Finding Peak w/ Ryan Hanley - The American Dream Is Built, Not Promised | David Rubenstein

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

A promise is not a path.The American Dream works when people can see a believable route from where they stand to somewhere better. That route does not build itself. It requires memory, opportunity, responsible ownership, and leaders willing to carry the burden that comes with authority.Get C.R.E.A.M., my weekly growth-marketing experiment, playbook, teardown, or take for people doing the work in the age of AI. With receipts: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribeDavid Rubenstein is the Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of The Carlyle Group and the Chairman, CEO, and principal owner of the Baltimore Orioles. He joins me for a conversation about the American Dream, historical memory, sports ownership, and what leaders owe the people who trust them.We begin with a real tension. Working families and small-business owners are operating the same lives on thinner margins. David argues that confidence in upward mobility is weakening. But diagnosis is not the destination. The useful question is what makes belief rational again.History is part of the answer. David explains why a country needs to remember its successes and failures, why he places copies of the Declaration of Independence in public spaces, and why forgetting the operating record makes it easier to repeat old mistakes.Then we move inside professional sports ownership and David's book, Inside the Owner's Box: Conversations on Power and Leadership in Sports. Sports franchises have become an investment class, but David's reason for buying the Orioles was rooted in Baltimore. He wanted the team to help revive and reconnect the city that raised him.That gives us the operator lesson. Owners set the standard, approve consequential capital, and carry the criticism. Experts who live and breathe the work make the day-to-day decisions. Ownership is not permission to play every position. It is responsibility for building the conditions where other people can win.The American Dream is not self-executing. It is built in the institutions we remember, the opportunities we create, the decisions we fund, and the people we trust.Get Easy Mode book resources and updates: https://ryanhanley.com/easy-modeConnect with David RubensteinWebsite: https://www.davidrubenstein.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-m-rubenstein/Inside the Owner's Box: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Inside-the-Owners-Box/David-M-Rubenstein/9781668022498X: https://x.com/DM_Rubenstein Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You know, you go to the grocery store and what used to cost $200, now it costs $250, and then in six months you're worried it's going to cost $300. And we're like operating the same exact life on thinner and thinner margins every day. If you just look at the wealthiest people in the country, they're doing fine. But the people in the middle class and the lower income classes, they are not in good shape. The wealth that people have made in recent years by buying and selling sports franchises has made people think that sports is now an investment class. It's a way you can make a fair amount of money.

If you don't have a thick skin, you shouldn't own a sports team. Where I wanted to start, and we can take this any direction that you want to go. But I guess what enamored me to, I was watching Instagram and then I reached out to your rep at Simon & Schuster. Okay. And, you know, just said, hey, I'd love to have David on the show. I'm very interested as to this amnesia that, so I'm 45 years old. I feel like at my generation or the people within maybe a standard deviation of my age have some feel for the history of this country. But I was just in Italy and I had a tour guide in Vatican.

And she kept bringing up, do you know? And then she'd insert someone who was like famous beyond belief, Julius Caesar. You know what I mean? She's just bringing up these names. and then she'd say, well, have you heard of them? And after about 10 minutes, I stopped her and I said, you know, I mean this with no disrespect. You don't have to keep prefacing it. Do you know this person?

Like I know, at least a decent amount about history. I said, are the really people that don't know some of these famous individuals? And she's like, oh, yeah, my tour that I had yesterday. And I said, please tell me they weren't from America. And she was like, yeah, they were Americans. And I was kind of taken and she said Americans tend to have the least her perception, doesn't mean it's true, the least understanding or at least towering about history in some regard is what she had to say. And I guess my question for you was just, why do you believe, do you believe?

And if so, why do you believe there seemingly is an amnesia of the history of this country that it's very tough to deal with? Let me try to explain. When I was an undergraduate about 50 years ago, about 9% of undergraduate to the United States were history majors. That percentage is now down to about 1%. And that's because today, people are afraid if you're not a STEM major in college, you won't get a job at Google or Facebook or Goldman Sachs. So parents have obsessed about getting their kids to be STEM majors. The result is people know less about history. It turns out that Americans know less about our history than people overseas. For example, if you want to be a citizen in this country and you're not born here and you become a naturalized citizen,

you have to take an effect of history test, a citizenship test, and 91% of the people that take it passed. The same test was given to people born in this country, not long ago, and in 49 out of 50 states, a majority failed the history test. So the result is we don't have people that know history very much, and why is that a problem? Because the theory of history is that those people that don't remember the past are condemned to relive it in the future. The theory behind stunning history is you figure out what was done wrong and don't do it again in the future. But we don't have that love of history so much in our country. In Europe, for example, which is much older than the United States, people teach history much more. it's considered a part of their DNA, a part of their fabric.

In this country, even though we're celebrating the semi-Quincentennial, many people might know Thomas Jefferson or the Declaration Independence, but beyond that, they don't really know very much about our history, sadly. It's very difficult to have conversations about what's happening today if we don't have an understanding of the past. And do you see that, do you think that this is part of why we have, I mean, obviously discourse has always been polarized, but seemingly today it feels exceptionally polarized.

Do you think this plays a big role in why we can't have like logical, honest conversations with each other? Well, there are many reasons for it. I think one of the principal phenomenon right now is the money that is involved in politics. You are allowed to raise unlimited amount of money. And in politics, you raise money by appealing to the far left or the far right. And nobody raises money by saying, I'm going to be right down the middle. I'm going to go to Washington and do what's right for the country, whether it's left or right.

No, you're either raised money on the left or on the right, and generally the far left or far right. And so money has taken over our political situation. Therefore, something called bipartisanship is frowned upon today. When I was young and I worked on Capitol Hill, if you were a great legislator, you were thought to be bipartisan. Today, if somebody calls you bipartisan, it's a curse word because Democrats and Republicans don't want bipartisan people.

They want people that will be part of their own church pew. So it's a sad situation. It's not going to change overnight. The semi-Quincennial was designed, among other things, to help Americans celebrate their history and remember it. But, you know, as I make talks around the country about the Declaration of Independence or American Revolution, very few people really seem to be that interested in it or really beyond a surface knowledge.

They don't know much about it. So I try to do what I can. I put copies of the Declaration Independence all over the place. I had reproductions of my rare copies of the Declaration given to every governor to put in a statehouse, every Major League Baseball Stadium, every NBA stadium, and many other establishes around the country, and every American embassy. So the people that go into these stadiums or embassies or state houses can see and maybe reflect upon the Declaration Independence. But I'm just a drop in the bucket, and we have a long way to go before people really

understand history as much as I think they should. I actually have the Declaration of Copy of the Declaration of Independence. By copy, I mean, obviously it's a copy. I don't have one of the originals. But just a framed version of the Declaration of Independence that sits right next to my door. So every day when my kids have to leave or come in the house, it literally sits right there. And then I have a little corner.

And then Teddy Roosevelt's, the portion of his speech that really is known as the man in the arena kind of sits kitty corner there. as a reminder of kind of how lucky we are to live and have been born in this country and then how much we have to keep working for it. I agree. Look, think about this. This country, when we had the Declaration of Independence, had three million people in the country, two and a half million white people, 500,000 slaves.

When we won the Revolutionary War, in fact, it ended in 1783, nobody thought we would necessarily survive to be that bigger country because we were. We're only 3 million people and without a lot of wealth. However, over the next 250 years, became the wealthiest, most successful, most powerful country in the face of the earth. How did we do that? We did it by one thing, among other things. We had immigration.

Large numbers of people who were very talented, left their own country. So we have today 55 million immigrants in this country. Some of them are their most talented business or cultural leaders. We're now squeezing that down a bit, so I don't think we're going to have as much immigration in the future, and that's going to be a problem for our country because we're not reproducing enough, and therefore our population's going down, not up. And historically, when populations go down in a country, their GDP goes down, and the country's civilization is not as vibrant as it once was. The reproduction thing is very interesting to me, because it seems derivative of

upstream problems. And when I talk to some of the younger professionals and the businesses that I work for, even even as old as like 35 it's like this this they don't always know how to articulate it but it's this idea of feeling stuck they're still in an apartment they're still you know they've been maybe fiancee or engaged for for years you know what I mean I mean well you're right it seems like we're extending these things and they just stuck and for any population anywhere in the world to stay the same in terms of its size just the same Women of childbearing age need to have 2.1 children on average. 2.1 on average. The United States number now is 1.6. So our women of childbearing age are reproducing 1.6 children on average. So that would mean that our population is going down. We're not reproducing ourselves.

And unless we have immigration, we won't grow the population. That's a big challenge. Another challenge is that we have an older and older population. And as you have an older and older population, the younger people have to work to support the older population through contribution to social security and other kinds of social and safety net program. So it's a problem, but it's not only here. In some countries in the world, the reproduction rate is not 1.6. It's 0.6 in Japan and Korea, for example, women are not even reproducing at the level of one point, on average, one child per woman of childbearing age. So we have a problem, but it's not as bad as other countries.

What I really want to get to is like to living in Albany, I'm staring down the river at New York City. And, you know, just this, it's shocking me. Shocking is the wrong word because logically I understand how these cycles work. But it's making me very nervous the communist rhetoric and the way that we are attacking it from multiple angles, Democratic Socialists, Socialists, all these kinds of things. You know, now I've heard people starting to use the word co-op as a way of seemingly shielding these ideas. And as someone who's 45 as a 12 and 10-year-old kid who's trying to set them up and do whatever he can, through this podcast, through talking to people through being a capitalist myself and trying to engage in society,

like, how worried should I be about what they're going to launch into in 10 years? Every generation throughout history is always worried that the next generation won't be as good as the current generation. That's one phenomenon. Another phenomenon is that our current generation, your age, my age, think that maybe the world is going further south away from the United States. The values the United States has are not going to be the values that our children have 10 or 20 or 30 years from now. So every parent should always worry. You know, the best thing to do is to try to educate your parents. your children, give them the best values you can, but sometimes there's social factors that

are beyond what you can do. And in the case of the Democratic Socialists, it's now a growing part of the Democratic Party, which if it continues to grow, I think will keep the Democratic Democrats from getting elected because I don't think it's strong enough to overcome the Republicans in many ways if the Republicans are united. But, you know, we've had the Democratic Socialist movements of war they've often frittered out. But this time, there seemed to be some real electoral success. You saw what happened in New York City. You see what's happened in the Michigan Democratic primary for Senate.

So I do think it's something to think seriously about. But in the end, the most important thing you can do is give the children your own values. And hopefully, you know, they'll stick. You know, raising children is among the most complicated things in human existence. you know, you spend them a lot of time with your children, and then you never know what they're going to turn out to be. Some, you know, parents who have four or five children, sometimes some turns out to be liberal,

some turn out to be conservatives, some turn out to be actors, some turn out to be business people. You just never know what you're going to get. And the best thing you can do is just give them as much time and attention as you can when they're younger because once they get the teenage years, they're not going to listen very much. I use my mom as a bellwether for,

or like what's starting to hit the zeitgeist, you know, what's starting to hit people who kind of, I classify her and I mean this with no disrespect. She kind of just lives her life. And it's not like she's seeking out this information. She's not on X, you know, trying to figure out what the latest political thing that's happening or economic thing. And she actually brought up, I mean, she knew about Mondiom or whatever, but she brought up recently that she's like, tell me about what's going on with this democratic socialist thing. And my question is more, is this, do you think if, if you're trying to run a small business, you're trying to live your life, you're trying to kind of manifest the American dream and whatever that is today, how concerned should you be?

Like, is this something that you should be thinking about? Is it something you need to be protecting yourself for? Or is, for most people, is this seemingly going to flare up and flare away over a period of time and it's not something we need to waste brain cycles on. Well, the country is very bitterly divided. It's not as bitterly divided as it was during this civil war, but clearly there's real schism in the country, and sometimes politicians have helped foment that.

But at the moment, there's clearly an interest by some people in the Democratic Party of supporting the Democratic Socialists because they're not happy with what's going on in Washington or not happy what's going on their state governments, and it clearly excites younger people. Younger people traditionally are not, conservative. Younger people want to try new things, want to experiment, and therefore you find

the Democratic Socialists appealing very often to younger people, younger voters, because they're the ones more willing to experiment, more willing to try different things. I don't think in this country, the communist and socialist movements have been tried over many, many decades, and never really gotten anywhere. So I don't think they're going to take over our country, but I do think that more and more people will pay attention to them if they win these elections as they seem to be doing. I get questions all the time just from doing this show and I don't know how to answer them. I'm a marketing guy. I'm a podcast guy. I like to ask questions and I'm curious. There are things I know about, but I certainly don't know about like here in the greater

Albany area where I live, not a lot of houses for sale, the houses that are seemingly are well overpriced. They're struggling from the standpoint of every day. It seems like, you know, you go to the grocery store and what used to cost $200. now cost $250, and then in six months, you're worried it's going to cost $300. And we're like operating the same exact life on thinner and thinner margins every day. Obviously, look, in the end, the economy in the United States is growing very well for people who are in the upper income categories. If you're an investor in Anthropic or SpaceX, you're probably pretty happy person. but the average person is not doing as well, and therefore, you see statistics that show that the cost of living is not keeping up.

I mean, the cost of living is going up higher than the average wage is going up. And as a result, people feel squeezed. Now, if you just look at the wealthiest people in the country, they're doing fine. But the people in the middle class and the lower income classes, they are not in good shape. we still have a very large homeless, very large poverty section in our country. And it's not going away of anything. It's increasing. So that would be called K-shaped economy, right?

Just for the audience. Correct. Correct. Okay. And, you know, I was listening to a podcast the other day, the All-In podcast. I don't know if you're familiar with that podcast, a few different investors. And they were talking about here's four guys who are. I think one of which is worth eight figures,

the other three are worth nine figures, and they're talking about what we can do. And I'm listening to them talk as a seemingly regular, everyday American facing problems that someone who isn't worth eight or nine figures has. And it was shocking to me how disconnected their argument was for why people are frustrated and scared and nervous and don't know how. to reposition their lives to be successful

like they saw their parents were and kind of what's promised to you when you're growing up in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. So how does someone not feel frustrated? If they're listening to this and they own a small business, it's a lot of small business owners listen to the show and they're grinding every day.

They're making enough money to put food on the table, have a house, their kids aren't, you know, have clothes on their back. But, you know, you hear the people who seemingly are dictating the conversation or making the decisions, and it just seems like there's nobody advocating for what they're actually experiencing. How do they work through that? How do you start to position your life to get rid of some of that or at least feel like you can get back on that road and start climbing the mountain again?

Well, it's difficult. Obviously, the Democratic socialists are appealing to those people who feel frustrated, feel that the people in Washington are not listening to them, and feel that in the end, the income distribution in this country is not fair. Now, capitalism is said to be the greatest economic system ever developed, and it has great wonders and virtues. But it does sometimes have income inequality. And right now, the income inequality in our United States is growing quite high. And we also have a very high lack of social mobility. It's, you know, the sack of social mobility means people in the bottom think they can get to the top and they actually do get to the top.

Right now, there's a large perception of people at the bottom of the socioeconomic structure. that they can't get to the top. And therefore, something called the American Dream is dissipating. More people believe in the American Dream who come to this country from overseas because they believe in the American Dream than people born in this country believe in the American Dream. Increasingly, people in lower socioeconomic classes don't believe in the American Dream anymore that if you work hard, you can get to the top. That's a sad situation.

Do you spend any time on X? Do you ever go on X? I am not a big social media person. Which is perfectly fine. I'm sure it's great, but no, I don't really do it, but I assume you do. Which is probably better for your mental health and your daily work output. It saves time. It does.

If you bear with 30 seconds of context, I wanted to support what you said about people who come to this country, believing in the American dream and capitalism more than people who are born here. And there's an account of a Japanese man who brought. brought his family here. And he's kind of just telling stories as he learns about the country. And I was shocked, like, reading a lot of the other, you know, you see a lot of people who want to tear the country down and talk about, like, every negative thing, not like there's not negative things everywhere in the world.

And this guy, he just so, he articulates what I believe the American dream is in a way that I don't know that I've heard Americans talk about. And I was like, it was so refreshing to me to hear him talk about how like the unspoken economy of doing favors for your neighbors, how, you know, the waitress at the, you know, comes and the tip culture and how it makes this, you know, dynamic that you just don't get in Japan. And it was like eye opening to me and it made me kind of so happy that people who come in see it and it seems like when the World Cup was here, there was a lot of that as well, people who came to America and saw what we have here. How do we start to change the conversation for Americans? The phrase American dream was really

developed or invented by a writer in the 1930s and it was designed to illustrate the kind of Horatio Alger stories that you come from nothing and you work your way to the top. Sadly, people don't believe in it so much anymore. And therefore, you often see more immigrants coming here, believing in it, than people born here. I think in the end, you know, the country is pretty stable and not likely to have revolutionary kind of actions. But I do think that we are probably losing a lot of the American entrepreneurial spirit and a lot of the feeling that we can conquer any problem. and we're also increasingly having a country of halves and haves-nots. The people at the bottom have less than they used to have,

and the people at the top have more than they used to have. And that's not a prescription for success in the end of our country. Well, I want to switch the conversation over to your new book inside the owner's box. My understanding of owning sports franchises for most of my life has been that they were like a vanity purchased for someone who had made it in their life. But it seems very much like in the last five or ten years, that has really, that's changed. The value of sports franchises has gone up. The level of investment in sports franchises has gone up.

And why own a sports franchise in the first place of all businesses? I mean, I know it's not the only business you've had, but like why. And then what makes them unique? Well, historically, people who bought sports franchise. is we're interested in the sport and they liked the sport. So in the 1920s or 30s or 40s, people might buy these teams, but they weren't really wealthy people in the traditional sense. The wealthiest people in the United States were not buying sports teams because they were

not at all that profitable. It was aggravating. People criticize you, all of those kind of things. As illustrative of this, in 1972 with the New York Yankees, the greatest baseball franchise of them all, perhaps, when they were sold, nobody really wanted to buy them. a young businessman in Cleveland named George Steinbrenner bought it, but he only had $250,000 of the $8.8 billion purchase price, so he syndicated it.

But the wealthiest people in the United States in 1972 didn't say, I want to buy a baseball team, I want to buy the Yankees. Today, that's changed because the wealth that people have made in recent years by buying and selling sports franchises has made people think that sports is now an investment class. It's not just a vanity thing or it's not thing for people that just like sports or like their hometown. It's a way you can make a fair amount of money. And as we've seen some of the prices recently of the Los Angeles Lakers, the Seattle Super Hawks, the Seahawks, the Boston Celtics, prices are staggering compared to what people used to think. You used to be able to buy

and when the NFL started, the franchiser probably costs a couple hundred thousand dollars. Now they cost $10 billion. When Baltimore Orioles, a team I bought, when it came to Baltimore in 1954, the purchase price was $2.2 million. I paid $1.7 billion. So the prices have gone up a fair of it. People are buying them because they do like sports, but they also think it's an investment category now, and they'll make money on it.

So I suspect they're common occurrences. In my own case, I bought the Baltimore Orioles because I'm from Baltimore, and I saw it as a philanthropic gesture to help revoke. Revive Baltimore. Baltimore is a city that has a lot of challenges, and I've tried to think that if I could revive the Orioles and make them more successful, the downtown area of Baltimore might get revived, revitalized, and it would be good for Baltimore. That was my main motivation. Are you seeing that start to manifest? It takes a long time. So, first of all, the team hasn't done as well on the field as I would have liked, and that, therefore, makes people less interested in going to games than that they might otherwise be. Secondly, redeveloping downtown Baltimore is not easy. When the Camden Yards was built in the early 1980s, people thought then, or 1990s, when people thought then that it would revitalize the downtown area, but it really hasn't.

And so we've got to put more effort into it. And with the cooperation of the governor and the mayor, we're working now, the Orioles are, to kind of help revitalize downtown Baltimore physically. But it takes time. Yeah, I was there about a month ago with my son. He played in a baseball tournament at Ripkin Park. Yes. And as part of the experience, we brought the team down to the game.

And we had a great time. To me, and I actually used to live in D.C. for about five years and would go to games in Baltimore all the time because they still played, the Nationals still played an RFK, which was not a great place to watch a game. So I used to love going up to Camdeniards to watch games. but it has been interesting how this, I mean, I think it's one of the most beautiful parks in all of baseball, and it has become, in my mind, like a Fenway or a Wrigley in terms of, you know,

just having this unique structure and feel and experience. When you think about a sports franchise as a business, it's different than an investment firm or a, you know, you're pumping out, you know, widgets out of a manufacturing plan or something. What are some of the core, drivers of how you actually grow a business like that? Like, what are the metrics that you have to focus on in a sports franchise that are different from some of the other more, maybe traditional businesses that people are used to? Well, I've been in the private equity business for almost 40 years. And there, when you buy companies, you're looking to increase earnings and you want to typically increase them fairly regularly. And when your companies go public, you want to have increased earnings every quarter because you're measured on whether you're increasing every quarter. In this, sports world, you don't tend to reveal your numbers every year, or if at all, and you don't

have to reveal quarterly numbers. And so the focus on increasing quarterly earnings is not really there. What you're trying to do in the business world, in the baseball world, is basically build a team on the field that will draw people into the stadiums. If people come to the stadiums, you're going to have higher TV ratings. Ultimately, you're going to sell more food, you'll sell more merchandise, more parking, ticket prices will probably, you know, go up a bit as well if the team is very popular and so forth. So you're looking to put a better team on the field and, you know, it's not easy to do so. You've got 26 players on a team at any given time, as the Orioles have seen, you can have a lot of them injured. So only one team is going to win the World Series every year,

but there are 29 others who are trying desperately to do so. It's not easy. And it's much more competitive than in the private equity world. And the private equity world, you might buy a company, but you might have two or three or four competitors. In baseball, you have 29 other competitors, or the same is true in NFL or NBA. A lot of competitors who are trying to beat you every day, whereas you don't have to have that as much in the business world. So how do you develop a better team? Like, is it, do you feel like you need to get hands in? Do you need to have, like, say, or is it trust the general manager, trust the manager on the field?

and let them kind of run the op. Well, there are different approaches. When George Steinbrenner owned the Yankees, he would sign players that didn't even tell his general manager about, or he would negotiate contracts that the general manager might not have known. Today, that doesn't usually happen. Usually, you have owners who are pretty skilled business people, and they generally tend to delegate the baseball operations to two people.

One does the business side, one does the baseball side. The business side does, sells corporate suites, season tickets, does advertising, promotions, those kind of things, and ultimately try to get as much revenue in as possible. The baseball side really figures out who to draft, who to trade for, who the manager should be, and so forth. So they're different sides. And most of the owners, and again, there are 30 major league baseball teams, most of them are not going into their clubhouse and giving people lectures on how to hit better. they generally don't do that. They leave that to the managers. In my own case, you know, I go into the clubhouse from time to time

to cheer the team when they've won a game or something. But I think generally the owners stay out of the clubhouses because that's the player's kind of private sanctuary. And most of the owners are not all that personally close to the players because they realize they're negotiating with these guys for contracts very often. It could produce a problem if you're too close to them. And secondly, you might trade them. So I think owners know some of their players pretty well, but generally, most of the owners are not spending a lot of time socializing with the players.

Let's say a general man who wants to make a trade. Do they, is there a level at which they can make that trade, a certain type of player where you're saying, hey, maybe it's the 26th guy on the roster. It's a left-handed, you know, middle reliever and, hey, we want to move this guy and we need a piece here. or is everything pitched to you and like maybe a board? Like, how does that work? Right. Okay. So when I bought the team, I brought in a partner named Mike Arrogetti,

who's a business person like me and he has a large private equity firm. He knows baseball extremely well. He and I are in regular communication with our president of business operations, or baseball operations, Mike Elias, who we inherited. And we think he's very good. he was rated, voted the Major League Executive of the Year a number of years ago. He has a call with us once a week and we have emails almost every day about players' injuries or possible trades or draft picks.

So he would not trade a player or draft a major player without telling us what he was going to do. Now, if we didn't support what he wanted to do, generally he might say, well, if you're never going to support me, maybe I'll go do something else. So generally, we support what he wants to do. He does explain it to us. We ask questions. But that's true of most, you know, most baseball organizations. The general manager, the head of business, the baseball operations is really making the day-to-day decisions on players.

Very few owners have that kind of expertise. Is it almost a good thing that you kind of separate church and state in that regard? Like if you got your hands and all his decisions, does it, it would probably muddy the waters. And you saw that with Steinbrenner and, you know, in the mess, I mean, as much as the Angis had success occasionally, I mean, in large part, most of his tenure was a mess. I would say he had some successes. He had some failures. But in the end, he did win some World Series. But he had a lot of controversies and fired managers and fired players and did all the things.

But, you know, in the end, I think he probably was a plus for the sport. Today, the owners are probably less colorful. and they tend to be more restrained in their public statements, and they tend to be unwilling to, you know, criticize their people in public. I don't think you see that anymore. It had to be a wild feeling to be on that team. I mean, you think, you know, you said you go down,

so you know the guys at least a little bit, but you head down, you get out of the shower, you sit down, and now you got to answer a question from a reporter about the owner in the owner's box, you know, tearing you apart or belittling you. And, you know, then you're supposed to go out and hit a baseball the next day. It does not seem like a good. relationship. It has its challenges. Today, the owners, I think, are generally of the mindset that

the players really are best judged by the experts, and therefore very few owners are really doing actively involved in the trades. They will certainly be informed, and they'll no doubt give their consent, and they will be informed about the major players being drafted. But they rarely are going to second guess the general manager, because the general manager just lives in a breathes baseball, and those are much better than the owners do. Can you maybe explain for the audience the relationship of your minor league teams and how how involved do you get in the cultivation of the players? Because baseball in particular is unique in its farm system and how many players are involved there. So put it this way.

In college basketball and college football, if you're drafted to play in the NFL or the NBA, you're almost certainly going to make the team if you're one of the early drafts. Remember, the NBA, I think, only has two rounds of drafts now. It used to be 30 or 40. Now it's only two rounds. And so if you're drafted as number one or number two first round, you're almost certainly going to make the NFL or the NBA.

In baseball, it's not quite that way. First of all, you don't go directly into the Major League. You typically go into the minor leagues for two years. So even the best college or high school prospects are not coming into the Major League's right away. And the ability to guess who is going to be a superstar is more complicated in baseball.

There are many people who are the first draft picks of the Major League Baseball who never made into the Major League Baseball, never made it into the major leagues. That wouldn't happen in football or basketball. Somebody that's the number one pick every year in the NFL or the number one pick in the NBA is going to be almost certainly

a star in that league. It's not the case in baseball. It's more complicated. So, you know, you do the best you can. You pick a lot of players and you try to sign them up, but you sent them in the minor leagues for two years to see if they really can hit Major League Baseball pitching or if they're pitchers or they can really strike people out or get people out. It's a more challenging endeavor, and it's harder to predict who's going to be a superstar. How much of your time or how involved do you get in that process? Because 64 rounds,

am I correct, in 64 or 62? I don't know if it's that many, but there's a fair number of rounds. and, you know, obviously the owners in all of the teams are probably informed by their general manager of the third five or six or seven people they want to draft. Beyond that, it's probably most owners are not that involved because if you're drafting somebody in the 20th round, the chance that person's really going to help them major league is modest. It might happen, but it's less frequent.

And so I think the owners and all the teams are informed about who their top draft books are likely to be, And then you just, you know, wait and see. We drafted our first draft pick this year with somebody we had decided we really wanted. And we had the seventh overall draft pick. And we took him. His name is Eric Booth from Alabama. How do you handle, like, player negotiations for salary?

Because I know, like I said, there's a lot of small business owners that listen to the show. And they have to deal with similar but different conversations with their own team members. And I think just being that these individuals, we watch them on TV, we have, my kids got their sports cards upstairs on the table. You know, how do these things go? Everybody knows what everybody's salary is pretty much these days. There's no secrets because everything is pretty much publicly available. If you have a major contract, which could be these days a 10-year contract or a five-year contract, that's a large amount of money. And therefore, the owner is always going to be involved in deeply,

involved in saying, yes, I'll spend the money or no, I won't. If you're just signing a one-year contract or you're signing a minor league contract with somebody, the owner is probably not that deeply involved. But if you're, you know, if you're Steve Cohen and you're going to try to get Juan Soto in your team and you're going to pay them over $700 million, obviously Steve made the final decision on that. The same is true when they signed Otani at the Dodgers. Obviously, the ownership there was deeply involved. I am informed about what our guy is going to do.

We talk to them all the time in terms of how much we want to offer and what we think is realistic or not. But in the end, you know, the general manager or the head of baseball operations will ultimately, you know, have to negotiate out the details of the contract. But generally, you're spending a lot of money in these kind of situations. And when you're doing long-term contracts, you have to recognize that very often you're going to be signing a player

who might not be playing for many of the, the years that you sign them up for. So, for example, if somebody gets a 10-year contract and he is, you know, 28 years old, that means he's going to have to play to his 38. Very few players at the age of 38 are as good as they were at 28. I think for baseball, it is said by some. I haven't really, you know, studied it deeply. But something like the age of 27, 28, maybe 29 is the peak for most players.

Now, some players are doing better in their 30. than they did in their 20s, but as a general rule of thumb, the late 20s probably is the peak of athletic performance from most athletes. Do you get to set philosophy on how you, how we bring in players, or how you bring in players like the Soto deal, right?

Like, obviously the Yankees were trying to get him to. They were unwilling to pay the same amount. There's different reasons for that. But, I mean, that deal was fairly highly criticized just for bringing him in. and is it the right park for me? There's like, I guess, I guess my question is, you know, this is more just as a sports fan when you're watching.

Like sometimes you look at a situation, you're like, are they just buying jerseys? Like is that, it's just buying jersey sales? Like, it doesn't seem like the right player for the ballpark, for the team. It's an incredible amount of money. And you're like, as a fan, I don't understand. I wasn't involved in that. We weren't trying to sign him up.

So I can't speak to that particular one. But I would say as a general rule of thumb, what owners want to do is put the best team on the field, and if they can make a profit doing that, they'd be happy to do that. Most baseball teams are not profitable. I think that's not a secret. Most on an operating basis don't make money.

They make money when they sell a team, perhaps, but not on the operating basis. That's probably true of some other sports as well, though the NFL is in a league by itself in terms of profitability. You know, I think if somebody is going to sign one, Juan Soto, the owner is going to be deeply involved. In that case, Steve Cohen said that he was involved and met with Juan Soto and his family, and I think it's probably helpful. You know, generally what happens in the case of the Orioles is when we've signed a number of players of longer-term contracts,

the ownership has agreed to the price, but ultimately we have the general manager work out or not the general manager. He's not that sense on his title. The president of business, of baseball operations is the person who works out the details of it with the agent up for the player. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you're informed, your understanding, you're buying into the, to the concept and the idea, but it's not like your hands, it's like your redlining contracts in between podcasts. Not really. I would say not so. I don't think any owner is doing that anyway, but the owners are deeply involved. Look, in the old days, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago.

It may have been harder to communicate with people across the country or around the world. But today, through the Internet, you can communicate with people and cell phones instantly. And so there's no need to not inform people. Everybody knows what's going on. The question is, is it worth the money or not? People, you know, have their debates on it. You know, when Alex Rodriguez was signed, I think it was a $250 million contract for 10 years. He had been on the Seattle Mariners and went to the Texas Rangers.

people were really critical of the Texas Rangers was spending that much money, $25 million a year then was like the equivalent of like, no, $100 million a year today. So, you know, you're always going to get some criticism. And if you don't have a thick skin, you shouldn't own a sports team. Because while the Orioles, for example,

are a nice team, their revenue is far less than the revenue of, you know, probably five or six dozen firms that Carlyle my private equity firm owns. You know, we might own a company that has three billion of revenue. It's a large chemical company. Nobody ever asked me about it. The Orioles might be, you know, a couple hundred million in terms of revenue,

but people are talking about it all the time. It's just a different phenomenon. You know, when I buy a team for Carlisle or not a team, a company for Carlisle, no eight-year-old boy comes up and asks for my autograph because I now own a chemical company. But with baseball, you know, I've got eight-year-old boys and girls coming up and saying, can I have your autograph? And I keep saying, look, I'm not really a player. And I don't know why their parents are telling them they should get my autograph, but it's easier to just sign it than to explain that it's not really that useful. Is it fun, though? Is it fun getting to talk sports and being around people?

It's the fun part for me has been that I reconnected with Baltimore. I moved out of Baltimore when I went to college. Haven't really spent much time there, though I, you know, my parents grew up there, married there, they're buried there. I'll be buried there. So I have a real connection with Baltimore. But I hadn't spent as much time there as I did in the nation's capital. I've lived in Washington for the last 40-plus years. But I reconnected with my friends from high school.

In fact, this weekend I'll be spending time with about 10 of my friends from high school together for the weekend. I've seen people that I hadn't seen in 60 years. Once I'll go to a baseball game. One time somebody said, David, David, I hadn't seen this guy in 60 years. It was a neighbor of mine, and I didn't know what happened to him. And then I have people even from, as I wrote about in my book, a young girl in my sixth grade class, when I hadn't seen her since the sixth grade, she wrote me a letter saying, hey, guess who I am? And I'd like to meet with you now. And here's what happened in the last 60 years of my life. And so I did have lunch with her. And so it's a good way to reconnect with people. And I reconnect with the city of Baltimore. So it's fun. But, you know, it's more fun when you win than when you lose. Yeah, I get that. A big bass. get blue crabs in a picnic table? Is that the...

Right. Well, that's Baltimore for sure. And look, I grew up eating crabs and, you know, I know how to open them pretty quickly. Well, David, I appreciate your time. Thank you very much. And congratulations on your success. And hopefully your success as a father, right? Yes. Well, thank you. And I appreciate it. And you probably don't need to hear this. but man, the kids on my son's baseball team just had a phenomenal time and the people in your park and just the general atmosphere and culture was phenomenal. So you want to come again? Just let me know if you want to come again.

Just email me and we'll make sure it happens again, okay? I appreciate it so much. All the best success on the book and just thank you for being out here telling this story, man. Thank you. Next time I'll make sure they get on the field. Okay.