The Jordan Harbinger Show - 606: David Rubenstein | Patriotic Philanthropy and Leading Large

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

David M. Rubenstein is co-founder and co-executive chairman of The Carlyle Group, host of The David Rubenstein Show, and author of How to Lead: Wisdom from the World’s Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers and The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream. What We Discuss with David Rubenstein: Why David was one of the original signers of The Giving Pledge, a promise to give away the majority of his wealth instead of just building a stockpile of money for his heirs. The many ways David gives back to the United States for the privilege of growing up here, but why he eschews the idea of running for office. Why David finds giving away his money more rewarding than making it. The key errors people commonly make when fundraising for their business (and what they should be doing instead). How David raised his kids to develop the skills and strong work ethic to succeed without spoiling them. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/606 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss our interview with Freeway Rick Ross, the crack empire kingpin gone good? Catch up with episode 121: Freeway Rick Ross | Life in the Crack Lane here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. The people that have made money, by and large, with some exceptions, obviously, are people that wanted to prove their idea of work, and it got successful when it took off. But it wasn't because they said, I've got to make a billion dollars because I want to be rich, I want to buy a big house and so forth. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, all those people. They were not obsessed with making a large amount of money. They were obsessed with building a company that had really good products and services.

And that's what you really have to do if you want to make a lot of money. Don't worry about the money. If you build something good, the money will come. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Spies, psychologists, astronauts, and entrepreneurs, even the occasional journalist-turned poker champion, billionaire investor, or mafia, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works

and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to this, show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always love when you do that. We have episode starter packs that should make that a little bit easier. These are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topics to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on this show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started. Now today, David Rubinstein, co-founder and co-executive chairman of the Carlisle Group, a global investment firm with $230 billion under management.

David is one of the original signers of the Giving Pledge, pledging to give away the majority of his wealth instead of simply creating another singular family dynasty. He's also a fellow podcaster with a great roster of guests in his own right. Today, patriotism, philanthropy, and politics, and why he will put his money where his mouth is, but never run for office himself. And why giving money away has been more rewarding than making it in the first place,

which, to be honest, I think is easy. for him to say, but we'll get into that. Also, fundraising for a business or company and some of the key errors people make when it comes to this. And finally, raising successful kids, especially when you yourself are making enough for them to never work and never worry about money, how to instill work ethic and skills in the next generation. Of course, lots more. If you're wondering how I managed to book folks like this, it's because of my network. I'm telling you, I have created something here that you can also create with a little bit of effort, six minutes a day. I'm teaching you how to do this for free at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I don't need your payment info, no credit card info,

nothing. It's just a free course. I know, surprising, right? Go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. You'll find it there. And most of the guests, by the way, they subscribe to the course. They're in their contributing. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's David Rubinstein. So you trained as a lawyer. And, you know, we have that in common. I did not work for Jimmy Carter, but he was the president when I was born, just to sort of highlight the difference here. I know you stay out of politics, and I've heard that you don't donate any money to politicians. Why is that? Well, for a number of reasons. For a long time, I've been the chairman of the Kennedy Center. I was chairman of the Smithsonian. I'm chairman of the board of the library of

Congress. I'm a member of the National Gallery of Art Board. And I've thought that if I were to do that and give money to politicians, it would diminish my ability to work with Democrats and Republicans on a bipartisan basis on those boards. Secondly, I don't like the perception that the press has of wealthy people who give money that they're trying to buy something. And I don't want to be seen as trying to buy something. And so if I were to give a half a million dollars to some candidate, all of a sudden it'll say Rubenstein is trying to buy an embassy or trying to influence this.

And I just don't like that perception that I'm trying to buy something from government officials. Third, there's no benefit to doing it, I can see, other than you're trying to buy an embassy or something like that. I just don't see any real benefit to it. There are plenty of other people want to give money. I just like to stay out of politics at this point. I did it when I was younger, and now I'm trying to do something different.

You say by an embassy, I think a lot of people don't know that a lot of diplomatic positions, especially sort of paradoxically in countries like France, where you might have a career diplomat at the top top, but the ambassador, which is almost in some countries, almost like a figurehead position, often goes to donors. Am I getting that right? I think over the last 50 years or so, it's been very clear that about a third of the embassies go to people who are politically connected or people that are not career people. Two thirds

go to career people, FSO, foreign service officers. But clearly, the most desirable places, France or England or, you know, Japan or China, those places typically go to people who are not career foreign service officers. And I am not interested in being an ambassador and I have not, you know, never talked to anybody about doing that. It's not appealing to me. Interesting, because you're the chairman of, and on multiple boards, you'd think, well, naturally, you should be an ambassador. I mean, you've got a lot of leadership experience. You've got a lot of experience dealing with both sides of the aisle.

I mean, it's well suited to you. I mean, obviously, you don't think so, or you're just busy with other things. Many times people get to be my age. I'm now 71, an age I never thought I'd live to be at. But when you're 71, many people are slowing down and they are looking to cap their career, perhaps with an embassy which has a lot of prestige to it. You're representing the United States. But I learned when I work in the White House many years ago that ambassadors really are just doing what young people at the State Department, more or less tell them to do. They don't really have

a lot of say. In the old days, before instant communications, you had ambassadors to really be representative to you in France or England, but with instant communications, it's not necessary anymore. So it's almost, as Felix Rowan in 170, he was ambassador in France, it's like being a concierge. you're basically whining and dining people that come in from your country and you're doing all the kinds of things and arrangements. You don't really have a lot of political power and you're not really making policy. In addition, I'm not slowing down and looking to cat my career. I have a lot of things I'm still doing.

So I wouldn't want to give up everything I'm doing to just go to a country and probably not have any impact on the policy. That's my theory. Yeah, you're right. You'd probably be trading all of your board positions and all of these interesting initiatives that you're doing and running to sit around. at dinner parties night after night after night, hobnobbing with people that probably, I mean,

a good percentage of them, you won't be able to stand and won't want to talk to at all for more than five minutes. Well, I won't comment on that. I would just say that I am trying to lose weight, and when you get to my age, it's harder. So if you go to a lot of embassy dinners, you're probably not going to lose weight.

Yeah, that definitely makes sense. You said you never thought you'd live to 71. Are you kidding about that, or were you living in a fast life earlier? No, I've always lived in a slow life. but, you know, 23% of the people who are born when I was born in 1949 are deceased. So when I was growing up, my parents used to read the obituaries every day, and I'd say, why are you doing that?

Well, they said they want to see who died. At that young age, I didn't care about that. Now I read the obituaries every day because I want to see why somebody younger than me died or how they died and what happened to them. And you have to recognize as you get older that, you know, inevitably you're going to slow down or inevitably you're not going to live forever. I do think about it. And as you get older, you're too young to think about it.

You do think about what you want to leave behind as your legacy, and you do think about what you want to get done before it's too late to do anything else. Yeah, maybe I'll cap my, now you got me thinking, maybe I should be a diplomat. I'm not qualified for the board of anything, but I'm good at eating. Well, you're probably pretty good at exercising. You're very slim, it looks like. So I don't want to denigrate being an ambassador.

I think it's an important role. It's just not, I have no interest in doing it. And no president's ever called me up and said, you really should be ambassador here or there. Now, people that go to be ambassadors who are the one-third, they generally don't sit at home and people call them up and say, you know, I'm the president. I really want you to do this. That happens rarely. Usually you say, I did something for the president. I did something for his campaign. I'd like something. This is what I want. And then you negotiate with the State Department and the White House on what's appropriate for you in the country. And I'm just not interested in that. So I don't denigrate anybody that wants to do it. I think it's a great thing to serve your country. I just think I'm doing things that are better for me right now. Yeah, now that makes sense. The highest I got in the State Department was working at the embassy in Panama, and we didn't even have an ambassador. I don't know if he was recalled or something. We had a charger de fare, which is like, it's basically the ambassador without the title of your country having an ambassador. And I can't remember exactly why that was at the time, but we never ever even had one. The whole time I was there, we never had one. It is seemingly a very interesting position, but you're right. It's no longer, let me send my most adept man to work with the head of this other nation. Now it's, hey, man, check your Blackberry. You have 20 emails from the 31-year-old who says that you're doing this backwards and you need to be doing this and just show them this document and then go to the zoo

because they're opening a new tiger exhibit. There's probably a lot of that. I mean, a lot of it is doing things that you have to do. But when George Washington was president and he would send a message to his ambassador overseas, it might take, you know, two months for the ambassador to receive the message. And when the ambassador followed through, it might take two months for the president here back. So that was a time when ambassadors really had some authority. Today, I don't really think any ambassador has that much authority because they are more or less following the instructions of the White House staff or the State Department desk officer. And there's just not that much maneuverability room. Did you feel qualified to work in the West Wing, I think you were, right, in your 20s?

No, I did not feel qualified. I didn't think a lot of other people working with me were all that qualified either. We were all young. Remember, campaigns often have a lot of young people in them because they are willing to take the risk of being a campaign. They don't have mortgages. and might not be married yet, they might have families, and you have young people. When you win a campaign, you say, what's the benefit? Well, I'd like to work in the White House for the administration. I got lucky, and my boss was close to the president. And so he got a job as being the assistant

to the president for domestic policy. I became his deputy, and I had an office in the West Wing. 27 years old, I didn't really know anything. I wish I had the energy I had then and the knowledge I have now, I could do a better job for the country. But I thought that doesn't work out that way. So sure, I wasn't, didn't feel qualified, but there were people younger than me. And people less experience of me and less educated than me. So I didn't feel terribly out of place, but I just wished I'd known more and I've been a little bit older. When people get close to the crown or they end up in positions near or with high performers or they're supposed to be a high performer, such as probably your law career, often imposter syndrome kicks in. And it's a running theme in this show

where people think like, I don't know, Jordan, can I get this in my feedback Friday inbox where we answer advice. People say, I don't know, Jordan. I don't know. I'm only two years in and they're saying they want to promote me. And I think I should turn it down because I'm not qualified, and it's just this imposter syndrome that people who are, people who are high performers tend to suffer from it more than people who are in the middle or low. In fact, if you want to meet somebody without imposter syndrome, I always tell people, go look at a high school. Those kids know everything. They have no imposter syndrome at all. It's the person who's the chief of staff, but they're younger than some of the staff on their team. Those are the people that suffer from

this. And I wondered if that crept in at all. Sometimes if you're reasonably intelligent and hard working and you're trying to do a great job, you may realize how inadequate you are to the task, and therefore you tend to get some humility. People, you know, who are arrogant and have no humility and think they know it all, they're the ones you have to be careful about because they will probably make mistakes, deal to their hubris or things like that. As a general rule of thumb, I tend to admire people that have a fair amount of humility because they, I think, are smart enough to realize they don't know everything. And I didn't feel like I knew everything in the White House, but I just thought that, you know, for the job I was doing, I wasn't going to do that much damage to the country because I didn't have

that much authority. So the safety net was, they don't really let me do anything anyway. Well, there's so many people around you and the government that you have so many people protecting you and keeping you from doing too much. So it's hard to do too much that's a big mistake. Though, you know, it's going to be embarrassing if the president calls you and he asks you a question, you give an answer and you realize five minutes later you gave him the wrong answer. So what do you do? You run down to the Oval Office and say, by the way, I screwed up or just hope that somebody else gave them the right answer? What do you do? You hope there's two David Rubinsteins on the floor they're working on. I think that's the strategy.

Well, it can be a problem sometimes. You know, when the president's about to go make a speech and he says, David, what about this? What's the fact here? And you have to on the top of your head say yes or no or this is the fact. And if you get it wrong, he gets blamed, but you know you made the mistake. Well, you worked for Carter, right? He's a one-term president. Do you think you would have ended up with a totally different career had he been a two-term president? Would you've gotten more embedded in the Washington scene or the West Wing? That is a very perceptive question for this reason. When I worked for Carter, I thought he would be a two-term president. We didn't think we could lose as such an old man like Ronald Reagan, 69 years old. How old can you get? I didn't think he had the energy to even get out of bed in the morning at that age. But we lost.

And we lost in part because we didn't think anybody could vote for somebody who wasn't as smart as Carter. And we just had what's called cognitive dissidents. We just eliminated all the information we didn't want to believe. And we believed all the information that was consistent in what we wanted to believe. So when we lost, I had to go back and practice law, but I hadn't have the skill set for that. So I didn't do a great job. And then I decided I had to do something different with my life. And I was young enough to do it.

I started a private equity firm that took off. Had Carter been reelected, I had no interest in making money at the time. It was no concern to me. I would have stayed for second term. Maybe I would have been the senior domestic advisor or something like that. And then at that point, I would have left at a age of 34, 35. I would have been well known enough so I could slip into a law firm and just easily just sold my access to important people. I didn't have that kind of senior level access when I left Carter because

I was too junior. Had Carter been reelected, I would almost certainly have a number of typical Washington lobbyist lawyer, go in and out of government and never, you know, be heard from and have no money and probably not do the kind of things I've done. So in hindsight, as often the case in light, I got very lucky when I didn't think I was lucky. I thought it was the worst time in my life. I couldn't get a job for a while, but it worked out okay. You mentioned the term cognitive dissonance. I assume that when you learn a lesson like that, like how could this happen? I remember in my 20s is how can this happen with the economy crash? Most of us take those lessons throughout our lives and if we're successful, we apply them in other areas of our career. I'm guessing that

you've, you probably look back at that and think, okay, this looks impossible now at Carlisle Group or in this initiative that we're running. But then again, I thought Carter was going to win a second term, so let me reevaluate this. You know, has that stayed with you, that lesson? Well, yes, you have to recognize that in the end, making mistakes can help you or if they Ellen can help you. There was a famous scriptwriter named Bo Goldman who wrote the movie called Pitch Cassidy and a Sundance kid. You may be young to remember this, but it was Robert Grasford and Paul Newman. It was great movie. He later wrote an autobiography about Hollywood and how it works. And he calls it, nobody here knows anything. And what he really meant was nobody really knows

when you're writing a movie if it's never going to work or not, because nobody really knows. It's not predictable. And the same thing is true in life, generally. You know, many times you're doing things and you'd say people around here really don't know what they're doing, but, you know, I know a little bit. I'll do what I can and, you know, maybe it'll work out because I'm not as bad as the other people are here. So whenever you have an idea, you want to pursue it, if you pursue it hard enough, you know, you may say other people don't know what they're doing, I'm going to plow through and get this done and maybe it'll work out. So I've tried to do things that other people thought you couldn't do and sometimes they've worked out. You've done some patriotic philanthropy,

namely restoring historical monuments and things like that. And you mentioned in another interview, I can't exactly remember where it was. I read it somewhere, but you said you wanted to be historically accurate when it came to, I think, Thomas Jefferson's house. You wanted people in part to know that he owns slaves. And I wondered why that's important to you. Well, the theory of studying history is that if you learn about the good and the bad of the past, you can take the good and try to ignore the past and not make those mistakes.

That's the theory of history. That's why we should study it. One of my principles has been we should learn more about American history, so we can avoid the mistakes of the past and also take the best from the past. So Thomas Jefferson is idealized, as he perhaps should be, for writing the Declaration of Independence, created the University of Virginia, buying the Louisiana purchase, all those things. He was a slave owner, and he was a very big slave owner. So I wanted when Monticello needed some money to repair it, I said, I'll repair it,

or provided that you make certain that the slave quarters are built out. And we give the story of Thomas Jefferson as a slave owner, and I think that that's important. And now it's not because of me, but other people thought it's a good idea. as well. So same is true now at Montpelier. I asked that James Madison's home have the slave quarters built out so people could see what it was like there when he was a slave owner. And I think it's just important to learn the bad and the good and hopefully take from the good the things that we don't move into the future. Are you worried at all that people are trying to whitewash or rewrite history? Well, historically, people did. When I went to elementary school or junior high school or high

you would read textbooks that would never mention that George Washington was a slave owner or Thomas Jefferson was or that they didn't do any of the bad things that they are now accused of having done. But Thomas Jefferson, I won't say it's good or bad, but he did have a relationship with his slave, Sally Hemmings, for some 40 years. Now, many slave owners had, you know, sexual relations with their slaves that they had no control over what the slave owner would do to them. And Thomas Jefferson, you can debate whether it was a love story or whatever it was. but clearly probably not the kind of policy that we would say is a good thing to do, which slave owners taking advantage of their slaves in that way. So I think that these kind of things should get to be known better so people can look at people and say, okay, he was good or she was good.

She was bad on some things and bad on other things, but, you know, we should know the good and the bad. We mentioned earlier on the show that you don't donate money to politicians. Do you get involved in politics at all, or do you eschew that completely? I've dropped out of that years ago. I've never given a dollar to a person running for president of the United States in my life. I hardly ever given any money at all. Maybe 20 years ago, I gave a tiny amount of money.

But relatively speaking, I've nothing in the last couple decades. And the reason is, as I said earlier, I want to stay out of politics. But I'll give you an example. I started a program, which led to my first book, where I would interview a great historian in front of members of Congress once a month. Once a month at the Library of Congress, with the Library and at Congress, I will host a dinner. And I will pay for the whole thing. So there's nobody can, you know, say I'm taking advantage of government.

resources, and I do it at the Library Congress because members can get there easily. I host a reception for dinner. I ask members of sit with people from the opposite party, which they do, and this was done until COVID. We'll start it again when COVID's over. And then I interview this person. I wouldn't be able to track Democrats and Republicans if I was seen as an ardent Democrat as an Arden Republican, so I try to be completely apolitical. And take the Kennedy Center, for example. The Kennedy Center, I was appointed initially by George W. Bush, then later by President Obama, appointed by Democrats and Republicans. I have board members who are appointed by Trump and appointed by Obama, and I just try to stay out of politics. I don't blame you there. I mean, your strategy makes sense. It's obviously,

though, like, on the one hand, right, you're very patriotic. You care a lot about the country. You're working a lot for the country, the history of the country. On the other hand, there's no involvement in politics. And that's interesting. And it signals, pardon me if I'm reading into this, but it signals maybe you don't think politics are necessarily the best way to express patriotism. Is that the case? I do think it is unfortunate that a few decades ago or maybe longer, the Republican Party kind of latched on to the idea that they were the party of patriots. And the Republicans would start wearing little pins on their lapels showing American flag as if Democrats who didn't wear them were less patriotic. And the Republicans did a better job, I think, that Democrats are evoking the idea that they're patriots because they were either supporting wars that were theoretically patriotic or so forth. I think it's unfortunate that happened.

And so I have coined the phrase patriotic philanthropy to kind of convey the idea that you can be a patriot by giving money or helping restore historical things without having to say I'm a Democrat or Republican. So unfortunately, I think the word patriotism has been abused a bit. And I regard myself as a kind of what I'll call a cultural patriot. I'm trying to give money back and do things that will, and with my time and energy to help the country in certain ways. but I wouldn't equate myself with somebody who has given the last full measure of devotion to the country, which would say go into combat and be killed for it. So what I'm doing is obviously much easier than going to combat. But I do think that people go into combat or patriots and people that can do other things

to help the country or patriots as well. I wonder what you think of the statue drama with the Confederate statues in some of these Southern states. What do you think about that? I wasn't planning on asking that, but it seems like you probably have an opinion. Well, a couple points. One. Many of the Confederate statutes were put up, were not put up to honor Robert Lee for having led the South in the Civil War. They were put up well after his death. They were put up in many cases early in the 20th century when it became clear that the integration or segregation was a major subject for people. And I think a lot of people in the South wanted to say we stand for what the Confederacy stood for. And so we'll honor some of the Confederate generals when I think it was really more to be, I would say, racist somewhat in doing that as opposed to honoring the contributions these people may have made to

their states. I also think that we should recognize that when you destroy monuments and memorials, you also are destroying history. So sometimes we keep things together and around because they remind us of history. So nobody would say that because the pyramids were built by slaves, we should destroy the pyramids, right? Probably not. So you can't destroy everything that's a past because it might have been built improperly. But some of these things have become some symbols of racism, and they're really put together and put up to remind people of racism, as opposed to honoring Robert Lee for other purposes. So I think some cases, maybe the name should be taken off in some cases, maybe the monuments should come down. Some of them are truly

historic and might have been built for reasons other than just racial. For sure, yeah. I do think it's hard for me to have an opinion on these sorts of things on the show without causing a crazy you-know-what storm. But there's also a huge difference between the pyramids and these statues in that nobody is walking around Egypt going, yeah, you know, my grandfather was forced to build that. I find that offensive. I mean, those were thousands of years old. We're still finding them under sand, right, these tombs and things like that because they're so old, there's no historical record. There are people walking around Louisiana who go, I remember when they put that up, I was 11 years old, and it was a terrible time in history.

You can go back and look at anybody and find something at fault. George Washington was a slave owner, so maybe some people would say take down the Washington Monument. Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't do enough to, I'd say, help the Jews avoid the Holocaust, some people would say, so maybe we shouldn't honor him. You can't find anybody. Abraham Lincoln, as you may know, is being criticized for, in effect, having been not against slavery for much of his life and for being, in effect, a slave catcher in the view of some people, because he was enforcing slave catching rules for a while.

So you can find something wrong with anybody that later is honored. So you have to be a little bit careful, or basically you get rid of everybody who's done anything. Yeah, that's interesting. I guess the question is, where's the line? And I'm certainly not qualified to decide that. I don't know about you. I wouldn't say I'm qualified. I'd say you have to have, like most things in life, it's gray. If it thinks things in life are black and white, you're often going to be wrong. There's some gray areas there. But I think the best thing to do is to educate people about the pluses and minuses of people and other people make some judgment about what's appropriate. Right now, we often have people doing things without a lot of information. Why didn't you stay a lawyer? You have an interesting opinion on this, namely, if you're quoted as saying, you can't be good at something if you hate it. And I can get behind that.

When I went to law school, I did reasonably well, but I wasn't a Supreme Court clerk. So I was on the law review. I did okay, but I was clear I wasn't going to be a law professor or a genius lawyer. But I went to practice law because not all lawyers are genius lawyers or law professors qualified people, but I didn't really enjoy it because in the end, the person making the decisions is the client, and you're just kind of facilitating what the client wanted to do. And a lot of it was, I thought, relatively boring kinds of things and mind-numbing and not exactly a great use of your gray matter. But I guess I could have done it if I was more

successful. If people had said, you're the greatest lawyer we've ever seen and we want to pay you lots of money to do this stuff. And I'd say, well, I'm not that good. But if they think I am, I'll do it. But nobody came up to me and said, you're that great a lawyer. So I just also came to the conclusion that, you know, life is short. And if you don't enjoy what you're doing, you'll never be great at it. Nobody's ever won a Nobel Prize. I like to say, hating what they do. You have to love it. And I didn't love practicing law, and clearly it didn't love me. So the good thing is I was good enough to be able to practice law and see what I was like and make my mother happy that I got a law degree. But on the other hand, I was not good enough to get stuck in being a lawyer.

And had I done so, I'd be probably retired now by a law firm that says now when you're 70 years old or 65, you have to retire. And I would have made a modest amount of money relative to what I've made in the private equity world. So I have no regrets. My son just went to Stanford Law School and graduated. And now he's in Stanford Business School, he went to both. but he's not interested in practicing law either. Maybe because he saw I wasn't that good at it, and he didn't think he'd be that good at it.

You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, David Rubinstein. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting this show. Your support of our advertisers, that's what keeps the lights on around here. You don't have to worry about writing down the codes of those URLs. They're all in one place.

They're at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please do consider supporting those who support us. And don't forget, we've got worksheets for today's episode, if you want some of the drills, exercises that we talked about here during the show, those are all in one easy place. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. And now back to David Rubinstein on the Jordan Harbinger show. You've set the bar pretty high. I would imagine people, and it's going to be kind of hard, and we'll get to this in a bit, but it's got to be kind of hard for other people in the family

because, you know, well, look at, why can't you be more like your brother or your uncle, or, you know, your grandfather, he's a billionaire. Imagine if you'd retire. If you'd retire, from a law firm, you'd merely be a millionaire right now. Imagine the shame. Well, look, I would say that having a lot of money doesn't make you a better person or necessarily make you happier. Continuously, I get introduced as being a billionaire. Well, big deal. There's a lot of people are a lot wealthier than me. There's no evidence that being a billionaire or multi-billionaire or sent to billionaire makes you happy. Happiness is the hardest thing in fine in life, and a lot of people are happy when they don't have a lot of money. In fact, the happiest people I

know don't have a lot of money. Some of the most tortured souls I know have a lot of of money. So you have to really know what you're going to do with the money and doing something useful. If you're just going to pile up artwork or houses, it's probably not going to make you happy. I'm a pretty happy person, relatively speaking, but, you know, if you're Jewish, you can't be completely happy, is my theory. Yeah, we're not allowed. We're not allowed. And as soon as we get close to that, your mother or your grandmother or both are there to take you down a couple of pegs. So look, I'm pretty happy with where I am. But my biggest challenge in life now is, you know, at 71, my parents made it to about their mid-80s. And I, sometimes you see people that

have genes where the family will get to 90 or 95 or 100. I don't have those genes. Mine are kind of my family whole history is around the mid-80s. So I can see I've got a limited period of time. And the question now is, what do you want to do during this period of time? So I'm trying to cut out stuff that I don't really do. But therefore, everything I'm doing now, including what I'm doing with you, I enjoy. I wouldn't do it if I didn't have, if I'd enjoy it. I like talking to people are smart like you and giving my views and hopefully other people might be influenced by him. So I enjoy it. And as you know, I do interviewing myself and I enjoy doing that. Yeah, you do a great job, actually. do enjoy the interviews you have. And as you know, when you're running a podcast, at least a third of

it is access to great guests. And that's certainly something that you get an A plus on with Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. And I think you've had it was Oprah on there or did I imagine that? I mean, she's Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a, that's a guest roster that anybody, anyone who does interviews anywhere would certainly envy. So that's, that's great. And you do a good job at the interviews as well. Thank you. I, you know, I didn't realize I had that skill. I started doing it a number of years ago, people seem to like it. I kept doing it. Maybe if I'd done it when I was younger, I would be a full-time interviewer, but I'm happy where I am. Yeah, I think you, trust me, you picked a more lucrative path and now you can have access to all these great people. You can treat it as a hobby,

which honestly, I'll tell you, interviewer to interviewer, when I started creating this as a business, it was less fun for at least a decade. In the beginning, it was fun because it was a hobby and I was just doing it and enjoying it, much like you probably are with your show. And then it became a and I think the next eight years were kind of like, I like it, but I miss the days where I could just flick the recorder on and then kind of go, hey, I want to talk to this person and it doesn't matter if it's going to convert or generate sales. And now I'm back there again where I'm just having fun doing it and it's also making good money, which is just a, I hate to overuse words like a blessing, but it really is. It's just kind of lucky and also the result of a strategy that

thankfully worked out. As I've been talking about my book recently, I've realized a couple of things. One is, it seems like everybody has a podcast, and there should be a sticker, a hunk if you don't have your own podcast. Now, obviously, I'm not exaggerating. There must be thousands of people, tens of thousands of times. There are over a million and a half podcasts out there right now. You know, it's just hard to believe in how you rise at the top. You're obviously a very successful one, but rising at the top out of a thousand or a million people, it's not easy to do. And sustaining the interest is not easy because people have a short attention spans, for sure. and getting good guests is a challenge for sure.

It's like the SPAC world. I mean, a SPAC world is proliferating like podcasts. I mean, see, everybody's got their own SPAC now. Everybody's got their own podcast. Can you explain what a SPAC is? This is something that is specific to investing that a lot of people haven't heard of. SPAC stands for special purpose acquisition company.

And what it is is a company that has raised money from typically individual investors, and a lot of times it's hedge funds, on the idea that if you give them the money, they will take two years to find a company to buy, and as soon as they buy it, that company will be public because the SPAC is already registered with the SEC. So what you're getting is a chance to invest early in a company that you might buy at a cheaper price than would otherwise be the case. There's people running the SPAC theoretically know how to make the company more valuable,

and so you have a chance to buy something. But if you don't like it, you can sell out of it into the public markets probably within six months after the investment is made. So it gives people some flexibility. it's very lucrative for the sponsors of the SPAC because they tend to get 10 to 20% of the profits, or not the profits of the whole company at the outset, which is much more lucrative than you do in the private equity world. Like anything, there seems to be an enormous number of them right now, whether they all can make profits for people we don't know yet. Yeah, look, I'm a little naive in this area, despite having worked on Wall Street as an attorney, but that type of thing always makes me a little bit nervous. I was in real estate finance,

mortgage-backed securities in 2006, 2007, and saw what happened in 2008, because that was why I became a podcaster full-time and a radio host. So when I see things like Spacks, I go, wait a minute, there's a catch here. Maybe companies shouldn't be allowed to sort of instantly go public after being acquired. I mean, allowed is maybe a strong term, but there's always a catch. Well, Herb Stein, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under Richard Nixon said famously, he was Ben Stein's father. If something can't keep going on forever, it won't. At some point, people will say the prices are too high and it's not going to keep going on. But until there's a major crash in a SPAC and people lose a lot of money, I suspect it will keep

going on. It takes a crash to get people's attention that it's not all perfect. So who knows where it will come out. But it clearly is a way to get a company public more quickly than a typical IPO process. And that's one of the reasons why the sellers like it and the buyers like it. How did you pick the name Carlyle Group for the fund? I was doing research. I couldn't find anyone with that name in the organization or the history. I've got this theory that it was like someone's dog or something like that. And you just said, hey, that sounds great. Now, what happened is when we were starting a company,

we came up with all the usual Greek and Roman names, which either we couldn't pronounce or they were already taken. And then we came up with wonderful things like Washington International Finance and Investment Company, which doesn't roll off your tongue. And so at one point, one of my partners at the beginning said, he had just read a book about Andre Maier, who was the former head of Lazard Freer, who had lived in the Carlisle Hotel. He was a single man, and he had a single man's lifestyle in the Carlisle Hotel, I'd say.

And I think this partner aspired to have that single man's lifestyle at the Carlisle Hotel. So he said, what about the Carlisle? And it was two syllables. It was sort of available. It sounded British. It sounded upper class. It sounded like we had more money behind us than maybe we did. So that's how we did it.

I wasn't too far off. I mean, it wasn't a dog name, but it was a hotel name. Right. You mentioned in the beginning that you didn't have, of the fund, the Carlyleau Group. You didn't have a Wall Street mindset, but you had a value mindset. So less interested in getting good fees like Wall Street folks and more interested in making good investments. So what? So the clients would see results and then word would spread. Is that, was that the theory there? Well, as you may have heard me say elsewhere, Everett Dirkson, a former

Senate minority leader famously said, when you're getting kicked out of town, get out and pretend you're leading a parade. What does that mean? Well, basically, take advantage of the situation you find yourself in. So I'm in Washington, D.C. I don't have any investment banking experience. So what we said is, look, we're not investment bankers who have their handout for fees all the time. We're basically people that really will build companies and stay with them. And by the way, we understand companies heavily affected by the federal government better than those guys in Wall Street. It seemed to be true to some extent. And maybe it was. And so that we differentiated ourselves. If we had been a Wall Street investment banking firm in terms of backgrounds,

we probably would have obsessed over the fee part and not so much the building the value of the part. What was the phrase, if you're getting kicked out of town, leave town, but pretend you're leading a parade? If you're getting kicked out of town, pretend you're leading a parade. The lesson is take advantage of the situation you find yourself in. And we found ourselves in that situation. As, you know, everybody markets what they can and they take advantage of the attributes that are strong. And that's the attribute we had. We were in Washington, D.C. We were not Wall Street. We weren't investment bankers. It seemed to work. Obviously, you have to get a track record in the end. Right. Yeah, of course, your track record. So it's sort of you lead with,

with the value mindset and then once you get a track record, you don't really have to worry about it because people say, if these guys are making money, let's throw our money in, right? Yes. I mean, obviously, to get anybody's attention when you're starting a business, you have to say why somebody should give you money. And, you know, you come up with reasons. Some will work, some won't. So those are kind of the things we talked about.

But later, if you have a terrible track record, you're telling everybody how great you are isn't going to make a difference. In the end, you have to have a good track record. Long-term thinking, such as that, you know, if we go down that road, it really is more long-term thinking, right, the value mindset. It's more and more rare these days. And I'm wondering how you cultivate that among people in Carlisle group or how you did when you were, you know, every day nose to the grindstone there, because it's really easy to get short term when, especially in the United States and the Western economies, we're looking quarter to quarter. Well, historically,

private equity firms basically were looking to hold on the assets for six years or so, and their funds were 10-year funds. So you tend to get people who recognize that they're not going to be just judged on their annual track record, and they're not just looking at a fee at the end of the year as a bonus. So you get people that want to build companies and are willing to get the greater rewards from that, but it takes more time. When you become a publicly traded company, as Carlisle, Blackstone, Apollo, KKRR, you do have quarterly pressures. And therefore, you have to deal with quarterly pressures as well as making sure your investors and your funds get the long-term kind of appreciation they want. It's a balancing act, not easy to do. Remember, there are probably 10,000

private equity firms in the world now, maybe at least 10,000, but only a limited number of public. So those public ones are the biggest ones, and they tend to have to deal with these issues that I've just talked about, which is balancing the shorter term concern about quarterly earnings with the longer term concern about longer holding periods of time. Do you think your ability to think long term is a key advantage in other areas of business or of your life in general? Well, I think generally, if you're not obsessed with what's happening tomorrow, it's probably better off and you can plan things down the road because of anything.

of consequence takes more than an hour to get done or a day or a week or something. So anything that's really been built, any great company, Amazon or Microsoft or Apple, these companies took a while to build. And like Jeff Bezos was famous for saying when all the analysts in Wall Street said, hey, your company's going nowhere. You have no earnings. And he said, well, I'm building market share. I don't need earnings. And they said, oh, no, no, your company's terrible. Well, who had the last laugh? The richest man in the world because he focused on building a franchise and realized earnings would ultimately come as they have now done. Do you feel like, I know you didn't grow up with a, by any means, with a silver spoon in your

mouth, right? So do you feel like your modest upbringing helped you focus on value instead of money? Because I guess if you don't grow up wealthy, you either are obsessed with it or you don't necessarily regard money super highly because you didn't have it to begin with. Well, some people that were really poverty stricken, as I've read, you know, they wanted money because they had absolutely nothing. And they just thought that if they could get money that life would be better. I wasn't poverty-stricken. My father was a blue-collar worker. He made $7 to $10,000 a year, which was, you know, enough to get, you know, support one child and so forth. I would say that I never cared about money because my parents didn't have any money. They didn't

talk about money other than say they don't have enough to buy some things I might have wanted. I would say in those days, when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, there were no billionaires in the United States or in the world. And there were hardly any millionaires. And if you were Jewish, you basically were told by your parents, be a doctor or a lawyer or dentist, or if you had a family business, you go into a family restaurant business or whatever might have been. People who were Jewish weren't going to Morgan guaranteed generally or weren't going to First Boston generally because those weren't places where people were Jewish were thought to be rising up and succeeding.

So in my case, I just was interested in politics and I thought to go into politics, it should be a lawyer, and that was my skill set. I wasn't really good in sciences as good as I was in other things that maybe a lawyer would have a skill set in. So I just wanted to be a lawyer and go into politics and not make a lot of money. In fact, I couldn't care about money at all because it just wasn't in my mindset. In fact, in those days, when people were growing up, there were no tech startups. There were no buyout firms. There were no venture capitalists. You just have that on your horizon. Today, people coming out of college, feel if they don't do a tech startup in first five years and make a billion dollars, they're nothing.

Yeah, it's kind of a shame, right? I mean, you look at these young folks now, not only they have so much FOMO, so fear of missing out, but you could become a millionaire by age 30 and say, man, I've only made a million dollars. What am I doing with my life? You know, I agree. And now you could say the same with a billion. I mean, how many people are making a billion dollars before their age 30 and they're going to do with the rest of your life? I mean, strange phenomenon. But the people that have made money by and large, with some exceptions, obviously, are people that wanted to prove their idea work and it got successful when it took off. But it wasn't because they said, I've got to make a billion dollars because I want to be rich.

I want to buy a big house and stuff. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, all those people, They were not obsessed with making a large amount of money. They were obsessed with building a company that had really good products and services. And that's what you really have to do if you want to make a lot of money. Don't worry about the money. If you build something good, the money will come. What initially got you so interested in history? I mean, your books, you've written books about history.

I've also noticed that a lot of people who are highly successful, especially in finance, are very interested in history. Ray Dalio is as well. You guys have that in common. That and rugged good looks and billions of dollars. You have that in common. But what is it about history? history that is so appealing to people in your position generally? In my case, I worked at the White House,

so you do have a sense of history when you're working the White House. And I worked in the Capitol before that, and you have a sense of history because of that. And you live in Washington for 40 years, you have a sense of history. And probably history was a good subject for me in college. And so maybe that's it. Also, my mindset wasn't good in chemistry, physics, or biology. So probably I didn't have the obsession with science. But in terms of other people, I just think as you get older and more successful, you kind of look back and say, okay, what happened, how other people do this, and you know, you probably get more of appreciation of history. I like to remind people that very often, very successful business people or CEOs do not have a technology background.

It's often thought that if you have a technology background, you're going to be great, and therefore you have to be a superstar in STEM or something in college. Many people who rise up on Wall Street or build companies have social sciences or history backgrounds. And so it's important not to ignore those kind of skill set, which teach you how to think, which teach you how to read, which teach you how to talk better, all those kind of skill sets that I think are important. In one interview you said that you had a gift for running a business. I think it was God gave me certain gifts

and one of them is running a business or something to that effect. And you also said that you'd regretted not giving away more money earlier and getting started and giving in charity earlier. My question is, why not simply focus on making money and then have somebody else give it all away for you after you retire or after you pass away, you know, why focus on giving right now when you said yourself that your gift is actually in making the money? Maybe that's an overly, I'm looking at efficiency a little bit too much. I don't know whether I said that. I probably, I'm probably better at

giving away the money than making it in some ways. But historically, when people got very wealthy John D. Rockefeller, as an example, they would hire people to give away the money. And sometimes when they died, they would have foundations created that would give away the money and they weren't really involved in it. But the zeitgeist of this era is that people say, I've made the money at a young enough age so that I'm young enough to be able to be involved in how to give away the money. So Bill Gates, more or less retired at the age of 50, 51. So he was young enough to not to sit around of the beach, let's say I'm going to go create a whole different life in philanthropy and actually do things where I understand what I'm giving the money to. In my case, I wasn't as wealthy

when I was my 20s or 30s. I just didn't do as much on the nonprofit side then because I was tunnel vision to building my company. When I stepped back a bit in my early 50s and I decided to go give away all my money, I wanted to do it myself. I don't have a staff. I kind of figure out what I want to do and call up people and say, I'll give you this money. And that's generally what I'm interested in. I intend to give it all away before I die. And I think I'd rather see it be given away and see what's been done with it while I'm alive rather than some executive giving it away. Yeah. I mean, obviously I can understand that. It's probably very rewarding to establish something and then funded and get it working quickly and have it benefit so many people kind of right away,

or at least very tangibly, right in front of your eyes. The patriotic philanthropy is maybe 5 to 10% of my philanthropy, but it's 99% of what the attention is for goes to it. It's okay. Most of my money goes to education and medical research, particularly education. I have scholarships at all the universities I've been involved with. You know, at the University of Chicago, for example, where I went to law school, I had a full scholarship. And so I've created programs, which I think now fund about 60 students a year at the

New York of Chicago, full ride for University of Chicago students for a number of years I've been doing that. And I have programs like that at Duke or other programs in high schools in Washington, D.C. and other things. So I think scholarships are really important to help people get education. I know your mother appreciated you giving away money. You mentioned something about if she'd found some or you'd found some scrapbooks. Would you tell us about that? I think that's an important point, actually. Yeah. My mother rarely called me up and said, hey, I just read the Carlisle is going public with the company and you made a lot of money. She never would call me. She didn't read the business pages, but she wasn't an obsession with her. When I started giving away

the money, she would call me from time to time and say, I'm really proud of what you're doing. You're actually doing something useful with your money. And then after she passed away, I went through all of her materials and she had all the press clips of my gifts put together, but none of the press clips of Carlisle's success. So she was obviously proud of the money I'd given away. And when she, after she died, I realized, I gave her all the money she would take. She didn't want any money. She didn't view herself. as a person that should have, you know, tens and 20s of millions of dollars. She didn't want to have that much money. But when I gave her money, she ultimately would give it away. And then after she

died, I'm getting now still organizations that are sending me things that my mother contribute to every organization. You know, if you get a letter in the mail saying, can you give $10 to this charity in Iowa, you're not from Iowa, my mother would always say yes. You know, I got it like, you know, 600 of these things. I keep getting letters from people saying, your mother gave us money before. Why don't you continue the tradition? Because she gave money. everybody. Well, I suppose it's easier to say yes than no, right, when those people call anyway. Seems to be. She's definitely a Jewish mother, though. I heard she called you once while you were live on C-SPAN and told you to put a hat on because it was cold outside. We were announcing the

gift to the Lincoln Memorial to redo the Lincoln Memorial. We're sitting there. All of a sudden, it starts to snow. And I said, the park rangers, the National Park Service, people, what are we going to do? And they said, well, we have hats and we're park rangers. We can live in the snow. So let's just get this announcement done. There's live on C-SPAN. And I got a call on my cell phone from my mother saying, David, I see you on C-SPAN, put your hat on. It's snowing. So yes. I'm surprised you answered the phone, but I guess when you know what happens if you don't. Well, you see your mother's calling you. What are you going to do? Yeah, that's a good point. I know. I know one to two books every week and you're the only other person I know, well,

one of the only other people I know who does this. I do it because I do two shows a week. And I feel like it would be so rude to have somebody on here and say, yeah, so what's your book about? I haven't looked at it yet, right? I wonder if you feel the same way. Do you think your show actually kind of gives you a kick in the pants to make sure you've got the book under your belt? Yes, because it helps me because I don't feel it's a good idea to interview somebody about his or her book and not have it read it. So, and I have a separate program on the PBS where I interview people about history books. It's with New York Historical Society. And like tomorrow night, I'll interview Walter Isaacson about his new book called The Codebreaker about Jennifer Doudna,

who just won the Nobel Prize for her CRISPR work. And I always try to have books that I'm going to be interview authors about with me so I can read them and make sure I know what I'm talking about. It's amazing. When I started off interviewing, I thought, you know, I can just read the summary. And as soon as you read the book and then have the interview and you realize how much better it is when you actually know what the heck you're talking about, you can't ever go back. No, I mean, it's a trick to this. I'm generally not interviewing people about things I don't know anything about. So if it's a book on chemistry, I'm probably not going to be a superstar and understanding it. Or it's a book on some type of philosophy. I'm not going to be an expert on it.

But if it's on history, biographies, politics, things like that, I'll probably. know a fair bit about it already, so it's easy for me to get through the books. You don't ever try and stretch it and go, you know what, let me do this interview about genetic sequencing, just to see, because it's an interesting subject. Larry King famously said he never prepared. Well, let's not use him as an example then. He just had a bigger impact than probably you or I are going to have, so he never prepared. Why that was, I don't know.

You know, as Jim Baker used to say, it was drilled into him. Prior preparation prevents poor performance. So be prepared, and I like to be prepared. So I asked Larry King why he didn't prepare because I told him that I read the book and he said, well, that's a lot more work than I ever did for an interview, right? And I thought, well, okay, but why? And he said it interfered a little bit with his natural curiosity, which is an argument that I don't necessarily totally buy. And I definitely have made fun of him for, well, when he was alive, you know, and I would see him, I would make fun of him for this.

And in a good-natured way, you know, you don't do that with somebody who's that much more senior to you in your profession or in general. But I would say, you know, of course, you should probably prepare a little bit more. And he really loved just asking why and kind of winding the person up and letting him go. But there are famous instances of that really biting him in the butt and embarrassing himself. Did you see his Jerry Seinfeld outtake, his interview where Jerry said, I didn't get my show canceled. Do you even prepare for these things at all? It's a little embarrassing. His career went on for quite a while. I remember when he first started it. And what was he on CNN for 20 or 25 years. It's quite a while. Yeah, it was a while. And before that, he was doing

radio for, I mean, probably since like the 50s or something like that or the early 60s. Because I remember he told me how he got started was he was sweeping the floor and somebody didn't show up. And they didn't have pre-recorded broadcasts. They could air on the radio then. It would be you had dead air, which you don't do in radio. So they said, hey, get in here and talk. And that was the beginning of his career. And then I think, you know, 17,000 packs of cigarettes later. And he's got his trademark voice and he got really good at the curiosity thing. Although I will say this. Look, I love Larry King. I always liked him as a person. I always thought he was a good interviewer in many ways, but I also see that being prepared is better. I don't care how curious you are. Being prepared for your guest

is better and you can be curious and prepared at the same time. Yeah, the trick is sometimes when you're prepared, I found a couple times, like for example, I've interviewed authors about books. Some cases they wrote them years ago, and I just got around to interview them now for some program. Well, they forgot what they had written. And I had read the book recently. So do you then correct the author of the book in front of the author and front of the audience a little embarrassing when you have to say, well, no, you actually said this in the book. And I, so I have to bite my tongue sometimes because you're prepared and you know more than the author. You've got to be careful not to embarrass the author by saying you don't really know what's in your own book.

That makes sense. In front of a live audience, I can see that being the case. On this show, I will say, well, you wrote this and then my producer cuts it out and then you start talking again. looks like you knew that the whole time. All right. Well. So I'm willing to make that cheat just, you know, for the sake of the guest. Okay. I should try that.

Yeah, try. But I guess if you're in front of a live audience of 30 people and you say, well, you wrote right here the opposite of the thing you just said, they might be like, why did I agree to this again? I'm never coming back on this guy's show again. You have to be a little bit careful there. Yeah. But as you know, sometimes you ask questions where the answer is pretty much in the question,

which implies you read the book. Now, when you're doing interviews, and you've probably heard me say, the interview format as entertainment is relatively new. And I attributed to maybe the original Tonight Show when there was somebody before Jack Carr, Steve Allen, and they used to interview people for entertainment as much as information. We don't have interviews of Abraham Lincoln or Julia Caesar, those kind of people, because they didn't do that format in those days. You know, it would be great if we could interview those people. When you do interviews, you have to make certain you're not overpowering the guests. I won't mention their names, but there are a couple of people who

had interview shows that didn't last very long because they, overpowered the guests, in part because they tried to show the guests how smart they were and didn't let the guests answer the question, or they would get into arguments with the guests, which is not a good thing to do. I do. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest David Rubinstein. We'll be right back. Now for the conclusion of our episode with David Rubinstein. Some of those people were experimenting with format, so I'll give them that. You know, if they go, I'm going to have a show where I mistreat everyone. Okay, fine. You know, but then you become a bit, it's a little bit like the Jerry Springer effect, right? Remember what he used to be a serious talk show

host and he would have real good discussions and you'd go, wow, that was, this guy's smart. Then Geraldo Rivera gets hit in the face with a chair, breaks his nose, ratings go through the roof because he had like white supremacist and Black Panthers on the stage at the same time. And then Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, Ricky Lake, they all went from let's have a real conversation to, okay, we need people that are going to throw chairs, who hates each other, bring them all in the same room. And it became the Jerry Springer effect, but you can't go back from that, right? That's why people go, why don't you do more of this or that or the other thing? You can't go back. You can't become the governor of, or was it the mayor of Cincinnati that Jerry Springer was? You can't go from

the guy who's got the chairs flying back to intelligent conversation. You can only go in one direction with your show. Is this show still on? Actually, yeah, he's got a bunch of new shows. One is where he's a judge, like the people's court, and he's doing the judge thing. And I think he's got other types of shows, but I don't know. I don't, I don't spend a whole lot of time watching daytime TV. I assume you don't either. I don't. No, I used to think that sometimes when I did have a chance to watch it, the same shows I was watching when I was, you know, in the elementary school were still on, you know, I love Lucy reruns or so forth, but I think they got rid of them by now. You've got successful kids. They're all well-educated. How did you avoid spoiling them?

Or maybe that's not the right question. How did you instill a good work ethic and drive? And did you do anything artificially to create an environment where your kids would have to struggle a bit so they could learn the lessons born from that? I was a hard worker and I am a bit of a workaholic. Maybe they would see that working hard was something that was important. And in the other hand, I didn't flaunt my money. I didn't have lavish houses and lots of expensive lifestyles. I mean, obviously, I don't have a poor lifestyle.

But I didn't go out of my way to kind of say, we're going to have the biggest house in the world. We're going to have the fanciest this and that. So my children recognize that I did value. education more than anything else probably than hard work. So it seems to have worked out. But as you know, raising children is always a ongoing process and it's not easy to do. And I wouldn't say my children have no challenges. Nobody's children have no challenges. There's always challenges. And so do you have children. I do. I have one, but he's only 19 months old. So there's not a whole lot of work and stilling going on just yet. Oh, I assume he's walking by now. So you get credit for getting him

and teach him how to walk, right? Yeah. Yeah, teaching him how to walk. And now the next lesson is teaching them that you can't just bite people when you want something or don't want something, that's where we're at right now. Okay. Well, I'm sure he'll learn that by age three or four. Yeah, I've got, I don't know if you can see it on camera, but there's a mark right here. That is a tooth mark from a 19-month-old, and there's a mark right here that you wouldn't see normally on camera, and that's from this morning, and it still hurts, man. I got to tell you, this little tiny teeth, they go deep. But have you gotten them enrolled in, you know, Harvard yet or anything like that? Yeah, he's on the waiting list for Yale, maybe,

we should put his application in tomorrow. You know, that's a thing that I wonder if it'll even exist in the same form as it does now in 20 years, or 18 years. It's hard to say. I call that early, early, early admission, you know, when you're three or four. But I don't know. These schools are now, the demand is so great. It's just unbelievable.

When I was in high school, I graduated in 1966. At Harvard, I suspect they probably had about three or four thousand applications this year of 57,000. 57,000. It's amazing. And so the competition for these schools is so intense. And, you know, obviously you can still be successful if you don't go to Harvard or Yale or other places. Yeah, of course. I think, and I've talked about this with Scott Galloway. I don't know if you know who he is, a super sharp character. He mentioned that these schools are becoming more like luxury brands and that they should actually be ashamed of rejecting 50,000 applicants a year,

not saying how many people they reject. I mean, if you're a public institution or a private institution that says they serve the public in this way, maybe rejecting 50,000 people, 40,000 of whom were pretty much qualified to go there? It's not a point of pride. It's actually the opposite. What do you think? It's complicated. I do serve on a number of university boards, and so I am conflicted because we get all these applications that we don't have enough room for all of them. So what are we supposed to do? Now, maybe we shouldn't encourage that many people, but in the end, you know, the people that don't get into some of the elite schools, they usually wind up getting to, you know, some other school that's pretty good. And as you all know,

it doesn't make a difference what school you really went to. And some of the most best people didn't even graduate from college, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, they did pretty well. They didn't even get a college degree, right? Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. I just think, you know, for me, when I went to undergrad and then law school, the law school absolutely cared about which undergrad you went to, and then the law firm certainly cared about which law school you went to.

Otherwise, you couldn't even apply there. I mean, you could maybe get a job sweeping the floors if you didn't go to a top 50 school. That was true then and was true when. I was doing it, I may have changed a little bit now, but the trick now is that the law firm world has changed because in those days, when I was doing it, every lawyer had a secretary. Now I think virtually none of them have secretaries. They all have to type everything themselves or something on a word processor. In those days, you know, they had a lot more associates per partner than I think they do today. The economics have changed a fair bit.

Let's talk about fundraising, because this is fundamentally a sales skill set, and you are very, very good at it, right? I know you share those skill sets. Would you say that sales is one of the rarest or most undervalued skill sets in any industry? Well, it is in this sense. In most companies, where do they start you out at sales? You know, you want to hire somebody out of college or you're in sales because they figure, you know, we'll throw a whole bunch of people in and some people will figure how to do it and some won't. If you go to Harvard Business School or Stanford Business School or University of Chicago Business School really goes to schools and you say, you know what, I want to be fundraiser in the private equity world. Or I want to be a salesperson. There's no courses in

salesmanship, no course in fundraising because it's thought to be the lowest part on the totem pole. But when I give speeches and I ask people, how many of you have asked people for money or been asked for money in the last month or so? Everybody raised their hand because everybody's either asked for money or been asked for money, for a political reason or a cause or a philanthropic cause or a business cause project. So I think it's an important skill set. And you shouldn't say to people, I'm sorry to ask you for money. If you're sorry to ask, then don't ask. You should basically take some pride and know what you're talking about. And I was not by nature an outgoing person and a fundraiser. But in my firm, when I was getting it off the ground, I didn't have the still set to do the

investing because my partners had MBAs and I didn't. So I took on the job of fundraising. And ultimately, I got comfortable doing it and spent, you know, 30 years running around the world begging for money. Do people ask you for fundraising advice now? I'm wondering if we can do that. You know, how do people learn how to raise funds for their startup with their business? You know, where would you start if you were starting in sales again right now? Well, if you're trying to raise, money for a startup of business, that's easier than I think of for a philanthropic or political thing in some extent in the sense that you're giving people the promise they might get their money back or the hope and a good return. It's harder in that you're typically asking for larger

sums than you're asking for in a charitable or a political contribution. I think when you're putting together, you've got to have something that sounds credible and test it out with other people and make sure you really believe it and know what the facts are. You can't go there and say, I don't really know the answer to your question. You've got to know this stuff pretty well. Be prepared. are some of the top mistakes that people make when they're trying to raise funds for a startup or a business? Is there anything that you see when you're showing people how to do this or giving talks where you think, oh, my gosh, these poor guys are never going to get their mind around this if they keep doing X, Y, Z? Well, they have to have a set of materials that make sense

that are easily understood. People may not get the page 23, so make your key points in page one, two or three, be prepared to say that you're investing, whatever money you have alongside. Be prepared to say that you're not just trying to get rich quick, that you have a fiduciary mindset, that you have something that has some risk, don't lie about the risks, and that basically you're trying to get people to buy into an idea that you're going to work hard to pursue, and you've got to show people that you're intelligent, you're willing to work hard, you're sacrificing, this is important to you, you're driven to get it done. That's what it often takes.

You mentioned in a previous interview that you should give the bad news up front. Did I get that right? Well, generally, I think it's important to not make everybody think that things are perfect when you're trying to make a sales pitch. I think you get more benefit out of the person who's listening if you say, look, these are some of the risks, and I want to let you know up front. This has never been done before. I don't have a lot of money to put in. I've been turned down by a few people, but this is why they turn me down. But you should be honest about it because people reflect, I think, in respect people who are. more honest when you're trying to raise money. Sales is my best skill set aside from interviewing, or maybe it's vice versa. It depends what you think of the interview. But when I used to give the bad news or the tough news up front, it helps manage expectations. And for some reason that's sort of

beyond our discussion here, people expect less bad news later if you're up front in disclosing the downside initially. Because I guess if you throw it in at the end, people go, okay, what else are you hiding. If you put it in the beginning, there's a psychological kind of almost expectation that that was it. It depends on your style. My style is to kind of say to people, look, I realize I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here. And I'm not going to say this is going to cure cancer. But this is a nice little thing that I think can work out without exaggerating how great it's going to be and tell them what the challenges are you've had. And I think people will respect you more for telling them the downside because everybody knows nothing is perfect. You've spoken before about not being afraid to make

mistakes, embrace failure. A lot of successful people say this, right? But how did you initially steal yourself to failure? You know, a lot of people fail, they get discouraged, they don't pick themselves back up. Do you think you were wired differently? Or do you think maybe you learn to embrace rejection or failure from being in sales, in a sales role, and having to raise money for funds and hearing no, you know, a hundred times a week or a month? Remember, most people in life are rejected for most of the things that they try to do in life. How many times it, You get cut from an athletic team. You didn't get whatever award you wanted in high school.

You didn't get elected this. So you get used to by the time you're a young professional, you've probably been rejected a fair bit. You know, you do have some experience in it. And you have to recognize that you've probably learned something from it. And in my case, in our business career, as we were getting it off the ground, we had some deals that didn't work out. We lost some companies.

We wanted to buy. We made some mistakes. You know, we just didn't do the things we wanted to do all the time. And you just have to say to yourself, look, I'll do better. I learn from this and I'll do better. and not try to lie about it and not be arrogant about the fact that it was somebody else's fault. It wasn't your fault. People were respecting more of you say, I made a mistake. This is what I did wrong. This is what I've learned from it. I think you get further along that way.

For me, sales was a huge driver of success. I think I just got used to hearing no, running into objections and difficulties. And now when I run into an objection or an obstacle in business or anywhere else for that matter, I feel like it just barely slows me down because I've got so much practice getting knocked on on my back, as it were. And I think sales does that. I almost feel like everyone should do sales, even if it's miserable, just for a short enough period of time or a long enough period of time to learn that being told no, not being able to make something happen is just not the end of the world and that you can move on from that. Steve Schwartzman, who built a firm that's very successful, Blackstone, in his kind of autobiography, we talked about the fact when

Pete Peterson, his partner, who had been a former Secretary of Commerce and president of Lehman Brothers, and he, Steve, had been the head of M&A of Lehman Brothers. When they ran out to raise their first buyout fund, they got rejected 98% of the time. They only got succeeded, 2% of the interest. And I think that's probably, you know, something they weren't probably so used to. And I would say it's a similar percentage when I was starting. But like one person who became our biggest individual investor turned me down nine times. And every time I would go into this foreign country, he was at Switzerland.

And I would go see him, just going to say, remember me? Here I am again. And he would say, no, nine times fine. He said, okay, tell you what, don't. come anymore, I'll give you some money, and then you don't have to come bother me every month or so. And then he ultimately became our biggest investor. So he paid you to go away and then eventually he kept coming back. That's a good trick. It worked. Yeah. Like it's an old saying that about somebody, you know, Richard Holbrook, who was a very famous diplomat, you know, I think was Henry

Kissinger who said about him, you know, you're eventually going to say get the yes. So it's easier to say yes in the beginning, then say no, because eventually you're going to get the yes anyway. because O'Rourke was so persistent. Eventually, you're going to say yes. So just give him the money at the beginning or given what he wants at the beginning. You've saved time for yourself. Steve Schwarzen, by the way, we'll link this in the show notes.

He's episode 447 of this show, if you want to hear more about that. On leadership, a large percentage of the population has some problem with women in leadership roles. And I'm wondering, one, if you debate that, and two, in what areas do you think women have an advantage versus men as leaders? Well, of course, 50% or 51% of the population is female, so I'm not sure it's that part of the population that has a problem with women in fleeters, but maybe some percentage of women. I guess I'm more talking about, like, corporate leadership, you know.

Well, there's no doubt that women today are not running companies at the same percentage as anywhere close to their percentage of the population. So you've probably got the Fortune 500 companies, I'm sure, you know, less than 25 or probably run, maybe maybe less than 35 now or run by, or firstly, Fortune 100 companies, probably less. and 10 are run by women, something like that. I'm not sure exactly the numbers, but they've gone down a bit because the number of women CEOs are very prominent stepped down recently. I would say, surely it's a change from where we were. For most of organized history, over the last several thousand years, women were subjugated to men. They were not given leadership positions. In our country, when we started, women couldn't even own property if they were married, let alone vote and hold offices and so forth. So the world has gone through this change,

And I think we've accelerated dramatically in the last 20 years so that more and more women are on boards and having leadership positions. You and I know when we went to law school, at least in my case, probably 10% of the student body was female. Now most law schools, it's probably more than 50%. And the same is true in many medical schools. So it's changing. We'll see the benefits of this further and further down the road. But 10 years from now, 20 years from now, you're going to have more and more women. It's just taking a while for men to get used to the fact that they're giving up power.

Why did men oppose letting women vote? Well, they did. Think about it. For most of our history, we didn't have women vote. It was only in 1919. We'd let them vote, but because men were not willing to give up power. As a general rule of thumb, when people have power, they like it, and they don't like to give it up.

And some men didn't want to give up power to women in terms of voting. And I think as a general rule of thumb, men tend to be more favorable to other men than they are to women in terms of business promotions and so forth. So that's changing in the last, you know, decades. One thing you mentioned is that maybe not a significant number of, of the population is opposed to women in leadership. But now that I think about it, there are plenty of women that also oppose other women

in leadership positions. It's not just men, right? Well, look, think about it. One of the most progressive women of the 20th century was Eleanor Roosevelt, and she initially opposed women's having the right to vote because her view was, well, look, I got a pretty good deal here already. My husband can have the right to vote,

and I don't really need the right to vote. But, you know, obviously she ultimately came around to it. So it's not impossible to take the view that, as some women did many years ago, that women maybe aren't as good as men in certain areas. Some women may have that view, but I think it's gradually changing. Do you think there are areas in which women have an advantage over men in a leadership role? Well, sure. I think that some women have innate sensitivities that they've been discriminated against so long, or they had to work harder than men,

or as they used to say about Ginger Rogers, she had to do everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels. So, yeah, sure, women have had some more difficult times rising up to get to the level where they are. And so when they get to that level of being a CEO, they probably have experienced more hardships than men did getting there. And so probably they are, many ways, great CEOs. And the women who have been great CEOs have been extraordinary in their capabilities. I interviewed one the other day who's incredible what she's done. The CEO of Progressive, I think is triple the value of the company since she's been the CEO of one of the largest automobile insurance companies. There are many women who have done outstanding jobs. They just haven't been given

as much opportunity as maybe they should. In closing here, what are you most proud of in life, your accomplishment was, aside from your kids, because I know you kind of have to say that, right? Right. Well, I think that's generally a standard affair to say that, yes. Probably in the end that people think I did something good for the country. It's an interesting phenomenon. Nobody ever says I want to die for my neighborhood, my state, my city, my high school, but people are preparing to die for their country. People have a view on their country as being an important part of their being. And so the fact that some people have said, I've done something good for the country in some ways is probably what I'm most proud of, even though, you know,

building a private equity firm isn't necessarily something that's that unique. And doing things for your country is unique. But just that's probably what I'm most proud of. It's not just having built a company, but having given away the money in ways that some people think it's intelligent. David Rubenstein, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. You've got a lot of expertise. You've been very generous. And so it's a great conversation. Thank you. My pleasure. Good luck. Appreciate it. Bye. Bye. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger show to sink your teeth into,

here's a trailer for another episode that I think you might enjoy. Tell me about the neighborhood where you grew up. South Central Massachusetts. Yeah. Well, most people play the game, uh, Grand Theft Auto. Yes. So I'm sitting on the porch, and I don't know what I'm going to do. And my partner calls me, and he's like, man, I got the new thing.

And it was cocaine. Cocaine was really, really expensive then. Yeah. You know, a gram of cocaine back then was like $300. $75. Wow. So it was dozens of times more expensive back then than it is now. Like 300 times. Wow. And it's also the most expensive thing that you can fit in your hand that cost that much money probably. Maybe you have watched. Yeah, absolutely. At that time, they said cocaine was more expensive than gold. How much money are we talking about here? I probably was making about $55,000 off of a kilo. I think you made up around a billion dollars in the 80s in L.A. That's what I heard on the documentary.

For two years, I made like $600 million. Not profit for me, but money that went through my hands. Before I started making a million every day, we was making $500 every day. Before we were making $500. We made $400. Before we was making $400. Before he was making $2, we made $100. So you scaled up to a million dollars a day.

Yeah, yeah. I had days that I went through $3 million in one day. How are you even counting that much money? Oh, you have money counters. Yeah. And you have a team of girls that sit there and they count money all day. You know, you have a house, and this house would have like a slot in the door, and people would just come in and drop duffel bags through the door.

So I wanted to know what was the difference between real business and the cocaine business. And what did you find? There's none. For more of Freeway Rick's story as one of the biggest drug dealers of all time, including his ties to the CIA, check out episode 121 of the Jordan Harbinger show. I really thought he was going to tell me that Carlisle was the name of his childhood dog. or something like that. It turns out it was his partner who was the dog.

Rimshot. Wish I'd thought of that joke during the show. Story of my life right there, I'd give up every penny to be 10 years younger, he said at the end of the show. Now, that's interesting to me, right? Being rich in terms of time instead of money, that's certainly something to think about.

For those of us who are, you know, non-billionaires or maybe not one-percenters even, being rich in terms of time instead of money. That means something. It means something, at least to the point where billionaires are thinking about it. Are they only thinking about it because of what they already have?

I don't know. You'd be the judge. Big thank you to David Rubinstein. His podcasts and books will be linked in the show notes. Please use our website links if you buy books from any guest on this show. It does help support the show.

We've got those links that give us, I don't know, like a quarter every time or whatever. Worksheets for this episode are in the show notes. Transcripts always in the show notes. There's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger

on both Twitter and Instagram, or just hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same software systems and tiny habits that I use for show booking, for my personal life, for my business. I met my wife using similar skills disease. I'm teaching you how to do this all for free. It's a course where you don't even have to enter your payment info. It's just a few minutes a day. Go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash course.

I'm teaching you how to dig that well before you get thirsty. and most of the guests on the show subscribe to the course as well, so come join us, and you'll be in Smart Company. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful

or interesting. If you know somebody who's interested in finance, who's interested in raising capital, or is just interested in raising successful kids, please do share this episode with him. I hope you find something great in every episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Please do share us with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best

to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show,

you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions

that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested,

and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love,

and it's got thousands of five-star reviews, because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work, itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.