YouSaid · the spoken record

David Rubenstein

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2022-03-29
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2022-03-29
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  1. “Kindest thing anybody's ever done for me, I guess, is of course aside from your parents raising you and trying to help you and other relatives helping you along the way is basically people introducing me to philanthropic opportunities where I can really make a difference. And a lot of people have introduced me to really good philanthropic opportunities that I've now pursued and I've really been pleased with it. And of course, people have introduced me to people that helped make my career and a lot of good introductions to people. I'm indebted to a lot of people.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “My father was a former Marine. He worked in the post office his entire life. He was a typical blue-collar worker. You don't work more than a minute overtime without getting paid. As soon as you can legally retire at 55, you retire because that's what you do. He didn't have a lot of intellectual interest. I was their only child, so they put a lot of energy into trying to help me get somewhere.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “These people are now. I get hundreds and hundreds of them, and they're saying, Well, you haven't given anything in a year. I said, Well, she's died four years ago. She was giving to everybody and she couldn't resist any appeal. She was very giving person.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “My mother was not educated person. She dropped out of high school to get married. She was a person who was always very giving. She didn't have any money when I got wealthy. I gave her everything she would take. She didn't want much money because she thought it would change her life if I gave her too much money. After she passed away, I got her mailing address sent to my house and all her mail came to me. And every day I get like 25 different philanthropic things that she would.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “What could be more fun than making your parents proud of you? That was something I felt good. And when I do some things I've done to honor my parents, I redid the Iwajima Memorial. My father was a Marine to honor him. And I did some things in Washington to honor my mother. Those are things that you really feel good about.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “When you get an award that is meaningful, but I think the thing that I've probably the most when your mother calls you up and says she's proud of what you've done with your life. When I was making a lot of money, Carla, my mother never called me and said, Carlisle's making a lot of money, you're really rich and so forth and so on. But when I started giving away a lot of money, she said, I'm really proud of what you're doing. And when she passed away a few years ago, I went through all of her possessions. And the stuff that she saved all the articles about me were the ones where I gave away money, not the things about how much money I had made.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think so. And when you reach a certain age, you're younger than me, but you reach a certain age, you say, okay, I've had a reasonably good life. I'm now prepared to give up my life to protect my children, my grandchildren, and so forth. I think almost most people would probably do that. You're young. That's a Sophie's choice for you. For example, if we were attacked militarily today by the Soviet Union, would you go volunteer and knowing that volunteering and getting the military year would be almost certainly killed? I guess you would say for the purpose of this, yes, but obviously probably think about it a little bit more. But my father's generation, they were prepared to go into World War II. They did. So-called greatest generation. And people didn't think twice about going in. In fact, they were embarrassed not to go in.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Somebody said to you today, Look, your children need your body parts. We're going to take your body parts out, but you're going to die. Each one needs a kidney. You've got two kidneys. So obviously everybody's prepared to give their life for their children. It's an interesting phenomenon that people prepare to give their life for their children. Nobody doubts that with very few exceptions.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Think there's a sense that your country is your way of life, you're protecting your children, and it's just a different phenomenon. But for example, if I said to you today, somebody said to me, look, you have a chance to go to Ukraine and fight for the U.S. Army if we're going to go there. And let's suppose the U.S. Army gets into Ukraine. And you're going to go there and you're going to fight for your country in Ukraine, or we're going to give you citizenship to live for the rest of your life in Switzerland. What do you want to do? You can move your family to Switzerland, or you can give your life. And we know you're going to be shot and killed if you go to Russia and Ukraine. What would you really choose? Would you really choose to give your life to fight for Ukraine, or would you rather just go to Switzerland and live there?”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “You think about it is anybody prepared to give their life for their neighborhood for their little league team, for their state, for their school? People don't say that. But people often say I'm prepared to give my life for my country. Why is that? It's an interesting phenomenon that so many people are willing to give their lives to protect the way that we have our life in this country. It's something I'm interested about. I put it in one of my most recent books. I interviewed somebody who was prepared to give his life in Vietnam and almost did. He won the Congressional Medal of Honor for it.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think Oprah's a good interviewer. Mike Wallace was a good interview too, different style. But Chris Wallace is a good interviewer. He's now passed away. But Tim was on Meet the Press. I think he was a great interviewer. There are a number of other good interviewers. The trick in being a good interviewer on TV today is you've got to press somebody but not offend them. And it's sometimes hard to do because you're on tight timeframes and so forth. My next book I'm thinking about is probably going to be something like Giving Back to America, what it means to give back to America and give examples of people who have given back to America and then talk to people who have had relatives who have given what Lincoln called the last full measure of devotion, obviously giving their life or talk about people who've been wounded, have lost two limbs or three limbs in a war. It's an interesting phenomenon when you were growing up, you might have heard this, I know when I was growing up, I heard it, that my country's the greatest country in the world, and I'm prepared to give my life for it.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “I thought about doing that, but I don't know if I'll do that. Anyway, I think the interview format is a relatively novel concept in the grand span of history.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Thought about writing a book on how to be an interviewer because the interview business itself is an interesting phenomenon. We don't have interviews of Thomas Jefferson. There's no interviews of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington. Why is that? Because the interview format, as we now know, it came about is kind of a form of entertainment, education in the 1950s on the tonight show and then other spin-offs on daytime talk shows and so forth. I've thought about doing a book where I would interview people that are no longer alive and get people who are experts in them to play that role asking William Shakespeare, tell us the truth. Who really wrote those plays? You couldn't have done it all by yourself. Or asking Henry VIII, why don't you just get a prenup and not have to chop the heads off of your wives or ask Cleopatra who's really a better lover? Mark Antony or Julia Caesar.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Today, you get people who have to spend 40% of their time raising money. And when you have to raise that much money, you don't have time to give in the arena kind of speeches. Very few people write their own speeches. Barack Obama was a pretty good writer, and I did write a lot of his speeches that when you're president, you can't spend your time writing speeches full time. But in those days, what Teddy Roosevelt or others, people didn't have speechwriters so much, and they actually could spend the time to write things. They didn't have to be interrupted by tweets all the time. They're responding that the emails all the time. You did see that. I would say it's harder today to get people to write their own speeches that are going to be meaningful.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “The most effective speeches like Teddy Roosevelt's are speeches which do not promise to do anything. They are not speeches which list legislation. They are not ones that have the word I. So let me take three famous speeches.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Well, the Magna Carta was a document that was the inspiration for the Declaration of Independence. It had more impact in many ways in this country than it did in England, more or less the first document of its type, which basically guaranteed certain rights. Now, the rights were guaranteed to barons, not the average people. Certain people were excluded from the benefits of it for sure. And it has lots of flaws in it. It's a symbol of people being able to get certain basic rights like the right that trial by jury or a right to have a punishment proportionate to the crime or the right to be represented when you're being taxed and so forth. It's a symbolic beginning to the idea that people really are more important than the rulers.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “remind people of history and heritage of our country as a way of saying look we don't want to make the mistakes of the past let's realize what we did wrong before and let's try to fix it that's what civilization is all about progressing and fixing the mistakes we made in the past and progressing forward in the Darwinian way”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It this way I buy a lot of historic documents and I put them all on display and I just bought a rare copy of the Bill of Rights and it'll also be going on display at the National Archives. The reason I do that is because I'm trying to remind people of the history and heritage of our country. And when people go to see the original the Magna Carta, they're more likely before they go, while they're there or afterwards to read about it and learn more about it. If you just look on a computer slide, you can find out what the words are of the Magna Carta. But I think when you actually see something in person, it makes a difference. The human brain may evolve in the next thousand years or maybe even 100 years such that if you look at something on a computer slide, it has the same impact as seeing it in person. We're not there yet. And so that's why I think it's important to kind of preserve these things. And secondly, same with Monticello. Preserve certain historic buildings for the same reason. People in this country don't really know much about the history and heritage of our country. We don't teach history and civics as much as we used to. So one small part of what I'm trying to do.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “That's a selfish thing. And I should maybe give more money to global climate change things, but I don't think I have enough money to have an impact. I don't think I'm going to see enough progress in my lifetime and enough other people working on it. I'm trying to find things that there aren't as many other people doing as I'm interested in doing.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I have four standards for my philanthropy. Number one, start something that wouldn't otherwise get started. So building the Kenny Center, they wouldn't have done if I didn't want to do it or fixing Monticello. It wouldn't have gotten done if I didn't want to really put up the money to do it or building at the University of Chicago that I just built and it's now open for the University Conference Center. So I try to start something that wouldn't otherwise get started. I try to finish something that otherwise wouldn't get finished. Third, I try to find something I'm going to have an intellectual interest in so that I'm willing to be involved not just by writing a check, but being involved on the board or other ways. In other words, it's my view that philanthropy is derived from an ancient Greek word that means loving humanity and it doesn't mean just rich people writing checks. And the thing that's the most valuable is your time. You can always make more money. You can't make more time. I want something I'm going to put time into. And the last standard is I want to see some progress during my lifetime.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, many people would say who knew him better than I did. I know his son, who's the Prime Minister now, much better, Lee Kwang Yu, I've met through President Bush and some others when I was there. A brilliant man who many people would have thought would have been one of the most powerful people in the world had he had a country that was as big as China or United States. Very smart, very brilliant, a great leader, built a country from nothing. I mean, he took over that country in the early 60s and built it into an incredible thing. Malaysia didn't want Singapore. They kind of gave it away. And all of a sudden, he's built this great powerhouse”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And I think they've done a wonderful job as well trying to bring people together from all over the world and try to listen to them and have some good solutions come to enormous problems.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Singapore is an incredible country. It's very small, maybe five million natives and maybe 2 million expats or something like that. Works extremely well. It's very honest. No corruption that I'm aware of. And it's really intellectual centers. I think it's pretty good. I think Israel has a government that you could say is very Noah's Ark-like. It just has so many different parties in it. It doesn't kind of work as well as I think our system works, but Israel has an incredible entrepreneurial culture in the country and quite impressive in my view. I'm impressed with another of other countries that have had to survive in very difficult situations. Clearly, Ukraine has now a poster child for how to survive bombardment. I assume they'll emerge from this stronger than they otherwise would have been, though obviously I wish they hadn't gone through this tragedy. But there are a lot of nonprofit organizations that I think have done a really good job of managing problems. I'm a member of the board of the World Economic Forum, which is the Davos.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Call on people to ask their views, try to make sure you have people going to present who have some interesting things to say, but listen to what people have to say and then try to have some good things to talk about each time and also end on time.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “When I get involved in a nonprofit, I try to make a difference. So if I say, look, I'm going to be the chairman of the Kennedy Center there. I said, I want to build a new building there. I'm going to make a difference, try to make something happen. So I don't want to be a chair just to preside. I want to do something that makes the organization better for my having been the chair. And obviously sometimes that takes leadership. Sometimes it takes money. I do enjoy it and I actually enjoy running meetings. And I think I have a good sense of humor so I can make the meetings go less painful than nonprofit board meetings might otherwise be.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I'm not quite sure. I just think a lot of boards, and eventually I wind up as a chair. Maybe it's because the other people are smart enough to know that being a chair takes a lot of time and they want the job. So no, but maybe I got it because I was the only person not in the room when they were voting on the chair. I don't know.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Service the industry because I think the genie is out of the bottle and I don't think the industry is going to go away anytime soon.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I was skeptical of crypto in the beginning because I figured there's nothing underlying this. But it's clear to me now that many younger people don't think that there's much underlying the dollar or the euro or other currencies. So they think I really can't get gold for my dollar anymore. So maybe the government's promise to make it valuable isn't maybe there when you have so much money you're borrowing and you're inflating your way out of the value of the currency. So I think many people like the fact that it's private. You can't really know how much somebody owns. They like to be able to transfer around the world. And look, if you're in Ukraine or you're in Russia and you want to have some assets and your country has got lots of challenges, having some cryptocurrency probably enables you to feel better that you can have something that's outside of the government's control and it's not dependent on a bank opening up its doors to you. Another factor seeing people make money in this and therefore they tend to go where people has made money. I have not bought cryptocurrencies, but I have bought companies.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “For the last 40 years, people have said private equity is about to fall apart. Private equity can't keep doing what it's doing. And for the last 40 years and every year in the last 40 years, private equity has outperformed everything else because in the end economic incentives are staggering 20% of the profits, if not 30% of the profits, and the ability to fix companies, if you make a mistake, sometimes you're in a private setting, you have the opportunity to fix it before the public realizes the mistake that you might have made. You tend to attract a lot of very talented people too. There's no doubt the economic reward system is very good. And so you attract a lot of talented people, hardworking people. Profit equity returns may come down because there's so much money in it now, but the basic ingredients of private equity, which is the economic incentive system, fixing things, being more aligned with the workers and the managers, I think that does tend to produce pretty good rates of return, and we'll probably be here for quite some time.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Private equity, and what I use the term private equity, I mean the American sense of private investments and so forth. One is doing venture, one's doing growth capital and so forth. I think that they all got MBAs from really good schools. Maybe they saw me as a bit of a role model. I don't know. Maybe I should have nurtured their creative skills and had them be artists or poets or playwrights. It just didn't work that way. I'm not sure why they drifted into it, but they did. And maybe I encouraged them somewhat, but I didn't force them to go into that business for sure.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I'm not citing myself as a perfect parent. I'm not. One is not putting enough time into it, making your kids think that there's a higher priority than them, not listening to them when they have a problem, not trying to nurture them in things that need nurturing, giving them too much when they don't really earn it.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “The hardest thing in the world to do is raise children, even harder than raising children is raising children if you're wealthy or famous. Because we've all seen examples where that didn't result in such wonderful offspring. I try to be a role model a bit by doing things that I think they would be proud of and try to not spoil them by giving them undue money, but make sure they have a good education. As of this moment, I've never told my children I'm giving you X dollars when I die or they're going to get a large amount of money before I die. I help them a bit around the way, along the way, but then help them with their education. But none of them are sitting back and just saying, well, I can't wait till my father dies. I'm going to inherit a billion dollars. All of my kids are well educated and they all have MBAs and they're all in mankind's highlight calling private equity.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Trying to maintain some humility, trying to recognize that I wasn't gifted in many areas, so I had to work harder than other people, trying to learn from people that could be mentors or could educate me, trying to make as many contacts as I could who you never know who might call you up with some good idea someday or help you with a job. Many of the jobs I got, I got because I had some random contact I didn't think would lead to anything, but it ultimately did. Ultimately, I think for anybody listening to this who wants to kind of rise up, I think trying to read as much as you can, learning how to perfect your oral skills, learning how to write reasonably well is very important, learning how to network with people, retaining some humility, sharing the credit. These are things that I thought I did along the way, and I got lucky too.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Succeeding in our country or in any country. Let the 1.7 million people drop out of high school every year. We don't really, I think, train people to read as well as we should. 80% of the people in the juvenile delinquency system are functionally illiterate. So until you solve literacy, you have no chance as a person in the social underclass of rising up, in my view. That's a big problem.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Principal flaws we have today are income inequality is getting worse, not getting better, and lack of social mobility is getting worse, not better. I grew up in a modest blue-collar background, but I believe in the American dream. I was white. I didn't have prejudice against me. I was Jewish, but the prejudice wasn't as apparent as if you were black. I worked hard, as you no doubt did, and worked your way up. I think today many people don't believe in the American dream. Immigrants believe in it more than people who are born in this country in many cases. If I had the answer to income inequality and lack of social mobility, I would have been in Iowa and New Hampshire many times trying to run for president. I don't have the answers, no easy answer. But one answer that I think is something we should focus on, literacy. Right now, 14% of Americans cannot read past the fourth grade level. If you're functionally illiterate, which is what that definition means if you can't read past the fourth grade level, you have no chance of”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “This country succeeded in part because we have a constitution that's worked reasonably well. Only 27 amendments in 250 years, which is pretty good. It's got lots of flaws. Slavery was the biggest flaw in not having the right for women to vote was another major flaw. But it's worked reasonably well with the amendments. Secondly, the capitalist system has tick hold in this country. It's an improvement on the capitalist system that operated in Western Europe when we started our country and we've refined it. Entrepreneurial activity is another part of our”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “I work in the White House as a young man, so when you work in the White House as a young man, you do get a sense of history. You're working in the same places, a lot of famous people. Secondly, I've stayed in Washington, and therefore you see all the monuments, memorials, and so forth from time to time. The book you referred to, the first one, I basically started a program to educate members of Congress about American history where I interview a great historian in front of members of Congress once a month. I did that for about five years because of COVID. We stopped, but we're starting again tomorrow night. I'm going to interview Susan Eisenhower, who wrote a book about her grandfather, President Eisenhower. And I think it's an interesting thing to kind of educate other people about American history. So it's something I'm interested in. And I tell people to find things you're interested in and pursue them. If you told me I had to educate people about nuclear physics, I don't think I could do that very well because I don't understand it.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Geniuses are very, very hard to manage, for one thing. I've hired a few people that some people might say are geniuses, but they usually didn't work out. That's not always the case. But geniuses are coddled for a bit by people telling their whole life how brilliant they are. And when people tell you how brilliant you are, you believe so much in your ideas that you are maybe not going to listen to other people. You're going to be tone deaf about certain things. Now, some people you would say are Steve Jobs was a genius. You could argue or you could argue Bill Gates wasn't. They worked out. But for every Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, there are plenty of people you don't hear of who just were brilliant, but they didn't get anywhere.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Looking for people that are reasonably intelligent, geniuses are tough to back because sometimes they get a little crazy. But reasonably intelligent, hardworking, have a vision of what they want to do. This is their life. They're putting up whatever they have in money in terms alongside you. They are available to answer questions. They can explain what they're doing. If somebody can't explain what they're doing to me, I get nervous. If you really can't explain it, I wonder whether they really understand or whether it's going to be something I'm going to understand when they make a mistake, what they really did wrong. Those are some of the things. I also like people that have reasonable educational background. So I recognize that everybody goes to the famous schools. And I like people that are, I think, focused on the business at the time later in life they can focus on philanthropy. They can focus on all kinds of other personal things. But I'm working for somebody that's really focused in their 20s or 30s on building this business. You get all those qualities.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “We have a part of it that does invest in funds and things like that. And, you know, I have people working on it, of course, but I do have a reasonably good intuition of things, but I'm not perfect. I make a lot of mistakes. And so I would say I'm okay. But I tend to rely a little bit more on my gut than on enormous amounts of due diligence. So people working in declaration, they spend much more time on due diligence than I would have the patience to do. But the truth is, if you're putting money out with people, the best people are going to be people that probably don't have the longest track record because the best people starting new funds are going to be people that are building the next Blackstone or Carlisle Apollo. And they're young and they're hungry and they're ambitious to prove themselves. If you go into somebody's fund who's been there doing it for 20 years, it may or may not be as good.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Didn't make the book, but you're really good, and I'm going to use it somewhere else or I'm going to put you in the audio version of it or my publisher's the bad person. I wanted you in, but the publisher didn't. It's not easy.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Because I'm in the investment world, I know a lot of people, so I wasn't that difficult to get these people to let me interview them. That's always a trick, as you know, get people to let you get into their lives. Secondly, I put it in the three categories. You can have an infinite number of categories. Basically, I said my head what I'll call mainstream so people that do traditional stocks and bonds and things like that, real estate. Then I have alternatives, which is private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, and so forth. And then I have something I call new, which is something that's relatively even newer than private equity. And that's things like cryptocurrency, spax, things like that that are relatively new infrastructure. And the hardest part is this. I interviewed a lot of people, but the publisher doesn't have enough space for all the interviews. So now I have to go to some people and say, well, sorry.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Clear to me that I meet people sometimes and they tell me, well, I have 20 million followers on Instagram. I think I might have two followers on Instagram if I started. The reason I don't do some of that stuff is I'm embarrassed to how few followers I would have.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “I'm not Mr. Handsome. I'm not Mr. Charming. I don't have all the attributes of a wonderful television host or something. So I wasn't sure that I could pull off all of this. And I'm not writing books that Darwin would have written or something like that. I mean, these are nice books, but they're not going to win Nobel Prizes for literature or anything like that. But they're easy to read and I think enjoyable. So I basically learned that try to focus on what you're working on at a time. Try to make something really good. Don't try to do something that's half-assed. Make it really, really good. And then people will maybe respond to it. And then learn along the way. I'm better today at talking with you this way than I was five years ago or 10 years ago, just as you're probably better at doing this podcast than you were when you first started. You learn in terms of media, I would say I'm still in a stone age because while I do have some of the things you mentioned, I don't know how to do Instagram. I'm not that good at that stuff. I should learn how to do it.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “You're meeting with investors and you have investors, you have to be honest. If you make mistakes, explain it, tell people up front what went wrong and be honest about it. If you do a good job, don't brag about it so much and tell people how wonderful you are. People will read the material. They'll figure out you've done well if you've actually done well. But also making people feel like they're part of a club. They're part of an organization where you really care about them, not just their money. I think that's very helpful. I think making investors feel that they're more than just a number and more than just a client. an organization around the world. When you're recruiting people, you want to make them also feel like they're part of something different and something that is going to be enjoyable to be part of and that they're not going to be embarrassed by being involved with it.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Of the advantages we had in the beginning at Carlisle was we're based in Washington, there weren't a lot of other firms like ours that could steal people away if people want to wash Washington. We obviously built that other office and now have more people probably professional investors in New York than we have in Washington. I would say that everybody wants to feel that they're part of a healthy culture. Everybody wants to enjoy where they work. If you build a culture where people think that you care very much about them, you compensate them fairly, but you tell them that maybe you can make money elsewhere even more than you're making with me. But you feel like you're part of something you enjoy going to work, you enjoy your colleagues, that can make a big difference. So in building our firm, we really wanted to make sure that there was a culture of friendliness, culture where people felt that working together was helpful. And in the end, that they work together, they would make a really good compensation out of it and be fairly rewarded.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Masters are people who are, they didn't invent golf or they didn't invent basketball, but they perfected it in a way that almost nobody else did. How did they become a leader? How do you perfect the skill of being a basketball coach or being a great golfer? There's no one skill that anybody can say is the way to do it, but practice, practice, practice makes a big difference. And then learning how to communicate with other people very often like Coach K, you have to communicate with young teenagers if you're going to be a great coach in ecology world. In Yo-Yo Ma, it's just practice. I mean, he's very talented for sure, but practice, practice, practice. So to become a great master at something, you have to just give up other parts of your life and really practice it and perfect that skill over and over and over again.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “My experience is that most people, there may be a few people who have wonderful ideas, but their head is in the sky and they don't really get down to brass tacks and build the company. The people that are successful entrepreneurs building companies, you can call them builders or visionaries, are really into the details. Steve Jobs was into every detail, as we know. Bill Gates was into every detail. And Ken Griffin and others, people that build great companies actually, they master the details. And it's not just having a vision of something and let somebody else do it. That can happen occasionally, but that rarely is the case.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Sometimes people might be an innovative genius and they come up with a brilliant idea and they may not be a great administrator or good operator, but the idea itself ultimately takes on and they had other people help them. Sometimes you get people that might not have thought of something for the first time, but they really built it in a way that's better than anybody else did. Let me give you an example on the ones you just mentioned. I just interviewed Ken Griffin recently. And as you know, he's built two successful companies. One is a hedge fund, but another one is his market maker Citadel Securities. And there are other market makers out there, but they built a company that is just incredibly in the market making business. And he just sold a piece of it, $21 or $22 billion valuation to Sequoia and Paradigm. He's a builder. He built something. It wasn't the first person to invent the idea of being a market maker, but he kind of built something in that area that was quite impressive and is quite impressive.”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Well, it depends on different business, but I think it's very effective. The lobbyists have some impact for sure because they know the members and all that, but nothing beats having employees or workers come into Washington and talk to members of Congress because these are the workers in their districts or other states or having a more senior level, having a CEO come in and meet with the president of the United States and having the CEO really know what he or she is talking about. It's very effective and that's why a lot of CEOs spend a lot of time in Washington these days because government policy can really make or break them in many ways. So what major government policy today is not going to affect business in one significant way or another?”

    2022-03-29 · Invest Like the Best · David Rubenstein - Life, Leadership, and LBOs - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 270] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source