, so I had to go find another job. The only job I knew how to do was practice law. I'd practiced a couple of years in New York. I wasn't really good at it. I didn't have a lot of experience at it, and I didn't enjoy it. And if you don't enjoy what you're doing, you're never going
to be great at it. Nobody's ever won a Nobel Prize hating what they do. And so I realized that my clients weren't really dying to see me continue practicing law. My law partners didn't think I was going to be Benjamin Cardoza or Louis Brandei's. So I decided to start the first buyout firm in Washington with no experience, no money, and no credibility. Ultimately, I got lucky and it turned out to be a very large firm.
So there's this little bit of an urban myth that at age thirty seven you read a book on entrepreneurship that states, hey, once you're older than thirty seven, the odds is starting a new firm drop precipitously. Is there truth to that?
Sometimes urban myths are accurate. In that case, I read a book that said that if you are going to be an entrepreneur, you typically start your entrepreneurial venture between the ages of twenty eight and thirty seven, and if you're thirty seven you haven't done it. The chance of
doing so is very, very small. And I read that when I was thirty seven, and I thought Okay, if I'm going to go out of the practice law, I better do it now before I have more family obligations or other kinds of personal obligations.
So you've been in DC for the previous couple of years working in the Carter administration. How did you figure out how to piece together? Hey, I know a lot of people in this town and a lot of buyouts are tied to what's going on with the government. What was the aha moment there?
Well, whenever you're trying to start business, you try to say, here is my special area of expertise, or here's what I can do that maybe nobody else has done. And so my idea was to say, we understand companies heavily affected by the federal government, maybe better than the guys in New York. Those would be companies like aerospace, defens telecommunications, healthcare, all of which are heavily regulated by the federal government.
So I thought that that would be something that would enable me to get some people to give me some money to invest. And we did raise money deal by deal initially, then later a fund, and I recruited people who actually knew more than I did for sure about investing. So that was a big plus.
So I'm glad you brought up recruiting for two reasons. First, a lot of CEOs say it's the hardest part of their job is attracting high quality talent. But you managed to recruit some very talented investors with outstanding track records early on. Was it tell us what enabled you to do that? Was it the novelty of what you were doing? Was it just something different? How did you bring in the top notch talent that you did well?
Initially I was hiring people that had investment experience who were living in Washington, because it was easier to get people to stay in Washington that moved to New York, and so I did get people who had been CFOs or treasurers or the equivalent at companies base in the Washington area. Later, I went out and recruited big names who had been in government, people like former Secretary of
State Jim Baker, former Secretary to Fans Frank Carlucci. And that gave us a certain allure because people are wondering what are they doing in an investment firm. But in the end it worked out quite well.
Early on, you focus on quote returns rather than fees, which really helped not only contribute to the firm's success, but its image of trying to take care of clients tell us a little bit about the philosophy there.
Most private equity firms of any consequence were built in New York by people who had been investment bankers. And while investment banking is a great profession, you tend to reconnize when you're in investment banking that you need to make sure you click the fee. We didn't really have that kind of background. None of our people had been
in investment banking. So we were investing our own money alongside our investors, and we were not, let's say, very fee obsessed, and so we didn't focus on the fees so much as we focused on the returns. And that was a plus because our returns turned out to be pretty good.
So you're coming up on half a trillion dollars, which is not an insubstantial amount of money when you look back from eighty seven until today. Any particular milestones or markers that stand out on the path. What's the secret of Carlisle's success.
Well, we've made many mistakes, and I could have a show about twenty four hours long about all the mistakes that I've made. But what enabled us to move forward, aside from a very good track record, was the business concept that at the time people made fun of, but in the end worked out. And the idea was this, Historically private equity firms or venture capital firms only did one thing. They did private equity, or they did venture capital or the great growth capital, whatever it might be.
I decided I would do many different things in the under the Carlisle rubric. So we'd have a buyout fund. If we did well in it, I'd say to people, we'll give us a chance to do something in venture capital. If you liked us on buyout, maybe you'll like us in venture capital and so forth. And then I decided, once we had multiple funds that we would globalize it. So I spent a long time going to Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, Japan, Middle East, setting up funds all over
the world. So we became a multi discipline firm and also a global firm. So that was relatively novel at the time.
You said there was a decent amount of pushback to that. I'm kind of surprised how often I hear that. When Vanguard launched, there was pushback to then there was a lot of skepticism about Black Rock when they went to do what they did over and over some of the most successful companies in the world. People looked as scance at it early on. What does it do to your psyche when you're found and running a firm when the traditional form of finance gives you kind of a hard time.
If anything is easy, it probably is not worth doing. Anything that's very hard is probably going to be hard because many people say it can't be done. But the best ideas in time and best companies start from people who say, I'm going to try something that hadn't been done before. Who thought that you could sell books over the internet? Jeff Bezos did. Who thought you could have something like Facebook? Well, Mark Zuckerberg did. Who thought software would be so important?
Well?
Bill Gates did. But people didn't give them money in times, and many people thought that they weren't going to be successful. So anybody that's built the company really has people saying that it's not going to be possible. For example, the company that we're now talking about Bloomberg. Mike Bloomberg, when he left Salomon Brothers, he was starting a technology company people didn't think of would ever get anywhere, and obviously now become the biggest in the world at what it does.
So I guess it's consistent because there are different points in your career. Early on and the standard forms of conventional wisdom look askance at what Carlisle does. Later on in your career, you start this side project of publishing a series of books based on interviews with various leaders. You speak to historians, you speak to people, focus on business leaders, on other sorts of leaders. I'm kind of intrigued by how you went from Hey, you know, the
conventional wisdom says what we're doing is wrong. To let me find the most interesting visionaries, builders, commanders and decision makers and see what wisdom I could pull out from the people who have been really successful. Tell us how years of top Carlisle led you to this really fascinating series of books. We'll get into the new book and a little bit, but I'm intrigued by the arc of publishing that you've created.
Well, when I was a little boy, people would come over our house for dinner and I would ask them lots of questions. My mother said, don't be such a yenta. The yenta being a Yiddish word for asking other people they're about their business in effect, and so I was always inquisitive and intellectually curious. And what happened was I became the head of the Economic Club of Washington, where I was supposed to get people to come in and
give speeches. And the speeches that were being given by business people were boring and I could see members were watching at their watches when they could get out of there. So I decided I would try interviewing them, maybe make it a little bit more interesting. And it turned out that people liked the interviews. I use some humor. I had really spent a lot of time researching the people I was interviewing, and eventually Bloomberg saw it, and Bloomberg said, let's make a TV show out of it, and so
I began doing some interviews that way. I also started a program at the Library of Congress where I interviewed great historians in front of only members of Congress once a month, doing it for ten years.
Wow, that's fascinating.
And the theory was, let's get members of Congress to come and sit with each other from different parties in different houses, which they rarely get a chance to do no press, nobody can see them talking to somebody who's a different member of a different party. And that's been going over ten years, and I took some of the interviews from that, some of the Bloomberg interviews I've done.
I've also had a program at the New York Historical Society to interview great historians there and taken these interviews and altering put some books together from them. This particular book is one that is a compilation of interviews I've done about presidents, asking great presidential scholars about particular people they've written about. And I also had some interviews presidents themselves in the book.
So let's go back to what you did with members of Congress interviewing historians. You know, we live in a kind of cynical era. What was the impact of getting people from both parties to sit and listen to a scholar who could give them deep historical perspectives on various topics. How was it received? Did it move the needle in terms of comedy or any form of allowing people to work together.
As you know today there are very few people you can criticize without being criticized yourself. You can criticize lawyers, and you can make jokes about lawyers and you get away with it. You can make jokes about members of Congress and always get away with it because members of Congress aren't as highly respected as maybe they should be. So members of Congress actually are pretty hard working. They're
very poorly paid, and they have incredible a workload. But occasionally they like to come together and actually talk with each other in ways that they don't get criticized for talking to someone from the opposite party. So I thought, if I had a dinner at a neutral site, the Library of Congress, and members of Congress can come there through underground tunnel so they don't have to go drive to it, and I would have a nice dinner and
a really good speaker or interviewee. So Darris Kern's goodwinner, the late David McCullough, people like that. Most recently I had Ken Burns. People want to hear from them, and so I'll do an interview. Then members of Congress will ask questions, and they'll do an effect and interview as well. And then what I found is that members of Congress don't really talk to people from the opposite party very much anymore because of the ethos in Washington. Also, they
don't know people from the opposite house. It used to be conference committees to work out difference between the House and Senate, but there's not much legislation anymore, so there's not a lot of conference committe And there used to be Codell's which is members of Congress going overseas, and that got heavily criticized. That doesn't happen very much. So I've been surprised at how many members of Congress don't know people from the opposite party of the opposite house.
This gives them a chance to come together in a setting that no press person can see. There's nothing secretive about it in the sense that it is doing anything wrong, but there's no press there. They don't have to worry about somebody saying you were talking to somebody from the opposite party, why were you doing that? And so members like it. It's been going on for ten years now. We get people who are leaders coming from the both houses and rank and file members.
So I'm hearing that whoever the particular historian is to borrow a phrase from Alfred Hitchcock and the mcguffin, what really The goal is is to get a little mixing going on between Congressmen and senators, Republicans and Democrats.
The theory is that if you get people talking to each other and they're not yelling at each other all the time, it better for the country. And so I don't want to make it sound like I'm solving all the country's problems. I'm obviously not, but I do think it has some benefit in getting some members of Congress to understand the other side better. And members of Congress tell me this is maybe sad. This is one of the most interesting things they're doing in Congress is coming
to these dinners. Now, obviously there's hyperbole there, but clearly they enjoy it. And we get you know, about two hundred two hunred and fifty members of Congress coming every time I have a dinner.
Wow, So you're moving the needle, however incrementally it is. But you know, it's better than these folks not talking to each.
Other, better than food fights. And remember and during the Civil War we had over sixty times during the Civil War members of Congress would get into fights with other members of Congress on the floor of the House or the Senate. Sixty times fights, fist fights. Their most famous one was one one member of the House took a cane and bashed ahead of a senator he didn't like and took a long time for that center recover. But that we're not doing that now.
For although sometimes it feels like we're coming pretty close.
There's a lot of division in the Congress, but the division that Congress really affects, it reflects the division in the country. Members of Congress really reflect our constituents. And as you know, we now have blue states in red states. In nineteen sixty, for example, Richard Nixon campaigned in all fifty states because he didn't really know who would win
the particular states. They weren't red in blue states necessarily. Today, most people running for president are going to campaign in about seven states because those are the only states we don't know for certain how they're going to happen or what they're going to do. So, for example, if you became a candidate for president United States tomorrow and you're the Democratic candidate, you're going to win New York or California. It doesn't make a difference what you say or what
you do. And if, by contrast, you became a Republican, you're Republican nominee. You're going to win Texas or Mississippi or Alabama. So most those states are not relevant for the presidential election because we know how they're going to go. So we're now really focused on seven states, the so called five swing states, and maybe two more swing states
that now might be swing states. And it's an interesting phenomenon that you can have people in just a few states really decide the presidential election.
You've been in DC most of your life, you're in astute observer of both business and politics. What should we credit this this huge We're no longer purple, we're blue and red. Some people point to Citizens United. Some people talk to how toxic social media. I'm assuming it's much more complex than either of those answers. But what's your perspective?
Well, it's a very complicated subject. But I think a lot of people who are not happy with what goes on in Washington feel that the country has moved away from them and that the country is much different than the country they thought it was going to be when they were in the grade school. Remember in nineteen sixty when John Kenny ran for president, the country was ninety percent white, eight percent black, two percent Hispanic. That was
basically it. Today we're a much more diverse country, obviously, and I think the diversity has upset some people, rightly or wrongly. And therefore I think some people feel that the country has gone away from them, that the globalization of the economy has taken jobs away from them, that a lot of them feel they're not yet the benefits of America. For example, only forty percent of American adults
are college educated, I mean sixty percent or not. So if you are not college educated, your job has been lost on an over offshore company, you're going to be very disappointed. And many of those people are disappointed and looking for people who are maybe more xenophobic than maybe we should be the case. So I do think it's the case that you have many people now in the country who are very disaffected from the country's image that they grew up with.
I saw something a couple of years ago about the impact of gerrymandering that has shifted our elections to the primary. If you're in a safe district for either a Democrat or a Republican, it's the primary that matters, not the general. And when the primary matters. You tend to get Republicans who are more right rightist and Democrats who are more leftist. Any truth to.
That, Yes, that's a very good point. For example, it's something like ninety five to ninety six percent of people who run for reelection in Congress get elected. Now, it's in part because if you win the primary, you're probably going to win because your district has been probably gerrymandered, or it's probably a very Republican or very democratic district. So how do you win ninety five percent of the time, Well, whoever has the most money usually wins, not always, but usually.
So what do you do is you spend a lot of your time raising money. So about forty percent of the time members in the House is raising money. It's because whoever has the most money will probably win, and therefore there's a lot of emphasis on raising money. And you don't raise money typically by saying I want to
go to Washington and be right down the middle. I want to be a person who decides what's right or depending on the facts as I look at them, they tend to tend to say I'm going to be very far to the right or very far to the left, and that's what enables people to raise money. If you went to Congress and you were a member of Congress and you said, your constituents, I want to go and assess each matter on a deal by deal basis, and I want to be right down the middle. What is
really the best compromise? You probably won't raise a lot of money, right.
And that's how we end up with a deeply polarized Congress that arguably is much more polarized than the nation at large.
Well, typically you're seeing some people on the far right and maybe on the far left as well. They are making speeches on the floor of the House at the very moment that their campaign operation is saying, see what our member is saying on the floor of the house. Give us money, Now, give us five dollars, ten dollars, fifteen dollars. And the fundraising that comes in from small donations is quite large.
Really quite fascinating. So you've written a number of really interesting books based on conversations with various leaders. The Highest Calling, What was the motivation for this book on not just presidents but policy and politics.
Well, let me talk about the presidency for a moment. The title is The Highest Calling Historically I've said the highest calling of mankind is private equity. Obviously tongue in cheek, it gets a laugh from people because they recognized that private equity is probably not the highest calling of mankind. But the highest calling really reflects maybe the most important job in the Western world, which is the presidency of the United States. When George Washington was elected president, he
wasn't the most important person in the world. Probably the President of the United States did not become the most important person in the world until Woodrow Wilson went to Paris in right after World War One, or at the end of World War One, to negotiate the treaty that in World War One, and as he went there he was descended upon by hundreds of thousand people thanking him for winning the war. And then after wilson presidence, he became less significant, as we had some presidents who weren't
so well known or so historic, hardang or Coolidge. But then when FDR became president, he took over in effect the Western world and became the most important person in the Western world. And ever since that time, the President of United States has been the most important person I think in the Western world. Certainly, if not the world. And so I tried to do in the book is interview great scholars about great presidents, what made them important, what made them do well or do poorly, and then
talk about from presidents directly that I've interviewed. And I have a number of interviews in there with presidents of night states that I did the interviews myself. So what I'm trying to do with the book is simply this say to people, learn your presidents, learn your presidential candidates, and vote. In this country, about two thirds of the people vote for president. That means about eighty million people who are eligible to vote don't vote. Eighty million people.
In the year two thousand, only five hundred and thirty nine votes made a difference about who was elected president. I states the votes in Florida. So I want everybody to think about this, maybe read the book, think about why the president's so important, and go out and vote. That's what I'm trying to do with the book.
So you describe the presidency as the most important, at least in the modern era, as the most important job in the world, is it safe to say this is the single most difficult job in the world.
Well, other than the job of doing interviewing as you and I are doing.
I'm going to let you in a little secret. I think you and I have the best gigs in all the finance. You find this difficult dinout.
It's fun. I'm just being facetious. I would say the presidency is often said to be the hardest job in the world, and so it does have enormous amount of difficulties to it because everything you do affects everybody in the world. If a president makes a decision, it's going to affect people all over the world almost all the time. So it's a tough decision. If you talk what people
who become president, they age, they age a lot. When you look at somebody who's been in there for four years or eight years, you see what they look like at the end, what they look like in the beginning, you kind of realize how it can really aige you. And the reason is the toughest decisions get resolved only by the president. If it's not that tough, it'll get resolved at a lower level. When it comes to a president making the final decision, it's usually the very difficult decision.
So you do a poll in the book on the best and worst presidents in US history. What motivated that poll and what surprised you and those results.
I had a poll commissioned to just figure out who people thought were the best presidents, who were the worst presidents, What are the qualities you want? And not surprisingly, the poll shed that Abraham Lincoln was probably the best president, George Washington and maybe the second best. But in some respects more modern presidents have very high ratings as well. President Kennedy is extremely highly regarded today, even though interestingly,
only seventy percent of Americans. It's hard for you and I to believe we were alive when President Kenny was alive. Only seventy percent of Americans. Thirty thirty percent of Americans were alive when President Kenny was alive. Seventy percent of Americans don't know anything about him. They were very little about Hi because they weren't alive when he was president. I'm the chairman of the Kennedy Center in Washington that we've built an exhibition recently to show people of who
President Ken Kenny was and what he's done. What I think overall, what I'm trying to do with the book is say to people, have a civic responsibility and learn your president's presidential candidates be informed, learn about their personalities, their characteristics, their programs, and then make a decision to vote. In this country, we have pretty much the lowest percentage
of people in Western democracies who are actually voting. So in some countries maybe they get financial incentives to vote, but you get ninety ninety five percent of people or more voting in a major election. Here, we get maybe two thirds in a presidential election. In non presidential election years, we sometimes can get mayors elected in let's say New York City or someplace else with twenty percent of the vote.
You know, it's kind of fascinating. I always wondered is that a function of a dysfunctional democracy or is it a function of an economy that's so robust that people almost don't care. Hey, we're so wealthy as a nation, whoever's president is almost irrelevant.
There are many different reasons why people don't vote. Some people have a theory that people are generally happy with where the situation is, and they think the outcome is likely predictable, and so why would they make a difference by voting. Some people can't really vote easily because you have to wait in lines if you don't vote early. And sometimes people don't have the ability to wait in lines. Sometimes people don't know much about voting in advance or
doing the ability to get a valid in advance. There are many different reasons, but I think it's unfortunate that people don't vote, and I really encourage people to vote, and whatever your decision is, vote and just make the democracy stronger. If you have ninety five percent of the people voting who are eligible to vote, more likely than not that government is going to have be empowered to really do much more than would do if only you know sixty percent voted.
You know you look. In Europe and many other democracies, election day is a national holiday. The stock markets closed, the banks are closed, people at schools are closed. It encourages people to go out and vote. Is that something we should be thinking about here?
We should look at things like that. For example, people have suggested we allow people to vote on Sundays or basically make election Day Sunday now for religious reasons. People don't like that in some cases, but having it as a national holiday wouldn't be a big idea. Now with advanced vote or early voting. We've mitigated that problem to some extent, but making it a national holiday, we have a lot of national holidays. Adding one more probably wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
So let's get back to the highest calling to the book. One of the things that really struck me were the last two chapters, on Trump and on Biden. Those two chapters felt very different to me than the rest of the book. And I don't know if it was the conversation or just because it's so present and current and fresh, but they felt qualitatively different than me. It's also as you're reading it, the things that are being discussed are just so fresh and vivid in my recollection, but I
found those two chapters to be really intriguing. Both journalists you interviewed and both subject matters really fascinating.
Well. Maggie Habram is a New York Times reporter who covered President Trump when he was at the White House. She also covered him before he became president. Like many books about the Trump administration, her book, called A Confidence Man, was not probably that favorable. Franklin four is a journalist at the Atlantic and he took the first two years of the Biden administration and wrote about it, and it was one of the best books that had been written
so far about the Biden administration. So while I do have an interview with President Biden in the book, and I do know him reasonably well, I thought having a journalist perspective would add something to the book. And Franklin Ford did a really good job in the first two years of the Biden administration. Obviously didn't cover the last
two years of it. But the books about presidents probably are best read twenty or thirty years after the or written, but probably best twenty or thirty years after the president served, because you really get more data. Then you have more information. But I think for a book that's really relatively contemporaneous with the president, Franklin Ford did a very good job describing Biden. It's just you have to bring your own perspectives to it. But I try to be as balanced
as I can. And as I point out in the book, while I did work in the Carter White House, I do not give money to politicians. I make no political contributions. I don't advocate any candidate or at any given time, so I'm as apolitical as probably you can realistically be. I also have you know, because I chair the Kennedy Center and chair the Smithsonian share the Library of Congress board, I felt that I would be best to be a political So.
You interview Biden, you interview Trump, you interview George W. Bush, You interview Bill Clinton. Both journalists you interviewed. They seem very forthcoming. It doesn't feel like they're hedging their words or being guarded. Some parts of the conversations with presidents, it seems like they are very intimately aware that everything they say impacts their legacy.
Sure, journalists, their job is to penetrate the information that is available and kind of give it the perspective that they have and write as fully as they can about it. Presidents are more guarded. All politicians are more guarded. Some presidents don't have filters, but generally presidents have filters and they say things that you know they're going to probably appeal to their constituents. There was a movie where Warren
Batty played a Canada candidate named Bullfinch. I think it was Oh Sure, and basically that candidate had no filter and was saying things you shouldn't say. You rarely get candidates getting to be the president United States without some filter. Obviously, some candidates in recent years have been thought to be having not enough of a filter, but generally they have some kind of filter. Journalists don't have a filter as much because they're not basically trying to run for election and get votes.
Do you find when you're talking to a president and you're past the thirty or forty minute mark, their guard drops a little bit. You can get a little more to the core without that facade or media training show getting in the way.
Well, they're pretty experienced. If you interviewed Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, and I've done that several times, they're very experienced, and they're not likely to say some things that are going to be get them in trouble. I wouldn't think, because at this point they're so experienced and so used to doing interviews. But sometimes people say things off the record that you don't publish, but that you do get a better sense of them in that way.
But off the record is something that people don't do as much anymore because nobody thinks anything's really off the record anymore.
My sense of George W. Bush is that he wasn't Obviously Trump is the ultimate unfiltered president, but I never really got the sense that despite growing up in a political family his father was first head of the CIA and then vice president, then president, he doesn't strike me as someone who was especially filtered. He doesn't reveal what he doesn't want to reveal, but it seems like there are broad areas he's very comfortable talking about what was your experience like interviewing Bush.
I've known the Bush family for quite some time. George Herbert Walker Bush joined my firm as an advisor after he left the presidency, so I got to know him, and I got to know his son reasonably well. George Herbert Walker Bush and George W. Bush are really very different personalities. George Herbert Walker Bush grew up really in Connecticut. George W. Bush grew up in Texas. George W. Bush I think reflects his mother's personality more than his father's.
And his mother was very had a sharp tongue, and she was fairly critical of certain things, and she would tell you what she would say thought without a filter. And George W. Reflected that to some extent as well. As he became more experience in politics, I think he had a little bit more of a filter. But still he's willing to make fun of other people. He's willing to use humor in a way that I think is
advantageous for him. And so I think the interview in the book is it does reflect his personality.
So you had the interview with Peter Baker about Obama, I would have loved to see your interview with Obama. How come that didn't come about.
I did interview President Obama at a Carlisle event years ago, but it was not recorded, and it was right after he left the presidency, and just for space and other reasons, I couldn't get every in there in his scheduling problems and so forth. But I think that the Peter Baker book on Obama does reflect pretty well what Obama did as president.
And he is another one that he seems very structured and controlled, but occasionally will tell you what he really thinks.
Yes, President Obama is an extremely smart person, very intelligent. President of the Harvard Law Review, and early on he decided to get into politics and not really become a lawyer or law professor, which he had the opportunity to do. I got to know him reasonably well when he was President of the United States. Very cerebral, a person who would like to would read a hundred page memo and
go through it quite well. He's a very, very talented writer, maybe the best writer who's been president since Woodrow Wilson.
Wow. Really interesting. So when you the manuscript is locked, I don't know if people are where. You know, when a hardcover comes out, it's months in advance. So in between the time the is locked and published, we had a pretty substantial shift in the political scene here. When you submitted this, you could take surveys of Republicans or Democrats, they were both unhappy with their presidential candidate. We've now had this massive change in the paperback version that comes
out in six months. What's the addendum you're going to do about the twenty twenty four election.
Well, when this went to the printer, it was really in June, and at that point Biden and Trump were likely to be the nominees. As it was getting ready to be printed, all of a sudden, President Biden said, I'm not going to be the nominee, and as we
now know, Vice President Harris is the nominee. So I did write it in addendum to the book on the very back that does say, look what happened in just the three weeks after I submitted the manuscript until today, which is that you have a new person running for the Democratic presidency, you have President Trump was shot at, and then things like that have changed a great deal.
So I did try to reflect that. But there's no doubt that when you're writing a book about the presidential situation and you're having the middle of a presidential election, things can change. And so even after the last week or so, things have changed from what we knew. I didn't have a chance to put the Tim Walls selection in the book either.
So the book runs from George Washington to Biden. Let's talk a little bit about how the important roles of the president as both leader of the country and leader of their party has changed over that two and a half century era. How has the role of the president of the United States evolved in modern times.
Okay, so initially when the president was the president George Washington, it was not a global figure. Really in the United States was not a global country. Today, the United States president is the most important person in the Western world. For sure. He plays or she will play if she gets elected, a role where you are not only the head of the government, but the most important person in
the political arena. You're also a global figure who are making decisions about war and peace from time to time. So it's an incredibly important job. It's hard to think that anyone human can do it perfectly, and nobody really has done it perfectly. But it's a role that very few people would say that there's an equivalent anywhere else in the world.
You've written that as a twelve year old boy, you were deeply inspired by President Kenney's inaugural address, particularly his call to public service. Tell us about that.
Yes, I was young, and my sixth grade teacher went over that speech with us the day after it was given, and I recognized what he was saying is that people should give back to the country. He was not from a wealthy family. I didn't know what I wanted to do at twelve years old, but I thought serving in the government in some way would be a thing that would be a worthy goal, and so I ultimately did try to do that by working in the White House
for President Carter. So that led to other things, and it led to the company that I created, Carlisle, after we left the government, and then that became successful and I decided to vote a large part of my life now to philanthropy.
So let's talk a little bit about some of the things you do, because it's really a fascinating arc of things. First, you're one of the original signers of the Giving Pledge. Tell us a little bit about that.
Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett conceived of a pledge. It's informal, it's not binding in some ways, but it's basically an informal pledge that you would give agree to give half of your net worth away during your lifetime or upon your death. And there were forty of us who signed it initially. Now they're probably more than two hundred have signed it, mostly from the United States, but are some certainly from around the rest of the world.
And it's a commitment that I've tried to honor. I have given away a fair amount of money in my lifetime to things that interestingly get some more get more attention than others. So a large part of what I've done is met research and universities and scholarships. The thing that has caught the most attention is what I've called patriotic philanthropy, which is to say, giving money to remind
people the history and heritage of our country. So fixing the Washington Monument, fixing the Lincoln Memorial, fixing the Jefferson Memorial, fixing Mount Vernon, things like that, Monticello, Montpelier. I've been willing to kind of put up the money to help get these things restored on the theory that if they're restored, people will visit them, and if they visit them, more likely they'll learn more about presidence, more about our history
and heritage. And I've done the same in trying to buy historic documents like the Magna Carta Declaration of Independence, preserve them, have people see them, hopefully learn more about our country's history.
So it's a fascinating phrase, patriotic philanthropy. How did you find your way into that space? It didn't seem I remember when there was a problem with the Washington Monument and there was a cold raise capital kind of repair it. It didn't seem that, like very many people are spending time, efforts, and money repairing the great monuments of the United States.
Well, many people think that the federal government has the responsibility to put up the money for that. So when I called the head of the Park Service and said how long is it going to take to fix it? And where you're gonna get the money? He said it's going to take a while getting the money from Congress. I said, forget that. I'll put up the money.
And I was, wait a secon I got to stop you right there. Which monument are we talking about?
Washington Monument?
And that was not an insubstantial job. That was tens of millions, hundreds of millions.
No, it wasn't that significant. What happened was the Washington Monument, which was opened around eighteen eighty eight or so. They had earthquake damage in twenty eleven, and so the head of the Park Service said he didn't know exactly what it would cost. I said, well, tell me what it
would cost, and I'll put up the money. And he ultimately said that maybe Congress would put up some of the money, but he was worried initially that Congress wouldn't move quickly enough give him the money when he needed it.
So I decided to move quickly to do it. I've been surprised at how many people think about that because it was not the largest gift I've ever given, right by far, but it was then Wash the monument the symbol of our country, and then a private citizen would put up the money for it kind of struck people as strange. Why wouldn't let the federal government do it?
And I've tried to do many things that the federal government could eventually do, but maybe they can't move quickly enough, or they don't have the resources to do it in some cases, or they can't allocate their resources. I've tried to buy historic documents for the same kind of reason. The federal government doesn't buy historic documents typically, but I think by preserving them, we give people a chance to see these documents and have them think much more about
our history and heritage. And the reason that's important is Jefferson said that to have a representative democracy work, you need to have an informed citizenry, and very often we don't have as informed a citizenry as we should have. We don't teach civics in high school or junior high
school as much as we used to. Americans don't pass civics tests very well at all, and as a result, we don't have people that actually know as much as I think they should know about our country, its history, and its heritage.
So you buy a lot of these documents, how are they visible to the public.
All my documents are on display. I put them on the Smithsonian or the National Archives or the Library of Congress or equivalent organization, National Constitution Center, so people can see them and there'll be obviously a curator describe it more detail. And the theory is that, well, if you could look at what's in the Declaration of Independents on a computer slide, you don't need to go see the original. But the human brain still works in a certain way.
If you know you're going to see an original, you're probably going to read about it before you go there. When you go there, you're going to have a curator tell you about it, and Effroich, you'll probably read more about it. So the human brain still gets much more out of seeing an original. Am I view original building or an original document than just seeing something on a computer slide.
So the documents that you have purchased and made available to the public, the Declaration of Independence, an original copy of the Constitution? Did you say Magne Cartas, Yes.
I bought the only copy in private hands of the Magna Karta, and I put it on permanent loan to the National Archives.
Besides those three, which are not insubstantial, any other is worth.
Well, the Bill of Rights. I recently bought a rare copy of the Bill of Rights and put that on display at the National Archives as well. I have the first printings of the Declaration of Independence, the first printings of the Constitution that were printed actually in newspapers at the time, and a lot of other historic documents like that. The thirteenth Amendment is also one that I have, which is the amendment that abolished slavery.
Huh really really quite fascinating. Let's talk about boards. You sit on a number of boards. Your chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Council Law and Foreign Relations, and Nasal Gallery of Art, the Economic Club of Washington, the University of Chicago. That's a pretty busy schedule. What are you doing with these various boards in terms of helping them raise money and helping them do programming.
Nonprofit boards are ones that are time consuming, like for profit boards, but there's no compensation. You do it because you really want to help the cause. I joined all these boards thinking I wanted to help in that particular cause or project, and I got elect to chair in some cases of it to those boards, and I try as a chair to be a representative of the organization and to help them raise money. And obviously if you're the chairman, you're going to be expected to give money
as well. So I've been the chairman of the Kenny Center for the last fourteen years, and I'm now the chairman of the National Gallery of Art as well and the chairman of the Library of Congress Board. And the Library Congress Board reflects my interest in reading. This weekend we'll have the National Book Festival in Washington, and I'm the chair of that as well, and with the Carla Hayden, who's the Library of Congress, and I just love reading.
I love promoting books, and that's one of the reasons why I enjoy the Library of Congress.
So we'll talk a little bit about books in a few moments. I want to stay focused on your alliance on scholarships to attend college and law school, and now as part of your philanthropy, you're aiming to expand access and opportunity for young people from disadvantage backgrounds to get a better education.
Tell us about that My father did not graduate from college or high school. He went into World War Two, came back, got a job in the post office, married my mother. They were very young. I was their only child. My father had a blue collar salary his whole life, and so to go to college I needed a scholarship, and I got the biggest scholarship from Duke University. I'm sure it was not a basketball scholarship though. And then I got a scholarship to go to the Universiticago Law School.
So I've tried to help those universities by being board chair. I've been the I was the board chair of Duke University for a long time, and then now I'm chair of the Universiticago. I've given a fair amount of money those universities for scholarships for people who didn't have the chance to get there if they didn't have a scholarship. And I have something I'm very interested in doing because I think scholarship money is the best money you can
give to see some progress in the near term. Very often when you make a philanthropic gift, it may be decades before you see the progress. But with scholarships, you know you're giving somebody money to go to school who otherwise wouldn't go to that school or probably couldn't attend that school.
So let me change gears on you in the last few minutes we have. You grew up how far from Baltimore?
I was in Baltimore.
You grew up in Baltimore. Now you're the principal owner of the Baltimore Orioles, which you purchased this year. Tell us what motivated you to buy the team and how it's been going.
I did play Little League baseball, but I assure I was not a superstar, and like the all kids who play baseball, you always want to play in the major leagues, but you realize the time you get to fourteen or fifteen, now that's not going to happen. I spent most of my career living in Washington post the White House years, and I've given a fair amount of my money and time to causes in the Washington area or national causes.
But I felt that I hadn't done enough for Baltimore, my hometown, which had given me a public school education, where my parents were born and raised, where I was raised, where my parents are buried, and where i'm no doubt will be buried as well. And I just thought if an opportunity came along to do more in Baltimore, I would try to take advantage of it. And an opportunity came along to buy the Baltimore and Oriols, which is
very important to Baltimore. Baltimore has lost a lot of jobs in recent years, a lot of businesses in recent years, and as a result, Baltimore doesn't have as many things to brag about as maybe New York City or Los Angeles, and therefore the Oriols, which have been there since nineteen fifty four, are really central to the ethos of the city, and I just thought I wanted to help contributing that way, and so I put a team together to buy the Oriols.
What surprised you most as an owner of a Major League Baseball.
Team how dedicated the fans are. I've met fans who've had season tickets for forty five years, fifty years in some cases, and I'm just surprised how people regard baseball and the Oriels almost like a religion, and people know every statistic, they watch every game. People are much more dedicated than I actually knew, and I was surprised how important Baltimore really regards the Oriols es central to it's fabric, and so that's been one of the most important things I've learned.
So let me give you an opportunity to put push back on some nonsense I read when it was first announced. Oh no, a private equity guy is buying the Orioles. Ticket price is going to go up. Hot dog price is going to going up. This is going to be a disaster.
Well, there are private equity people before me who have bought sports teams and the results have been reasonably good. I think. You know, baseball is a complicated sport because it doesn't have kind of the arrangements that the NFL has or the NBA has, and so it's a much more challenge for small town teams to do as well as big town teams. But you know, I don't think that's the biggest focus is increasing prices on food or
something like that. Our focus is winning a championship and giving the best team we can on the putting the best team we can on the field, and that's what I'm really focused on, and that's what our energies are are devoted to.
And arguably, you have the best stadium in all of major league sports. What makes Baltimore so special.
In the nineteen fifties and sixties and seventies, stadiums were being built around the country that are were what I would call androgynists. They could be used for football, they could do used for baseball, and they were not really baseball centered the way let's say Wrigley Field or Fenway is. And as a result, baseball kind of went away from its roots and having very unique kind of designs in
its stadiums. When Camden Yards was open about thirty years ago, it returned baseball to its roots and building a stadium is built only for baseball and which has some of the unique characteristics. And it's now thirty years old. We'll rehabit over the next three or four years with money that the State of Maryland is providing us, and so we wanted to make it one of the best experiences in all of baseball. To come to a game like that, experience what a great stadium is like, and actually enjoy
the team on the field. It's an historic stadium in many respects. It's not old, but it's thirty years ago when it was built, but it now is iconic. It's iconic because many stadiums that are being built since the Camden Yards have built, are trying to pattern themselves after what Camden Yard cas is looking like. And so today when baseball stadiums are built, they're built to be like the old stadiums. They're not built to be ready for football or some other sport.
I grew up as a long suffering Mets fan and spends a lot of afternoons at Shea Stadium, and when the new city Field was rebuilt, Camden Yards seems to be the blueprint for that. Arguably city Field is a better experience for a fan than the new Yankee Stadium.
Well, I've been to the Yankee Stadium and I've been to city Field recently. In fact, the last two days we had games in there with the Mets, and unfortunately, as we talked today, we lost two of the three games to the Mets, and I in kind of walk off home runs in the last inning. But the stadium is very modern in many respects. It's it's iconic and the fact that it does look like a baseball stadium but has electronics and a scoreboard and other kinds of
fan services that are really unique. So I think people should be press out in new York of that stadium.
Yep, they did a really nice job. All Right, I only have you for a few minutes, so we're going to jump to our speed round. Let's go through these as quickly as we can, starting with who are your mentors who helped shape your career?
Well, I worked in the White House for a man named Stuart Eisenstadt. I dedicated the book to Ted Sorenson, who I mentioned earlier, and to Stuart eisenstadd he was my mentor who helped me work at the White House and been very helpful to me, and I would cite him as a mentor.
I know you're a big reader, supposedly used to read four or five books a week when you were younger. What are some of your favorites and what are you reading right now?
Well, right now, I've just finished reading a book called g Man, written by a professor at Yale, and the book won the Pulitzer Prize. It's about Jaegar Hoover, a really good book. I just finished reading a book on Martin Luther King that also won the Pulitzer Prize by Jonathan Eig. Those are really really good books. I just finished reading a book about Winston Churchill by Eric Larson, about Churchill's first year in office. And I think that's
an excellent book as well. I like reading books that are non fiction books, and typically books that are, you know, books about history. But I did read a book by a very famous author, James Patterson recently, on his new book on Tiger Woods. I'm going to interview James Patterson soon, and he's written enormous number of books, but this one on Tiger Woods is quite interesting and I enjoyed that as well.
Huh, really intriguing. You mentioned McCullough early. Did you ever read his book on the Wright Brothers.
Of course, I interviewed him about that book, and I think if it's a great book. I didn't really know much about the Wright Brothers compared to what I should have known, and he didn't know much either, and he dug into it and he actually he did a great book. Yeah.
Really fascinating. Right. Our final two questions, what advice would you give to a recent college grad interest in the career in either private equity, philanthropy, or invest in.
Learn how to read. Keep reading. You can't read too many books. Learn how to write in a simple way. Learn how to communicate orally, experiment, try many different things. Don't take the path of least resistance. Don't make ethical mistakes, because in the end you could ruin your entire life. You only have your reputation to give. You only have your reputation to walk around with, and if you ruin your reputation, you'll never be able to recover it.
And our final question, what do you know about the world of private equity investing today? You wish you knew back in nineteen eighty seven when you were first launching the firm.
Well, I wish I knew how big and complicated it was. It wasn't as big and complicated then. I wish I'd known many different types of deals that I could have done that we didn't do. I passed on some great deals. We had a chance to invest early on in a company like Amazon, and we passed up on that, and we had stock in it, but we didn't really hold it as long as we should have. So I've made a lot of mistakes, but on the whole, I'm reasonably satisfied with where my career now is.
Well, this has been just tremendous. Thank you, David for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with David Rubinstein, founder of the Carlisle Group and author most recently of the Highest Calling Conversations on the American Presidency. If you enjoy this conversation, check out any of our previous five hundred interviews we've had over the past is
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I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps with these conversations together each week. My audio engineer is Meredith Rank. My producers Anna Luke. Sage Bauman is head of Podcasts at Bloomberg. A Teak of Albron is our project manager. Sean Russo is my head of research. I'm Barry Ritolts. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.